Thus the Garden fades in darkness in the memory of mankind and yet lies behind every subsequent action as the enigmatic source of its power.

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.

The fact is that the revolutionary impulse in art does not hew so cleanly to revolutionary politics.

And yet, the content and meaning of Angst II is excruciatingly difficult to define. The impulse to try to make the irrational moments — or the whole — meaningful is constantly frustrated.

“The Waiting Room” is remarkable for its lack of concern with its institutional home and its disregard for questions of aesthetics.

A critic might try to pluck TEEN from the growing heap of dance-pop bands and salvage their music by dissecting it scientifically.

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.

For religious anti-capitalism, then, the sinful sides of capital must be rejected; for Koons’s affirmative postmodern attitude, you can’t but embrace them.

The text gets lost in rhetorical questions, cliché, and telling the audience what it is not about.

The task of the artist (or art critic for that matter) is perhaps not to avoid categories, but rather to temporarily show that all of them are in fact ambiguous because all of them change before our eyes, regardless of us.

It is affectless electronic music at its best, and it is an exegesis of self-cancellation. 

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.

Oneohtrix Point Never is the highest expression of the art of middlebrow pastiche.

With A Moon Shaped Pool, the band has officially transitioned from ostensible aesthetic activity to political pseudo-activity.

How then, in 1994, did O.J. become the posterchild for “racial justice” against the LAPD? How did his acquittal convincingly offer any sense of hope to black people across America?

As a whole, it is clear that Floratos has revamped the ways of the amateur and did not merely mimic them.

The Life of Pablo is West’s most dissonant record, literally and figuratively.

In truth (one Poitras fails to see) nothing today is readily available. In our society, that unknowable-ness, that other, is channeled into fear-driven domination.

The majority of ambient music seems to reside in a form of despair; it exists most often in a state of being, relying merely on the passing of time itself to serve as its dramatic momentum, engaging the listener in a largely static sonic-auratic experience.