Drone and Apocalypse
Drone and Apocalypse

Author: Joanna Demers

Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

Published: 2015-12-11

Total Pages: 117

ISBN-13: 1782799958

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Drone and Apocalypse is an exhibit catalog for a retrospective of twenty-first-century art. Its narrator, Cynthia Wey, is a failed artist convinced that apocalypse is imminent. She writes critical essays delineating apocalyptic tendencies in drone music and contemporary art. Interspersed amid these essays are “speculative artworks”, Wey’s term for descriptions of artworks she never constructs that center around the extinction of humanity. Wey’s favorite musicians are drone artists like William Basinski, Celer, Thomas Köner, Les Rallizes Dénudés, and Éliane Radigue, and her essays relate their works to moments of ineffability in Herodotus, Aristotle, Plato, Pliny the Elder, Isidore of Seville, Robert Burton, Hegel, and Dostoyevsky. Well after Wey’s demise, the apocalypse never arrives, but Wey’s journal is discovered. Curators fascinated with twenty-first-century culture use her writings as the basis for their exhibit “Commentaries on the Apocalypse”, which realizes Wey’s speculative artworks as photographs, collages, and sound/video installations.

Mysticism, Ritual and Religion in Drone Metal
Mysticism, Ritual and Religion in Drone Metal

Author: Owen Coggins

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-01-25

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1350025100

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This is the first extensive scholarly study of drone metal music and its religious associations, drawing on five years of ethnographic participant observation from more than 300 performances and 74 interviews, plus surveys, analyses of sound recordings, artwork, and extensive online discourse about music. Owen Coggins shows that while many drone metal listeners identify as non-religious, their ways of engaging with and talking about drone metal are richly informed by mysticism, ritual and religion. He explores why language relating to mysticism and spiritual experience is so prevalent in drone metal culture and in discussion of musical experiences and practices of the genre. The author develops the work of Michel de Certeau to provide an empirically grounded theory of mysticism in popular culture. He argues that the marginality of the genre culture, together with the extremely abstract sound produces a focus on the listeners' engagement with sound, and that this in turn creates a space for the open-ended exploration of religiosity in extreme states of bodily consciousness.

Louder Than Bombs
Louder Than Bombs

Author: Ed Vulliamy

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 022671540X

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Part memoir, part reportage, Louder Than Bombs is a story of music from the front lines. Ed Vulliamy, a decorated war correspondent and journalist, offers a testimony of his lifelong passion for music. Vulliamy’s reporting has taken him around the world to cover the Bosnian war, the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of Communism, the Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003 onward, narco violence in Mexico, and more, places where he confronted stories of violence, suffering, and injustice. Through it all, Vulliamy has turned to music not only as a reprieve but also as a means to understand and express the complicated emotions that follow. Describing the artists, songs, and concerts that most influenced him, Vulliamy brings together the two largest threads of his life—music and war. Louder Than Bombs covers some of the most important musical milestones of the past fifty years, from Jimi Hendrix playing “Machine Gun” at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 to the Bataclan in Paris under siege in 2015. Vulliamy was present for many of these historic moments, and with him as our guide, we see them afresh, along the way meeting musicians like B. B. King, Graham Nash, Patti Smith, Daniel Barenboim, Gustavo Dudamel, and Bob Dylan. Vulliamy peppers the book with short vignettes—which he dubs 7" singles—recounting some of his happiest memories from a lifetime with music. Whether he’s working as an extra in the Vienna State Opera’s production of Aida, buying blues records in Chicago, or drinking coffee with Joan Baez, music is never far from his mind. As Vulliamy discovers, when horror is unspeakable, when words seem to fail us, we can turn to music for expression and comfort, or for rage and pain. Poignant and sensitively told, Louder Than Bombs is an unforgettable record of a life bursting with music.

The Musician as Philosopher
The Musician as Philosopher

Author: Michael Gallope

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2024-03-15

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0226831752

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An insightful look at how avant-garde musicians of the postwar period in New York explored the philosophical dimensions of music’s ineffability. The Musician as Philosopher explores the philosophical thought of avant-garde musicians in postwar New York: David Tudor, Ornette Coleman, the Velvet Underground, Alice Coltrane, Patti Smith, and Richard Hell. It contends that these musicians—all of whom are understudied and none of whom are traditionally taken to be composers—not only challenged the rules by which music is written and practiced but also confounded and reconfigured gendered and racialized expectations for what critics took to be legitimate forms of musical sound. From a broad historical perspective, their arresting music electrified a widely recognized social tendency of the 1960s: a simultaneous affirmation and crisis of the modern self.

Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off
Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off

Author: Victor Szabo

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-11

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0190699302

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Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off: Ambient Music's Psychedelic Past rethinks the history and socioaesthetics of ambient music as a popular genre with roots in the psychedelic countercultures of the late twentieth century. Victor Szabo reveals how anglophone audio producers and DJs between the mid-1960s and century's end commodified drone- and loop-based records as "ambient audio": slow, spare, spacious audio sold as artful personal media for creating atmosphere, fostering contemplation, transforming awareness, and stilling the body. The book takes a trip through landmark ambient audio productions and related discourses, including marketing rhetoric, artist manifestos and interviews, and music criticism, that during this time plotted the conventions of what became known as ambient music. These productions include nature sounds records, experimental avant-garde pieces, "space music" radio, psychedelic and cosmic rock albums, electronic dance music compilations, and of course, explicitly "ambient" music, all of which popularized ambient audio through vivid atmospheric concepts. In paying special attention to the sound of ambient audio; to ambient audio's relationship with the psychedelic, New Age, and rave countercultures of the US and UK; and to the coincident evolution of therapeutic audio and "head music" across alternative media and independent music markets, this history resituates ambient music as a hip highbrow framing and stylization of ongoing practices in crafting audio to alter consciousness, comportment, and mood. In so doing, Turn On, Tune In, Drift Off illuminates the social and aesthetic rifts and alliances informing one of today's most popular musical experimentalisms.

Anatomy of Thought-Fiction
Anatomy of Thought-Fiction

Author: Joanna Demers

Publisher: John Hunt Publishing

Published: 2017-07-28

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 1785355538

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In the year 2214, the Center for Humanistic Study has discovered an unpublished manuscript by Joanna Demers, a musicologist who lived some two centuries before. Her writing interrogates the music of artists ranging from David Bowie and Scott Walker to Kanye West and The KLF. Questioning how people of the early twenty-first century could have believed that music was alive, and that music was simultaneously on the brink of extinction, light is shed on why the United States subsequently chose to eliminate the humanities from universities, and to embrace fascism...

Cinematic Encounters with Disaster
Cinematic Encounters with Disaster

Author: Simon R. Troon

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2024-06-13

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13:

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Cinematic Encounters with Disaster takes Hollywood's disaster movies and their codified versions of natural disaster, post-apocalyptic survival, and extra-terrestrial threat as the starting point for an analytical trajectory that works toward new understandings of how cinema shapes and informs our conceptions of disaster and catastrophe. It examines a range of films from distinct regional and industrial contexts: Hollywood, indie movies, different kinds of documentaries from the US and elsewhere, and auteurist-realist cinema from Europe and Asia. Moving across and beyond critical and industrial categories that often inform thinking about cinema, this book contends that different approaches to film style can push us to imagine disaster in distinct ways, with distinct ethical connotations. Framed by contemporary concerns around the global climate crisis and the advent of the Anthropocene, questions about how films can best offer responses to historical exigency guide the book's explorations of spectacular 2010s blockbusters like Gravity (2013) and San Andreas (2015), environmental documentaries including the paradigmatic An Inconvenient Truth (2006), post-disaster films by auteurs including Abbas Kiarostami and Lav Diaz, and more. Conceiving of disaster as intersubjective ethics between humans and nonhuman alterity – forces of nature, errant technology, monsters, ghosts, and other entities – it analyses how formal techniques and narrative strategies render encounters in which human protagonists are confronted with the threat of death and respond in ways that can be instructive for our planet's present juncture.

Doug Aitken
Doug Aitken

Author: Philippe Vergne

Publisher: Prestel Publishing

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13:

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Accompanying the artist's first full-scale survey exhibition, this generously illustrated book explores Doug Aitken's work across mediums, disciplines, and themes. From photography to architecture, and from video to spoken word, Doug Aitken has delved into a variety of art forms to create a provocative body of work. This volume surveys the full scope and depth of Aitken's work: sound pieces, sculpture, architectural experiments, land art and happenings, which embrace a collaborative spirit across disciplines and beyond walls, to re-imagine the nature of what a work of art can be. Interspersed with hundreds of color illustrations, the book's essays examine the plethora of ideas the artist tackles--from environmental decay to the end of linear time--and explain how and why Aitken challenges many artistic barriers.

The Ternary Distinction of Film Music
The Ternary Distinction of Film Music

Author: Gaspara Cailléz Angeles MPhil ASCAP

Publisher: Balboa Press

Published: 2021-12-30

Total Pages: 87

ISBN-13: 198229325X

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The author addresses the problematic categorization of film music in terms of the reductive diegetic/nondiegetic binary distinction. Caillez Angeles reconstructs the binary to establish a new tripartite schema that subsumes ambiguous classifications of film music that remain sitting outside and within the binary regions. Following the law of parsimony, the schema proffers a new way to organize film music without destabilizing categorial logic.

Dreams in Double Time
Dreams in Double Time

Author: Jonathan Leal

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2023-07-17

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 1478024585

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In Dreams in Double Time Jonathan Leal examines how the musical revolution of bebop opened up new futures for racialized and minoritized communities. Blending lyrical nonfiction with transdisciplinary critique and moving beyond standard Black/white binary narratives of jazz history, Leal focuses on the stories and experiences of three musicians and writers of color: James Araki, a Nisei multi-instrumentalist, soldier-translator, and literature and folklore scholar; Raúl Salinas, a Chicano poet, jazz critic, and longtime activist who endured the US carceral system for over a decade; and Harold Wing, an Afro-Chinese American drummer, pianist, and songwriter who performed with bebop pioneers before working as a public servant. Leal foregrounds that for these men and their collaborators, bebop was an affectively and intellectually powerful force that helped them build community and dream new social possibilities. Bebop’s complexity and radicality, Leal contends, made it possible for those like Araki, Salinas, and Wing who grappled daily with state-sanctioned violence to challenge a racially supremacist, imperial nation, all while hearing and making the world anew.