Interviews
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QUANTUM BLUES
France Jobin has been exploring quantum theory for many years now, an interest that has shown up in her compositions, sound installations, and work with VR. But the pandemic finally afforded the Montreal-based minimalist composer time for deeper study with a personal brain trust of physicists she’d assembled over the years. Jobin recently released Infinite…
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DIS/PLACED
Matana Roberts is a multidisciplinary artist, saxophonist, composer, and performer. With the release of In the Garden…, their ongoing, projected 12-chapter series COIN COIN is near its midpoint. Roberts has developed a composition system for the series based on mixed media scores combining graphic notation, visual art, film, and ephemera, channeling the images and (hi)stories…
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DIS/EMBODIED
Having first captured our attention with Monolithic Nuance (2018) for Longform Editions, Megan Mitchell’s Cruel Diagonals has continued to impress with each new work. With Fractured Whole, she set herself the task of producing an album using nothing but her voice as raw material. While she deserves recognition as a gifted vocalist, she deserves at least as much praise for her…
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OLD & NEW DREAMS
This episode of Sound Propositions features scholars Kerry O’Brien and Will Robin, editors of the recent anthology On Minimalism: Documenting a Musical Movement. Described as a historical source reader, the book compiles over 100 primary sources retelling the story of minimalist music from the 1950s to the present. Sources include liner notes, interviews, journalism, manifestos, and other material organized chronologically…
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INDISCREET MUSIC
Patrick Nickleson is the author of The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art, Music, and Historiography in Dispute, an academic study that radically reconsiders the origins and boundaries of musical minimalism. Uninterested in searching for the earliest work of musical minimalism, or even in doing the admittedly necessary work of expanding the canon to include lesser known but equally…
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FREE TIME
Andrea Belfi discusses his latest album, Eternally Frozen, a canon-based composition for percussion, electronics, and brass ensemble. Inspired by a visit to LA’s Museum of Jurassic Technology, Belfi draws upon the story of Deprong Mori, a mythological bat that could use its powers of echolocation to phase through solid matter, before being captured by an American researcher,…
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Vodacom Superstars – Akon goes to the Congo
Given that Congo is back in the news, I’m reposting this piece I wrote for SSG Music in 2011, which I noticed is no longer available online. In my contemporaneous post on this blog “Congo, Coltan, and Colonialism,” I provide some more historical and political context that didn’t fit into this piece. Congo has been…
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Lino Capra Vaccina
Lino Capra Vaccina is one of the greats of Italian minimalism. In the early 1970s he was a founding member of the ethno-jazz group Aktuala, who pioneered a distinctly Mediterranean form of contemporary music more than a decade before industry suits coined the term “World Music.” After his departure, he joined Franco Battiato (with whom he would continue to…
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“a mic at a window…”
Presque Tout launched in 2019 as a Bandcamp page, a humble ongoing digital archive of field recordings from around the world. Anyone can participate, and the parameters for inclusion are very straightforward: Make a recording from an open window, with no editing and minimal signal processing, and then email it to them. Submissions took off during the pandemic,…
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CRITICAL POSITIVITY
Happy (very belated) birthday to us! Back in January of 2022 we celebrated the tenth anniversary of our blog. To celebrate, in this episode, we pull the curtain back a bit to talk with ten of the writers who have contributed to A CLOSER LISTEN since we began over a decade ago. Utilizing my idiosyncratic…
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Christopher Tignor / Slow Six / Redhooker / Wires.Under.Tension
Christopher Tignor is set to release his latest album, The Art of Surrender, out later this month on Western Vinyl. I recently saw him perform in Montreal, which motivated me to gather some Tignor-related features I contributed to TSB many years ago. I have really vivid memories of listening to Nor’easter on my fire escape in…
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COGNITIVE DISSONANCE
This episode features Giuseppe Esposito, a Neapolitan musician who runs the tape label Archivio Diafònico, an operation that mostly documents artists who are based in Napoli. The chaotic and bustling capital of the South of Italy undeservedly gets a bad reputation, and the city has a vibrant cultural scene and rich history that is sorely…
Sound Propositions 