Swinging Modern Sounds #57: Going Long, in Four Parts
...if you want more, the music can meet you where you are. It can instruct on the meaning of music itself, on its history, on its cross-cultural possibilities.
Rick Moody
110 posts
Swinging Modern Sounds #56: On Song-Sharking
The human relationship to music is a passionate relationship, or at least it is in the kind of music I like.
Swinging Modern Sounds #50: The Big 5-0!
While it’s possible to find a lot to worry about in the world of contemporary music, there’s always something new to listen to as well, post-historical, outlying, pre- or anti- or minimally digital music. And so maybe there will be five more years of Swinging Modern Sounds.
Swinging Modern Sounds #55: Meredith Monk, Composer
Rick Moody talks with composer Meredith Monk about her new album Monk: Piano Songs, the physical movement integral to music-making, and what the future holds after 50 years of performing.
Swinging Modern Sounds #54: Jam Band Apotheosis
Back in the seventies, in circles I travelled in, you could not escape the Grateful Dead, even if you wanted to—and I was someone who wanted to.
Swinging Modern Sounds #53: The Distribution Problem, Part Three
I thought, in my ongoing attempt to describe how digital music is changing the way we consume music, that it would be good to speak to a representative young person about her music listening habits.
Swinging Modern Sounds #52: Chris Abrahams Riffs
There are not so many great bands anymore, not like there once were. But there's still Australian experimental jazz trio the Necks.
Swinging Modern Sounds #51: Free For One and All
Dean Wareham is a great writer, and possessed of a strikingly astringent and dry-eyed view of things without pity or self-pity or undue kindness, and what follows, I trust, will give abundant evidence of this.
Swinging Modern Sounds #49: Divided by a Common Tongue
Rick Moody interviews Belle & Sebastian's Stevie Jackson about his solo album, misinterpreting songs, and the band's rough early days.
Swinging Modern Sounds #48: Trying Not to Stare at the Sun
Rick Moody talks to novelist and musician Wesley Stace about his career-defining, game-changing new album Self-Titled.
Swinging Modern Sounds #47: A Further Miscellany
This column collects a bunch of albums (and, in one case, a book by a writer/musician) that I have loved a great deal in the last six months, as well as exactly one album that I think is not worth the hype.
Swinging Modern Sounds #46: The Distribution Problem, Part Two
Dave Allen is a formidable commentator these days on all things Internet, a sort of web 2.0 version of Marshall McLuhan: less New Age than Jaron Lanier, less Palo-Alto-Research-Center than Bill Joyce, less corporate than Mark Zuckerberg.