Electroacoustic
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Couple of things you should know if you’re considering a move to Svalbarð, the archipelago that lies inside the Arctic Circle, between Norway and the North Pole. First, get used to reindeer and polar bears. A lot of them. With a hypercarnivorous bear population something close to 3,000, they outnumber the locals by about 15…
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It’s not often we hear such advanced, confident work on a composer’s sophomore release. With In the Company of Architects, collaborators Paul Baran and Gordon Kennedy have delivered an exceptional illustration of the adage: two creative minds are better than one. The pair compose music as The Cray Twins. For this release, they have assembled…
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Hüseyin Evirgen’s latest under the Magna Pia name sports a title that’s believed to be of Sumerian origin. Daiauna is a reference to “having power over fertility” according to the album’s notes. The Greek word for demon or minor deity – daimōn – is one of its derivatives. This seven-track dark-ambient album begins with a…
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It is remarkable how little music instruments change over time. Percussionists still pound drums and various other found objects. Symphony orchestras, even those with the most modernist repertoires, are not fundamentally different than they were one or two centuries ago. And the synthesizer, arguably the 20th century’s most significant musical step forward is still operated…
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One of my more embarrassing radio moments came in the early 1990s, as I began to develop an interest in the history of experimental music. Not having paid sufficient attention in French class, I was forever mispronouncing words containing the language’s various accents: l’accent aigu, l’accent grave, etc. This meant that the enthusiasm with which…
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Artists who produce instrumental music – or to put it more precisely, music that doesn’t feature vocals – are often asked how they decide on titles. At the risk of sounding elitist, that always struck me as one of the dumber questions in music journalism. Sure, not all music lends itself naturally to a pithy…
The Moderns 