Other Minds News

“Darkness Sounding” Takes Music Outside The Southern California festival stretches from back yards to the desert. By Alex Ross February 22, 2021 On a chilly Los Angeles morning in late January, I woke up an hour before dawn and drove to Griffith Park, a rugged expanse that stretches northeast of the Hollywood Hills. Five times […]

From primitive instruments and sacred chants to today’s minimalist electronica and metal, drone music has a long and mystical history. A new book investigates. From the womb – where the rushing of maternal blood is heard loud and clear at 88 decibels – through myriad historical, spiritual and subcultural pathways, our connection to the drone runs […]

Nathan Bajar for The New York Times The bassist, bandleader and composer’s 10-disc “Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World” invites you to listen, and let the music do its work. By Alan Scherstuhl Feb. 8, 2021 “Listen,” the singer Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez implores in the opening notes of the monumental new boxed set […]

From Steven Smoliar’s Rehearsal Studio Blog:   This past November Other Minds (OM) celebrated the 85th birthday of Bay Area composer Charles Shere with the digital download release of a recording thought to be lost. The recording captured the world premiere performance of the trio he composed for violin, piano, and percussion. This composition had […]

Critics have compared the San Francisco-based Santomieri-Farhadian Duo’s experimental musical compositions to everyone from modernist Anton Webern to rock icon Frank Zappa. This exciting pair — Thea Farhadian on (electronic) violin and Dean Santomieri on guitar/ electronics — have been collaborating for close to a decade now, creating some of the most compelling work on […]

The Newark native has long been lauded for his brilliant abstractions. Lately he’s writing about something more concrete — and producing his most powerful music yet. By Adam Shatz    Jan. 7, 2021 On March 6, hardly a week before the pandemic lockdown began, close to a hundred people packed into the Jazz Gallery in […]

Prototype, known for presenting visceral, chamber-scale new works, unveils an almost entirely streamed pandemic edition. By Zachary Woolfe   Jan. 11, 2021 The annual Prototype festival of new opera and music theater thrives on intimacy. Its chamber-scale offerings — often politically charged, emotionally brutal and just plain loud — vibrate the viscera. Prototype has become known for […]

“Times3,” a collaboration between Pamela Z (photographed here in San Francisco) and the theater artist Geoff Sobelle, is part of a pandemic edition of the Prototype festival of music theater.Credit…Andres Gonzalez for The New York Times By Seth Colter Walls January 7, 2021 The composer, vocalist and multimedia artist Pamela Z was supposed to have a […]

In one sense, the voc-25 is just a keyboard controller triggering a synthesizer, with some visual yuks thrown in. But when I heard it played, I realized there’s a loud clack every time a note is sounded. I think it’s produced by the solenoid that’s opening the teeth — but since it sounds like the […]

Molly Joyce is among of the most versatile, prolific and intriguing composers working under the vast new-music dome. She’s composed spectral, searching works for orchestra, choir, string quartet and percussion ensemble; collaborated with ­virtual-reality artists, dancers and poets; and studied with the likes of Samuel Adler, Martin Bresnick and Missy Mazzoli. She also teaches composition […]