“Rainbow ribbons in her hair…”
On Tycho’s subtle and fluid ‘Dive’
Scott “Tycho” Hansen has been making wordless electronic music for years, building each piece with organic accompaniment that’s often treated to make it sound both warm and worn. The acoustic guitars that roll through Dive, his debut LP for Ghostly International, mimic the temperate folk progressions on the early Simon and Garfunkel LP Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. Sea-spray sonics and unearthly keyboard squiggles splinter off into endless directions, sometimes finding their way around impossibly cylindrical basslines. Read more of my piece on the Tycho album at The Brooklyn Rail.
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Go check out ‘THE BEST ELECTRONIC MUSIC OF 2011’ from PopMatters.
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Even as they’re busy with equally provocative electronic records in separate solo side projects, New York City producers Travis Stewart and Praveen Sharma dealt an aurally dense and lively full-length as Sepalcure in 2011. I wrote about their absorbing EP called Fleur earlier this year, and the self-titled LP follows strongly the ambient house/bass-driven beat sound they’ve been turning out since 2009. Read my PopMatters piece on Sepalcure’s debut LP
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Great stuff from my friend Ben Smith — check fam’ and friends Krista Umile on cello and Matt Magarahan on drums!
XPN’s Studio Session arrived today! It’s a 5-minute video with performance clips and an interview from a recent visit down at their studio. Hope you enjoy it. They also managed to play my “Love Potion #10” directly after The Searchers’ “Love Potion #9” this morning.
I wrote about HTRK, Walls, I Break Horses, Tropics, Max Cooper, Balam Acab, and Martyn for Blurt Magazine. Check out BEATS WORKING now.
As Obama and Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. have admitted, waterboarding is clearly torture and has been long defined as such by both international and U.S. courts. It is not only a crime but a war crime. By blocking the investigation and prosecution of those responsible for torture, Obama violated international law and reinforced other countries in refusing investigation of their own alleged war crimes. The administration magnified the damage by blocking efforts of other countries like Spain from investigating our alleged war crimes.
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| — | Obama: A disaster for civil liberties (Los Angeles Times) |
Ernest Hemingway and Journalism
In his book about Ernest Hemingway’s early years as a reporter, Charles Fenton wrote that the author grew to value newspaper writing for its “opportunity to write constantly, for publication, in a medium which required narrative that was interesting and forceful.” I’ve long been familiar with Hemingway’s short stories and a couple of his novels, and now, in finally getting to his archive of journalistic efforts, I’m appreciative of how his reporting sharpened his ability to confidently, carefully tell a story. At PopMatters, my short piece about Hemingway’s reporting was published earlier this week. Thanks for reading.
