Review: Ve Palor by Arovane
It's been nearly a decade since Uwe Zahn's last record. In a field that demands constant innovation, that's a timespan of geological proportions. Most electronic artists would feel compelled to...
View ArticleMagnus Lindberg's Clarinet Trio
There's modern music to understand, and modern music to enjoy. All too often, those things are mutually exclusive. But not always. Sometimes we get music that fires on all cylinders and lights up both...
View ArticleThe Grammys
As a matter of course, I don't pay much attention to these. The whole nomination process reeks of high-school politics, and the most deserving artists are nearly always ignored in favor of...
View ArticlePete Seeger, 1919-2014
Folk singer Pete Seeger died this week. He leaves behind a profound, if mixed, legacy. He was instrumental in the folk music revival of the 1940's, and yes, he was a Communist. That last point is...
View ArticleAutechre: elseq
The last couple of years have been busy ones for Autechre. Exai was an album of staggering scope, made even more audacious by the fact that it was uniformly good. Not many musical acts in any genre...
View ArticlePlaid: Polymer
Well, they're back in the saddle. Plaid have a long and respectable history in the electronic music scene. When so-called IDM (intelligent dance music: yeesh) became a genre in the 1990's, Ed Handley...
View ArticleThe Music Industry Is Dead. Long Live the Music Industry.
…or, How I Quit My Job and Made a Record. First, the plug. I have a record available for purchase on Bandcamp. You can hear it for free on YouTube. I've spent the last four years of being disconnected...
View ArticleThe Music Industry and Technology
I was born in the early 1970s. My parents were music fans, and I grew up at a time when the record labels actively developed and supported new artists. As long as they could count on a few big hits...
View ArticleThat Business of Music
Despite the price hikes and restricted access to content, overall revenue for the music industry continued to rise during the 1990s, reaching a peak of $14 billion in 1999. *Somebody* was making...
View ArticleHow the Music Business Missed the Internet
Kids today wouldn't recognize the internet of the 1990s. Access was metered by service providers and connections were largely made over slow telephone lines. Still, it had taken off as a medium, and...
View ArticleAutechre: SIGN Review
So, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything on Autechre. I still adore their work, but damned if they haven’t made it hard to write about these last few years. If you need catching up, here’s a...
View ArticleAutechre: PLUS Review
So, two weeks after the release of SIGN, Autechre have dropped another album. It’s different in some ways and similar in others. The first question that comes up is whether or not this is a distinct...
View ArticleElliptical Sunset in Neon
A quick single with the Deluge and a 606. Since it sounds retro and I stink at naming things, I went with nonsense 1980s titles.
View ArticleThe Grammys
As a matter of course, I don’t pay much attention to these. The whole nomination process reeks of high-school politics, and the most deserving artists are nearly always ignored in favor of...
View ArticleTangerine Dream: Raum
Tangerine Dream can be an insurmountable mountain. They virtually invented popular electronic music, and they’ve released over 100 albums. In the 1970s, they crafted left-field records like Phaedra and...
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