“A screaming comes across the sky,” begins Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow-a description which could well apply to the female primal scream that opens Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s 1979 debut album. Given that the side-long title track translates to “Mt. Fear”-a volcanic mountain...
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It was only through George Russell’s obituary that I ever learned about him in the first place. He was not as household a name as Duke or Miles or ‘Trane, but he mattered in a way that is only now...
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On the face of the evidence, Karlheinz Stockhausen's Mantra is that composer's most widely-recorded and -performed piece. There's the Bevan/Mikashoff recording which I reviewed; the Kontarsky version issued through Deutsche Grammophon / Stockhausen Verlag; the Corver/Grotenhuis version (Stockhausen's alleged favorite, which is not in print); a ( Read more... )

Categories are devilish things. They seem to exist solely for the purpose of being defied. This goes doubly so when it comes to music, where the albums I find most fascinating and personally resonant resist having a single, easy label...
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First off. Ebert, as usual, nails it.

The gathering storm - Roger Ebert's Journal
We need to pull in our belts, pay more taxes, demand more value for our taxes, and say no to an ideology that requires converting our health money into corporate profits. We should to raise the lowest wages, and lower the highest ones. We have to return to the saying ( Read more... )

So, on a totally different note ... Seiji Ozawa will be leading a Japanese cultural festival later this year at Carnegie Hall.

The Japan festival is set for December, with a second round to follow in March and April. It will feature dance, Noh theater, taiko drumming, art exhibitions, manga and jazz, as well as performances by orchestras partly ( Read more... )

The other day in a conversation elsewhere, I asserted: If you have a choice between bootlegging something and buying it used for a reasonable price, buy it used. There may be benefits that you don't immediately see.

1. Buying a used copy of something removes it from the general pool of available copies. That creates, in the long run, an incentive for ( Read more... )

Do you remember Godflesh? I remember Godflesh. I remember Pure. I still speak of it as an album that changed my life, without irony. I remember the relentless grinding of the first self-titled album, the utter despondency of Streetcleaner, the...
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One way you can tell casual listeners from self-appointed Music Fans: they have weird senses of organization. They are incapable of just filing things alphabetically. For a long time I thought I was the only person on the face of...
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