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On Modular Grid Structures: Thinking Through Sol LeWitt’s Cubes
I recently saw a striking cube-based structure by Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) at the MoMa. When you stand in front of it and take it in, the work works on multiple perceptual levels. Here are few things...
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On The Rhythms Of Soccer And The Game Of Music
At home my wife and I watch a prodigious amount of English Premiere League soccer–that’s real football to the rest of the non-North American world. In earlier posts on this blog I have written about...
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On Negative Achievement: The XX Perform In New York
“The creation of a style often begins with a negative achievement.” - Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd, Good Prose If you are a fan of musical minimalisms, atmospheric indie rock, and electronic beats,...
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Notes On A Talk By Robert Fripp
On a whim I searched Spotify for music by Robert Fripp but found none. Instead there was a recording of him speaking to a crowd about various musical things. And it was good. “Music never goes away” he...
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Notes On What Makes A Piece Of Music Work: Boards Of Canada’s “Tomorrow’s...
“So it was becoming clear to me that texture deserved as great a place as process in the theory of how music involves people and draws you into deep identification, total participation, past the...
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On The Musicality Of Architecture
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” – Martin Mull Walking across a recently re-designed section of Times Square last week I had a pleasant sensation that the design was working on...
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Richard Powers On Divisions In Music
“Music doesn’t mean things. It is things.” – Richard Powers In a recent interview on Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon, novelist Richard Powers spoke about his new music-saturated novel, Orfeo....
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David Hockney On Perspective
I’ve been reading more Lawrence Weschler lately, this time his engaging study of the painter David Hockney, True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney (University of California...
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On Pacing, Saying Something, And Music
I’ve been thinking about pacing. In running, pacing is a matter of speed: take the wrong pace–a pace that’s too fast or too slow–and you’ll soon be in trouble. Good pacing is a matter of listening to...
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On The Ambiguous Appeal Of The Musically Worn
As I produce a track I’m constantly looking for ways alter its sounds so that they’re damaged and unclear, and some of my favorite effects processing plug-ins are those that destroy or roughen what is...
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