like the moon
In honor of the late, great Aaron Swartz, pictured above, I’m making an overdue effort to get some of my own works out from behind walls of various sorts and into the open. (This is always my practice, but sometimes there’s more of a lag than I’d like.) I can’t say that I ever met […]
Read More →Hard to believe the fall semester is already coming to a close, but we’re going out with a bang in Technomusicology (see & hear some of our projects here and there): Thursday’s final class session will feature a visit from none other than Jace Clayton, aka DJ /Rupture, globe-trotting artist, writer, label honcho, three-turntable magician, […]
Read More →Last week the students in my technomusicology class submitted their video études. The assignment was relatively straightforward: make a montage of YouTube-sourced videos interlinked by some (musical) subject, theme, or tune. One additional challenge, if made far easier by Ableton’s video capacity, was to attempt to bring the various performances into a kind of musical […]
Read More →I’m happy to report that the semester has been going swimmingly. Sorry for the dearth of posts here, but I’ve been rather engaged with reading, for one course, across a vast and dense literature on music, race, & nation while exploring, in another, the history and potential of music’s (and sound’s) deep entanglement with technologies […]
Read More →What a weekend on the way! First, this Friday, I’ll be honored & pleasured to drop some gems at the Good Life (downstairs to boot!) for an absurd iteration of Picó Picante, my favorite local dance party. (And apparently Boston’s too!) In addition to resident DJs, Pajaritos and Oxycontinental, I’ll be joining downstairs headliners Uhuru […]
Read More →I’m very pleased to report that I’ll be teaching full-time in the Music Department at Harvard this year, filling the big shoes of two ethnomusicolleagues on leave, Ingrid Monson & Richard Wolf. This is an honor and a pleasure, and even as a one-year non-renewable gig, it sure beats the adjunct beat I was walking […]
Read More →Yes, people! After last month’s epic Toneburst reunion, we’re keeping the Beat Research torch aloft with a very special session this Wednesday, August 29, featuring local DJ heroine Philomena (aka Ivanna B), mic-rocker Cathy Cathodic, & all the way from DC, a sistren from a kindred crew, the one & only DJ Bent from Anthology […]
Read More →Allow me to remind that next WEDNESDAY, July 25, Beat Research will play host, in the Good Life‘s booming basement, to a full-blown reunion of Boston’s legendary Toneburst Collective. Bubbling up from Boston’s underground during the late 1990s, Toneburst was a loose-knit crew of DJs, electronic musicians, and video and installation artists, who together produced […]
Read More →I’m headed back to Rotterdam a week from today — to continue the bubbling research, of course, but also, expressly, to take part in a hip-hop festival called Street Science. Among the various performances & screenings & discussions & battles, I’ll be speaking as part of a panel on Sunday the 15th concerned with “Diversity […]
Read More →Summer vibes really on lock all a sudden, eh? Boston tropical and ting! (In fact, the main reason I’m finally getting around to writing this post — best intentions notwithstanding — is on account of IT IS TOO HOT TO SLEEP.) The dog daze arrived just in time, tho, for I’m delighted to report that […]
Read More →Ok, Boston Massive, the time has come! Tonight we kick off our new monthly edition of Beat Research with none other than NYC’s DJ Rekha! What (more) can we say? Flack & I have been wanting to get Rekha up here for ages; we’ve both had the pleasure to open for her at local shows; […]
Read More →Ok, rounding things out, here’s the 3rd review/polemic in the 3-part series I’ve been running here (see parts 1 and 2). This one’s the most recently published, hardly a year old! (That’s not bad for lag, as these things go.) On the surface, it’s a review of 2010’s Anthology of Rap (Yale); but again, while […]
Read More →Following up on the last post/review, I’m running the next in the triad I described there: a series of book reviews written over the last few years which together bring matters of form — and its institutional (re)production — to the fore. This one — a review of Mark Butler’s Unlocking the Groove: Rhythm, Meter, […]
Read More →This Thursday at MIT, Dave Tompkins will be giving a talk based around his book, How To Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder From World War II To Hip-Hop. I’ve not given the book a full treatment on the blog, but I’ve been recommending it to anyone I talk to about music or technology or […]
Read More →Contrary to former reports, we will not have DJ Rekha at Beat Research tonight. Indeed, we will not be holding Beat Research at all this evening. Our final Tuesday night session will happen next week, May 8, when Tony “DJ” Flack and his students from MassArt present “Beat Research at Beat Research” — that is, […]
Read More →We’ve got the one DJ Delay — aka Brian May, aka Beam Up, aka Sonical — in the house at Beat Research tomorrow night. I’ve been into his dub-drenched beats for a minute now, linking to one project (of gritty, bassy Balkan remixes) way back when, e.g. — After Junior Rodigan’s stunningly sweet set last […]
Read More →If you happened to have slept on either of these two recent and utterly epic Beat Research sessions, I’m happy to report that both DJ Rashad’s blistering juke set and Junior Rodigan’s masterful tour of Studio One’s rocksteady resonance are now online and listenable & what-not. Enjoy!
Read More →It’s finally time, Boston Mass(ive): tonight, Tuesday April 17, we’ve got the city’s undisputed #1 reggae selector, the mighty Junior Rodigan, in the house at Beat Research! We’ve been wanting to have Junior over for a long time now, and though we’d welcome any set from him, we’ve taken the special occasion to ask him […]
Read More →I’ll be talking twice in the next two days about a thing I’ve been calling technomusicology. If in a previous moment bi-musicality represented cutting edge musicological literacy, today’s tech-suffused world would seem to call for the development of something akin to technomusicology — which might also include a sort of technomusicality. Aside from bringing into […]
Read More →This is my new favorite thing in the world, and somehow it makes it make more sense that Luanda is the most expensive city on the planet. Sure is rich anyway (here’s a little background, fyi) — /big tip of the proverbial hat to Farrah Jarral, whose awesome voice I first encountered on Keysound’s classic […]
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