We are entering an age where sound is being repositioned as a tool of terror. | | | | | Deicide's "In the Minds of Evil," on red vinyl. (MihaiPora) | | | | | | “We are entering an age where sound is being repositioned as a tool of terror.”
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| | rantnrave:// Music as a weapon: The U.S. military interrogators who blasted DEICIDE, BRITNEY SPEARS and BARNEY at prisoners in the war on terror weren't the first to recognize music's own potential for inflicting terror. In his essay "The Sound of Fear," LAWRENCE ENGLISH, a doctoral student in music, traces this use of music back to the biblical BATTLE OF JERICHO, in which JOSHUA's army toppled the walls of the city with trumpets. While the story is almost certainly apocryphal, English notes that it stands as evidence that even thousands of years ago, armies recognized "the physiological and the psychological implications of sound in warfare." His history of terroristic sound from Joshua's army to the Aztec death whistle to Nazi sirens to BLACK SABBATH and NANCY SINATRA makes for compellingly frightening reading... ANOHNI says APPLE essentially weaponized her "DRONE BOMB ME" video—which the tech giant funded—into "a more potent advertising tool for Apple than a hundred more explicit ads." She regrets working with APPLE ("I felt like a house cat that had been declawed"), and uses the story as the springboard for a lengthy rant against both corporate sponsorship and the streaming music economy. More compellingly frightening reading. (The Anohni interview, by the way, comes from ex-PITCHFORK editor BRANDON STOSUY's promising new project, THE CREATIVE INDEPENDENT, which is posting one interview per day. Here's PHILIP GLASS trying to follow the money in the streaming economy)... PUSSY RIOT's NADYA TOLOKONNIKOVA on how to use music (among other tools) as a political weapon... DAVE EGGERS' "30 DAYS, 30 SONGS" project, which will feature one new or unreleased song per day from 30 artists seeking to sing DONALD TRUMP out of the public's hair, launches with an on-the-nose (and kinda great) DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE tune... G'mar tov to any readers observing YOM KIPPUR. | | | - Matty Karas, curator |
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| After decades of silence, the hip-hop pioneer's alleged victims are stepping forward. Here are their stories. | | |
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| From Long Range Acoustic Devices used to disperse protesters to ear-splitting military drones to songs blasted on rotation to prisoners, ours is an age in which sound has been repositioned as a tool of terror. | | |
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| Do I love Father John Misty or do I hate him so much that I never want to hear him or anyone else ever say anything again for the rest of my life, especially if it's some shit about Slavoj Žižek? A tough call. | | |
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| When the Boss talks, people listen. With World Health Awareness Day falling on Oct. 10, his message is more resonant than ever. | | |
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| As the Ibiza season wraps up for another year, Carlos Hawthorn profiles a party that for the last ten years has been doing things a bit differently. | | |
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| While much of Laura Jane Grace's memoir, "Tranny," deals with the nuances of everyday life as a transgender person, this excerpt indulges in full-on sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. | | |
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| Since the 1999 launch of Napster's music-sharing platform, the music industry has been in near-constant turmoil, with dipping revenues, lack of transparency,.. | | |
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| Anohni speaks about her ambivalence towards writing songs, her interest in making visual art, the way corporations damage culture, and why the independent music industry is dying. | | |
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| I’ve slept on it, and I’m sure. “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music” is sublime. | | |
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| On the subject of the Yom Kippur chant "Kol Nidre," a Tunisian record sleeve from the 1960s reads, "Every Jew must listen to it with feeling." As Yom Kippur is upon us and now that I have digitized Nathan Cohen's "Kol Nidre," I invite all readers of this blog to do the same. | | |
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| In this edition of In The Hot Seat with Larry Leblanc, he sat down with Martin Goldschmidt, the chairman of Cooking Vinyl Group, to discuss the inception of the company, the process around signing and keeping artists, and the evolution of the company. | | |
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| With his new EP 'J'ouvert' on the way, Wyclef is feeling inspired once again. | | |
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| The line outside the Swans show swells and shrinks. Under a glowing marquee, men with tattoos and women in all black wait their turn to show their driver's licenses. It's mid-July, and the experimental rock band are about to headline their second night at Chicago's Lincoln Hall. | | |
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| Take a look at nearly any major tour routing, and you'll likely see a lot of the same familiar cities. However, often between those bigger cities are tons of smaller stops that go unnoticed. | | |
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| For most of my life, I’ve been an avid lover of hip-hop. More specifically, the rhetoric behind the trap music sub-genre has reverberated many of my own mantras. Yes, I am a feminist and no, I am not a drug dealer. However, the culture is much deeper than what meets the eye and ear at the surface. | | |
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| From Lars Ulrich to Questlove, photographer Deirdre O’Callaghan went out to unpick the enigma that surrounds the world’s most celebrated drummers. | | |
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| “You don’t have to write about tan-lines and flip flops and cold beer and the sand every fuckin’ day...Write about your feelings, for once.” | | |
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| Singer’s second court action could prevent UK debut of the performance by Bartabus the Furious. | | |
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| Group member Nadya Tolokonnikova lays out her advice on how to get political in an increasingly volatile world. | | |
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| M.I.A. wants to make peace. Well... Eventually. | | |
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