Music
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Aural Fixations, the Rumpus Mixtape #8: Van Gogh
Van Gogh … beauty that breaks your heart. Vincent painting images that he had to view through the bars of the asylum. Vincent eating his paints.
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Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #7: Revelry
Revelry. A raw expression of joy. Delight. It’s loud, laughing, possibly bawdy, frequently boozy.
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The Rumpus Interview with James McMurtry
I call James McMurtry late one morning when I’m visiting Austin, Texas. By now, I’ve seen him play three times, in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and California, and I’m always struck by the way audiences in different parts of the country identify…
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Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #6: Drinking Red Wine
There are picnics where people discuss how long the potato salad can be out in the heat and there are picnics where people discuss Wittgenstein. At Wittgenstein picnics, the people are drinking red wine. White wine is a kiss; red…
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David Lynch Interview
Salon converses with David Lynch about his new album Crazy Clown Time. The director discusses transcendental meditation, his attraction to sound, and finding humor in the disturbing. “When you get something that’s thrilling, if it’s working on a couple of…
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The Rumpus Interview with Mirah
Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn (born in 1974) came up in the fertile Olympia scene of the late ’90s. She was part of the K Records renaissance along with bands like the Microphones, the Blow and Old Time Relijun – all…
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Rumpus Sound Takes: Moving Backward, Forward
Steve Reich WTC 9/11 (Nonesuch) “It’s pretty much Different Trains but for 9/11.”
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Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #5: Maudlin
Maudlin: a feeling we don’t so much encounter as create. A sad place with funereal bits and a ladle of self-pity. Darker than Fitzgerald’s dark night of the soul, it is a place far past despair.
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Albums of Our Lives: Dead Moon’s Thirteen Off My Hook
I was 19 years old when I first witnessed the achingly beautiful sounds of Fred and Toody Cole and Andrew Loomis. They were called Dead Moon.
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Rumpus Sound Takes: As If It Were The First Time
Cass McCombs Humor Risk (Domino) The thing I have noticed about Cass McCombs, or rather the thing I think is a telling parallel to his music, is that he never really looks the same in pictures.
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Record Related #2: Wild Flag, Wild Flag, Wild Flag
Wild Flag, S/T (Merge) / live at The Bowery Ballroom, NYC, 10/18/11 Eleanor Friedberger, best known as half of The Fiery Furnaces, sings the ultra-catchy, ’70s-damaged “My Mistakes.”
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Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #4: Reading Didion
Great writers wound us. Their words cut into our bodies; their ideas become notions of ourselves. Cue Joan Didion. She stitches sentences through your brain. You emerge exhausted and charged — agreeing, disagreeing and questioning. Reading Didion invites a…