Links / Music
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Apple opened a 600-capacity venue inside Battersea Power Station yesterday. The room borrows from the power station it sits in—heritage brickwork, fluted arches, bronze balconies. In an age where concert venues are usually not much more than a black box with a logo over its door, this looks beautifully done.
Apple Music Hall and the new Apple Music Radio studios, images courtesy of Apple There are two mix studios, a 48-speaker spatial system around the audience, and sixteen-odd hardwired cameras feeding a broadcast control room. An artist can play one intimate show and leave with a finished Spatial Audio recording, a broadcast mix and multicamera video.
Very clever, and a very expensive way of funneling listeners to an Apple Music subscription. (I guess this explains the push notification I received for a new two-month trial.)
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“Resolution” is the second movement of A Love Supreme, the 1965 Coltrane album, and Nicholas Payton and Butcher Brown make playing their rendition look like a walk in the park.
This one’s taken from A Supreme Blue, a reimagining of that album alongside Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue. The first five tracks follow the Davis album in order, then come Coltrane’s four parts.
As Jack Kenny puts it on All About Jazz:
A Supreme Blue is not a museum piece but a translation. It reframes two landmark statements through a contemporary sonic language that privileges groove, texture, and atmosphere. House rhythms, electric keyboards, and layered production reshape the modal and spiritual frameworks of the originals, rendering them less austere and more rhythmically grounded.
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The strangest thing happened in my brain today, where SpaceX’s IPO reminded me of this guitar teacher, who hears Radiohead’s Weird Fishes/Arpeggi for the first time, tries to deconstruct it on the fly, falls for it, and is especially taken by Phil Selway’s drumming like a metronome.
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Over the past few years I’ve grown to appreciate Jeff Parker (virtuoso guitarist from Chicago) very much. The jazzy, improvised nature of his work—best exemplified on a few of his recent albums, like The Way Out of Easy and Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy—is just phenomenal.
The latest album he’s released with his quartet, Happy Today, might be my favourite so far. International Anthem and Nonesuch Records recently uploaded the video of its recording to YouTube, and it is a trip.
Jay Bellerose on drums and percussion, Anna Butterss on acoustic bass, Josh Johnson on alto saxophone—I hope to catch them live all together one day. I can’t believe this has accrued just 14K views so far!
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A kid introduces his professor, a poet, to Kendrick Lamar. The professor, expertly spinning his pencil, impressively sinks his teeth into Kendrick’s lyric, from across a few albums, and—admiringly—lays out the poetic nature of his work.
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Edith Bowman interviews Jonny Greenwood about his score for One Battle After Another, the latest film by Paul Thomas Anderson that’s just plain fantastic. They have collaborated on many films now (There Will Be Blood, Phantom Thread, Licorice Pizza, Inherent Vice, The Master), and hearing Greenwood explain in detail how he went about creating this latest is a treat.
Apparently, prompted by the fact that one of the musical cues needed to go on for 22 minutes, he built and programmed a mechanical ghost drumband; I’d love to see it in action. Greenwood always speaks with such respect about the musicians he’s worked with, and is so humble about his own musical genius. Always a joy to listen to.
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I don’t know why this happened at the office of The New York Times, but here we are. Erykah Badu hasn’t released an album in forever, and it doesn’t matter. Look at her aura as she floats into the room; you wouldn’t dare ask her why. The performance is just about flawless.
Currently, she’s celebrating the 25th anniversary of her landmark album Mama’s Gun. Perhaps someday soon, that album she made with The Alchemist will see the light of day.
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The Quietus, revamped
№ 109
Earlier this year I noticed The Quietus got revamped, and I’ve been reading their work much more since then. The glow-up was done by 11:11, who took on the branding, design and development work.
The revamped The Quietus, all images courtesy of 11:11 I appreciate the tactile nature of the work; the combination of the typography and illustrations makes the site feel ‘reader-first’, if that makes sense—as opposed to most similar sites, where the writing is buried beneath a pile of ads, waiting to be excavated.
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I very much enjoyed this two-hour mix by Caribou, Floating Points and their intern, Fred Again.., who had me at the drumless version of Earl Sweatshirt’s “Chum”.
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Sunflower Sound System by Sam Shepherd (Floating Points). Photo by Angelina Nikolayeva Sam Shepherd (known as Floating Points) has built a massive sound system, consisting of eight giant cabinets and a handful of tweeters hung from the ceiling. This video from Resident Advisor shows the build, and Jeremy D. Larson wrote about it on Pitchfork. He visited Dekmantel (which quite literally happens in my backyard), where the sound system was installed at The Greenhouse Stage. I wish I had been there to experience it!