Category: Artist Profile

Steve Roach Profiled

Source: My Spilt Milk.

His music is nominally ambient, but not as aggressively blank as Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports. His affection for Tangerine Dream led Roach in more of an art-rock direction. He loved Klaus Schultze’s Timewind, (1975), which “fit in with this surreal, imaginary landscape” on the cover, he says. The epic sweep of his classics Structures from Silence (1984) and Dreamtime Return (1988) bring to mind the sci-fi cover art landscapes of Roger Dean in their elegance and rich textures. The title track of his recent Molecules of Motion pulses with a Kraftwerkian mechanical precision, while pieces move like waves, creating a sound that slowly swells and grows in definition until it crests and recedes, only to be replaced at a regular interval by another sonic wave much like the one before.

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Nate Wooley Profiled

Source: tdn.com.

After being “surrounded” by New York’s creative scene, Wooley solidified his niche: experimental jazz. Although his passion for the genre’s wonky side was at first a “rebellious streak” against his more traditionalist father’s tastes, Wooley said he eventually realized that his love for avant-garde music was genuine.

Alice Coltrane Profiled

Source: Pitchfork.

Over a decade after Alice Coltrane passed away—or, as her website puts it, “left her physical form”—the musician’s followers continue to grow, via her time with John Coltrane’s late-period band, her pioneering solo work in the ’60s and ’70s, or the deeply spiritual music she recorded as Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda. For listeners who want to dig a bit deeper into her long journey, there are several excellent rarities to discover that give an alternate look at her musical quest for transcendence and transfiguration.

The Avant-Garde Adventures of Brian Chase

Source: Bandcamp Daily.

The double life of Brian Chase as both ubiquitous John Coltrane-inspired free improviser (dude gigs virtually every night) and spastic anchor of post-punk lifers Yeah Yeah Yeahs keeps the longtime Brooklynite firing on all cylinders. That double life has now turned into triple life, as Chase now heads up his own label, Chaikin Records.

Behind the Scenes with the Stanford Laptop Orchestra 

Source: WIRED.

The orchestra members have gathered at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics to rehearse a new kind of musical composition. Together, sitting on meditation pillows in front of MacBooks, they create songs that stretch the definition of music. The orchestra plays laptops like accordions, turns video games into musical scores, and harnesses face-tracking software to turn webcams into instruments. But at this rehearsal, the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) looks less like the symphony of the future and more like an overworked IT department.

Sound American 19 is Out

Source: Sound American. And it is all about David Dunn.

Sound American 19:
The PLACE ISSUE

Guest Edited by Null Point
Colin Tucker and Ethan Hayden

SA19: The PLACE Issue
From The Editor
Nate Wooley

Sounding Collectivities beyond Nature and Culture: an Introduction to the Music of David Dunn
Colin Tucker/Ethan Hayden

PLACE:
A Performance in Ten Parts
David Dunn

PLACE:
42 Years Later
David Dunn

A Listener’s Guide to David Dunn’s PLACE

Colin Tucker
Ring Theory:

Techno-alchemical Integration in the Works of David Dunn
Ethan Hayden

Environmental Dialogues:
Conversations with Nature in the Music of David Dunn
D. Edward Davis

The Emergent Magician:
Metaphors of Mind in the Work of David Dunn
Madison Heying/David Kant

Performing PLACE
Conversations with the Performers about Null Point’s World Premiere Realizations of David Dunn’s PLACE

The Tuba-Driven Doom Metal of Dan Peck

Source: Bandcamp Daily.

Just last week, Jon Wiederhorn meticulously traced the history of doom metal in his Bandcamp Daily piece, Doom Metal: A Brief Timeline. As that story proved, the subgenre is vast, with plenty of room for both genre traditionalists and left-field outliers.

Brooklyn-based tuba player Dan Peck falls squarely into the latter camp. For roughly the last five years, he’s been melding doom’s slow-crawling bludgeoning with elements of jazz, minimalism and noise. And while “tuba” isn’t exactly the first word doom metal brings to mind, Peck—with his trio The Gate, his solo tuba record, and a hodgepodge of other releases on his label, Tubapede—has managed to deconstruct the genre, working within an unconventional setup without relinquishing any of doom’s heaviness and brutality. Call it doom-jazz.