Last winter, Georg Friedrich Haas mentioned to me that the composer Arash Yazdani, a former student of his and a friend of mine, had given him a word he’d been looking for his entire career. That term is “plasmatic music.” I’ll let the two artists define the term in the correspondence below, which covers that […]
Tag: New(ish) Music
Posted inReview
On the Shore of the Cosmos
Conductor Maxime Pascal delights in the vast, the weird, and the borderline unachievable. At the Salzburg Festival this year, he offered a program featuring two of Pierre Boulez’s most forbidding works—”Sur Incises” and “…explosante-fixe…”—each lasting around 40 minutes and featuring ensemble writing of dazzling complexity. Just programming one is a feat; Pascal did both, with […]
Posted inReview
An Explosive Legacy
Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival—or HCMF for short—is in full swing, celebrating its 48th edition with performances, workshops, installations and more, all against the backdrop of mounting economic pressures in the UK’s arts sector. Over 48 hours of concerts, interviews and informal networking receptions, I tried to work out how the festival is negotiating a harsher […]
Posted inEssay
Gap Trap Laugh, Part II
PART II VI.Shimmering Ontology / (Laugh) Struck by the apparition, she burst out laughing. The laughter of childbirth.—Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils Kundry’s primal scene—the instant of her transformation into the figure of the eternal feminine pariah—takes place at the base of the cross: having laughed at the body of Christ, she endures as […]
Posted inEssay
Gap Trap Laugh
for Seth Brodsky PART I: STRANGE THINGS I. getting it just right Every act of reading is a difficult transaction between the competence of the reader (the reader’s world knowledge) and the kind of competence that a given text postulates in order to be read in an economic way.—Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation All artists play […]
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 inReview
Situations for Distracted Listening
Every time cultural organizers huddle to pick a festival theme, their brainstorming heat surely counts as a modest contribution to global warming. In today’s attention economy—where information is overabundant and rage-bait has surpassed click-bait like an evolved Pokémon—art institutions are forced to perform the same precarious dance, navigating survival and relevance under the increasingly standardized […]
Posted inReview
Strength in Absence
In late September 1940, a month after negotiations between the French and German governments dissolved the Third Republic and established the Vichy regime under Marshal Pétain, Walter Benjamin found himself a refugee with dim prospects for legal exit from France. The German-Jewish man of letters boarded a train from Marseilles toward the Spanish border with […]
Posted inInterview
What is the Work / What is the World
There is something strange in the ancient woodlands of Jeløya island. Were it not for the little orange sign staked into the ground, you might almost not notice it, so subtle is “The Grey Zone (NeverWhere),” an installation by Jacob Kirkegaard for this year’s edition of the Momentum Biennale in Norway. The loudspeakers are carefully […]
Posted inReview
The Dissolving of the Line
Under the artistic triumvirate of Marie-Therese Bruglacher, Laure M. Hiendl and Bastian Zimmermann, Musik Installationen Nürnberg—in its second edition following a 2022 debut—set out to present music differently: “not as a normal concert, but as an experience in space.” But what happens to music when it leaves the concert hall and instead latches onto a […]