Announcing Liquid Brick
Last year I performed at a festival in Birmingham, Alabama, curated by composer Monroe Golden. Also on that festival was a local quartet called Liquid Brick - two percussionists, electric guitar, and acoustic bass, as I recall. Their heavily rhythmic music, with slower harmonic effects on the pitched instruments, was very interesting, and was intertwined with a computerized video show with moving images intercut among each other, both real and abstract. The complex interrelation of sounds and images was entertaining, and represented, I thought, the beginning of a new type of visual-audio synthesis that might draw a large, younger audience to music that, without the visuals, might be a little too weird for them. The fact that such a sophisticated group was down there in Bush-country Alabama only added to the mystique.
Because I was a fellow performer on that festival, I didn't write about Liquid Brick. But today I was recommending them to a student, Googled them, and found, lo, that they have a website at liquidbrick.org with music and visuals, including the film/music I heard, a piece called Eyedrum. Seems to me they would go over very well in New York and other places. I see them described on the web as a noise band, and I'm not always a noise band fan (though I do appreciate Borbetomagus, from a safe distance), so they've evidently achieved some crossover appeal. Check 'em out.
Categories:
Sites To See
American Mavericks - the Minnesota Public radio program about American music (scripted by Kyle Gann with Tom Voegeli)
Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar - a cornucopia of music, interviews, information by, with, and on hundreds of intriguing composers who are not the Usual Suspects
Iridian Radio - an intelligently mellow new-music station
New Music Box - the premiere site for keeping up with what American composers are doing and thinking
The Rest Is Noise - The fine blog of critic Alex Ross
William Duckworth's Cathedral - the first interactive web composition and home page of a great postminimalist composer
Mikel Rouse's Home Page - the greatest opera composer of my generation
Eve Beglarian's Home Page - great Downtown composer
Just Intonation Network - a meeting place for people interested in alternative tunings
Erling Wold's Web Site - a fine San Francisco composer of deceptively simple-seeming music, and a model web site
The Dane Rudhyar Archive - the complete site for the music, poetry, painting, and ideas of a greatly underrated composer who became America's greatest astrologer
Utopian Turtletop, John Shaw's thoughtful blog about new music and other issues
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