Pampelmoose by Dave Allen of Gang of Four — music . media . web. culture

Moldover has reinvented the CD package with his new release. It’s a CD case, a circuit-bending musical instrument, and a ingenious design piece. Check the video: YouTube – Moldover

Sonic Youth is not a band. It is an institution. Where other bands who manage to stay together for over a quarter of a century (or much less) become legacy bands (i.e., bands that are only known and revered for a part of their careers long past), Sonic Youth continue to push themselves and their [...]

Here’s my first column for ESPN, entitled “The Revolutions Will Not Be Televised,” in which I reminisce and ruminate as to why BMX flatland television coverage disappeared. Here’s an excerpt: When I started riding flatland BMX, there were only a handful of flatland tricks to learn, and it was easy to see where to start [...]

The music scene of the 1990s was confused. At the turn of that last decade, Hip-hop was displacing Metal as the top-selling genre, and Nirvana was allegedly setting off the so-called “alternative revolution,” yet Guns ‘N Roses was all over MTV with opulent, twelve-minute videos and all over the charts with an epic double CD. [...]

Post-rock instrumental bands have been emerging from every crack and crevice of the map the past few years. You can usually tell them by their simmering introductions that build to explosive crescendos and their airy adverb-clause or sentence-length names. Russian Circles’ heavy brand of meandering rock leaves lesser bands choking on their smoke. Where amateurs [...]

As elated as many of us are that we elected Barack Obama our next president, dälek is here to remind us that it ain’t all good. Opening with a minute-plus excerpt from a Reverend Wright sermon, Gutter Tactics (Ipecac, 2009) lets you know from [the] jump that dälek isn’t caught up in the hoopla of [...]

When Daniel Pinchbeck invited me to write something for Reality Sandwich, I sifted thorugh the piles of pieces I was already working on (some of which have been developed on this site) and put this together. It’s sort of an amalgamated excerpt from my book-in-progress. Here’s a polemical taste: James Howard Kunstler uses a computer [...]

It’s that time again, time for my annual Summer Reading List, and this year’s is the biggest yet. As always, I asked several of my friends and colleagues for their recommendations — including newcomers Daniel Pinchbeck, Steve Aylett, Ian MacKaye, Mike Daily, Paul Saffo, Gareth Branwyn, Rodger Bridges, and Peter Lunenfeld, as well as return [...]