I've been overwhelmed by the guilt that the stack of unopened CDs on my desk perpetually induces, and so I've devoted several hours a day this week to spinning discs and reading liner notes. The music has run the gamut from amazing to dull, as have the accompanying texts. Like cleaning out your inbox, however, I'm down to just two or three discs still in their shrink wrap, and I feel much, much better. In my own recreational listening, I tend to spend little or no time perusing those little … [Read more...]

Suffering from Olympic withdrawal? Counting the minutes till the Democratic convention kick off? Just plain sick of the broken-record rotation of CNN Headline News? Whoever said that news reporting would one day be distilled down to a Twitter message needs to make a lunch date with composer/performer Michael Hearst. He'll raise you one and sing it back to you. His intentionally redundant "Songs for Newsworthy News" project offers subscribers sonically encapsulated reports on items of public … [Read more...]

As you may have gathered, I'm sort of a sarcastic person. What can I say? I watched a lot of M*A*S*H as a kid, and it rubbed off. In personal email, this sets up a 21st-century quandary, because you want to make sure people get that your jokes are jokes without tone and facial cues (let's just ignore that if you have to signal your jokes that blatantly, then maybe you shouldn't be writing them). So recently I posed this question: Can a 30-year-old woman legitimately use emoticons to punctuate … [Read more...]

The CounterstreamRadio/New Amsterdam Records post-concert photo re-cap.  … [Read more...]

...when you have stuff like this: When listening to this music you should keep in mind artists such as Frederic Chopin, Cat Power, Keith Jarrett, Talk Talk, and Chris Whitley -- unless you don't know any [of] them or are not a fan, in which case you should keep in mind Nick Drake, The National, Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky, and other, trendier bands whose music has recently appeared in car commercials. That said, I am totally holding out for a hero.But seriously, is trading in category labels … [Read more...]

I've never been one to crack a beer and settle into the sofa for an afternoon of sports on T.V., but I've been doing some late-night Olympic viewing. Turns out a colleague of mine at NewMusicBox has been doing a little spectating himself, and he has drawn an interesting parallel between the audience for new music and the audience for the 50 km speed walk. By the end of his post, his basic question is this: Why does the new music community remain so fixated on how to attract a bigger/broader … [Read more...]

There was an anecdote I heard once, I think it was at the Lincoln Center Festival's Merce Cunningham retrospective six years ago, that put Merce and Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg all together in a vehicle crisscrossing the nation. John Cage was driving. This was back in the early days of their careers, when few people were paying attention and even fewer were actually paying serious cash to see their work. Anyway, ever since then I've wondered: Did they end up recognized as great creative … [Read more...]

Speaking of getting on the bandwagon, Pitchforkmedia.com, a site often driving these conveyances for a significant swath of the nation's music fans, reviews new music this week in the form of new discs from Carl Stone and Elodie Lauten. In your humble opinion, how well did they do? I give Mike Powell points for risking mixing entertaining, over-the-top language--i.e. "foofy, inert bullshit peddled by charlatans to suckers who would stoop to intellectualize a rock"--with some universally … [Read more...]

Are avant-garde music fans too apathetic for the field's own good? (And here I clearly don't mean you, Jim Altieri.) Audience passion for this music clearly must exist--you have to work to access it in real life, whether in concert or on recording, and then work some more (generally speaking) to access it intellectually and emotionally once the music is right there in front of you. But in our fandom, we rarely express our passions out loud for the world to see and hear. Is that a mark of … [Read more...]