Brian Sacawa | Sounds Like Now

Michael Byrne’s article published today in this week’s CityPaper taking ASCAP to task is sure to stir up a firestorm. Keep those cards and letters to the editor coming.

This from an article about the Brooklyn music scene in the Guardian today:
The Maryland city of Baltimore plays a big role in Brooklyn’s musical renaissance. Sitek lived there, and is an old friend of Celebration’s singer, Katrina Ford, still a resident. Brian DeRan, the manager of Gang Gang Dance and Animal Collective, is a Baltimorean. […]

Every pursuit has its innovators, people who are synonomous with their field and without whom we couldn’t imagine that field existing the way it does today. This thought came to mind twice yesterday. The first time was while I was watching Dogtown and Z Boys, Stacey Peralta’s documentary about the birth of modern skateboarding. Would […]

The Red Room played host to two of Boston’s finest last Friday as Tim Feeney and Vic Rawlings schooled the faithful on the sound of silence. Although Tim confessed that Friday’s set was one of their louder efforts, both musicians operated in a dynamic space that ranged from niente to about mezzo piano. Yet within […]

All dressed up and no place to go? Allow me to suggest the following activities taking place this week in and around Baltimore:
+ Meet the Artist: Matthew Barney: The acclaimed artist and filmmaker best known for The Cremaster Cycle, and more recently for his collaboration with Björk in Drawing Restraint 9, will be at the […]

Last night was rock night at the Red Room with two extremely divergent but complimentary takes on the music. Up first was Kioku, a sax-percussion-laptop trio from NYC, performing “traditional Asian folk music within a new context of collaborative experimentation and improvisation” and more than a touch of funk and free jazz. Central to the […]

When Jonathan Franzen wrote a letter to Don DeLillo lamenting the death of the social novel and his (Franzen’s) place in the world as a fiction writer, this is part of the reply that he (DeLillo) sent:
“Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making […]

“You can only live in music, as it were, if you have other interests, if you see the parallels with literature, if you see the parallels with painting, if you see the parallel with the development of political process, and if you have an interest, and then you have the ability to deduce, then all […]

Last Friday’s performance of Unsilent Night in Baltimore lives on! Among the throngs of participants and supporters was one of Mobtown’s most renowned experimental percussionists, Bob Wagner, who came to the event packing a recording device and a microphone on the end of a very long boomstand. Bob herocially braved frigid fingers and tired arms […]

“For Franz music was the art that comes closest to Dionysian beauty in the sense of intoxication. No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Beethoven’s Ninth, Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Beatles’ White Album? Franz made no distinction between […]