Wednesday, May 20, 2009

hangs in the air


Mario Davidovsky's Electronic Studies No. 1 and 3, from the always excellent ANAblog. As an ambitious consumer of weird music in my college years (as now) I discovered the school of music performed a couple "tape music" concerts per year, and one of the most visceral memories was a pianist performing a Davidovsky piece involving a swarm of blips and bloops interwoven with an equally evocative if distant piano part. The beauty of Davidovsky's music that pushes past the novelty of his groovy 1961 technology is how it hangs in the air slightly our of reach. It is not as otherworldly as similar dream music like that of George Crumb; nor is it abruptly Appolonian like Babbitt or some of the Russian composers working in this field at the time. It operates in that space of the idyll, the daydream, the fleeting.

I am very into the new Los Amigos Invisibles record. It creates a perfect sphere of pop ambiance that this listener can usually get from vintage soft rock in weak moments. It makes people want to bust a move, if just a slight, almost imperceptible one, when they enter my office.

Just getting to the mammoth Iron & Wine collection of rarities and b-sides. This is music that begs for a long drive with the windows down, the wind filling in the gaps in his skeletal songs. Plaintively covering New Order is always an easy win in my book.

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