John Perry Barlow is an activist, writer, former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He’s also an engaging Twitter-er who gets my attention with concise, insightful original tweets and great quotations. In the last … [read more]
It’s been a different sort of music listening year for me. Starting last January, I largely took a break from listening to popular music and reconnected with my first love, classical music. The last few years of increasingly commercial ‘indie’ … [read more]
A review of Myriam Alter’s ‘Where Is There’ (2007) Myriam Alter is one of those musicians about whom the Internet seems to know very little. What Google manages to dig up more or less tells the same story: Alter hails … [read more]
Sometimes, you just connect with a CD — immediately, powerfully, viscerally. That’s how I reacted when I first heard Sinéad Lohan’s No Mermaid, a 1998 disc that few people heard and fewer bought (her Wikipedia entry claims that No Mermaid … [read more]
I was doing some reading about the inimitable Jon Hassell the other day (an appreciation of his mysterious and powerful music should be another post here one of these days) and came across mention of Mati Klarwein, an artist whose … [read more]
A review of Food’s Quiet Inlet (2010). In its web review, the BBC calls this “a magical hybrid of technology and improvisation, Europe and America, ambience and dance.” It’s definitely all those things. I find myself especially excited about this … [read more]
Everyone’s lamenting the decline of proper stereo equipment. Teens are losing their hearing to their tinny iPod earbuds and nobody knows what non-compressed music sounds like anymore. People don’t buy stereos these days — listening to music in one’s living … [read more]
For the past 6 months, I’ve been listening to classical music almost exclusively. (There’s a much longer post – or maybe a series – about that in the works.) Toronto, like most major cities, is definitely under-supplied with bricks & … [read more]