Source: Bandcamp Daily.

Forty years after he first started recording as Merzbow, Masami Akita’s music is no easier to categorize. Though his creations are perennially pigeonholed as noise music, anti-music, and even über-music, the sheer magnitude of his output will always present an obstacle to easy classification. Consider Mike Connelly’s comments in the opening episode of Merzcast, one of two recently launched podcasts attempting to scale Akita’s entire discography—which currently towers at 432 releases and counting: “Like, what is he thinking when he’s doing this?!”

Source: The New Yorker.

here is something awesomely confounding about the music of Tyshawn Sorey, the thirty-eight-year-old Newark-born composer, percussionist, pianist, and trombonist. As a critic, I feel obliged to describe what I hear, and description usually begins with categorization. Sorey’s work eludes the pinging radar of genre and style. Is it jazz? New classical music? Composition? Improvisation? Tonal? Atonal? Minimal? Maximal? Each term captures a part of what Sorey does, but far from all of it. At the same time, he is not one of those crossover artists who indiscriminately mash genres together. Even as his music shifts shape, it retains an obdurate purity of voice. T. S. Eliot’s advice seems apt: “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’ / Let us go and make our visit.”

Source: livemint.com.

In Turkish, ege bamyasi means Aegean okra. It’s also the title of German avant-garde band Can’s fourth album, released 47 years ago. For the album cover, the band used the picture of a can. A can of okra, to be precise. It was a hat tip to pop-art icon Andy Warhol, whose most recognized work of art from the early 1960s is one that depicts rows of Campbell Soup cans. It was also, obviously, a pun on the band’s name.

Source: The Brooklyn Rail.

Many musicians, including Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, and Dewey Redman, seized on the revolutionary spirit of the ’60s to extend their work into new territory. But Coltrane and Sanders together pushed their music farther than any of their contemporaries into an empyrean realm, virtually creating the category of spiritual jazz. In the grand but sensible words of free jazz icon Albert Ayler, “Trane was the Father, Pharoah was the Son, I am the Holy Ghost.”