Music
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Best Music for Writing
At The Village Voice, Jami Attenburg reveals 2011’s top ten pieces of music to listen to while writing, “as supplied by the authors of recent books,” so they must be effective. The list features some of our friends, including Rumpus…
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Albums of Our Lives: the Mountain Goats’ The Coroner’s Gambit
make me young again / make me well When I listen to the Mountain Goats I always hear traveling—a ceaseless forward momentum.
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Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #3: Revolution in the Air
Revolution begins with devotion to a moral vision and a belief that egregious wrongs must be made right. In this way all revolutions are a revolution within. These days, there is both revolution in the air and a fear that not…
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Songs of Our Lives: Simon & Garfunkel’s “America”
It’s Christmas morning, 2001 and I’m fifteen. I unwrap a record player, but am more immediately captivated by the record collection that comes with it.
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Best Music Writing Goes Indie
Do you love the Best Music Writing series as much as we do? Series Editor and music critic extraordinaire Daphne Carr has just announced that the venerable annual collection will no longer be published by Da Capo Press, so she’s…
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Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #2: Chicago
Chicago. Sometimes it gets overlooked as a great city as we tend to focus our energies on considering the coasts and leave the interior as a great blur in our minds.
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Smoke In Your Eyes
SMOKE IN YOUR EYES: Heartthrobs A beautiful Rumpus Comic from MariNaomi about partying with Duran Duran.
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Aural Fixations, the Rumpus Mixtape #1: Pastoral
Pastoral. For a long time we’ve thought of that simply as pastures, poetry about streams and paintings of lush, lime green grass. Cows. Works by Virgil. A certain longing for the countryside. Shepherds. Hills rather than towns. Yes all of…
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The Rumpus interview with Jóhann Jóhannsson
The Icelandic musician and composer Jóhann Jóhannsson specializes in disparate, subtly moving themes and careful musings on the ways in which industry and society intersect.
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Rumpus Sound Takes: In Our Rooms
Atlas Sound Parallax (4AD) I am not particularly attuned to my cultural moment when I listen to Bradford Cox’s music.
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Rumpus Sound Takes: Inside Outside
Iceage New Brigade (What’s Your Rupture?) Perhaps because the band consists of four clean-cut Danish teenagers, Iceage’s brash, discordant punk has made it the darlings of both the Pitchfork and the Maximumrocknroll sets.
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Albums of Our Lives: Joni Mitchell’s Blue
Bliss, melancholy—Blue is both at once, just as the holiday season is for me.