Posts by author
Rick Moody
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Swinging Modern Sounds #16: Indeterminate Activity
Lovers of contemporary experimental music will likely remember the moment in the early eighties when John Cage, the godfather of minimalism and of most New York City experimental music, referred to Glenn Branca (he of the pieces for ensembles of…
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Swinging Modern Sounds #15: On Technique
In popular music circles, these days, very good instrumental technique is often considered bad form.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #14: Nine Thousand Words On The Size Queens
The following is a record review in dialogue form conducted between this columnist and Michael Snediker (with whom I corresponded about Antony and the Johnsons a couple months back), the poet and literary critic. We were shooting for ten thousand…
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Swinging Modern Sounds #13: On Loops
These lines depend on your having a working knowledge of the New York City suburbs.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #10: The Interactive Playlist
The original idea for this blog was to find my way to things that were unreleased, self-released, and unsigned, and in this installment I’m going to take my mission seriously for a change. Since I’ve been writing these notes, I’ve…
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Swinging Modern Sounds #9: The Means of Production
Makers and consumers of music, there is no other conclusion but that the future of the medium lies in your hands.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #7: On Repetition
The intractable problem of the moment in the arts—in music, in books, in movies, in almost every area of contemporary culture—is the problem of inattention.
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An Interview with Julie Vanderburg, Obsessive Reader
Julie Vanderburg is a painter, jewelry designer, and mother of three from Seattle, Washington, who is distinguished, among these other things, by the fact that she has been reading the same book over and over again for a very long…
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Swinging Modern Sounds #6: The Transcendental Signifier
Note: to the readers of this intermittent bulletin, I recognize in what follows that I am violating the compact I made a couple of months ago, to cover only unsigned, unreleased, or self-released music, and I want to assure you…