The Allison Cameron Band. The Allison Cameron Band. Toronto’s Rat-Drifting label has long been committed to releasing sneakily hybridized and organically concept-informed music. Work that is deliciously fraught with odd details and the idiosyncrasies of the community from which it springs.   Cameron’s[...] Read more

Recordings Nick Storring Issue 108

Ross Bolleter. Night Kitchen: An Hour of Ruined Piano. Australian Ross Bolleter has devoted himself to ruined pianos: instruments found exposed—in different degrees—to the elements, having in that exposure developed a quirky originality, radically at odds with the piano’s usual ideal of uniformity. Cracked soundboards vibrate[...] Read more

Recordings Stuart Broomer Issue 108

Cathy Lane, ed. Playing With Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice.   “There are no more powerful things in the world than words,” says Laurie Anderson in an interview with editor Cathy Lane in Playing With Words, where the primacy of language in art and politics is discussed in a clear and compelling manner.   With over thirty-[...] Read more

Books Deanna Radford Issue 107

Tim Lawrence. Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973–1992.   As the result of a string of reissues at the beginning of 2004, Arthur Russell has risen to posthumous prominence as a ravenous pluralist and unsung innovator who did not achieve due recognition prior to his untimely death from AIDS in 1992. With each re-pressing or unreleased gem it[...] Read more

Books Nick Storring Issue 107

Stuart Broomer. Time and Anthony Braxton.   Stuart Broomer knows Anthony Braxton. He has listened to the American composer and multi-instrumentalist’s music from the beginning, attended concerts by him since the early 1970s, written about the musician many times, and over the years interviewed Braxton on many occasions[...] Read more

Books Ken Waxman Issue 107

Big Ears Festival. Knoxville, Tennessee. March 26–28, 2010. Clean, tidy, and walkable, downtown Knoxville feels more like Europe than America. Unlike the Next Big Thing-chasing club crawl of that other Southern-U.S. fest, South by Southwest, in Austin, the Big Ears Festival is a carefully curated festival driven by an artistic mandate to showcase cutting[...] Read more

Concerts and Events Jonathan Bunce Issue 107

Sonic Acts XIII. Amsterdam, The Netherlands. February 25–28, 2010. Since its launch in 2000, Sonic Acts has become a major biennial showcase for electronic music and intermedia art in Europe. This year’s thirteenth edition lived up to its reputation with an ambitious and densely packed program of concerts featuring new and established artists from such[...] Read more

Concerts and Events Patrick Valiquet Issue 107

Densités Festival. Fresnes-en-Woëvre, France. October 23-25, 2009.   A rural French hamlet in the Lorraine countryside isn’t the setting you would imagine for a world-class festival of unadulterated Electronic and Free Jazz music. Yet the Densités Festival in Fresnes-en-Woëvre—population five hundred—about eighty kilometres[...] Read more

Concerts and Events Ken Waxman Issue 107

Decibel Festival. Seattle, Washington. September 24–27, 2009. Decibel is an annual international electronic-music and visual-arts festival celebrating its sixth year, which it did by expanding its programming with stacked line-ups within genre-themed showcases, creating some scheduling conflicts and dilemmas of choice for audiences.   The[...] Read more

Concerts and Events Andrea Ayotte Issue 107

Debashis Sinha. Anudrutam.   Lean, economical and crisp, Anudrutam infuses a minimalist techno sensibility with acoustic percussion and naturalistic field recordings (collected by Sinha himself in Kolkata). While the bareness used by some similarly oriented artists tends to emphasize the cold, machine-like precision[...] Read more

Recordings Nick Storring Issue 107

Brian Ruryk. Cycle of Fords.   While the ingredients in any recent Brian Ruryk release are basically the same—rapid-fire editing, rubbery cassette-tape contortions, anxious Sonny-Sharrock-on-amphetamines acoustic guitar scribblings, torrents of debris (aural and actual) flying across the stereo field—[...] Read more

Recordings Nick Storring Issue 107