Joseph Sannicandro
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Eidolons
Kassel Jaeger, once little more than a mysterious German moniker producing captivating music on our favorite boutique labels, has since been revealed to be François J. Bonnet, composer, philosopher, and now director of Ina-GRM, France’s legendary center for electroacoustic research. No longer shrouded in mystery, his prolific output has lost none of its power. In…
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LISTENING THROUGH MIMAROĞLU
Servet Koçyiğit, Soft Landing (detail), 2020 We sit down with director Serdar Kökçeoğlu in Istanbul to discuss the 2013 Gezi Park protests, how the sounds of the city have inspired his work as a film maker, and how composer İlhan Mimaroglu was inspired by the activism of his wife, Güngör. Kökçeoğlu has recently completed his…
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OUTSIDE THE BOX
I’m very pleased to share this conversation with Bruno Stucchi, graphic designer and co-founder of the Die Schachtel label. Stucchi reflects upon the evolution of the label, the suppressed history of Italian experimental music, and the continued importance of big ideas. Die Schachtel is a partnership between Bruno Stucchi and Fabio Carboni, who…
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Making Yourself Disappear
Alvin Curran has been at the forefront of challenging musical convention for over half a century. His work has pushed back against the institutional stranglehold on culture, encouraging anybody to make music, anywhere and with anybody. A dominant tendency in his oeuvre has been finding new ways to activate spaces and cultivate active listening and…
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Montreal Underground
“Montreal Underground” – field-recording contribution to the Montreal Sound Map (2010) While I had made field-recordings on tape for years, I had only vague plans for them, and more often than not I used the micro-cassette recorder I carried around to record stray thoughts in the era before smart phones. Thus “Montreal Underground” (2010) is…
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Inventing Masks
Inventing Masks is a new moniker adopted by Giuseppe Ielasi. Ielasi’s work should be familiar to our readers, as a solo artist, prolific collaborator, and as a label curator. Ielasi chose this new name in order to unite his more rhythmic, beat-related post-Stunt material, though he will continue to use his own name for other projects. He…
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Significant Scores
“Significant scores” (2008) Domenico ‘Mimmo’ Napolitano Translated by Joseph Sannicandro “The musical instrument is a machine useful to man. But not only useful for producing notes, and not at all neutral; with its techniques, it is the concrete custodian of the choices made in continuity and, like buildings, has a memory. The sounds produced by…
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The Pleasure of Emptiness
“John Cage, or, the Pleasure of Emptiness” (1977) Roberto Calasso Translated by Joseph Sannicandro For almost twenty years I have seen John Cage booed: first in Darmstadt, where the followers of Neue Musik themselves booed, frightened by his intrusion that ruined all their Beautiful Structures (and in fact his arrival did signal the end of…
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I Always Worked
“I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next.” – Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast “Work is always an antidote to depression.” – Eleanor Roosevelt Joseph Sannicandro ~ I Always Worked Dinzu Artefacts “Alea Iacta Est” (16:50) “A digito cognoscitur leo” (16:16) Dedicated…
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Sound Propositions 019: KMRU
Joseph Kamaru aka KMRU is a young artist from Nairobi, Kenya who has cultivated a unique sound utilizing field-recordings as compositional aids. While his bandcamp and soundcloud have been home to prolific self-released work over the last few years, 2020 is sure to raise his profile with three new full-length releases. Much of his self-released…
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Jon Hassell ~ Seeing Through Sound
You don’t hear too many octogenarian trumpet players. The horn is a cruel instrument, in that embouchure collapse cuts many brass players’ careers short. (A good friend of mine was disappointed many a time by Freddie Hubbard cancelling a gig at the last minute.) So as the years passed following the release of Jon Hassell‘s…
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La Guerra dei Cafoni
I’ve noticed that film audiences are more sensitive to “spoilers” than literary theorists, so I will just say a few words about the title of this film to restore some of the context lost in translation. La Guerra dei Cafoni. Released in English as The War of the Bumpkins, the choice of “bumpkin” for cafoni…
Sound Propositions 