Andrew Hamlin
Various Artists. REWORK_ (Philip Glass Remixed). And how, you may well ask, do the epochal Beck and the magisterial Glass bond and re-bond? With lots of echo, I’m here to report. Echo and backwards-boinging. And the chanting of an avant-garde choir. Because “avant-garde” is “now,” for now, this choir sings[...] Read more
Anthony Braxton and Buell Neidlinger. 2 By 2. Braxton and Neidlinger’s 2 By 2 is a resurrected set from 1989, recorded live at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, which explains the sparse but polite applause, which is tentative, at times, at the end of solos. Braxton and Neidlinger convey a sense of urgency; they have[...] Read more
Kay Larson. Where The Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists. How very different the Western art world might have been—the structure of ideas, certainly, but also the structure of emotions, the hierarchy of belief—without the arrival in New York City in 1950 of a Japanese man who was “barely over five feet tall, and almost invariably[...] Read more
Pharaoh Sanders. In The Beginning: 1963–1964. This four-CD set features unreleased recordings of tenor horn player Pharaoh Sanders as he plays sets with Paul Bley and Don Cherry, plus two sets of Sanders with Sun Ra at Judson Hall, December 30 and New Year’s Eve, 1964. Also included in this set are recorded interviews with the[...] Read more
Frank Lowe. The Loweski. This new release from ESP features the Frank Lowe Quartet in unreleased tracks that didn’t make it onto Lowe’s 1973 ESP release Black Beings. As a free-jazz set, The Loweski is distinguished by its silences, one helping each, at the beginning and end of the set, where the ensemble[...] Read more
John Luther Adams. Four Thousand Holes. If minimalist music is like lying back in the grass, waiting and noticing as the stars appear one by one, then the titular piece of John Adam’s latest CD, Four Thousand Holes, could be said to keep rolling back that moment to the appearance of the first star, repeating richly the[...] Read more
Tara Rodgers, Editor. Pink Noises: Women On Electronic Music And Sound. Tara Rodgers, a.k.a. Analog Tara, remarks in her introduction to Pink Noises, that the world finds it all too possible to assemble “a historical narrative of electronic music” along “patrilineal” lines, where the best that a female working in the field could expect[...] Read more
Kyle Gann. No Such Thing As Silence: John Cage’s 4'33". Cage never used absolute silence. In the beginning (his beginning, at least), such matters did not concern him—and concern with the earlier, less-notorious John Cage forms just one part of Kyle Gann’s fascinating study of Cage’s best-known composition. [...] Read more
Sun Ra. College Tour Vol. 1: The Complete Nothing Is... This reissue of Sun Ra’s Nothing Is . . . comes “complete”—or at least more complete, with ninety minutes of extra music—one complete concert set from St. Lawrence University in Potsdam, New York, on May 1996, plus a partial second set and a sound[...] Read more
John Zorn, Fred Frith. Late Works. It helps, I think, to imagine John Zorn as the rude one in this couple, and Fred Frith as the polite one. In their collaborations, as in their work outside those collaborations, alto saxophonist (and Tzadik label maven) Zorn waved a rude goodbye to listenability ages ago; his followers must[...] Read more
Terry Riley. Autodreamographical Tales. Over, under, and through Terry Riley’s undeniable influence and worth, lies his whimsy. Some of his pieces make heavier use of humour than others, but a lighthearted view of the multiverse and a reverence for mutability has marked his style over more than forty years of prominence as a[...] Read more