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avant garde

Books

Daily Dose Pick: Harry Smith

By Tanja M. Laden on

Based on a 2001 symposium at the Getty Research Institute, Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular surveys the artist’s influence on American film, music, and the visual arts.

Featuring color reproductions of Smith’s images, as well as essays by scholars, friends, and colleagues, the book explores the life of the 20th-century Renaissance man best known for his definitive Anthology of American Folk Music — a six-record compilation of commercial songs from 1926-1932 that helped facilitate the folk revival of the ’60s. The multifaceted mystic also achieved cult-hero status in the world of cinema for his experimental films, and received critical praise for his rare, freeform abstract paintings. … Read More

Music

Exploring the Avant Garde, Nurse With Wound-Style

By Matt Sussman on

It’s hard to think of a musician whose discography is as far-ranging in tone, mood, and texture as Stephen Stapleton’s. His prolific output as Nurse With Wound has included trance-inducing drones, hellacious tape cut-ups, and Krautrock homages — all guided by dark sense of humor and the Surrealist’s assertion of the primacy of the unconscious, that, to quote Andre Breton, “Man is but a plaything of his memory.” Words that ring even truer when thinking back on NWW’s March 26 show at the Great American Music Hall. After the jump, our San Francisco-based music guru Matt Sussman reviews the avant-garde legend’s rare performance. … Read More

Music

Free Album Download: Au Clair de la Lune

By Eli Dvorkin on

Almost exactly one year ago, the world’s music-history textbooks simultaneously fell out of date, after reports emerged questioning Thomas Edison’s status as the father of recorded music. Sure enough, researchers confirmed that an obscure French printer named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville managed to make a ten-second recording nearly two decades before the invention of Edison’s phonograph. However, Scott’s device, known as a phonautograph, came with a severe limitation: although it could accurately etch sound waves onto paper, there was no way to play back the squiggles.

Dip down below for a free, full-length download and the rest of the tale. … Read More