Over the past year or so, I’ve been playing a lot of guitar again. I’ve been especially interested in working with open tunings, which have opened up a fat new toolbox of techniques — not to mention the lion’s share of the Keith Richards song catalog. Coming back into standard tuning after playing for a […]
The hot synthetic biology video of the moment. Putting together molecular timekeeping and quorum sensing. Beautiful. Plus, bonus video for the obscure title reference of this blog post. Morrissey forever!
Thursday, October 29, 2009
I like electronic dance music a lot. But I don’t really know a lot about it, and I’m practically illiterate when it comes to the lexicon that real aficionados use to describe the music’s multitude of subgenres. For those, who like me, get tripped up on the distinctions between trance, techno, and trip-hop, not to […]
It’s probably a good thing that I don’t understand the lyrics to this or know anything about the politics of Syrian techno-popstar Omar Souleyman. (Don’t tell me!) I first heard him on a recent episode of Bob Boilen’s very hip weekly NPR podcast All Songs Considered that was guest-deejayed by Bjork (who made some other […]
There was an interesting article in the NYT Magazine last weekend about Michelle Obama’s cousin, Capers Funnye, a convert to Judaism who is the rabbi of [the largest?] black synagogue in Chicago. About a year ago, the Times did another story about Funnye, which has a great little multimedia slide show embedded. This is a […]
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Thanks BoingBoing for reminding me about the 33 1/3 series — a collection of small, really personal books, each riffing on a single pop/rock album, edited by David Barker. I can imagine holing up for the winter with the whole collection and the accompanying music. Of course, that’s not gonna happen. But … beautiful packaging, […]
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Wrapping up end-of-year business has been a bit of a slog to say the least. As we all take a breath before diving in again, I offer this heartbreaking cover of “Celebrated Summer,” a great Husker Du tune from the seminal New Day Rising album. My vinyl copy purchased circa 1986 has Grand Canyon grooves […]
Thursday, October 2, 2008
A great evening of music at Higher Ground on Sunday, September 28, with Richie Havens playing new and old stuff in a trio with Walter Parks on lead guitar and Stephanie Winters on cello. His singing voice and guitar playing are as strong as ever and his sound is unique. And we should all look […]