BOMB 112/Summer 2010
Subscribe!
In No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33”, Kyle Gann tackles the experimental composer’s infamous “silent piece” with superb knowledge and skill. Gann happily answered my inquiries via email from Belgrade. Read on…
Martinican musician/linguist Jacques Coursil just released Trail of Tears, a new album featuring his signature trumpet sound—reminiscent of speech. Jason Weiss talks record labels with him, the heydays of jazz, identity, academia, and more.
WEB EXCLUSIVE If you know Jace Clayton, you probably know him as DJ /rupture, a turntablist who has hopped styles from clattering noise to grimy dub to cumbia. Coming off his recent album Solar Life Raft, Clayton met with poet Alan Gilbert.
WEB EXCLUSIVE Tristan Perich’s album 1-Bit Symphony is actually a programmed microchip. Live, he accompanies the complex bleeps and bloops of its songs with a harpsichord. With Nick Hallett, he expounds on the algorithmic impulse of his art.
My Brightest Diamond’s 2008 album A Thousand Shark’s Teeth vaulted operatic bandleader Shara Worden into the pop-music spotlight. This web-exclusive interview features a live recording of the band performing at Joe’s Pub in New York City.
WEB EXCLUSIVE! Rhys Chatham, legendary composer and performer, talks about the downtown music scene with guitarist Alan Licht.
Songbird Jambalaya: Musician and musicologist Ned Sublette talks to “blues growler” Coco Robicheaux, a true Louisiana spirit—a survivor of Katrina and more.
Beginning with the mostly solo Horn of Plenty, Droste’s ringing vocals catapulted Grizzly Bear to the fore of Brooklyn “freak-folk.” Ironic, then, that here he recalls being initially afraid to sing, even for himself.
If you’ve heard singer-songwriter David Sylvian’s indelible voice, you’ll share cult guitarist Keith Rowe’s desire to place it. Here they focus on the recent Manafon, their joint journey into the outer limits of popular song.
The Colombian-born cumbia has become a blank canvas for a new international genre. Musicologist and leader of the band Frente Cumbiero, Mario Galeano Toro, explains cumbia’s sonic boom. LISTEN to one of his mixes.
Novelist Jon Raymond calls Callahan’s early music as Smog, “gorgeous, literate, and bleak-hearted.” Raymond taps into Callahan’s passion for boxing and influences like DC hardcore and the Meat Puppets.
Oliveros is a perpetual pioneer of electronic music, the use of technology, telematics, and sonic awareness—or, as she terms it—Deep Listening.
Adrián Dárgelos, front man of Babasónicos, speaks of how the band went from being the hobby of a group of déclassé, unemployed, college graduates to one of Argentina’s most enduring bands.
Matt McAuley and Brain McPeck of the band A.R.E. Weapons take a studio timeout with Suicide’s Alan Vega. Vega will be speaking at the Brooklyn Public Library on 12/10.
Seven is to good fortune what eight is to infinity. The legendary Japanese noise band Boredoms on how their inimitable sound bridges Japan’s ancient folklore with world music, hardcore, and, yes, even cosmic disco.
The blues-rock provocateur on his historico-musico revue. A protegé of Eggleston, Falco also photographed and filmed ‘60s and ‘70s Memphis blues. WEB EXTRA: Listen to a song by Tav Falco’s Panther Burns!
Experience two sound poems by vocalist Arnaldo Antunes, as discussed in his interview with poet Eucanaã Ferraz.
Antunes, vocalist for the landmark rock band Titãs, on lyrical audacity, his sound and visual poems, and everything from Bossa Nova to Tropicália. WEB EXTRA: Listen to exclusive sound poems by Arnaldo Antunes!
With performers ranging in age from 72 to 88, Young @ Heart bridges the gap between modern and genuinely old school.
Quirky DIY popster R. Stevie Moore has recorded over 400 albums—most of them by himself, at home—since the ’60s. Shrigley Field, the album he recorded in response to David Shrigley’s book Worried Noodles, is available now.
The postmodern composer’s gleeful, spatialized works orchestrate invented instruments inside, outside, and all around the theater. A brilliant manipulation of form and perception.
Best known in America for his controversial album with Lou Reed, Metal Machine Music, pianist, composer, and Zeitkratzer leader Reinhold Friedl speaks with collaborator Elliott Sharp.
Los Tigres del Norte: the ultimate corrido-belting norteño band, and Grammy winners to boot.
Amina Claudine Myers, virtuoso pianist and organist, sits down with trombonist, composer, and educator George Lewis to discuss the articulations between sound, history, and place that are central to her work.
PERFORMA05 founder RoseLee Goldberg talks with Danish artist Jesper Just about his first-ever opera, True Love Is Yet to Come, which premiered this past spring in New York.
Experimental composer and pianist Anthony Coleman speaks with painter Michael Goldberg on the eve of Coleman’s CD Shmutsige Magnaten (Tzadik).
Antony and the Johnsons thrilled the music world with their debut album, I Am a Bird Now (2005), but Antony’s work has been confounding the establishment ever since he arrived in New York in 1990. He met filmmaker Charles Atlas soon after.
Novelist Erasmo Guerra caught up with Monterrey alterna-rock band Plastilina Mosh—the duo of Alejandro Rosso and Jonas—at a makeshift beer and sangria stand after their performance in Brooklyn this summer.
Andy Palacio was known as the king of Punta Rock, the Belizian dance music that grew out of that region’s strong Garifuna culture. Trinidadian artist Christopher Cozier talked with Palacio about the Garifuna’s struggle for survival in the Caribbean.