Dick Summer’s Subway MemoriesEvery Christmas, without fail, I watch Frank Capra’s iconic and cautionary tale, It’s a Wonderful Life. I watch it for its humor, nostalgia but also its central theme, that we all affect the lives we touch in ways you could never expect. I was reminded about this at the Star’s End 30th…
On Saturday, June 16th, an anniversary will be celebrated. It’s the 30th year of the Star’s End journey. It’s actually the back end of 30 years since the show was launched in 1976. That’s longer than Voyager has been traveling the galaxy. Since Star’s End took off, there’s been Disco, Punk, New Wave, Ambient, Grunge…
It was Forty Years Ago Today that Sgt. Pepper’s taught the band to play. Okay, how many articles on the 40th anniversary of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band have used that line? I still have my original Sgt. Pepper’s LP, complete with the cardboard cutouts of sergeant’s stripes and moustaches. But that’s…
Every now and then you learn a lesson you expect to keep with you for life, but usually, you have to learn it again. Back in 1985 when Kimberly Haas and I were conducting interviews for our documentary series Totally Wired, we talked with Patrick O’Hearn at a rehearsal studio in Los Angeles. Patrick is…
*****LANGUAGE ADVISORY***** I went to a club in London called The Blue Note a few years ago to see the Gateway Trio with Jack DeJohnette, John Abercrombie and Dave Holland. In the middle of the club was a pillar with four block letters vertically emblazoned on it: S T F U I turned to a…
WARNING: Possibly Creepy Last year you might recall electronica artist BT talking about Circuit Bending on Echoes. This is the art of taking commercial electronic products like Furby dolls and altering their sound circuits to make music, or at least funny noises. Recently, Lars Hoel did a cool piece on Circuit Bending for NPR. Well…
A great overview article of space music appeared in the London Observer/Guardian Sunday paper. It’s written by Simon Reynolds, a very good critic and author of several books including Generation Ecstasy : Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture. His article, Kings of the Cosmos, takes the stance that 70s space music is still…
If you’ve read some of my previous blogs, you’ve heard me lament the state of live performance in electronic music. It’s one thing to create elaborate architectures in the confines of your studio and computer, meant to be heard in environments detached from the real world, be it a boombox, a car stereo or ensconced…
There’s been a lot of activity on the space music list lately. One topic is what’s the difference between Ambient and Space music. Folks are camping out at either end of the spectrum, saying the twain should never meet, with a few taking up the middle ground, that space is a subset of ambient or…
It’s nice to know that in these days of high tech digital music, you can still create sound with something as simple as marbles and kitchen mixing bowls. That’s what Sxip Shirey has done in a fascinating video called Sxip Shirey Playing Bowls with Red Marbles. Think La Monte Young, Tibetan Singing Bowls and the…