BOMB 123/Spring 2013
WEB EXCLUSIVE Michael Rother is perhaps best known as one half of German rock group Neu!, whose three-album body of work from the 1970’s is widely considered to be among the most unique and soaringly beautiful music of the era.
WEB EXCLUSIVE Martinican musician/linguist Jacques Coursil’s Trail of Tears, features 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.
WEB EXCLUSIVE My Brightest Diamond’s 2008 album A Thousand Shark’s Teeth vaulted operatic bandleader Shara Worden into the pop-music spotlight. Listen to 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.
WEB EXCLUSIVE Songbird Jambalaya: Musician and musicologist Ned Sublette talks to “blues growler” Coco Robicheaux, a true Louisiana spirit—a survivor of Katrina and more.
WEB EXCLUSIVE Yo La Tengo’s And Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out illustrates the band’s commitment to artistic growth and depth.
Muhly chats with fellow composer, and Pulitzer Prize winner, David Lang about his recent work, love fail, and his uncanny ability of capturing deceptively complex emotions in his music.
Ben Chasny’s experimental project 6 Organs of Admittance has a new electric album, Ascent, out now. Chasny’s bandmate in Rangda (and former Sun City Girl) Sir Richard Bishop sits down with the guitarist.
McCombs, a singer-songwriter of few, carefully chosen words, talks to Ariel Pink, whose new album Mature Themes is out now.
Iranian musician Mohsen Namjoo, now exiled in the US, fuses classical Persian poetry and musical forms with the American blues. He talks with artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat.
WEB EXTRA VIDEO Ashley’s operas zero in on the American vernacular, finding ways to make the landscape talk. The composer reflects on the reinterpretation of Perfect Lives in Spanish, with Waterman, who’s spearheading the project.
Hagerty recounts his journey from Pussy Galore to Royal Trux to his current incarnation as The Howling Hex. Their new album is The Best of the Howling Hex. It’s not a greatest hits compilation.
In a conversation with the legendary British folk singer-songwriter Roy Harper, Joanna Newsom talks about the harp, her personas, and her predilection for California. Available online for a limited time only.
Musician and composer Robert Wyatt, renowned for his vocals and complex blends of pop, jazz, and world music, bridges the generation gap with the emerging “first lady of Arabic hip-hop” Shadia Mansour.
The Bug is Kevin Martin, the influential London-based musician/producer who, under the spell of the voices and rhythms of Jamaican dancehall, helped spawn a new era of dance-floor experimentation—as told to Jace Clayton.
No-Neck Blues Band’s Keith Connolly queried David Toop on inchoate listening, eavesdropping, and the uncanny—as contemplated in Toop’s new book, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. From the current issue, BOMB 114, Fall 2010.
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. On September 7, Japanese noise band Boredoms release a DVD documentary, 77 Boar Drum, of their incredible drum circle performance at Brooklyn Bridge Park in 2007.
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!
The insanely prolific songwriter rants with artist David Shrigley, who was just nominated for a Turner Prize.
