Dissolve Music, Again

Next week I’ll help kick off a 3-day “spatial sound” festival at MIT’s Black Box theater as one of about 20 acts diffusing sound/music through a 360-degree soundsystem powered by d&b audio. (My own set will probably be from ~9-9:30pm on Wednesday, Feb 19.) No doubt the performances will run the gamut as far as […]

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Get on the Good Foot

The following piece was published in December 2016 in The Wire‘s special issue, Spirits Rejoice: Sacred Songs, Divine Drones, and Ritual Rhythms (#394). I was excited by the call for pitches because I’ve been connecting lots of dots in my music history courses at Berklee between sacred and secular traditions, and I’ve become more and […]

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Beyond Addis (review)

This past year I began reviewing records regularly again, mostly for the wonderfully serious London-based publication, The Wire, which has been pushing lots of interesting releases across my desk. It’s been a great experience working with the editors over there and trying to bring my prolix, punny, occasionally-too-precious style in line with their more exacting […]

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Animated Sheet Music

You know me, total sucker for musical visualization, so I was delighted to see Dan Cohen’s Animated Sheet Music come across my radar (h/t @samim). Whether or not you read Western notation, it’s easy to follow along with the animation (indeed, it makes a good score-reading exercise just to watch the bouncing notes). And there’s […]

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YouTubes in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Today is the final meeting of my last class at Harvard this year — and possibly my final class as a college-level instructor, but we’ll save that discussion for another day. For now, I’ll leave you with a few playlists I created in order to have some examples a click on during class. In short, […]

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African Flowers

the duke, surrounded by “african flowers” — google img search, 1 sept 2010 I was really thrilled with the reception of my “Galangs” mashup last week. To see the video get passed along by the likes of the Village Voice, NY Mag, & NPR, and especially to get this sort of response from SFJ, was […]

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Todo Mundo Musikeando

When I was in Mexico recently, I gave a lecture-demo on how one might express ideas about music through music. (Readers of this blog will be familiar with these approaches, especially via my excursions in riddim meth0dism.) Although I want to keep the concept as open as possible, believing there are myriad ways to do […]

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musical examples (riddim meth0d repost)

[Here’s another repost for the archives. These are by no means my most accomplished etudes in this vein, but I think they suggest some fun and useful possibilities, especially for pedagogy. As usual, I’ve updated some links below. This was originally published way back on 17 February 2006.] in my class on electronic music, i […]

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Reanimating the Castles

Pacey Foster has a great post over at his blog detailing a recent discovery of — and creative engagement with — a 1914 book published by Vernon and Irene Castle, perhaps the premiere dancing couple in the pre-jazz age and crucial players in the formation of the “society” dance scene in NYC during the 1910s. […]

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Linkthink #74943: The Future Is Later

todo mundo » Blog Archive » Is that Lil Twane on the keytar? great post by kevin linking lil wayne to coltrane, miles, george duke and other techno-musical visionaries :: including the great question, "Is not Auto-Tune the wah pedal of today’s Black pop?" :: and, to boot, he inserts his video-supported commentary into recent […]

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Linkthink #833: Beyond a Boundary

YouTube – Roots Manuva – Again & Again “With this record I was trying to tune into that old Channel One, Studio One aesthetic.” :: roots manuva hits that ball out the park on this lead single (prod. by shyFX?!) :: rodney da realest, u done know (tags: reggae hip-hop cricket caribbean video youtube london […]

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linkthink #8998: The Money of Color

zSHARE – 02 live set 2.mp3 – “Where They At” vintage nawlins bounce live performance — triggerman & raunch galore (via twankle&glisten) :: http://twankleandglisten.blogspot.com/2008/05/lil-sumtn-sumtn.html (tags: neworleans bounce hip-hop live mp3 vintage digitized) zSHARE – boss man mood. original soul jazz cl.mp3 tis the season for killer instros :: a new reggae-soul-jazz mix c/o dr.auratheft :: […]

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linkthink #60989: Calypso Consigliere

Soca Mafia in Trinidad and Tobago – Reality or myth? :: ttgapers.com re: payola in T&T (tags: trinidad soca payola industry) The House the Kids Built: The Gay Black Imprint on American Dance Music, by Anthony Thomas “The following article was originally published in the US magazine Out/Look in 1989, and looks at house music’s […]

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linkthink #4825: Like Food

Happy 15th Birthday, Jungle | Mashit DJ C celebrates jungle’s 15th birthday (tags: djc blogpost jungle mixes UK london 90s rave) Passing Strange – Review – Theater – New York Times congrats to stew on his broadway opening! (tags: theater race rock LA amsterdam review) Battleground States Conference Tellem « UNFASHIONABLY LATE analysis of the […]

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Talkin’ All That Canon: On Hip-hop’s Jazz

Did I say something about “counter” canons? I think I like “loose” canons better. But the gist remains: that is, if we listen to some genre of choice through the ears of another, it can tell us a great deal about both genres (which is to say, about the producers and devotees of both). — […]

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Seven Steps to Human Nature

Tomorrow — that’s Thursday — I’m gonna be giving my second area performance as a recently transplanted Chicagoan. While the last one might have been described as lappy, this one’ll be more rappy. Jordan Davis’s Million Poems Show is coming to town, y’see, and I’ll be joining the fray by “reading” some “poems” (over beats […]

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Second Anniversary

Did I mention that “my better half” (re)designed this site? (Infinite props, my dear [see, e.g., #2].) Well, allow me to note it again and to send more love her way, especially as today marks the second annum since we publicly delared ourselves untwistably twisted. If I may go further, I’d like to reprise once […]

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