The recent social media meme listing 10 concerts people have attended accompanied by one they didn’t (“find the lie!”) has incited me to complete a list that started out as a “50th anniversary of the concept album” brainstorm over drinks one night last year. The question here is a little different: What are the most formative and […]
Archive for the ‘Music & soundscape’ Category
Greatest albums of the LP era
Posted in Music & soundscape, tagged aesthetics, album era, best albums, Bitches Brew, Bob Dylan, Can, Captain Beefheart, ecocritique, ecomusicology, Eno and Byrne, Funkadelic, Henry Cow, Incredible String Band, Magma, Miles Davis, music, musicology, process-relational thought, Radiohead, rock music, Talk Talk on May 8, 2017 | 10 Comments »
World Listening Day
Posted in Eco-culture, Music & soundscape, tagged acoustic ecology, ecomusicology, global hum, soundscape, soundscape ecology, World Listening Day on July 18, 2016 | 3 Comments »
Today is World Listening Day, a global event held annually to Celebrate the listening practices of the world and the ecology of its acoustic environments; Raise awareness about the growing number of individual and group efforts that creatively explore Acoustic Ecology based on the pioneering efforts of the World Soundscape Project, World Forum for Acoustic […]
A moment in May
Posted in Music & soundscape, tagged beauty, Mark Kozelek, music, sadness, spring, Sun Kil Moon on May 12, 2015 | 3 Comments »
The semester is over, the grades are submitted, the sun is shining after a beautiful heavy rain, and the trees on the streets of Burlington are in full bloom — cherry blossoms and flowering dogwoods, magnolias and crabapples (at least those are my guesses). And this song lilts the afternoon as I watch the traffic outside […]
Back to Zero
Posted in Music & soundscape, tagged counterculture, daevid allen, esotericism, Glastonbury, gong, music, psychedelia, rock on March 18, 2015 | 2 Comments »
My musical, intellectual, and ecocultural interests would not have evolved the way they did without Daevid Allen — beat poet, musical visionary, and psychedelic rocker who died last week at age 77. Here’s a personal account of why. In the background are the social, material, and ecological connections that I intend to examine more closely in […]
A 7-year musical itch
Posted in Music & soundscape, tagged 1960s, 1968, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Captain Beefheart, cultural change, David Ingram, ecocriticism, ecomusicology, Incredible String Band, jazz, Magma, Miles Davis, music, psychedelia, rock on March 12, 2015 | 5 Comments »
One of my pet musicological theories is that the years 1967-74 were the most creative 7-year period in the history of musical humanity. Why those years? The social and technological revolutions of the 1960s — civil rights, the women’s movement, the counterculture and anti-Vietnam War movements, the sudden unifying singularity of television and mass (and […]
[Circle with an X through it]
Posted in Music & soundscape, tagged alchemy, Circle X, ecomusicology, music, No Wave, post-rock on March 8, 2015 | 4 Comments »
It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about music here. But as I’ve gotten thinking and writing about it again, under the “ecomusicology” rubric, expect more of it on this blog. It’s a satisfying return for me (I studied music theory, composition, and performance as an undergrad and continued it semi-professionally for a little while afterward). This […]
Upcoming: ecomusics, climate change culture, etc.
Posted in Music & soundscape, tagged climate culture, eco-arts, ecomusic, ecomusicology, ecopoetics, environmental humanities, Latour, petroculture on September 30, 2014 | 1 Comment »
I am about to travel to Asheville, North Carolina, for the Ecomusics and Ecomusicologies conference, to be held from Thursday through Monday at the University of North Carolina Asheville. The international conference, which has become an annual event (it met previously in Brisbane, Australia, and in New Orleans), brings together theorists and researchers with performers and practitioners. Panels on topics including “musical […]
New growth…
Posted in Music & soundscape on August 10, 2011 | 6 Comments »
http://youtu.be/BzZBcqOe2lw And while we’re on a grassy, shooty, growthy theme (and in the midst of a rare spurt of blog activity)… I’ve been wanting for years to write a book about “Laughing Stock,” the stunningly beautiful final album from Talk Talk, so many worlds beyond where they started, and the epitome of a process-relational musical […]
Bitches Brew Revisited
Posted in Music & soundscape on June 13, 2011 | 3 Comments »
Graham Haynes’s band touring under the name Bitches Brew Revisited, after the famous album by Miles Davis that turned 40 last year, opened the Burlington jazz festival last week. They were wonderful.
Ever becoming…
Posted in Music & soundscape, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, music on May 10, 2011 | 4 Comments »
Glad someone uploaded this to YouTube… It’s, of course, the Heart Sutra via the Akron/Family. “Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond…” “Gone, gone, gone to the Other Shore, attained the Other Shore having never left. Oh what an awakening! All hail!”
Music of the turning earth…
Posted in Media ecology, Music & soundscape, Spirit matter on April 23, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Today’s link dump is devoted to sound, earth, religion, language, and the creativity of friends… First the sounds. Here’s Science Friday’s Earth Day episode on the origins of music in the Great Animal Orchestra; and what American English sounds like to non-English speakers (hilarious):
Sounding the land
Posted in Music & soundscape, tagged acoustic ecology, landscape art, music, soundscape on March 21, 2011 | 4 Comments »
Some Landscapes has a great post about landscape artist/musician Richard Skelton. As evident in works like Landings, Skelton is an artmonk, an eco-process-relationalist extraordinaire, and very much the musical equivalent of the kinds of artists I wrote about here. Threads Across the River (which follows Scar Tissue in the video below) is beautiful: