"We were so dumbfounded at the noise that was coming out of our instruments it took us a while to get a handle on what we were hearing, let alone thinking in terms of how any records would be structured." Music journalist Ned Raggett assembles the oral history of British experimental rock group
Disco Inferno's five EPs.
posted by Houyhnhnm
on Jan 23, 2012 -
17 comments
"everything is good that / has a good beginning / and doesn't have an end / the world will die but for us there is no / end!" Thus ends
Victory over the Sun (
part 1,
part 2), the "first Futurist opera".
[more inside]
posted by daniel_charms
on Dec 21, 2011 -
8 comments
"The prominent literary critic Marjorie Perloff has recently begun using the term 'unoriginal genius' to describe this tendency emerging in literature. Her idea is that, because of changes brought on by technology and the Internet, our notion of the genius—a romantic, isolated figure—is outdated. An updated notion of genius would have to center around one's mastery of information and its dissemination. Perloff has coined another term, 'moving information,' to signify both the act of pushing language around as well as the act of being emotionally moved by that process. She posits that today's writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly conceptualizing, constructing, executing, and maintaining a writing machine." --
Kenneth Goldsmith on why "genius" is an archaic concept, and how literature in English has fallen half-a-century behind advances in visual arts and music
posted by bardic
on Sep 22, 2011 -
44 comments
The Avant Garde Project is a series of recordings of 20th-century classical, experimental, and electroacoustic music digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today. Until now, of course.
[more inside]
posted by carsonb
on Jun 28, 2011 -
17 comments
"But this wasn't quite enough and so then I got the idea of having all thirteen of the lowest tones of the piano played together... In other words, I was inventing a new musical sound later to be called 'tone clusters'... Anyway, this was my professional debut as a composer." Henry Cowell's musical autobiography. Cowell was one of the most important figures in 20th-century American music,
described by John Cage as "the open sesame for new music in America." In this hour-long program recorded four years before his death in 1965, compositions from every stage in Cowell's career are contextualized and discussed by the man himself.
posted by No-sword
on Aug 8, 2010 -
10 comments
A favorite of
John Cage and Gyorgy Ligeti, the latter describing his music as "so utterly original, enjoyable, perfectly constructed but at the same time emotional...the best of any composer living today,"
Conlon Nancarrow's
musical ideas were nevertheless too complex and technically demanding for human performers, and his political ideas too radical and leftist for McCarthy-era America. Expatriated to Mexico, the Texarkana-born avant-gardeist
lived most of his life in isolation, in a cluttered, dusty
studio surrounded by records, piles of books, empty Vodka bottles, newspapers, cigarette cartons, and the tools of his trade: 2 old player pianos and a custom-built
piano roll press.
[more inside]
posted by swift
on Feb 15, 2010 -
16 comments
Seattle-based German artist Trimpin makes sculptural musical instruments. He was
profiled in a mini-documentary by Washington public TV station KBTC a couple of years ago. Here are videos of some other works of art he's created,
Fire Organ,
Liquid Percussion,
Cello, Sensors and Record Players,
Contraption at Seattle-Tacoma Airport,
MIDI-controlled Player Piano and
Sheng High.
Kyle Gann wrote
an essay by that placed Trimpin in the tradition of John Cage, Harry Partch and other avant-garde American musical inventors. The audio of a nearly hour and a half long 1990 interview with Trimpin by Charles Amirkhanian can be
downloaded from the Internet Archive. Another,
more light-hearted interview in connection to his show at this year's SXSW, where a documentary about him premiered (
trailer).
posted by Kattullus
on May 4, 2009 -
5 comments
Connecticut's
Have a Nice Life is responsible for one of the year's most
acclaimed, highly conceptual albums this year, Deathconsciousness.
The two discs (entitled The Plow That Broke The Plains and The Future, respectively) feature music spanning over five years of collaboration between the two artists, and are accompanied by a 75-page booklet on medieval Italian heretics in lieu of liner notes. Combining elements of
shoegaze,
new wave,
ambient drone,
post-rock,
experimental industrial,
avant-garde dark metal, and
electronic music, and citing references such as
My Bloody Valentine and
Joy Division to their credit, the original and only pressings sold out
within hours. Full stream of all 85 minutes available
here. Direct mp3 samples
here and
here.
[more inside]
posted by Christ, what an asshole
on Jun 28, 2008 -
34 comments
Introduced to Western culture by the Beatles in their single
Norwegian Wood, the
sitar has featured prominently in North Indian classical music for centuries. Princeton-based computer scientist Ajay Kapur updates the instrument with his
ESitar, an audio and video controller that uses
gesture input (PDF) and
machine learning algorithms to facilitate joining the computer with Ajay in his sitar performance. Undergraduate engineering students at the University of Pennsylvania work from the other direction, building
RAVI-bot, an
award-winning, self-playing
robotic sitar (YouTube) programmed to generate music from classical
Raga scales and melodies all on its own. For those in the Philadelphia area, be sure to check out a live performance of RAVI-bot at the local
Klein Art Gallery.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Apr 19, 2007 -
32 comments
A video broadcast of György Ligeti's
Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes (AVI, French), with
helpful background on the controversial piece located here. For those who know French, you may also be interested in 1993's
György Ligeti: Portrait, A Documentary by Michel Follin, showing Ligeti as "the displaced cosmopolitan", through the metaphor of train ride through the European countryside. These and many other avant-garde films can be found at
Ubuweb, including features with
William Burroughs, a recent "
performance" of Cage's 4'33", and Varése and Le Corbusier's 1958 World Fair collaboration
Poême électronique, a 400-speaker soundspace installation predating
later, more experimental feedback pieces.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Jul 2, 2006 -
14 comments
All Hail the New Jazz! Getting slightly bored with pop and looking to expand your horizons? Can't believe the musty
Burns/Marsalis version is all there is to jazz? Try the "avant jazz" tradition whose central figures are the amazing bassist
William Parker (so big and strong I've seen him pick up a bass and play it like a fiddle),
David S. Ware (to my mind the greatest tenorman since
Trane—see him live and you'll never forget it), and pianist
Matthew Shipp (a frequent collaborator of both). Want a convenient guide to their recordings, with brief descriptions and (tacky but useful) letter grades?
Here ya go—Tom Hull has great taste, and if he gives a record an A you can be sure it's worth hearing (and he gives you fair warning about somebody like Peter Brötzmann, who "sounds more like late Coltrane run through a blender by Einstürzende Neubauten: great heaps of noise unleavened by conventional musical signposts").
posted by languagehat
on Aug 21, 2004 -
16 comments
