once again with steroids

Eight Step Waltz / Lisa / Stukka Gruppa from Blowzabella on Myspace.

preservation versus McMansion

An update from the Wall Street Journal here.

the ghost of mixtapes past

From a turn of the century Noise Ministry playlist

The Work of Art in the Age of...

Digital Reproduction, wherein the FT goes all Benjaminian on the concept of HDcasting from the opera house, and

Historical Reproduction, wherein the FT talks technical on the record industry's new-found interest in shellac. Which in Benjaminian terms is pretty funny, since the medium -- and its mechanical reproduction -- is now a component of the art itself.

Late addition: Over at the NYT, Jonas Kaufmann talks to Peter G Davis about the tyranny of Fach.

It's Record Store Day!

the things you get to keep

When I used to stand around in the record store, trying to decide between Klemperer Conducts Wagner and Plastic Surgery Disasters, my long-suffering mother would roll her eyes and say "Live a little!". (She did that a lot, and she was buying.) Then she would patiently explain that music is something you will always have, so money spent on it is never wasted.

So to prove Ma's thesis in a way she may not have imagined, here's an article from the Guardian on the issue of music and dementia, and here's an interesting project in the US which gives people something useful to do with their old iPods that's way better than packing them off to a landfill in West Africa.

Whatever they find to put on mine, they are going to need the 160G one...

Actions with Spirits

Intermezzo reviews Damon Albarn's new, er, opera Dr Dee over here.  Given the interviews, it sort of matches what I imagine the inside of Albarn's head to be like -- lots of ideas floating around in a vast nebula in space, with occasional synaptic explosions to liven things up a bit.

Meanwhile, the issue of calling the work an opera might make for an interesting discussion/debate/street brawl.  What does constitute opera these days?  Does anything go or has the term just reached a level of outsider-hipness unseen since, well, the last time rock stars started attaching the term to their more grandiose projects?

*In the way of a snarky pedantic footnote, I wouldn't say the dude had "fallen from the very pages of history itself."  You really don't have to dig very far to find him.  He shows up in at least one Elizabeth I bioflick, and in John Crowley's Ægypt series.  Plus, having baby-sat one of his inscrutably Hermes Trismegistus-ish tomes for several, uh, years, I appropriated its title for a mixtape that proved, I have to say, extremely popular around the Boston Youth Hostel for a summer and was probably the only one of these ever to include Pyewackett's version of Moll Pately (....or was it Ten Cents a Dance?) and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' From Her to Eternity. So, off the historical/cultural radar, our John Dee? Perhaps by the time Blur escaped the playpen.