Continental Drift
I’d read somewhere that a book called Hearing History: A Reader, edited by the promisingly Fall-esquely named Mark M. Smith, explored the distinction between “American sound” and “European sound”. This got me all excited and I chased down the book. Disappointingly, though, it turned out that the relevant chapters were not really about the similarities […]
Bassless
To the horror of bass players everywhere, some bands just do without one. I’m not thinking at the moment of the increasingly popular guitar-and-drums duo format, whose sound is already stripped-down and somewhat experimental to begin with, and which probably deserves a post of its own. I’m thinking rather of bands that do seem to […]
Climate Change
“If we decide to call singing the heart of music – at least of the music of the past –” writes the pianist Alfred Brendel, “what then is harmony? The third dimension, the body, the space, the mesh of nerves, the tension within the tonal order, but also the tension in the apparent no man’s […]