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On David Byrne’s “How Music Works”
It’s hard to keep track of all the things David Byrne does. He’s the former front man of the Talking Heads, of course, but also a singer-songwriter who has collaborated with musicians from all over the world, a record label founder, a sound art installation artist, a designer, a visual artist, a photographer,a bicycle enthusiast,… Continue reading
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How Many Words Is A Sound Recording Worth?
“Seeing is believing, but hearing is hearsay” — Julian Henriques, Sonic Bodies (2011) Like a lot of people, I’m a fan of Instamatic, a smartphone photo app, because it makes me feel like a skilled photographer. The app is essentially photo editing software that allows you to quickly–really quickly, with the tap of a virtual… Continue reading
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On Repetition: “Jiro Dreams Of Sushi”
“I would see ideas in dreams.” – Jiro Ono Just as I was beginning to think I might know something about repetition, I watched a film that made me rethink that notion. The film is David Gelb’s documentary Jiro Dreams Of Sushi (2011) which follows around 85-year-old sushi master Jiro Ono as he works in… Continue reading
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On Small Things And Big Pleasures: David Guetta’s “Titanium”
I get excited by small things. The other day I bought a mechanical pencil to highlight books with as I read. While holding the pencil that evening and underlining, I was struck by the pleasure this $2.19 purchase had brought. It’s precise, light, and helps do a job, with the added grace of having an… Continue reading
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On Sounds And Humor
It took all of three minutes, but the guy on the subway was making all kinds sounds with his voice and as I listened to him I couldn’t stop giggling. Verbal Ace is his name and he’s a vocal artist, a human beatboxer, a singer, a sound effects machine, and mimic extraordinaire. Armed with just… Continue reading
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On Four Tet’s Good Taste
“It’s very rare for me to use instruments or synths or anything like that.” – Kieran Hebden I have long felt that the electronic musician Four Tet (aka Kieran Hebden) has good taste. He makes what critics once labelled “folktronica” music, a term that probably came about in an effort to describe how Hebden deftly… Continue reading
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On Musical Texts: T.M. Wolf’s “Sound”
T.M. Wolf’s Sound is a novel that merges writerly form and narrative content to approximate the ambiguities and instabilities of how we think and talk–not in books but in the real world. Content-wise, Sound‘s story is simple enough: Cincy Stiles, a disaffected philosophy graduate school drop out, returns to his hometown on the Jersey shore… Continue reading
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Peter Coviello On Musical Talk That Does Something
sympathetic resonance –a harmonic phenomenon wherein a formerly passive string or vibratory body responds to external vibrations to which it has a harmonic likeness (Wikipedia). In his article “The Talk That Does Not Do Nothing” in the July/August 2012 issue of The Believer (The Music Issue), Peter Coviello writes about fighting with a friend over the… Continue reading
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On Capturing Thoughts In Formation: Notes On Listening
It would be a blog post about listening. *** It would be about the relationship between what we listen to and what we create as musicians. About the tension between wanting to listen to many (new) musics briefly and listening to one (older, familiar) music repeatedly. Is one approach “better” than the other? Or–as it’s… Continue reading
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On Leanne Shapton’s “Swimming Studies”
“Swimming is my disembodied youth, yet I am rapidly becoming the embodied present.” — Swimming Studies, (187) Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton is one of the more poetically precise and evocative non-fiction books I’ve read in a while. It’s a meditative memoir consisting of a series of autobiographical vignettes, illustrations, and photographs that explore the author’s experience… Continue reading
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