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Organ Meets

May 9, 2012 | by | Category: Music | Leave a Comment
olivier_messiaen

Rosary Mantra, Jacaranda, April 21, 2012 – The programing masters at Jacaranda were at it again Saturday night. I could not pass up any opportunity to hear Messiaen, Dutilleux and Gubaidulina together and knowing the strategic pairing acumen of artistic director Patrick Scott, along with music director Mark Alan Hilt there was surely going to be some mighty music-appreciation in store. The extra layer of resonance was provided by the complex renderings of which only an organ can produce. I can confess to little familiarity with this instrument having had very few ecclesiastical excuses to pilgrimage to the great cathedrals where normally one experiences the pipes. But Jacaranda has the double blessing, being housed at First Press in ... [Read more]

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A Gentleman’s War

March 22, 2012 | by | Category: Music | 1 Comment
A Gentleman's War

An Interview with Faroese Musician Goodiepal, Part 2 Aram Yardumian: What was the real story surrounding the Key2Sound incident? Goodiepal: The real story was that Key2Sound was a company called Koblo back in the day. They designed Vipra 9000, which was a very successful piece of music software. That one was programmed by my childhood friend Emil, whose brother Max developed the Key2Sound synthesizer. They called me up for assistance in hardware design so I worked on that for a number of years. When Koblo closed down and laid off the employees, no one could get customer support. They were still selling the software by mail but people couldn’t get the authorization code! So I hacked their support email and started a free hotline ... [Read more]

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Goodiebags

March 19, 2012 | by | Category: Music | 1 Comment
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An Interview with Faroese Musician Goodiepal, Part 1 Long lectures at American universities on non-human intelligence and mirror points in music; Danish television demonstrations of a model solar system with tonal-valued planets designed to expose the poetic/scientific disjunction of 2D/3D space; classes on Eurobot mythology, complete with whistled discourse; a wind-up mechanical bird in a bell jar; an arrest warrant for the theft of a Eventide H8000 from the Århus Conservatory, from which he had been recently dismissed as a lecturer; some sixty record and CD releases with themes ranging from Skanderborg plate cutters to “how to reinstate the notion of utopia back into electronic music”; and a handlebar mustache. Personally, I ... [Read more]

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New Open Doors

February 23, 2012 | by | Category: Music | 4 Comments
Wulf

The Wulf, Deleuze and the Songbirds of Finland I am haunted by a woman facing South. I see her standing at the edge of an open field, eyes fixed on a distant road. I know very little about her. She died over a hundred years ago when her husband, August, my great-grandfather, rode off South across the Comancheria toward Mexico, his wagon loaded with the bulk of the family’s possessions. This woman was a lover of music, and I was thinking about her last week when I went to see some composers and sound artists present work at The Wulf in downtown Los Angeles. To avoid divulging more about my ancestry I could divert this post into a description of what I experienced at The Wulf, but I actually don’t want to tell you much more about ... [Read more]

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Playing Along

November 17, 2011 | by | Category: Music | Leave a Comment
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Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, Directed by F.W. Murnau, 1922 Organ accompaniment by Peter Krasinski Byron Coley once admonished Janet Beveridge Bean and Catherine Ann Irwin of Freakwater to “take a fuckload of hallucinogens and improvise a new soundtrack to Zabriske Point”. As far as I know, that never happened. But something almost as sublime did come to pass on Halloween Night at University of Pennsylvania’s Irvine Auditorium, in Philadelphia. Those few hundred people who gathered there on that dark blue evening to watch a screening of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 German Expressionist silent masterstroke, Nosferatu, were also impressed by the live soundtrack as played by organist Peter Krasinski. The history of ... [Read more]

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Listen

September 5, 2011 | by | Category: Music | Leave a Comment
Hoast

An Interview with American Sound Artist Jeph Jerman In the end, whether we consider Postmodern music a calculated response to Modernist forms, or a convex re-analysis of music in general, the act of listening remains deeply mysterious. Whether we ascribe universal meaning to Mass in B Minor or The Pirates of Penzance within their authorial and historical contexts, or devise a hyperlogical system to register tones as phonemes, 4'33" and The Well-Tuned Piano still stare back like Rorschach blotter. Perhaps the acme of Postmodern music will be an authorless text without any possible universal interpretation, only individual descriptions and resonances, such that the only possible recourse will be to listen. The act of listening is not ... [Read more]

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Boogie Street

August 29, 2011 | by | Category: Music | 7 Comments
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And the Production of Repose I remember lying around in the living room of the house on West 3rd Street in Lexington, Kentucky where the phonograph, the record player, commanded the space below the windows that looked out toward the holly tree. I remember the album covers stacked beside the speakers – 12x5 by the Rolling Stones, The Beatles’ Abbey Road, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and many others that were only slightly less emblematic of that era. Set apart a little in my memories is the album cover with, on the b-side, the picture of the naked woman engulfed in flames. Dark haired and voluptuous, the woman raised her eyes toward heaven, transfixing my ten year old imagination with her beauty, her nakedness, and with the mystery of ... [Read more]

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Tba

August 1, 2011 | by | Category: Music | 2 Comments
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Interview with Georgian composer Natalie Beridze A discussion of Georgian music in polite company usually relays between two poles: Zakaria Paliashvili and polyphonic choral singing. Little else of Georgia’s folk, classical and modern forms have been granted a visa to cross the borders. And yet, the more I move about the country, the more intrigued I become by the diversity of styles. Song and dance traditions vary between regions and even between villages. There is a lively hip-hop scene in K’ut’aisi, and the whiff of a garage band catches my ears some nights in my neighborhood here in T’bilisi. The conservatory is still a lively place. For better or for worse, the Rus-pop virus has infected the disc-players of all who own a ... [Read more]

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Point A to Point A – Interview Part Four: il sé interiore

June 27, 2011 | by | Category: Music | Leave a Comment
na_brezje

The Music of Giancarlo Toniutti A four part serial conversation between TQ's Aram Yardumian and Italian electronic musician Giancarlo Toniutti. This in-depth discussion is focused on Toniutti’s composition techniques, theoretical underpinnings and the role of language in the arts. Introduction and Serial Four-Part Interview Introduction Part One: Prolegomenon Part Two: Universal Structures Part Three: Authorship Aram Yardumian - Although your music is tightly composed and a cerebral experience—almost without limits—for the listener, I don’t find myself thinking it is bereft of emotion. Is emotional content a byproduct or part of the articulative structure, or something else? Giancarlo Toniutti - I think we should ... [Read more]

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Point A to Point A – Interview Part Three: Authorship

June 26, 2011 | by | Category: Music | Leave a Comment
memmedesimo_02.09

The Music of Giancarlo Toniutti A four part serial conversation between TQ's Aram Yardumian and Italian electronic musician Giancarlo Toniutti. This in-depth discussion is focused on Toniutti’s composition techniques, theoretical underpinnings and the role of language in the arts. Introduction and Serial Four-Part Interview Introduction Part One: Prolegomenon Part Two: Universal Structures Part Four: il sé interiore Aram Yardumian - What is the relationship between your album “Epigènesi” and epigenetics, if anything? Epigenetics is of course a most fascinating subject, but I failed to see how it was part of the concept of the album, if in fact it was. Giancarlo Toniutti - Epigènesi (Italian for epigenesis) has ... [Read more]

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