Other Minds News

It’s quite telling that when Jim Nollman went and recorded himself singing the Scottish folk song ‘Froggy-Went-a-Courting’ surrounded by three-hundred tom turkeys, in an attempt to harmonise with their incessant gobbling, it was a turn towards the conventional for him. Nollman, who grew up on the East Coast, had made his way to the San […]

When the greatest archive of the ancient world, the Library of Alexandria, was destroyed, all it’s precious resources disappeared. That’s certainly the way most people think of the vandalization that ravaged the world-renowned collection in 391 A.D. The truth, however, is more complicated with echoes that reverberate from the days when “data storage” was on […]

Nobody knows the now like Michael Tilson Thomas. The acclaimed conductor and composer, 12-time Grammy winner and Kennedy Center honoree, 77, also has an aptitude for the idiomatic. “Being a conductor,” he’s noted, “means you’re trying to get a lot of people to agree where ‘now’ is.” As conductors go, MTT — as he’s commonly […]

Fifty years ago, composer Morton Feldman wrote music to commemorate the opening of the Rothko Chapel in Houston. A half-century later, composer, conductor, multi-instrumentalist and MacArthur “genius” Tyshawn Sorey was asked to write a new piece for this nondenominational space. Sorey’s Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) debuted Feb. 19 at the Rothko Chapel. The Rothko Chapel is a […]

At Adobe Books in the Mission District, people crowd in for a free show, eagerly awaiting the headlining act. They watch as she arranges guitar pedals and a “turntable” made from a dismantled rotor. But the audience is most curious about what she’s wearing on her hands: “Needle Nails,” a.k.a. a set of acrylic nails, […]

For half a century, she has taken the things we know best— our bodies, our rituals, our nation — and shown us how strange they really are. By Sam Anderson Oct. 6, 2021 Updated 10:30 a.m. ET When the Hirshhorn Museum told Laurie Anderson that it wanted to put on a big, lavish retrospective of […]

“Once you get over-the-hill, you really pick up some speed.” Quincy Jones has adopted that aphorism and spread it around — and it most certainly applies to Wadada Leo Smith, who is enjoying perhaps the most prolific Indian summer of any jazzman of any era…. And if that wasn’t enough, with his 80th birthday looming […]

R. Murray Schafer, the eminent Canadian composer, writer, and acoustic ecologist who popularized the term “soundscape,” died on Aug. 14 following a struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 88. The news was confirmed in an email to friends and colleagues from Schafer’s wife, Eleanor James. “The loss of Schafer represents the loss of our greatest […]

The saxophonist and composer Anthony Braxton has been a galvanizing figure in American music for more than 50 years – and at 76, he’s definitely not slowing down. Braxton has two new box sets out this month, totaling more than 20 hours of music. Anthony Braxton has always done things his own way; he’s famous […]