Aïda Nosrat’s “Common Routes” sounds, at first, like a record about travel. It takes several listenings to fix its geometry: The accordion is French, the guitar idiom is Manouche, the groove absorbed from Burkina Faso. Nosrat’s voice moves through all of it with an ease that suggests she has been waiting for these specific interlocutors […]
Author Archives: Jordan Silversmith
… is the author of the novel Redshift, Blueshift (Gival Press), which won the Gival Press Novel Prize. He studied English literature at Vanderbilt University and holds a J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law. He lives in New York.
Posted inEssay
The Disappearing Monument
It is easy to believe in the permanence of sound. Now every recording can be streamed and repeated on demand without degradation; files replicate flawlessly; loops repeat without wear; digital archives expand infinitely. Music appears inexhaustible as technology promises security against erosion—like nothing goes away. William Basinski’s “The Disintegration Loops,” receiving a deluxe reissue in […]
Posted inEssay
Democracy of Dreams
Earlier this year, my piano teacher—by my side through the years I spent inching through “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” treating Bach’s counterpoint like moral instruction—sent me a lullaby she had composed for my daughter, who was not yet born. The audio arrived by text message one morning. She wrote that she had been thinking about the […]