Brian Eno has spent the last year or so producing the new Coldplay album, Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends.
As a teaser, the band has released a free download of a single from the disc, “Violet Hill.” It’s available for a limited time off the Coldplay website. The full album is set […]
An electro-pop classic from Air inches towards the timeless on the 10th anniversary of Moon Safari.
You can hear a three and half minute audio version of this with music.
When you’re making retro music for the future, time becomes nebulous. So we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s been 10 years since the French duo […]
The first live performance by acclaimed producer Tom Rothrock and seminal sets from Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin highlighted a recent excursion to Los Angeles.
Philip Glass called his music neurotic. The Beatles put him on the cover of Sgt.Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Thomas Pynchon references him The Crying of Lot 49. Karlheinz Stockhausen was a towering, often controversial figure in modern music who said he was writing music for the “post-apocalypse” the time of […]
I’ve attended a few concerts recently that pushed me further into the No-Laptop Zone and they couldn’t have been more different in their sound, influences, and effect. The best of them, Radio Massacre International and the Trevor Dunn’s Schemes of Omission employed no laptops, prefab drum loops, sequencer patterns or CD replicated […]
Echoes 18
We don’t celebrate our anniversaries well on Echoes. We did a decent job of our tenth, but didn’t really milk it for all it’s worth. And the 18th doesn’t quite have the import of the 10th or 20th. Going back into our past never seems quite as important as moving forward into […]
I just ended a road trip to California and the preprogrammed backing-track issue came up again with two very different sets of artists, Ulrich Schnauss and Melanie Hutton & Marshall Lefferts. I must say that my stance against preprogramming in live performance was challenged last week when Ulrich Schnauss came in for a Living […]
It’s been a long time since Sheila Chandra graced us with new music. Her last proper album was This Sentence Is True (The Previous Sentence Is False) in 2001. Since then Chandra has been retiring in southwest England, singing only in an amateur choir, still nursing her voice after years of nagging […]
A pioneer of the electronic frontier officially hits old age.
Even at a concert as well programmed as NEARfest, a few things aren’t going to work.
LIGHTS OUT: MAGENTA, BOB DRAKE
As much as I liked Izz, (see earlier NEARfest Blog) I truly disliked Magenta. Even though they are superficially similar - both playing a symphonic brand of prog - […]