Air Guitar Nation is a recent film about the U.S. Air Guitar Championships. Could be a lot of fun. Reminds me a bit of The King of Kong, what with the whole rivalry-within-a-niche-culture thing.
Category: music
I’ve been pining for this book since March. At long last, the Amazon Fairy turned a pretty crappy day into… well… Friday!
Sasha Frere-Jones discusses how indie rock lost its soul.
I thought I had no choice but to write about the 20th century; it’s such an extraordinary body of work that is relatively little known, especially in terms of your average educated person who can tell a Picasso from a Jackson Pollack and has read widely in contemporary literature and knows the great books of the 20th century, but will freeze up when you mention Schoenberg and Stravinsky. The thing is, they know the music, they know the sound of the musicÄîthey’ve been exposed to it in one form or another on film soundtracks, in concerts, or on CDsÄîbut they don’t necessarily know where this music came from, and how it all fits together, and how one composer affects another or reacts to another.
Alex Ross talks with Robert Siegel on NPR about 20th century music. Ross’ new book, The Rest Is Noise, is coming in a few days—looking forward to 640 pages of music history goodness!
Paul Festa made a film called Apparition of the Eternal Church, which looks really cool. Here’s the trailer. It documents 10 people’s reactions to hearing Oliver Messiaen‘s work for organ, Apparition of the Eternal Church. I hope it will come down to Atlanta for a showing. I definitely need to chase down a decent recording in the meantime.
Everybody Hurts: An Essential Guide to Emo Culture (review: 2/5)
I heard about Everybody Hurts: An Essential Guide to Emo Culture in Believer Magazine a while back. It’s funny at times, with some good illustrations. I enjoyed being able to point to parts of the emo taxonomy and say “I know someone like that… and that guy… and that one…” And for the emo consumer, there’s a pretty good round-up of what you should be listening to, where you should buy your clothes, etc. The writing is really chatty, though, and I couldn’t help but feel that they were stretching to make a target word count.
Mozart once wrote a little party song titled Leck mick im Arsch. Here’s the score. [via passionate geek]
Peter has written a lovely little piece about Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows. Everybody and their mom has touched on the overthrow of the big labels and the utopian arrival of direct-to-ear music subscription, but I thought this was really perceptive:
“They can independently master their disc and shuttle straight to their service provider, with no studio interns to smuggle a pre-master or studio reps to swipe a final copy.
Furthermore, fans get the music on RadioheadÄôs terms—not some nth generation digital-to-analog-to-digital transfer encoded to an MP3, but a direct-from-source version engineered to the bandÄôs specifications.
It is, in a sense, the best possible leak.”
We’ve got a new batch of MacArthur Fellows. I’d never heard of most of the fellows, which is great. But I am familiar with two of them. Stuart Dybek bowled me over with his short story that I’ve probably mentioned a million times, If I Vanished. Dawn Upshaw is a very good soprano. She sang in Atlanta last year in Ainadamar, an opera performed with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in 2006. Alex Ross wrote a review of the 2003 premiere.
Alex Ross noticed that everything is dead. What a downer.
James Brown does a short dance demonstration. Funky chicken, boogaloo, robot, etc.
Here’s 1500 or so prisoners dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. I love it. [via thought bucket]
An interview with Joanna Newsom. On her time studying composition at Mills College:
My music generally retains an interest in melody and harmony and some sort of meter– it might be a polymeter, but some sort of meter that repeats for more than one bar. But a lot of these ideas that I was interested in seemed to be considered pass?©, like they were unworthy of discussion and unworthy of listening. I wouldn’t necessarily say that would be true of the professors at that school, but the climate was dictated by what the students were interested in, and most of them were writing incredibly dissonant music on their laptop computers and didn’t play instruments [or] know how to write notation.
Sad and hilarious.
The Knockoff Project tracks album cover spoofs, tributes, & rip-offs.
A pretty cool collection of experimental thumb pianos. I always wanted to make an mbira (aka thumb piano aka kalimba) since I found out they existed. Just one of those projects I forgot about that I need to re-add to my list. I saw Bob Becker play one in concert at PASIC one year, I think back in 2001. Of course, because Bob Becker is who he is, it was amazing.
Mark Larson 