At 85, Wendy Carlos remains an enigmatic figure in the world of classical music. Intensely private, she has not granted an interview request in over 15 years. When the first book-length treatment of her life and work was published in 2020— without her consent—Carlos trashed it on her personal website, calling it “mean-spirited” and “presumptuous,” […]
Category: Playlist
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A David Lynch Playlist
David Keith Lynch died on January 16, days before his 79th birthday. A polymath best remembered as the director and writer of “Blue Velvet” (1986), “Mulholland Drive” (2001), “Inland Empire” (2006), and (much of) “Twin Peaks” (1990-1991, 2017), few artists can lay claim to his idiosyncratic, inimitable comfort with discomfort in content and form. Lynch […]
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A Norma Beecroft Playlist
The composer Norma Beecroft (1934-2024) was known for works that combined computer-generated and natural acoustic sounds. One among only a few Canadian female composers of her time, Beecroft’s musical formation, beyond her early training in Toronto, came with notable Italian musicians: composers Goffredo Petrassi and Bruno Maderna, and flutist Severino Gazzelloni. Yet her three years […]
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A Classical Kink Playlist
What does kink sound like in music? After posing the question to myself, I felt slightly paralyzed, so I set out on a walk with a friend, who sometimes sends me links to iconoclastic piano pieces. I thought he could be a kind of kinky music sensei. “Have you listened to any ‘kinky’ music lately?” […]
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A McMansion Hell Playlist
If you’re driving along the American suburban frontier, a McMansion is like obscenity: You know it when you see it. Oversized pediments and fiberglass columns, stickered-on quoins and a roofline that appears more like a turtle’s shell or a Braque composition than suitable shelter. Pretentious by definition, cheap by choice. But one may not be […]
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A U.S. Election Night Playlist
It’s that time again: When a handful of voters in a handful of counties in a handful of states in the United States decide the fate of planet Earth. The (once again) absurdly high stakes of the U.S. presidential election inspired me to make a playlist that doesn’t try to compete with substance use, CNN […]
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A Music and Chess Playlist
When he wasn’t busy scoring for the likes of Sergio Leone, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marco Bellocchio, Bernardo Bertolucci, Elio Petri, Brian De Palma and Terrence Malick, Ennio Morricone could be found hunched over a chessboard. He was a good enough player to hold former world champion Boris Spassky—who famously lost to Bobby Fischer in 1972—to […]
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Off-Site Eden
In his dazzling, fragmentary book A Lover’s Discourse, Roland Barthes wrote, “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words.” When I first encountered this analogy in my early 20s, I felt somehow relieved. I […]
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An Operatic Eurovision Playlist
It’s that time of year again: The Eurovision Song Contest is just around the corner, coming to grace (or haunt) television screens across Europe and beyond on May 11. What began as an experiment in transnational broadcasting in 1956 has since become a global cultural phenomenon in which camp and geopolitics intertwine. Eurovision, now in […]
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A Lord Byron Playlist
Back when Twitter was still (somewhat) good, someone by the user name @Swaefastide posted a portrait of Lord Byron, in traditional Albanian costume, with the caption, “I will NEVER apologize for being a wildly successful alpha male,” lampooning the words of Trump-endorsed author Nick Adams. Non-Trump-endorsed author Ryan Ruby took the parody one step further, […]