Tag: Vol. 31 No. 25

What do you get when you cross two certified geniuses? Variations on enigma. Mercy is a collaboration between two MacArthur fellows, composer-singer-choreographer Meredith Monk and visual artist Ann Hamilton. Monk, the older of the two by 13 years, was a member of the Judson Church group in the 60s but is better known now as […]

Improvisers are itinerants who usually travel cheap; concert harps are big enough to make any trip an expedition. That’s partly why there aren’t many improvising harpists. Still, there have been some good ones: Caspar Reardon played the instrument with ragtime inflections in the 1930s, Dorothy Ashby transferred bop piano technique to it in the ’50s, […]

Long local cabaret favorites both together and separately, vocalist Tom Michael and singer-pianist Beckie Menzie made a very strong impression at last week’s Chicago Cabaret Convention. Completely lacking the arch pseudosophistication some people associate with the genre, they touched both casual listeners and aficionados with their directness and intelligence as well as their musical skills. […]

This double-headliner bill is traveling as the “Death and Dismemberment Tour,” but while the name may be clever, it’s also a bit misleading: neither Seattle’s Death Cab for Cutie nor D.C.’s the Dismemberment Plan are going to kill you with their songs, softly or any other way; they’re not even going to injure you. Granted, […]

Two French brothers who call themselves Y. and R. started the Ultra Milkmaids with a friend in 1993 as an abrasive, noisy rock trio inspired by Helmet and various acts on the Earache label. But by the mid-90s, enthralled by Coil, they’d morphed into an ambient industrial outfit. Fortunately, although their output in the last […]

On their superb second album, Walking With Thee (Domino), the Liverpool quartet Clinic once again plunder several decades’ worth of rock quirk–but they’re getting better at wiping their fingerprints off the stolen goods. Bypassing most of the blatant 60s garage elements that gave the group’s debut, Internal Wrangler, its dirty sneer, they pare things down: […]