Avant Music NewsSource: Louder.
A ferociously intelligent man, Frank Zappa always made the listener aware that he felt that he was ‘slumming it’ by playing pop music, yet he did more than anyone to push rock music forward, to explore the possibilities and transcend its limits. As well as being a freak icon, Zappa was one of the great ‘serious’ American composers of the latter half of the 20th century – something that is only now being acknowledged by the ‘classical’ establishment.
Source: Bandcamp Daily.
If you have heard the name Jim O’Rourke, it is likely because of his work behind the boards for musicians including Joanna Newsom, Smog, Sonic Youth, Stereolab, Tony Conrad, and Wilco. Like Steve Albini, O’Rourke isn’t picky about who he chooses to work with (“Unless I have a moral problem with the group, I’ll always work for people,” he said in an interview with Hit It Or Quit It), which has allowed him to work with different musicians and touch on different genres—often resulting in those artists’ best albums.
Source: Modulisme.
Nicolas Peck is an American composer, keyboardist, sound designer, and audio director. He has been continuously active since the early 1980’s, and has made a living as a sound designer/composer since the late 1990’s. Many will know of his “Under the Big Tree” YouTube channel mostly dealing with electronic music but may also have heard his music without knowing it since he has been audio director of Disney Publishing Worldwide since 2012, where he has done hundreds of projects for iOS/Android, Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and many Disney partners around the globe. He is currently focused on creating audiobooks and linear audio stories across the many franchises of Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Twentieth Century, National Geographic, and Lucasfilm.
Source: Columbia Magazine.
Standing on the conductor’s podium, Tyshawn Sorey ’17GSAS summons colors with his baton, unplanned and unpredictable. Seated at the drums, he daubs his brushes on a moonfaced canvas, his ruminative gestures conjuring sound. A genre-defying composer and musician, Sorey, forty-two, is one of the most prodigiously talented, hardworking, and sought-after figures in the world of contemporary music, an artist who hears with his eyes and sees with his ears and whose works reflect a kaleidoscopic consciousness forever resolving itself into beguiling audio abstractions.
Source: Westword.
Subotnick’s work made an indelible impact on the future of music. He composed the first album of electronic music commissioned by a label, called Silver Apples of the Moon. He co-founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center, which held the first performance of Terry Riley’s “In C,” frequently considered the first minimalist music piece (in which Subotnick performed). He also started the California Institute of the Arts and helped design the Buchula 100, one of the first voltage-controlled synthesizers. These accomplishments would go on to influence a wide array of music and institutions, including the Lafayette Electronic Arts Festival, where a ninety-year-old Subotnick will play on Sunday, April 30.
Source: The Wire.
Drummer Dave Lombardo has recorded and performed in a surprising range of contexts, from conducted improvisation with John Zorn to electronically reshaped duels with DJ Spooky to the high-intensity post-hardcore vignettes of Mike Patton’s Fantômas, but for most listeners he’ll always be best known for his work in Slayer. His furious double bass work and ability to drive the band to greater and greater peaks of energy, particularly onstage, were a model for a generation of thrash and death metal drummers.
Source: Bandcamp Daily.
“You always have so-called ‘mainstream’ stuff happening,” says Wadada Leo Smith pragmatically. “That’s just the bandwidth of the commercial zone. You have it in every type of music.” Then the sagacious, 81-year-old trumpet innovator slows his speech for emphasis, adding dramatic punctuation with increasing pauses as his concepts expand. “Because those things are there—and you’re not part of them—then you have to build your own reality. And that reality is not a protest against—but it is something for—in this case, for ourselves.”
Source: Bandcamp Daily.
The opening line of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow is also the opening sound on the opening track on Sheen, the first album from Bloodmist—with Jeremiah Cymerman’s clarinet keys clattering in the aftermath. Bloodmist is an improvisational, electro-acoustic doom metal (or free doom jazz) trio of bassist Toby Driver; Mario Diaz de Leon (a composer who has written music for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the International Contemporary Ensemble) wielding synthesizers and drum machines; and clarinetist Cymerman.
Source: burning ambulance.
Shizuka were a Japanese band, named for lead vocalist and songwriter Shizuka Miura. The core lineup also included her husband, guitarist Maki Miura, who was also in Les Rallizes Dénudés and Fushitsusha; bassist Takehayu Harakawa; and Fushitsusha drummer Jun Kosugi. They were active — using a generous definition of that word — in the early to mid ’90s. They started out with four self-released cassettes containing a mix of live music and home recordings. They then made a single studio album, 1994’s Heavenly Persona, for the legendary PSF label, and continued playing the occasional gig. In 1995, they released the self-explanatory Live Shizuka on Persona Non Grata (a short-lived imprint of Byron Coley and Thurston Moore’s Father Yod operation; their only other release was a Keiji Haino/Loren Mazzacane Connors live duo set, which is also great), then disappeared. In 2000, a live CD-R, Tokyo Underground ’95, popped up on the Last Visible Dog label, apparently sourced from a tape owned by the bassist. Eight more years passed, and another live album, Traditional Aesthetics, was issued, again on PSF. In 2010, Shizuka Miura took her own life.
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