Series of posts

  • Top 40 Over 40.20: L. Subramaniam live

    Sometimes you just gotta trust a friend.  Every year Duke Performances has a concert series you can buy into at a package discount.  I pick up seats for the shows I wanna see before it all starts, and watch the dates roll forward and wash over me as the year unfolds.  At the suggestion of my…

  • Pretty Bubbles Turning Into Grime

    Michael Hudson has a new book out so I thought it was high time I posted some thoughts I’ve been meaning to write up about his last one, The Bubble and Beyond. I’ve posted before about Hudson’s 1973 classic Superimperialism, whose analysis of the economic strategy of American Empire was followed by a terrific 1977…

  • The Core is Getting Soft.16: Quick Shelving

    I’ve been spending more time than I really wanted to figuring out how to translate incidental sounds from loops and samples on my forthcoming record to a live setting this week.  I haven’t played live in more years than I can shake a stick at, and the last time I did this with Folk Implosion…

  • The Core Is Getting Soft.15: Crash Pad Course

    I’ve been spending the day loading my iPad up with samples and loops I used on my new record.  I’m getting a group of folks together to play some of these songs live locally and perhaps 1 or 2 places elsewhere this summer, and 2 of us are gonna practice tomorrow.  While live playing will…

  • New Project Update

    I’ve just posted an update to the Kickstarter page about where we’re at with mixing the new record.  You can check it out here. In the meantime, here’s to rallies in the rain: April 15th, 2015 at Shaw University.

  • Dirty Harry Does Diversity.2: Indicting Invictus

    (Like the original Magnum Force, this post is a sequel to the first Dirty Harry.) Of all of Clint Eastwood’s “Sympathy for the Other” movies, Invictus was the most popular in the Land of the Liberals.  J. Edgar (gays), Million Dollar Baby (women), and Gran Torino (SE Asians) all did well but received more criticism than…

  • The Core is Getting Soft.14: Bang a Slate

    One of the digital tools I threw in the mix of my new record is SSD4, the drum sampler made by Slate Digital.  It was the first time I used something other than an electronic drum machine to program drums.  The closest I’d come to fake “real” drums was the time we sampled a drum…

  • Dirty Harry Does Diversity.1: Magnum Tucked In Tweed

    One of the weirder phenomena of early 21st century cinema has been the emergence of Clint Eastwood as would-be spokesman for various groups marginalized by the white male power structure his famed ’70’s character Dirty Harry once defended with a famously long phallic symbol.  Million Dollar Baby (2004) concerned itself with issues of gender and…

  • Top 40 over 40.19: Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali Live in Concert

    In this series of posts on musicians doing high quality work after 40, little has been said about their audience.  Today’s post will start out with them first.  Last October, I went to see the Pakistani group Rizwan-Muazzam perform at the Reynolds Industries theater at Duke University.  I knew little about these performers from Pakistan, other…

  • Top 40 over 40.18: Peter Hughes and Dipa Ma

    I was once listening to an episode of Car Talk on NPR and heard a woman call in to Click and Clack with the following dilemma:  she had a Honda that was running perfectly, and that had proven to be very reliable over the years. Nevertheless, she found the car boring.  She found herself eyeing…