Tracks of the Week 09.09.23
In 1948 the audio engineer and music publisher Moses Asch founded Folkways Records with a mission to put on wax not only traditional, secular and children’s music but poetry, language instruction, liturgical...
Tracks of the Week 02.09.23
After graduating with a degree in musicology in 2014 and self-releasing the acclaimed albums Njoum and Arb’een (40), dialogues between vocals and oud which explored loops in time and modes of narrative...
Tracks of the Week 26.08.23
Between 1949 and 1989, the Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests on the steppe of northeast Kazakhstan, south of the valley of the Irtysh River. Exposing an estimated 1.5 million people to...
Tracks of the Week 19.08.23
In the fall of 2015 the drummer and composer Mike Reed read a harrowing story in The New York Times about ‘The Lonely Death of George Bell’, a 72-year-old New Yorker who...
Tracks of the Week 12.08.23
In the fall of 2020 in the backyard of Chicali Outpost in Los Angeles, the drummer Daniel Villarreal was joined by the guitarist Jeff Parker and bassist Anna Butterss for the first...
Tracks of the Week 05.08.23
Following up on the limpid rhythms, percussive riffs and shifting tectonics of Diatom Ribbons, which saw Kris Davis explore the hidden world of unicellular microalgae in the company of such luminaries as...
Tracks of the Week 29.07.23
Still navigating the quixotic charms and cavernous obsessions of Charles Baudelaire, whose insatiable lusts, death whorls and sometimes rhapsodic depictions of the lives of rag-pickers and blind men, prostitutes and gamblers scandalized...
Tracks of the Week 22.07.23
What’s an expanding universe? An ineluctable outpouring of general relativity, a spatial property, a shift of light observed through the telescope as distant galaxies stretch farther away? Is it Moon landings and...
Tracks of the Week 15.07.23
‘The cock crows / But no queen rises’ begins ‘Depression Before Spring’ by the elliptical modernist Wallace Stevens, a silvery wisp of a poem full of bird call and nonsense syllables from...