Music & Performing Arts
Ethics of the Exotic
Samsara (2011) is a documentary that consists of various images, from around the world, of people and their lives. Director Ron Fricke calls the film a “nonverbal guided meditati...
Other Post
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Here's Where Superchunk Comes In
June 10, 2013 -
Nothing But The Blood
May 13, 2013 -
Tinker, Tamper, Strings and Dampers: the Prepared Pianos of HAUSCHKA and John Cage
April 11, 2013 -
Hospitality, Intimacy and The Great American Songbook
April 01, 2013 -
SXSW Interview with Easter Island
March 13, 2013 -
Not by Fate
February 22, 2013 -
Swn y Chwedlonol (The Legendary Sound)
February 06, 2013
Hips: They Don't Lie [Love Realized for South America]
A winter and some change ago, I decided to take a dance class with a good friend at a studio on 9th Avenue in New York City. And because we were feeling a bit stagnant, she and I chose a form that was completely and utterly out of our skill set, and even further out of our realm of knowledge. Shake things up. Afro-Brazilian acrobatic dance fighting? Yep. What else? Capoeira it was. My co-hort was runni...
The Art of Repetition
Image by MaureenShaughnessy (aka MontanaRaven) via Flickr It happened one afternoon while I was working out in my basement. I was listening to the song “Answered” from the group Thrice's album Beggars, a song I had probably heard a half-dozen times before, when I suddenly realized that songwriter Dustin Kensrue was alluding to both the Biblical book of Job and C.S. Lewis's story Till We Have Faces. An a...
A Curveball from the Hold Steady
Guest blog by Curator contributor Rob Hays. From time to time, out of the blue, you tune in to a favorite tv show, only to be surprised by a curveball: the Very Special Episode. What was once a light-hearted sitcom has elected to take on an important issue like addiction or abuse, and rather than the half-hour of chuckles that you expected, you instead endure earnest over-acting and an out-of-character lecture f...
Improvisation and Musical Language
Imagine if your use of the English language was limited to reading literature with little ability to converse with friends or express your thoughts in your own words. That is how most classical music making has been for the last century. Literature is great and we would be impoverished without the creations of history's great masters, but we would be equally impoverished without the freedom and spontaneity afforded b...
A Live Music Retrospective
Ryan Adams in concert (Image via Wikipedia) I’m pretty sure my first concert was Stryper. I know. See, at the time, my parents had instituted a “Christian Music on Sundays Only” rule, and if there was good music being made by Christians at the time, I was clueless. I guess I heard Stryper on KSBJ and thought, Cool - rock ‘n’ roll! And, if I was going to any concert at a young age, it was with my par...
It Sounds Weird
Cover of Swordfishtrombones When one of the members of April Smith's band, the Great Picture Show, hauls a small suitcase up on the stage and turns it into a rhythm instrument, slapping it and hitting it with a tambourine, he connects the show to a whole tradition of American displacement and weirdness. April Smith, whose recent single I can’t stop hearing in my head and whistling to myself, clearly falls i...
An Unlikely Guide Points The Way Home
It is early in the morning on my deadline for this column; I was up before the dawn. I'm notoriously late in delivering my work to the editor, which is probably why I would not make it in the journalism business. Like any self-loathing writer I want to improve on my craft and all its periphery. Therefore I became determined to turn this piece in on time. I knew exactly the matter on which I was inspired to compose; I...
So Dark You See: The Music of John Gorka
"If you've just heard the records, you might think I'm a really sad, somber . . . depressed guy." In fact, John Gorka has perhaps mastered knowing when to be serious, even somber, and when jocularity is called for — in both his music and his life. "There's definitely some of that somber stuff in the music, and that's okay. But, as someone once said to me, 'You can take what you do seriously; just don't take your...
