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Tag Archives: audience participation

Tune-Yards

Anna and I caught one of the best performances we’ve seen in years the other night by Tune-Yards. My friend Andrew, who was at the show, said this afterwards: “I can’t decide whether hearing the president say ‘This is not class warfare, it’s math’ or the fact that this band could become popular makes me [...]

Glenn Gould predicts remix culture

Classical music recordings are usually straightforward snapshots of live performances. Sometimes recordings are spliced together from multiple takes or overdubbed, but this practice is considered by classical musicians to be highly shameful. Glenn Gould had a very different attitude toward the studio. He loved working there, and viewed it as a more valuable creative outlet [...]

Good old Grateful Dead

See also a post about the Dead and electronic music. Whenever I play guitar, it comes out sounding a lot like Jerry Garcia. I can’t help it. From the ages of fifteen to twenty, my guitar-learning years, there was no musician I cared more about in the world than Jerry. It’s not about drugs; I’ve [...]

Is clock time oppressive or liberating? Yes.

We take clocks so much for granted that it’s easy to forget how radical and recent a development they are. It wasn’t so long ago that clocks had to be painstakingly assembled by hand one at a time. Accurate timekeeping on the order of fractions of a second is a heroic engineering undertaking if you’re [...]