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Zadie Smith On Joni Mitchell’s Blue
In her recent essay in the New Yorker, novelist Zadie Smith recounts her listening history with the music of Joni Mitchell–specifically, Mitchell’s 1971 album Blue. Here is the title song from the record: Smith describes encountering Mitchell’s idiosyncratic and alternate tuning jazzy-folk music for the first time while in college and hating it. But years… Continue reading
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On Rhythmic Instabilities And Brand New Feelings: DJ Rashad’s “Feelin””
“The technology’s so on point now: we can sample almost anything now.” – DJ Spinn One of the talked about music releases of 2012 is DJ Rashad’s Teklife Vol.1: Welcome to the Chi. Rashad is a Chicago musician who makes music to accompany a dance style known as footwork. Footwork is characterized by its hyper… Continue reading
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On Advice To A Repetition Hater
“Practice, repetition, and repetition of the repeated with ever increasing intensity are its distinctive features for long stretches of the way.” – Eugen Herrigal, Zen in the Art of Archery Reduced to its essentials, drumming is fundamentally about repetition. Imagine for a moment that you’re a drummer. You stand in front of a snare drum… Continue reading
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On Grateful Sound: Thinking Through “Dark Star”
I have a secret: over the past few weeks while riding the subway with headphones on I’ve been listening to the Grateful Dead. And maybe not coincidentally, I haven’t shaved in about two weeks. So as I write this I’m wondering–Are these twin facts somehow related? Do they point to a strange metamorphosis taking place… Continue reading
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Bill Murray On (Groovy) Vibrations
In a recent New York Times interview, the actor Bill Murray discusses the importance of having a sense of spontaneity, improvisation, and connection with others. He observes that being playful not only puts both himself and others at ease–it also gets everyone into a deeper kind of sync: “It pays off in your life when… Continue reading
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On Re-Composition: Max Richter Meets Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons
The German-English composer Max Richter had a cool idea: re-write the score to Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Not a remix exactly, but rather a getting inside the piece and messing around with its materials. Richter calls the process “re-composition” and his piece is called Recomposed. The Italian composer, violinist, and priest Antonio Vivaldi wrote The… Continue reading
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Haruki Murakami On Repetition
Haruki Murakami, master novelist and enthusiast of long distance running, makes this observation about the repetition of writing, and the experience of repetition itself as a perceptual tool for tweaking the senses: “The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.” Continue reading
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On The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes The Mind
Seth Horowitz’s The Universal Sense is an exhaustive, lucid, and entertaining neuroscientific foray into the many ways hearing, listening, and sound shape the mind–how sound affects the way we think, feel, and act. Horowitz is a professor of neuroscience at Brown University who specializes in studies of comparative and human hearing. He’s also an enthusiastic… Continue reading
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Microthought: A Santoor And Tabla Duet
Tensioned melody over rhythmic cycled drum– Pandit strings motives. Continue reading
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On Listening With Sympathy
Sitting at the kitchen table listening to a mix playing from the other room– excited sounds flying around corners and down the hallway, partly muffled, half exaggerated, out of proportion, out of breath, and weakened upon their diminished arrival at my ear –a thought appears: listening with sympathy makes the music doubly resonant by giving… Continue reading
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