Speechsong: The Gould/Schoenberg Dialogues

Published: 02/11/2020

Speechsong is a work of imaginative musicology that addresses the engimas of Schoenberg and Gould, of singing and speaking, of Moses und Aron, of technology and being. Its point of departure is Gould’s last public performance, given at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles, where a number of Schoenberg’s works were performed during his[…]

Noise Thinks the Anthropocene: An Experiment in Noise Poetics

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Published: 02/13/2019

In an increasingly technologized and connected world, it seems as if noise must be increasing. Noise, however, is a complicated term with a complicated history. Noise can be traced through structures of power, theories of knowledge, communication, and scientific practice, as well as through questions of art, sound, and music. Thus, rather than assume that[…]

Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics

Published: 03/26/2018

Trouble Songs is a hybrid serial work that tracks the appearance of the word “trouble” in 20th- and 21st-century American music. It reads (and sings) songs and poems, with reference to cultural events ranging from the death of a pop singer to the growth of popular resistance movements. The trouble singer invokes the word “trouble” in[…]

Fugitive Traces

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Published: 09/05/2016

Fugitive Traces is an album and accompanying PDF booklet that collages the director’s commentary from over a dozen Werner Herzog films with electronic, chamber, and rock music to both pay homage to one of the world’s most visionary filmmakers and critique an artistic practice rooted in contradiction and frequent disaster. Fugutive Traces (album) You know[…]

Helvete 3: Bleeding Black Noise

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Published: 12/14/2016

Not to be confused with metal studies, music criticism, ethnography, or sociology, Helvete: A Journal of Black Metal Theory is a speculative and creative endeavor, one which seeks ways of thinking that count as Black Metal events — and indeed, to see how Black Metal might count as thinking. Theory of Black Metal, and Black[…]

Thoughtrave: An Interdimensional Conversation with Lady Gaga

Published: 04/07/2016

Thoughtrave is the immediate and most detailed archive of Lady Gaga’s emotional, intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual evolution, a reclaiming of her art (and humanity) from within the center of her celebrity during one of the most difficult transitions of her career: Summer 2013­–Fall 2014. I don’t like being used to make money. I feel sad[…]

Destroyer of Naivetés

Published: 11/07/2015

Go Here for Accompanying CD by Cave Bacchus (Joseph Nechvatal, Black Sifichi & Rhys Chatham)! Joseph Nechvatal’s epic passion poem, Destroyer of Naivetés, takes up a position of excess from within a society that believes that the less you conceal, the stranger you become. We live and love in a culture where surveillance/intrusion is tied[…]

Ballads

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Published: 06/03/2015

Ballads uses the lyric form to explore the effects of global Capitalism from a sharp Marxist perspective. Recognizing the congruence between folk song circulation and the circulation of money, the “currency” of the ballad alongside supply-side economics, Owens hails Wordworth’s Lyric Ballads experiment (undertaken at the dawn of England’s Industrial Age) as one touchstone. But he also understands the built-in[…]