Category Archives: Music
Music
Riding the crazy-wave with Lana Del Rey
Don’t worry, this is not another post about whether Lana Del Rey is a worthwhile popstar or not. It’s a rant about the personal crisis I had after watching her video Ride, released in September last year. ‘It’s Thelma and Louise meets grindhouse meets David Lynch,’ … Read more
Music
Out of the graveyard: Dock Boggs and Smithsonian Folkways
In 1927 in the heart of the United States’ central Appalachian mountains, an audition was held at the Norton Hotel in Norton, Virginia. The audition’s purpose was to find musicians playing traditional Appalachian mountain music to then bring back to New York to record phonograph records for … Read more
Music
Meet Me on the Desertshore
It’s easy, and inaccurate, to reduce Throbbing Gristle to a band obsessed equally with sex and death; but that doesn’t mean that they weren’t obsessed with those very topics. Take the cover of their seminal 1979 album 20 Jazz Funk Greats: a lovely shot of the … Read more
Music
Not incompatible, but mighty strange: The rise of the popular folk band
Marcus Mumford, lead man of Mumford & Sons, flicks the in-ear monitors out of his ears, throwing away the sound of the band’s foldback. His singing slows down, and the crowd falls out of sync with the band. Mumford has done this on purpose, separating his own … Read more
Music
John Peel’s carcass: Grindcore at the BBC
Of any figure in music broadcasting no shadow looms larger than that of controversial DJ, John Peel. For over 35 years the late BBC radio DJ’s well-heeled drone, eclectic taste and unwavering commitment to championing new music guaranteed him a dedicated following and he became the benchmark … Read more
Music, Reviews
Claustrophobic and Bittersweet: Tristesse Contemporaine and The Music From the Balconies Nearby Was Overlaid by the Noise of Sporadic Acts of Violence
The Parisian DJ-collective-cum-record label Dirty Sound System – DJs Guillaume Sorge and Clovis Goux, alongside a roster of associated producers and curators – have always been somewhat out of sync with their contemporaries, and this characteristic has usually served them well. In 2003, at the fag end … Read more
Music, Reviews
Rendering unto Caesar: Dirty Projectors’ Swing Lo Magellan
Until recently, Dirty Projectors traded in a highly idiosyncratic and instantly identifiable form of indie rock. The band’s sole songwriter and explicit leader, Dave Longstreth, is a Yale-trained musician whose songs contain passages as fiendishly convoluted and baroquely formalist as anything in the classical music canon. At … Read more
Music, Reviews
‘It’s a natural fact that it’s good to be gay!’: Strong Love: Songs of Gay Liberation 1972–1981
The digitisation of vast back catalogues of music has made music historians of all of us. Consumers can now access nearly any recorded music they want, and are thus encouraged to explore their favourite genres of music in great depth. Paradoxically, this also encourages a kind of … Read more
Music
Little Prince, big performance: a message from the cheap seats
For a long time I wasn’t sure that I was a stadium show person. I often found myself let down by costly international acts and blockbusters at Rod Laver Arena, attending shows by definitive artists more for the sense of ‘being there’ than for enjoying their exhausted … Read more
Music
Modern adventures in classical music
A few years ago I applied to be a presenter at the classical music radio station 3MBS. I was twenty-three. 3MBS is a certain kind of Melbourne institution: it may not be as well known as FM counterpart ABC Classics but devotees make up for this through the sheer force of their passion. Read more
