Tag: music

Having recently finished his somber Mass, Stravinsky wanted to write an opera, something light and deliberately old-fashioned, out of its time, both pre-modern and pre-Romantic, something almost Mozartean. In the spring of 1947, he had seen a Hogarth exhibition at the Chicago Art Institute, and that seemed to offer great possibilities. Back in Hollywood, he asked Aldous Huxley to recommend a poet to write a libretto on The Rake’s Progress, and Huxley warmly recommended Auden. Stravinsky was a very frugal man, but he not only invited the customarily penniless Auden to come and spend a week at his house in Hollywood that November, he even paid the poet’s air fare from New York. […]
Auden worried about the proprieties. Should he pack a dinner jacket? Stravinsky worried about the accommodations. Was the couch in his den long enough for Auden? How tall was Auden anyway? Stravinsky, a small man, searched in vain through Auden’s poetry for some clue. As soon as the visitor arrived, it was clear that he would not fit into his allotted space. But no matter. After a bountiful dinner with lots of wine, Stravinsky arranged a chair and some pillows as an extension to the couch, and Auden bedded down there among Stravinsky’s softly rustling collection of forty parrots and lovebirds.
[…]
They worked hard. Within a week, they had agreed on their central characters, on their plot and their general structure. Auden chain-smoked and drank and refused to go anywhere near the ocean.

Otto Friedrich, City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940′s

@septembriseur, in case you were unfamiliar with this anecdote. I thought the detail where Stravinsky anxiously combed through Auden’s poetry for a clue as to his height was particularly good. 

(via havingbeenbreathedout)

what composer you should fight

unalienablerights:

Bach – no. just no. one time bach got into a fight with a bassonist over his bassoon part, and, i quote John Elliot Gardiner, “was forced to draw his sword and defend himself.” bassoon rage is terrifying, and bach was able to hold him off even though it was a surprise attack. don’t fight bach. you’ll lose. (plus if by some miracle you won, you’d have 18 children after you to avenge their father. do you really want small bachs chasing you the rest of your days?)

Handel – you could take handel probably. no killer instinct. do not let him get too close – he threatened to throw a singer out of a window once and could probably have carried through. take him down through attrition.

Haydn – you could absolutely take haydn. take him down quickly before he has a chance to trick you.

Mozart – depends. instrumentalists probably possess enough resentment to take him on easy. vocalists…could you really bring yourself to fight mozart? his arias are so nice. so flashy. so singable. go fight haydn instead. unless you’re a contralto. then absolutely fight mozart. fight everyone on this list.

Beethoven – DO NOT FIGHT BEETHOVEN. DO NOT FIGHT BEETHOVEN. DO NOT FIGHT BEETHOVEN. you will lose.

Rossini – absolutely fight rossini. you’ll win. easy. 

Schubert – why would you want to fight schubert. he is a precious tiny forest spirit who just wants to compose lovely songs. the only person who is authorized to fight schubert is the accompanist who has just been asked to play erlkonig for the sixth time. and even they will feel bad afterwards. go fight rossini instead.

Berlioz – yes. fight berlioz. absolutely fight berlioz. sure, afterwards you won’t be able to brag that you defeated berlioz since no one outside of music knows who he is, but at least you’ll have a good victory on your hands.

Liszt – tough fight. liszt is 6 feet tall and has massive yaoi hands judging from his music. take him down from afar. 

Chopin – please dont fight chopin. you’re better than that. it would be too easy. give yourself more of a challenge.

Brahms – this is a fight that you can win. just tell him you’re from the future and he never lived up to Beethoven’s name. don’t feel bad when he starts to cry. just take him down then and there.

Schumann – don’t do it. the problem is not robert himself, it’s the fact that clara will come after you. and she will beat you. this has nothing to do with you or your fighting abilities – if you fight robert schumann clara will find you and clara will end you.

Wagner – ABSOLUTELY FIGHT WAGNER. PLEASE fight wagner. I will pay literal, actual money to watch someone beat up wagner. you will get lots of help from everyone else in the music world including other composers. even if you have just fought them. everyone wants to see richard “dick” wagner taken down. the only person in the music world more utterly fightable than wagner is andrew lloyd webber.

Verdi – go fight wagner instead.

Stravinsky – do not fight stravinsky. he will fuck you up.

Mahler – the same fight as brahms, except even easier.

Schoenberg – schoenberg has nothing to lose. he will be vicious. he will fight to his last breath. and when you are standing over him, bloodied, he will look up at you. and he will thank you. you will carry a twinge of uneasiness around with you for the rest of your life. occasionally you will hear a tone row in the distance. do not listen, do not investigate, or schoenberg will have won after all.

sharkchunks:

aliensnipe:

sledgehammertoe:

gotitforcheap:

tepitome:

For their single Blue Ice, Swedish band The Shout Out Louds sent fans a kit for making a record out of ice. Pour water into a silicon mold, freeze it, then play the record.

my new single dropping soon it’s a bunch of bees and you gotta put them into hives and get the honey out of them and then take that honey and mold it into a vinyl or some shit oh well pitchfork already told me i’m getting best new track 

My next song will be cut into clay with a wooden stick on a pottery wheel, like that one X-Files episode with the Lazarus Bowl.

To hear my next single you need to record the broadcasts of five separate numbers stations on 12/22/14 and overlay them. It’s post-glitchwave mathcore so in order to “perceive” it as “music” you need to deprive yourself of sleep for 72 hours while securing yourself inside an isolation tank, although an unused shipping container will do in a pinch.

You’re all amateurs, my new record is just an electrified lobotomy spike that you insert through your ear into the hearing center of your brain and you plug it in to stimulate the neurons to perceive the music. And when you play it for the first time, it melts the auditory cortex so you can never hear it (or anything else) ever again.

N I G H T V I S I O N: CONVERSATIONS: NIC ENDO.

N I G H T V I S I O N: CONVERSATIONS: NIC ENDO.

thisisnightvision:

image Few women in music can compare to Nic Endo, the modular synth-warping magi behind the classic Nineties album, Cold Metal Perfection, and beloved comrade of Berlin’s enduring digital hardcore pioneers, Atari Teenage Riot. As Atari’s frontwoman, a vanguard architect of experimental noise, and as an activist, feminist, and socially-conscious aesthetic icon, she is something of a patron saint to the Nightvision world, and a significant influence on why we even exist as evangelists of extreme ideas in electronica and beyond.

Retail is detail – my thoughts on HMV

banquetrecords:

BANQUET RECORDS – more than still your local record shop

Well, its been a long time coming. We were talking about this for a little while. Even as long as five years ago when people were talking about how indie stores were folding left right and centre, we were very vocal to point out that our indie has a longer future than HMVs and the like cos we can adapt to changing demands.

More recently there’s been a lot of doom stories about HMV’s demise. This facebook status and conversation was only a few days ago!! Talk of administration carried a ‘when’ tag rather than an ‘if’ pre-fix. This morning, we received a letter from the Banquet label’s distributor that they werent supplying HMV anymore until they paid their October bills. That’s when this situation became imminent to us. But even then, we never saw it as being this quick. I’ve had a few gripes with HMV over the years. Some of the favourable terms they get from suppliers are unfair. Some of their market dominance is unhelpful to the indie. And there’s indies smaller than us who must feel this even more. I don’t really know how HMV got to where they are. I dont know if they opened up in towns that already had indie stores, or whether as downloading was more commonplace they were able to sell DVDs and games in a way an independent record shop couldnt. But i do know that when i started shopping at (Beggars) Banquet there were about a lot more record shops in Kingston (two Our Prices, The Record Shop, the two dance shops i never went into, does Woolworths count? Borders?), and in time we saw and then lost Tower Records, Virgin Megastore (altho the advent of Uniqlo has done wonders for me) and i do know that, apart from Tesco and Asda, HMV is the only high street chain that sells significant numbers of decent CDs and records… I mean, a decent number of significant records. I mean, ah, you know what i mean.

So there’s many negative impacts of any HMV closure. If indeed it does happen – maybe it won’t. In the immediate short term, my thoughts are with the staff. HMV staff are certainly not the enemy. Max use to work there, and Jane used to work at Our Prices. Music fans are music fans and people are people. Losing your job – if this happens – is not a good thing for anyone. Im also gutted for any labels that suffer in this. We saw a lot of labels screwed when Virgin went under, also when the SonyDADC fire happened. We are also a label ourselves, altho its a tiny part of what we do, but if we dont receive money for CDs and records that have been sold, well thats not helping anyone. If this is to happen to such an extent that bigger labels get no cashflow at all, then some labels run the risk of going bust themselves. Obviously that’s disastrous.

But my real concern is for the continuation of the physical format. If you’re reading this you probably understand that physical formats are important to many people, probably you but not necessarily you. If its not important to you, then it will be to people whose music you buy. So it should matter. The immediate fear is that some labels just don’t bother to put out physical releases anymore, thinking that people no longer want them. Or they do so and completely cut out the record shop. Im not talking so much about punk bands and punk labels… For as far as i can see we’ll do well with Run For Cover, No Sleep, Alcopop and BSM… Im talking more the bigger UK indie labels… We NEED record labels like Wichita, XL, Sub Pop, Matador, Bella Union, and Rough Trade Records (the label) to not only want to put out physical music, but to find it also financially worthwhile to do so. God knows how the majors will react to this. We’re already seeing loads of direct-to-customer only releases from Universal and EMI. If this stuff continues, then we’re in some real trouble. And without this indie selling 100+ copies of a Haim record for example, there’s no indie to sell the indie label’s releases. I’m also wary that there’ll be some horriffic “cool” nu-HMV come in its place. “Hey guys, vinyl’s real cool right now, and look at these places with decent record shops. Lets go into those towns and undercut them all.” This would be a disaster.

However, I refuse to join in with the thought that music retail can’t exist without HMV or a similar replacement. The thing about Record Store Day and the celebration of indie record stores is that they’re all different. We’re not in competition with Rough Trade, Piccadilly, All Ages, Punker Bunker or Phonica. We’re all indies and we all need each other to do well to “keep fighting the good fight”. And now it seems increasingly more so. Music retail is about to change more radically than (m)any of us have ever seen.

Yes, there’s so many bad things about HMV going under (IF they do) but IF they do, then its an exciting new time to be creative. To re-embrace physical releases and the experience of buying them. To help customers get exactly what they want and to turn them onto things they might not yet know. If we can create a market environment in which the market leader is no longer given an unfair advantage to remain there, in which the customer is a friend more than a revenue stream, in which the struggling indie becomes slightly less so, and in which the bigger indies are able to contribute to the structure of future market growth, then this silver lining might even shine past this mass of dark clouds over music retail right now.

This is huge. A massive change in how people buy physical formats of music. But lets embrace the change and make music and local music communities all the better from it.

Making it up as I go along.: Why Kylie Matters

Making it up as I go along.: Why Kylie Matters

bevismusson:

Or a blog post in which I come over all Kieron Gillen (oh dear, just imagine…)

Kylie matters. Not in the big ways, but in the ways that make the world run, but in the little ways that make the world worth running.

Kylie Minogue (for it is she) is, in my opinion, pretty much the epitome of pop…