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Views From A Flying Machine Reviewed
Here’s Future Music magazine’s take on my recent recording Views From A Flying Machine: you can read the review here. The music is available at iTunes and CD Baby. Continue reading
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On The American Singing Voice: American Idol, Glee and The Sing-Off
If you’ve been paying attention to popular TV shows you might have noticed how important the singing voice is to the North American popular culture moment we’re in. Three shows in particular highlight the singing voice: American Idol (Fox), Glee (Fox), and The Sing-Off (NBC). All of these shows remind us how powerful the singing voice is as… Continue reading
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On Musical Desiring-Machines
The notion of “desiring-production” and “desiring-machines” comes to us from the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their book Anti-Oedipus (1972). For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is imagined as a kind of mechanical thing, a desiring-machine that acts as a circuit breaker in a larger matrix of machines it is connected to. Not… Continue reading
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Memory Palaces and Music
“A memory consists in the awareness, first, of the diminished intensity of an impression, second, of its increased ease, and third, of the connections it entertains with other impressions” – Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, p.31. In the New York Times Magazine this past weekend there was a fascinating article by Joshua Foer on “memory athletes”… Continue reading
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On The Beyond Digital Morocco Project
Over the past few weeks I discussed two examples of sound collecting in West Africa. The first was the Digging 4 Gold project, the second was the Music From Saharan Cellphones project. While these projects are not without their problems–foremost among which is the question of whether or not any of recorded musicians will ever… Continue reading
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On Music From Saharan Cellphones
I recently came across some interesting field recordings assembled by Christopher Kirkley, a music blogger who writes at sahelsounds.com. Kirkley’s blog is about sound and music and his research interests include making recordings in the Sahel region of Mali, Mauritania, and Senegal. The recordings in question are compiled on two releases, Music From Saharan Cellphones,… Continue reading
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On Secondhand Sureshots
The idea behind the documentary DVD Secondhand Sureshots (Dublab Collective 2010) was to invite four DJ/Producers to each build a new track based solely on their vinyl finds in California thrift shops. (Out Of The Closet Thrift Stores for you collectors out there.) The DJs Daedalus, Nobody, Ras G, and J. Rocc (see pic below) would each have five dollars to buy any… Continue reading
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On Daniel Lanois’ Soul Mining
“Letting something you don’t understand come to fruition is an intelligence in itself.” It’s not that often that a renowned record producer/engineer/musician/composer shares his thoughts on the creative process–from the nuts and bolts of technical things all the way out the mystical side of how to carefully, mindfully mine one’s life and create meaning in addition to hit records. In his book… Continue reading
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The Sound of Vuvuzelas
“I hate it when I go to a vuvuzela concert and then people start playing football! It’s so annoying!” – YouTube viewer In last month’s Wire magazine, Marcus Boon wrote a thoughtful end piece on the phenomenon of vuvuzelas at last summer’s World Cup in South Africa. If you remember, vuvuzelas are those small plastic… Continue reading
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On Becoming A Virtuoso Of Knobs, Buttons, and Sliders
In the course of preparing for a paper on laptop music making as creative practice I’m giving this summer at Cambridge University, I’ve been thinking about how exactly one goes about performing music with/on a laptop: What are the decision-making and problem-solving processes musicians use in performance and in preparing for performance? I’m approaching topic as… Continue reading
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