Category: Record Reviews
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Minimal Resource Manipulation…
…is the name of a label out of London UK. I’m not quite sure how I found out about them, but I ended up liking the soundscape offerings they have going so much that I bought their whole digital catalogue – 71 releases! – for something like 48 bucks on Bandcamp. It’s my new favorite…
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Top 40 Over 40.30: Duke Ellington, 1962
One of the things I admire about the jazz tradition is the fluidity with which musicians move from being leaders to sidemen. Take an album like Conference of Birds by Dave Holland. I mostly knew Dave as a sideman for Anthony Braxton and Miles Davis. But then Braxton turns around and plays sideman for Holland’s…
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Top 40 Over 40.29: 50 Ways to Be Steve Malkmus
When I started writing this series a number of years ago, I didn’t think I would be including Stephen J. Malkmus in the line up. My last year in college I had 7 roommates, several of whom played Slanted & Enchanted like 75 million times. I burned out on Pavement in the process, mostly through…
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Top 40 Over 40.28: Matana Roberts, Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis
Yes, social media can be a waste of time, and a low self esteem machine. Yes, it facilitates hate and social sniping. But – with a good roster of musical friends it can also introduce you to a lot of great new music – both in the sense of just released, and new-to-you. My latest…
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The Marathon and the Sprint
I don’t make best-of lists at the end of the year, but the song I spent the most time listening to in 2019 was B-Movie by Gil Scott Heron: It’s not as well known as his most famous song, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, and I can see why because it’s clear which song…
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Driftin’ back to Buckley
Simon Joyner once said to me I wish I could sing like Tim Buckley, but I do what I can with what I have. I said I felt the same way. This morning I was looking for something irrelevant to listen to while nearing completion of Gnawing on The Bone, an instrumental project I’ve been…
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The Residents and the Arctic
I rarely hear an entire record played on the radio. A few months ago, I heard the album Eskimo by the Residents played on WXDU’s stellar Sunday afternoon show, Polyphonic Perversity. I soon purchased it and have really enjoyed hanging out with it since. I know very little about the Residents, so I won’t say…
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Top 40 Over 40.16: Holding It Down
One possible answer to the question I posed in my post on Reckoning with REM – How come their early portraits of Southern life never said anything about the history of racist violence and forced labor in their native Georgia, even on their album Fables of the Reconstruction / Reconstruction of the Fables? – is that…
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Impersonal Problems.1: Thanissara
We’re used to thinking of problems as a word that goes hand in hand with “personal.” Of course, there are problems in our professional lives. But when we struggle with things that happen or come from outside of that realm, we tend to look at them as personal. I’ve been interested in several articles I…
johnhdavis / inundation records 