September 30, 2004
Home Work
A new book of great inspiration and relevance, just the right time to answer-back to our housing bubbled, over-morgaged, mass produced cul-de-sac world of unsustainable banality. From Lloyd Kahn, the author of Shelter, comes a book that describes homes built from the soul, inventiveness free from social constraint, but created with a solid understanding of natural materials, structure, and aesthetics... using organically sustainable material.. Home Work: Handbuilt Shelter. Regenerative.
Posted by jmarston at 02:02 PM
Critics
Music reviews are arguably the most obscure, a function of the sheer difficulty of describing music. While art critics are rarely artists and drama critics are rarely directors, music critics almost have to be musicians if they are to opine with authority. Yet to write in detail about music involves using a coded language and, in the process, losing nonmusical readers. Thus, more than in other disciplines, music critics write for musicians - and each other.
So what about the public? I recall a music critic friend who once observed that, during a recital by a popular but fading diva, he was probably the only person in the concert hall not enjoying himself. He considered the performance embarrassing; everyone else was lapping up the aura, the charisma, even the voice. It often happens in opera too: the audience cheers a soprano; a critic says she was singing off-key.
Really? I would have thought that more than any of the performing arts, visual arts, or (especially) food, music *needs* critics. If not partly for the reason the author says it doesn't, the perplexity - & im·pos·si·bil·i·ty - of transporting the musical experience into language. I think the critic is also there to position the piece of music, give it context, a history, a lineage, elicit its relationships, which at its most base level, is a way for the consumer to preview the art-object. Generally, music doesn't have the benefit of say, the trailer. But particularly, the author fails to recognize that music is perhaps the most commonly purchased art by the public, whereas a painting is viewed (unless you're a blue blood), and the others are art-experiences, one-offs. Which leads onto the question, besides the europhilic costal elites, who goes to the opera? Or the ballet? When speaking of relevance, sheer numbers outweigh the desirability of the elite, and this author. Food critics? I'll leave that alone.
Critics are part educator, part interpreter, and part advisor. There are thousands of pieces of music released every year. Most of which don't make it into the industrial machinery of promotion, radio rotation, and major market distribution. Don't folks need a guide through the flotsam? The problem with the big newspapers' music deparments is their seething irrelrevance, covering obscure performances of some long dead euro-composer, or Cult-Studding the significance of Ashlee Simpson. Of course folks don't want to read that. They read an ever growing universe of music journalism, which by its very growth, demonstrates the need for the critic, and the public's desire for them. Or at least, I hope.
Posted by jmarston at 10:19 AM
September 29, 2004
Animal Collective / Black Dice
11/6 - Brooklyn, NY - North Six
where this will be available...
from pawtracks.
22 min interview interspersed with peformance footage of Black Dice.
Posted by jmarston at 02:30 PM | Comments (1)
Touch
Posted by jmarston at 10:58 AM
September 28, 2004
Aphex Twin's Analord
The infalliable Richard D. James is sending his rabid fan base into a tizzy over this cryptic 'Rephlex Mail Order Exclusive', which looks more like a joke on ebay trawling collectors, then anything else. We shall see...
Posted by jmarston at 05:29 PM | Comments (8)
Moog Movie
Watch the trailer for a new film about the infamous Robert Moog -> trailer.mov
"A few years later Robert Moog, a graduate student in physics at Cornell University, published a magazine article explaining how to build a theremin, offering do-it-yourself kits for $49.95. Orders poured in, and Moog sold 1,000 that year. "We had $13,000 in the bank," he recalled recently, "a humongous cache of wealth for a graduate student back then!" The windfall enabled a career that helped bring electronic music out of the realm of novelty acts and university labs. A decade after the first RCA machine, Moog introduced the first widely adopted electronic instrument -- the synthesizer that bears his name..."
"Significantly, Moog's was the first synthesizer to use attack-decay-sustain-release (ADSR) envelopes, set with four different knobs, which control the qualities of a sound's onset, intensity and fade. Like many of his designs, Moog's envelope generators became a basic component of later synthesizers. The sound was monophonic -- one note at a time -- but that was enough, since studio recording techniques could create whole orchestras from single notes by the late 1960s..."
Quotes via Salon
Posted by jmarston at 04:06 PM
This is only a test...
standard tone...
Posted by jmarston at 12:49 PM