Diego Stocco - Experibass

The instrument from hell.

If you go, I will surely die.

If Schoenberg had freed the composer from the tradition, John Cage (USA, 1912) freed the composition from the composer. Cage blurred the distinction between what is music and what is not music.

First, he promoted silence, altered instruments (1940), sounds of nature (1941), found sounds (1951), the very movements of the performer (1952), the collage of random noises (1952), and even the background noise of the auditorium (1952) to the status of music, preferring the narrow range of percussion instruments while pioneering electronic music in Imaginary Landscape no.1 (1939), and composing Sonatas and Interludes (1948) for “prepared piano”, a technique that paradoxically scaled down the piano’s expressive power and basically turned it into a polyrhythmic percussion instrument (the equivalent of a percussion ensemble), an expedient later transposed to the String Quartet (1950).

Not content, in 1951 Cage also introduced indeterminacy and randomness in the process of making music, as demonstrated in the Piano Concerto (1958). Thus Cage’s music could be the random (“aleatoric”) outcome of “events” that were foreign to traditional music making (in which the only events are the musicians playing their instruments based on the composer’s score).

Like in Zen meditation, Cage’s pieces highlighted a higher dimension, which was not to be found in the minute details of the piece but in the experience of it. While Cage did not attempt to bridge the gap between performer and listener, he downplayed the composer (who specifies only the actions, not the music itself), increased the degrees of freedom of the performer (who produce the music), and, indirectly, demanded that the listener began to “listen” in a different way, more integrated with the act of making music.

Cage extended the scope of dadaism beyond mere provocation and turned it into a new perception of the artistic event; which is, after all, just that: an event. He removed both form and content from art, and left only the process. But, more than an artist, Cage was a creator of genres. He wrote the history of avantgarde genres for the following 50 years (and counting), even though he didn’t give it any masterpiece.

-Pierro Scaruffi, The History of Avantgarde Music

Fennesz - Shisheido

“If the previous albums were philosophical treatises, Endless Summer (Mego, 2001) is a poetic work, one that rediscovers the power of melody in a world that is largely dissonant. Thus the futuristic muzak of Made in Hong Kong, in which melodic themes recur cyclically albeit transformed into descrete sequences of digital events, the sweet waves of distortions lulled by folkish guitar in Endless Summer, Shisheido (a brief piano-based lullaby), Caecilia (a nostalgic proto-tune emerging from the shapeless breathing of the electronics, perhaps the most poignant track), “songs” that point towards a parallel universe of purely melodic sounds, but visible to us only through the fuzzy prism of quantum spacetime.”

-Pierro Scaruffi

Fennesz - Circassian

Ethereal and uplifting.

Probably the best MBV-‘clone’ since MBV.

Everything I know, I learnt from The Wonder Years.

And if you don’t think this is the greatest show ever, I will fight you.

"Last year, I was so lost, but that night was beautiful"

I liked Daul Kim because she was different.

She was raised in Singapore (national pride concept).

And she listened to some cool tunes.

She didn’t wear Balmain or Gucci, nor did she dress “ferosh”.

In fact, she dressed quite weird (for a model).

But she was smart, and sharp of tongue - and also - quite funny.

She didn’t take no shit from the industry, the Korean people, or anyone.

When I used to read her blog (it’s called ILIKETOFORKMYSELF), I thought we would’ve gotten along so swell.

She also seemed so sad.

RIP Daul Kim.