Author: J T. Ramsay

From my debut at Philadel­phia Week­ly: When noise artists Bore­doms replaced Green Day as the open­ing act for Philadel­phi­a’s Lol­la­palooza stop in 1994, it came as some­thing of a com­mer­cial shock and a thought-pro­vok­ing rev­e­la­tion. Bore­doms’ apoplec­tic per­for­mance proved both excit­ing and mem­o­rable as singer Yamat­su­ka Eye fre­quent­ly leapt from the stage, much to secu­ri­ty’s…

The Fiery Fur­naces w/ Man Man. TLA. Tonight! Few bands are as beguil­ing as The Fiery Fur­naces. Since Blue­ber­ry Boat splashed out in 2004, Matt and Eleanor Fried­berg­er’s Amer­i­can Goth­ic has unrav­eled as a com­pli­cat­ed, tumul­tuous fam­i­ly romance: an embar­rass­ment of rich­es, squan­dered!? A tri­umphant stand for art, arti­fice and arte­fact over novelty?!

From Down­beat, Nov. 1961: At Hol­ly­wood’s Renais­sance club recent­ly, I lis­tened to a hor­ri­fy­ing demon­stra­tion of what appears to be a grow­ing anti-jazz trend exem­pli­fied by those fore­most pro­po­nents [Coltrane and Dol­phy] of what is termed avant garde music. I heard a good rhythm sec­tion … go to waste behind the nihilis­tic exer­cis­es of the two horns.…

If you’re inter­est­ed in clas­si­cal and new music works, look no fur­ther than Clas­si­cal Con­nec­tion and Le Roi S’a­muse. They make me wish Woe­bot was right about this Xenakis biog­ra­phy. [It’s real­ly not in print. Le sigh.] For­tu­nate­ly, good friend and Deci­bel Mag­a­zine art direc­tor Paul Romano made me like 1,000 min­utes of insane mp3 rips…

From the New York­er: Leg­end has it that after one group of play­ers had crept their way as qui­et­ly as pos­si­ble through a score of his Feld­man barked, “It’s too fuckin’ loud, and it’s too fuckin’ fast.” Feld­man’s Rothko Chapel con­dens­es so much feel­ing into so lit­tle space that, giv­en the empha­sis he placed on…