A Conversation with Katrina Krimsky
Bret Schneider speaks with composer Katrina Krimsky about her career spanning half a century.
Wicked Attraction
A vision of the grotesque, our morbid fascination with violence, and the aestheticization of war…
Hearing in the Present Tense: On La Monte Young's Orphic Revolution
As if frozen in time, drone music has not developed as an art form since Young's Dream Houses, & has mostly been barbarized into a muddy ambience and cheap theatrics
A Dialogue on Music
Bret Schneider and Omair Hussain discuss musical composition and their albums Drunk Walks and What Goes Away.
Warm Midlife Grooves
Kevin O’Rourke reviews the album Sons Of by Sam Prekop and John McEntire.
Surrealism’s Declining Years: An Interview with Monique Fong
Monique Fong discusses Surrealism with Erin Hagood.
Disjecta Membra: Erik Satie
Personally, I associate Satie’s work with a feeling of the aridity that Nietzsche came to value over Wagnerism — the gentle sea-breeze in the highest mountains that wafts in from some strange land and tickles the senses with possibilities of spiritual freedom.
The Art of Gas
NFTs reveal that relational aesthetics and post-internet art have always been the same phenomenon, differing merely in surface technique and taste.
Sofia Gubaidulina: Der Zorn Gottes (2019)
If society no longer reliably yields a consistent aesthetic framework, and if even the immediate sensations of our own minds can no longer be trusted, how can we hope to reach the inner truth of an artwork?
The Legacy of Political Music: A Conversation with Frederic Rzewski
Jim Igor Kallenberg interviewed the late Frederic Rzewski.
Poems by Jack Clarke
Jack’s poetry asks you, the reader, to abandon yourself, to engage with what you don’t know, and can’t understand, and enter a path of transformative gnosis.
Figure with Meat
The best possible description for the piece is one line from the poem by Billie Chernicoff that comes with the download: “The nothing inside of a bell, unfurling…”
Reflections on Kanye West’s “Wash Us in The Blood”
If West’s works are ever “soothing,” it’s precisely because they do often succeed in revealing something true about the world, something we can relate to as listeners. If critics feel that “Wash Us in the Blood” fails to hit the mark, then, it must be for a different reason.
Daniel Barenboim and West-Eastern Divan Orchestra: Hommage à Boulez
The question is whether these works are self-critical in their own rebellion against established forms and their limitations, or whether they dogmatically adhered to Schoenbeg’s categories in their quest for the obliteration of the subject in service of musical free will.
TEEN: Love Yes
A critic might try to pluck TEEN from the growing heap of dance-pop bands and salvage their music by dissecting it scientifically.
London Symphony Orchestra Percussion Ensemble / Steve Reich: Sextet; Clapping Music; Music for Pieces of Wood
Within the essence of postmodern music is embedded a struggle with the necessity to toil against the interpretative and compositional standards of the status quo, and simultaneously, a fundamental confusion about how best to accomplish this.
Autechre: Elseq 1-5
It is affectless electronic music at its best, and it is an exegesis of self-cancellation.
Undeleting Garden of Delete: A Critical Intervention
Garden of Delete is the “determinate negation” of the Garden of Eden, whose claim to innocence it debunks.
Joseph Bertolozzi: Tower Music
The sounds of the tower, both percussed and ambient, are the most interesting dimensions of this project; yet, they are also what become the most compromised through Bertolozzi’s treatment of them.