Music
On writing music to the poems of Nick Flynn, Marie Howe, Natalie Diaz, and others.
On preserving improvisational force and the fluid collaboration between two musicians.
On resisting the limitations of genre and shifting toward a more spatial approach to composition.
With contributions from Okkyung Lee, Alan Licht, Aakash Mittal, and more.
The life of mutant-pop songwriter Peter Ivers was really something.
A look behind the scenes of Akhnaten, Philip Glass’s 1983 opera now playing at the Metropolitan Opera, in which the countertenor plays an ancient Egyptian pharaoh who defied gender conventions.
The sound artist on collecting and hunting for language.
“You could dance to it, mourn with it, revel in it, or march alongside it.”
The composer and percussionist’s Autoschediasms language invites collaborative composition between a conductor and musicians by employing a lexicon of gestures and textual cues.
Art as flotation device.
The sound artist on musical prejudices, metal t-shirts, and shortwave radios.
This fall, Concentric Circles will press to vinyl Heterophonious Fool—composer Jack Briece’s sole commercially-released recording…
A perfect hybrid of minimalism and spiritual jazz.
The pioneering ambient music artist discusses the computer programs, musicians, and spaces that shape his soundscapes.
The first time I heard something on Nyege Nyege Tapes was on computer speakers. For once, the promotional blurb wasn’t hyperbolic …
Coaxing elegies from tape loops, the composer propels us from the San Fernando Valley to deep space, then into “the long-form beyond.”
The secrets are boxed within. That’s what I thought two years ago in Quezon City, where I was doing research at the University of the Philippines Center for Ethnomusicology.
The electronic musician talks chess, information, and creating “sound music.”
The actress and singer contemplates family, language, and the nature of true artistry.
The improvisor and composer contemplates polyphonic pathways and reaching past the self.