Sufjan Stevens’ seventh album “Carrie and Lowell” reveals the possibility of turning darkness into something honest and powerful. These eleven laments seek to find answers during a very private struggle for Sufjan— reflecting on life, death, and finding God after the death of his mother who abandoned him. Sufjan quietly retreated to find these answers in simple orchestrations and haunting poetry that dive into a place of unapologetic grief.
Read MoreI really adore this little John Cage song, “The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs.” It’s a setting of Joyce’s Ulysses and goes against every kind of traditional text setting I can think of -— it sort of deals with Joyce words but not really, it’s just cycles through the same pitches over and over again. And yet it works —
Read MoreJacob Cooper is a fellow member of Sleeping Giant, my composers’ collective. I was really hoping to get his music on the show, but alas nothing quite fit. So I’m featuring this really beautiful song of his. Unlike Bon Iver, the voice is not transformed. Instead a lost sample of La bohème is transformed into a pulsing and repeated chord.
Read MoreI love Kanye. I also love “I love Kanye”. Lots of folks can’t stand him but something I fundamentally love about him is his blatant appropriation/re-adaptation of older materials. In “Blood on the Leaves” he pulls one of the most audacious moves I can think of — sampling the very famous recording of Nina Simone singing Billie Holiday’s “Strange fruit” and combines it with TNGHT’s “R U Ready”.
Read MoreIf there’s two things I love in music, it’s weird sounds, and beautiful harmonies; and the power of what happens when they’re mixed together. “715 – CR∑∑KS” is a perfect example of both. Throwing his voice into a vocoder, Justin Vernon of Bon Iver transforms his voice into a virtual choir, but not without the artifacted nature of these vocal transformations revealing the fundamental fragility of the intentions of its protagonist.
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