same walk, different music
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Same Walk, Different Music
Tom Thomson, Hot Summer Moonlight (1915) Debussy, Images, Livre II, Et la lune descends sur la temple qui fut (1907). In the early 1990s I spent the evenings of one summer typing up book notes for my mom, who had returned to graduate school to pursue a PhD in English literature. (Her dissertation used psychoanalytic Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music: Squarepusher’s Brief Music
Producer and multi-instrumentalist Tom Jenkins (aka Squarepusher) is (re)known(ed) for his intense drum and bass rhythm programming, electric bass playing, and forward thinking about music production. But it may be Jenkins’ mellower and very brief tracks that are his best work. Leading the way is the magisterial, one-minute-and seventeen-second “Tommib”, a piece that’s organ music Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
Ravel/Peter Phillips, “Miroirs: No.5, La Vallée des Cloches” (1904-1906). MIDI’s non-electronic predecessor was the piano roll, a punch card-like storage medium that was used to direct “player” pianos in the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries. Piano rolls were continuous (looped) rolls of paper with perforated holes whose vertical and horizontal locations on the sheet represented, Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
M.C. Escher, “Relativity” (1953) Stereolab, “Crest” (1993). I first heard this song—and learned about Stereolab—during a musicology graduate seminar over twenty years ago. Another student had chosen the track as way to talk about a topic in musical time which I don’t recall, but the music mesmerized me and I’ve never forgotten it. Years later Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
Burial, “Night Bus” (2006). The music of producer Burial (William Bevan) is a class in ambiance, aura, texture, and pacing. As famous for his anonymity as for using the bare bones audio editor Sound Forge, Burial makes emotionally heavy music. “Night Bus” achieves the feat of compressing a film’s worth of mood into two minutes. Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music: Photek’s “The Hidden Camera” (1996)
Photek, “The Hidden Camera” (1996). This track is classic drum and bass that exemplifies the genre’s rhythmic inventiveness and orchestrational-arrangement resourcefulness. Photek (Rupert Parkes) builds seven minutes of music around eight or so parts that enter and exit the mix at 8- and 16-bar intervals. The through line is a skittish breakbeat (kick and snare Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
Benge, Twenty Systems, “1981 Yamaha CS70M.” Benge (Ben Edwards) is an English musician with a longtime interest in analog synthesis. His 2008 recording Twenty Systems is an archeology of iconic synthesizers that traces a history of selected models from the late 1960s to the late 80s. Each track features a single instrument recorded without effects, Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
Stars Of The Lid, “Even If You’re Never Awake.” Good music often doesn’t go how you thought it would go. It may have parts and sections that repeat, it may use recognizable sounds, it may introduce themes, it may have a discernible structure, but still it manages to surprise you by how it goes and Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
Tipper, “Dreamsters” (2014). David Tipper is the best kind of artist—someone not easily pigeonholed, and someone whose work creates a unique aesthetic world. Such artists are rare in our time–Right?–when so many producer-composers sound similar to one another. But Tipper ins’t worried about fitting in. He’s an outsider about whom little is known. I like Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, “Hand Covers Bruise” (2010). This four-and-a-half minute track is a gem of minimalist melody, orchestration, and form. The music is the opening theme of the 2010 film The Social Network, which chronicles the earliest days of Facebook and historicizes how Mark Zuckerberg invented a website that would go on to Continue reading
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