Living In The Stew: A D...
On approach, Death By Audio, one of Brooklyn’s Do-It-Yourself, all-ages concert venues, is unassuming – and strikingly so. The north side of South 2nd Street’s sidewalk runs unevenly, from solid concrete slabs at the corner of Wythe Avenue to mid-block cracked asphalt and unkempt...
Girls’ Rooms and ...
Back When I taught comp, my last observation fell on a day for which I turned out to have assigned really boring reading. I don’t know how many of you use the McQuades’ Seeing and Writing, but it has a little portfolio of bathroom signs from around the world that caught my eye as I was franticly scanning the pages on the subway up to campus trying to find something more interesting to talk about than what I had already assigned. After thinking about it I decided to ditch my lesson plan and instead have the class talk and write about these signs. Thankfully, it turns out that there’s a mountain of things to talk about with bathroom signs.
Music Review: New Versi...
Petrushka and Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky. Performed by the Győr National Ballet. Il mondo della luna by Franz Joseph Haydn. Performed by Gotham Chamber Orchestra. This review is about three recent adaptations of classical works: The Győr National Ballet’s take on Stravinsky’s...
The East Village Scene
Like predecessors such as Roy Haynes and Elvin Jones, Foster doesn’t just “kick” the soloist, providing “fills” in the spaces between the horn players’ lines.
Rather, he sets up his own rhythmic patterns “underneath” the soloist. He is the Matisse of the drums, painting in bold shapes and colors, rather than the dense polyrhythms of Jones. Overall, the show was an example of beautiful, non-pretentious music with a focus on craft, openness, and freedom within tradition.
And the Beat Goes on… a...
Last month, the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Argento New Music Project, the Music Information Center Austria (MICA), and Le Poisson Rouge jointly presented Moving Sounds 2009, a festival “devoted to sound and its roles in contemporary music.” The three-day festival, which sought to bring together artists working with sound across different media and genres, featured several concerts of works by “classical” composers as well as by DJs, an art installation at the Austrian Cultural Forum, panel discussions, and parties. In order to get a taste of the festival, I attended concerts on September 12 and 13 and one of the panels on the afternoon of September13.
On the Musical Genealog...
This review is an attempt to assess the latest work of Neko Case within a broader genealogy of mostly North American guitar songwriters. It imagines these songwriters as a collective voice cut into discrete consciousnesses, contributing to one long, dissonant narrative on the rolling...
