Music Commentary--Creative Writing--Cultural Hilarity





"What if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles?"--Neil Postman






Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Spectrum Culture: Pat Metheny, The Orchestrion Project

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New on Spectrum Culture, I review Pat Metheny's musical science experiment called the Orchestrion Project

Nineteen-time Grammy-winning jazz guitarist Pat Metheny has always been at the forefront of using cutting-edge technology and unconventional instruments in his music. Take his 2003 album One Quiet Night, for instance, one recorded almost entirely on the acoustic baritone guitar, an instrument not heard often in jazz (or for that matter, in music of any type). Metheny, ever the innovator, has been working with a team of engineers the last three years or so on an experiment of sorts called the Orchestrion, an assortment of instruments–pianos, drum kits, marimbas, bells and even bottles tuned to various pitches—controlled by computer and capable of responding to the touch of Metheny’s hands on his specially-configured guitar. After releasing the studio record Orchestrion in 2010, the guitarist, with a team of technicians in tow, took his “machine” on a world tour. The Orchestrion Project, a double-disc set, was recorded in Brooklyn at the end of the tour without a live audience as document of the unique musical experience.

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Monday, April 1, 2013

Spectrum Culture: Record Review: Rhye, Woman

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New on Spectrum Culture, I review the excellent new record from the Sadie-esque Rhye: 

In her landmark 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler theorized that gender is a performance, a set of actions that we do, rather than a universal who we are. What it means to be “male” or “female” is more a product of societal conditioning than biological impulse. Canadian songwriter/vocalist Mike Milosh, a heterosexual man, has embraced some cultural signifiers of femininity in his music. He generally sings softly, approaches his notes tenderly and makes frequent use of falsetto (although, as he points out in a recent New York Times interview, he rarely sings as high as Thom Yorke). This musical gender bending has confused any number of critics who, in their initial reviews, took the title of Rhye’s debut record literally and assumed the primary vocalist to be female.
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