Tag: Vol. 35 No. 6

“I just want to relax the spines of dhrupad listeners,” says Faiyaz Wasifuddin Dagar in the liner notes to one of his albums. “It’s not necessary that you understand music to enjoy it.” Dagar, for his part, understands dhrupad intimately–he’s part of a family that’s been playing the ancient form of Indian classical music for […]

These retrofuturist electro-popsters were long the oddballs in Warp’s hyper-wired IDM lineup, but these days they rank alongside Prefuse 73 as one of the label’s flagship acts. Tender Buttons, the new album from singer Trish Keenan and programmer and multi-instrumentalist James Cargill, lacks the ambitious sweep of their previous disc, Haha Sound, sometimes recalling instead […]

David Grubbs (formerly of Gastr del Sol) had long been an admirer of poet Susan Howe, a 1996 Guggenheim Fellow and poetry and humanities professor at SUNY-Buffalo, when the Fondation Cartier in Paris first suggested the two collaborate on a live performance. That initial 2003 meeting has now resulted in Thiefth (Blue Chopsticks), their first […]

A sense of romance is conspicuously absent from the slick, sloppy, or analytical work that seems to make up most of the art shown in Chicago today. For those with a secret longing for subtlety and warmth, however, this evening of visual art and performance by fantastical, visionary queer artists is not to be missed. […]

Born in 1957 in Lyon, France, pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard won four first prizes while studying at the Paris Conservatory and at 15 won the Olivier Messiaen International Competition. Four years later Pierre Boulez invited him to be a founding member of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, with which he played for 18 years. In the past decade […]