new music
These are great days for compilations of popular musics from around the world that have gone overlooked by musicologists’ reverence for traditional forms and millennials’ gravitation toward a global pop beat. However, the soundtrack to a powerful new documentary has raised the bar for this genre. Anthropological fascination meets historical urgency in Don’t Think I’ve […]
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on the road
Back when I worked at one particular national music magazine, said journal decided the way to connect with the kids was to send the staff to live at a college for one month and work with the journalism students there to write pieces on the local music scene. The thought was apparently that we big-city […]
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new music
Blame it on the internet. Blame it on postmodernism. Blame it on the rain. “Curation” used to be the province of experts. To “curate” something implied a certain educated discernment, and the word itself tended to only pop up in art world contexts. These days, “curating” is just a slightly irritating way of saying “pick […]
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album review
Where are the survivors of 1990s electronica? I’m thinking in particular about groups with charismatic women singers: Everything But the Girl, Portishead, Sneaker Pimps, Olive, Mono, Ivy, and all the others who turned out moody, vocal-centric dance and downtempo music. It seemed only Bjork and Goldfrapp were still plugging away productively until today, when a […]
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new music
Dublin four-piece Girl Band really know how to make a deep incision, whether slicing through soundwaves or carving up a cadaver as happens in their new video. They also know their way around a single lyric, which in the case of “Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?” — a cover of a dance […]
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new music
It’s getting faster, moving faster now, it’s getting out of hand, On the tenth floor, down the back stairs, it’s a no man’s land… If you’re used to hearing these lyrics flying by in the tick-tick-ticking metronome of Ian Curtis’s drone, you may not even recognize it as a cover of the Joy Division song […]
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video
Have half-day Fridays for the summer begun already? Because I need to catch my charter plane and reach whichever tropical paradise is featured in this video by sundown. (Okay, maybe without the surface-to-air missiles… you’ll see what I mean.) The band is Alpine, from Melbourne, Australia, and their new single, “Foolish,” is the sound of […]
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new music
I first heard Nic Hessler when he was making waves on KXLU under the moniker Catwalk with a cover of Cleaners From Venus’ “Night Starvation.” He had a distinct dream pop lo-fi sound that I loved, but aside from a couple of 7 inches, he didn’t really have any proper releases. I was reassured that […]
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new music
A radical musical experiment lands on our laps today. Three unexpected collaborators — 70s classic rocker Todd Rundgren, dance music producer Hans-Peter Lindstrøm, and Emil Nikolaisen of Oslo shoegazers Serena-Maneesh — have created Runddans, a 39-minute work of psychedelic electronic music that aspires toward a “Good Vibrations” for the space-disco generation. “Put Your Arms Around […]
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reissue
I jumped at the chance to travel to a place of rolling waves and white sands after the winter I and most of America (the world?) had to put up with—alright Californians, you did get an extra helping of sunshine, but still, water is serving up it’s own special problems for you. It didn’t even […]
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