Video games are one of my great passions in life. I’m not kidding. I think the medium is absolutely fascinating, and have thought so since I was a child and discovered Baldur’s Gate and Final Fantasy VII. You can laugh.
Read MoreI encourage all of you to explore Björk’s work. Most of us think of her as that crazy Icelandic woman who showed up to the Oscars in a swan dress—how outré! She’s actually a prolific producer, composer, and performer of her own music. Her singing really threw me at first. Later it grew on me, as strange, imperfect voices are wont to do on all of us.
Read MoreShaw’s Pulitzer-winning composition is called Partita for Eight Voices. The voices in question are those of the members of Roomful of Teeth, an a cappella vocal band that fuses styles from all over the globe into contemporary classical music. It’s tough to describe, but seeing them live feels like going to one of the best rock concerts you’ve ever attended in a little club, except it’s also one of the best new music concerts you’ve ever attended
Read MoreIn preparation for my sister’s move to Israel this year, I asked her for a list of Israeli pop music I could listen to—you know, for my own edification. “Start with Idan Raichel,” she said. I’d heard of him, I thought, vaguely, but I wasn’t prepared for what his music is actually like. More properly known as “The Idan Raichel Project”—one source puts the number of his collaborators over the years at around ninety—his band aims to unite the diverse cultural threads that make up the Middle East.
Read MoreSinger-songwriter-pianist Regina Spektor is a force of nature. I am not cool enough to have heard of her before she was cool—I encountered her when I saw her music video for “Fidelity,” like everybody else. Remember that song where they were in a totally white room throwing colorful paint or Holi powder or something on each other? And she did that “hea-ah-ah-art” riff with all the glottals? Yeah, I liked that song.
Read More“Kafka Fragments” has the dubious, possibly oxymoronic distinction of being a famous piece of contemporary vocal chamber music – that is to say, people in certain circles feel it’s overdone and basically nobody else has ever heard of it. It’s an hour-long song cycle for solo female voice and solo violin, with texts from Franz Kafka’s diaries and letters. The “fragments” range in length from twenty seconds to ten minutes of music. Each is a fiendishly-notated jewel of expression.
Read MoreThis particular band, Mostar Sevdah Reunion, did exactly what it says on the cover: they reunited in the city of Mostar to arrange and record sevdalinka. The band’s founder recorded his first few tracks in 1993, when Mostar was under siege during the Bosnian war. On the band’s website, he described that first recording as “just a getaway episode to forget for one single moment all atrocities and suffering.” After the war, he reunited with his musician friends to record their first self-titled album.
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