Television guitarist and songwriter Tom Verlaine has passed away. In his honor, I’m reposting something I wrote back in 2010, a version of which made it into Shadowing the Anthropocene. Much of it deals with the objects-versus-relations debate that was occupying the then very active “speculative realist” (“new materialist”) blogosphere. The first video captures Verlaine […]
Posts Tagged ‘Miles Davis’
R.i.p. Tom Verlaine (relationalism & earth jazz redux)
Posted in Music & soundscape, tagged Grateful Dead, improvisation, Marquee Moon, Miles Davis, musicology, object-oriented ontology, relationalism, television, Tom Verlaine on January 29, 2023 | Leave a Comment »
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 »
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 […]
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 […]
relationalism, earth jazz, & the solstice
Posted in Music & soundscape, Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, improvisation, Miles Davis, music, object-oriented philosophy, paganism, relationalism, solstice on June 20, 2010 | 9 Comments »
If there’s a musical demonstration of relationalism, and by extension (as Skholiast points out) of ecology, it’s the kind of improvised music that the Dead are supposed to have excelled at (and occasionally did). The universe gives rise to many wondrous entities in its long history of spontaneity, relational responsiveness, habit-formation, and form-building. The habits start as rhythms, melodic chirps that turn into territorial refrains and calls, and that gradually maneuvre their way into verse patterns, melodies, harmonies, polyrhythms. Distinct songs develop for particular purposes and gradually get freed from those purposes, taken up into improvisational routines and performances, some of which crystallize into larger-scale architectonics, but only ever temporarily.
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