Experimental
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Whenever I bring home a new piece of audio tech, I search for the right recording to road test it with. As excited as I am to own the latest whatever, I’m almost always let down by the first thing I press play on. The music doesn’t so much disappoint as fail to really push…
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The Castel Sant’Angelo is revered by Roman Catholics around the world. Built on the bank of the Tiber River in Rome about 135 A.D., it was later the site of a key event in early Catholicism. Pope Gregory the Great, hoping to end a catastrophic plague by leading a procession in the area, reported a…
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Poetry fans will recognize At The Still Point Of The Turning World from T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton. The first of his Four Quartets, the poem is about time and redemption. Eliot’s big idea was that getting our heads around the nature of time and the universe will draw us closer to God. By focusing…
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The notes for Adrian Dziewanski’s new album The Trail Loops Back make an insightful connection between the Vancouver musician/poet’s work and early ambient compositions. “Dziewanski utilizes environmental recordings, found sound and prepared instruments as pathways into deep-time sonic meditation. His music harkens to an exquisite stasis that was once the focus of western music’s ambient…
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Listeners who find the title of this new Superalma Project album’s opener a bit on the nose can hardly be blamed. “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength” has an obvious resonance in the Age of Trump. But then artists have been quoting George Orwell for decades, convinced that they were living in…
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The fourth instalment in Peter Kutin’s and Florian Kindlinger’s Decomposition series landed at the beginning of March. Decomposition IV: Variations on Bulletproof Glass is very much as advertised. The duo abused a 400-kilogram slab of bulletproof glass measuring two by three metres and recorded the whole thing for posterity. At one point, a wrecking ball…
The Moderns 