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Keywords: Maybe Rationales
(Photo: J.S. Bach, “The Well-Tempered Clavier, Prelude in C Major”) Maybe the parts will eventually add up to something. Maybe the perfect sound will present itself. Maybe the track is good enough as is. A maybe rationale is a speculative rationalization we offer ourselves as to why it’s acceptable that the music in its present 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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From The Archives: “Piano/MS20/2022”
(From The Archives is a blog post series where I revisit older tracks that have escaped notice. Normally I post music to keep track of what I’ve done and flag what seems promising. But since I have no method of curating my stuff and I’m prone to recency bias, I overlook older tracks. There’s a Continue reading
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Database: Ed Ruscha On Traveling Along The Tops Of Things
“I’m not trying to wrap things up or make final statements or capture anything in a big way. It’s more like, whatever the voyage is, that’s where I am. I’m just traveling along the tops of things, not trying to bring an answer to anything, necessarily, but just to keep making pictures.” Ed Ruscha database Continue reading
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Art About Music: Ed Ruscha’s “Thick Blocks Of Musical Fudge” (1976), “The Music From the Balconies” (1984), “Silence With Wrinkles” (2016), “Note” (2018)
“Thick Blocks of Musical Fudge” (1976) “The Music from the Balconies” (1984) “Silence with Wrinkles” (2016) “Note” (2018) 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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Database: Malibu On New Music And Reinventing Codes
“Unless you invent a completely different way to make music, you’re not making new music. The only way that music today can be new is just in the way that late eighties and nineties babies reinvent[ed] all these pop codes that we grew up with and that we make our own.” Malibu database Continue reading
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Keywords: Music’s Lacunae
Consider the unfilled spaces of musical practice, its lacunae. Like the speech balloon emoji, which symbolizes someone speaking, music’s lacunae evoke the not-yet-said, its three dots proxies for in-progress, anticipation and mystery, and the spaces in which the musician/composer/producer works something out through sound, represents the ineffable,make sense out of style and style out of Continue reading
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