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On Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s Musical Duets
In one of the more austere corners of contemporary experimental electronic music resides a series of luminous collaborations between the musicians Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto) and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Over a series of five recordings, Vrioon (2002), Insen (2005), Revep (2006), utp_ (2008), and summvs (2011) the duo have explored mixing electronic and acoustic sounds into a meditative whole that is… Continue reading
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Thomas Merton On Silence and Chant
(Photo by Thomas Merton) In his classic autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), Trappist Monk Thomas Merton (1915-1967) makes fleeting but repeated references to silence, sound and music. Here are two of them. On Recalling Visiting A Quaker Meeting House In Flushing, Queens As A Boy: “I liked the silence. It was peaceful. In it, my shyness began to die down, and… Continue reading
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On Ryoji Ikeda’s The Transfinite
“In a twist my mind came free and I was aware of the hard workings of the natural world beyond the periphery of ordinary attention, where passions lose their meaning and history is in another dimension, without people, and great events pass without record or judgment. I was a transient of no consequence in this familiar yet deeply alien world… Continue reading
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On The Musical Metaphors Heavy And Deep
I might be generalizing, but when I’ve overheard musicians talking about a musician they really admire and respect, they don’t usually say “He’s an amazing musician” or “She’s really a wonderful musician.” For some reason, what I hear over and over again are the words “heavy” and “deep”–as in: “She’s such a heavy musician” or “His playing is… Continue reading
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On Marcus Boon’s In Praise Of Copying
Marcus Boon’s recent book, In Praise Of Copying (Harvard University Press, 2010), is a timely argument in favor of our freedom to freely copy one another in the name of healthy creativity. Boon, a professor of literature at York University (as well as a DJ and contributor to Wire magazine) notes that the word copy derives from the Latin “copia” which means… Continue reading
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On The Wellness Of Voice: Sounding Om
Yoga class. The lights are off, the dark space peaceful, and we sit quietly on our mats, legs crossed, hands prayed in front of our chests — Namaste. With one unison breath we chant Om on a single unison pitch– centering and togetherness through collective sound. We’re a choir of Om. But there’s a problem.… Continue reading
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On James Blake Live At The Bowery Ballroom
The most interesting part of James Blake’s live show at the Bowery Ballroom last night was his trio’s seamless use of technology to bring to the stage some of the electronic and otherworldly textures of Blake’s debut album, James Blake. Blake was playing a Prophet synthesizer for his gritty analog keyboard textures along with a… Continue reading
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On Being Perpetually Mindful
There is an iPhone app called Countdown Pro which is a backwards moving digital clock that counts down from any duration in days, hours, minutes and seconds, allowing you to input multiple events on far off dates and then keep tabs on their impending arrival. I suppose the app is one way to grasp time’s ongoing flow and the metamessage… Continue reading
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On The Trickle Down Of Electronic Dance Music Aesthetics: The Cases Of Rihanna and Britney Spears
Until relatively recently, it used to be the case that your favorite pop songs made the transition to the clubs when they were remixed by a well-known remixer/producer or DJ. The club remix of your favorite pop song is an exercise in democratizing it to the demands of the dance floor, which almost always involves squashing the song to the… Continue reading
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Music In Wallace Stevens’ Poetry
Rationalists, wearing square hats, Think, in square rooms, Looking at the floor, Looking at the ceiling. They confine themselves To right-angled triangles. If they tried rhomboids, Cones, waving lines, ellipses — As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon — Rationalists would wear sombreros. – Wallace Stevens, Six Significant Landscapes, VI (1916) The great modernist… Continue reading
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