Pallett takes a deft touch with pastiche; he also syncretizes the academy and the new-music frontier, combining traditional classical instrumentation and the ever-expanding field of synthesizer technology. This meeting-of-minds hearkens back to...
Folklorists like to romanticize blues music as being a pure expression of culture, but recorded blues music was carefully marketed to its intended audience from its very beginning. As early as the 1920s, music aimed at African-Americans was labeled...
When asked about the influence of late ’70s and early ’80s electronic music on his own record, A Period of Review, Seattle ambient pioneer and head of the Palace Of Lights label Kerry Leimer told The Ransom Note: What interests me most...
Drawing obvious inspiration from timelessness and less obvious inspiration from Aleister Crowley’s Thoth tarot deck, director Vinyl Williams takes Dub Thompson’s “No Time” and turns it into a multi-level philosophical...
2014's Shrink Dust is VanGaalen's first album in almost exactly three years. Described by its creator as a "sci-fi folk record", it takes the sound of its predecessor from 2011, Diaper Island, and, through the introduction of a pedal steel guitar...
Top picks for music festivals in 2014, with a focus on the Pacific Northwest festivals, New York City festivals, national music festivals, and transformational festivals that are worth a damn.
2010 didn’t offer up much to rejoice over, what with earthquakes, oil spills and other such tragedies dominating headlines and generally fucking over the world. Yet in the wake of those disasters the good Lord did deem it fit to bestow one blessing...
An appropriate follow-up to our feature on Experimental Music on Children’s TV, Nor-Cal powerhouse Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs leads listeners into similar notalgic territories with the music video for “Water Fountain”. With the...