The debut album from Japanese artists Hatis Noit came out toward the end of June, after what seems like a very long wait. It’s (almost?) entirely made from vocal sounds, manipulated and duplicated. There are points where it reminds me a little of Lisa Gerard and Dead Can Dance (the beginning of “Angelus Novus”, for …
Tag: china
December 31
Getting this one in just under the wire, so that I will have fulfilled my resolution to write at least one post a month. I know it’s not an original sentiment, but this has been a weird year— one in which time has seemed especially elastic. 2021 went by very fast, but at the same …
July 2021
I’ve got kind of a miscellaneous set of things to read for this month, without much of a theme, so I will just get right to it: 1) “The Rotting Internet is a Collective Hallucination”, by Jonathan Zittrain Once a year, I teach a class on technology and democracy. One of the ideas that I …
March 22, 2017: If You Build It
There’s a certain kind of person— usually, in my experience, a certain kind of middle-aged male— who will delight in telling you that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” and then nod sagely while they wait for your mind to be blown. This occurs to me because the point of this post, in …
Recommendations for May 29, 2016
Article: “Sunk” by Mitch Moxley A few years ago, I read somewhere that there are only four countries in the world where most of the music people purchase is made by artists from their own country: the US, the UK, South Korea, and Japan. I don’t know if that’s still true— it seems like China …
Recommendations for March 5, 2016
I have a mixed bag this time around. I’ll start with this video, which isn’t really a video but a sound file with an image attached so that somebody could put it on YouTube. Because of a film I watched recently, I’ve been listening to Chinese music played on theguqin, a seven-stringed zither played seated; …
Recommendations for August 23, 2015
Song: “KYBM” by Tunde Olaniran A producer/rapper/singer from Flint, Michigan, of all places, Tunde Olaniran is pulling together all kinds of different sounds on his debut album, which is one of the most interesting things I’ve heard this year. This track is fairly representative, to the extent that any one song could be. Article: …
Recommendations for April 25, 2015
Video: Time Lapse Video of the Eruption of the Cabulco Volcano in Chile There are many great photos of the recent Chilean volcano eruption available online, but this video allows you to see the process of the eruption on a timescale more readily grasped. It is, predictably, both frightening and beautiful. Article: “A Simple …