Autechre: Elseq 1-5
It is affectless electronic music at its best, and it is an exegesis of self-cancellation.
Christian Jankowski Storms the House of Art
Jankowski keeps trying to grapple with the problematic relationship art has to society even though he cannot offer a solution.
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.
Oneohtrix Point Never: Garden of Delete
Oneohtrix Point Never is the highest expression of the art of middlebrow pastiche.
Radiohead: A Moon Shaped Pool
With A Moon Shaped Pool, the band has officially transitioned from ostensible aesthetic activity to political pseudo-activity.
The People v. O.J. Simpson
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?
The Amateur's Embrace: Gerasimos Floratos @ White Columns
As a whole, it is clear that Floratos has revamped the ways of the amateur and did not merely mimic them.
Introspection and Electronic Music
Interiority is not anything other than a reflection on the social state of music itself.
Kanye West: The Life of Pablo
The Life of Pablo is West’s most dissonant record, literally and figuratively.
The Genre of Silence
Silence has been metaphysicalized in contemporary art and music, and so a necessity has been made a virtue; a critical opportunity has been neutralized.
Laura Poitras: Astro Noise @ The Whitney
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.
Tim Hecker: Love Streams
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.
To Take Up the Incomprehensible
In the end an artwork can teach us, as a form of social knowledge, about how we experience our own experience in the face of the total industrial domination of life and, of course, art.
Artworks: A Closed System?
Being ambitious about art criticism is really about trying to grasp what has not been grasped, even and especially by the artists themselves.
Taste and Transformation
The disintegration of art criticism does not have a single locus. But it does coincide with another decline: the decline of the political Left as an active force in the shaping of history.
The Closed-Eyes Listener and The Forty Part Motet
I propose that the truthful joy of The Forty Part Motet is rather more sober, clinical and above all alienated than the sublime or transcendent categories projected onto it.
Karl Fousek: Pattern Variation
Like much new experimental electronic music, Fousek is the result of a generation of ‘sound artists’ who find it necessary to return to the origins of electronic music.