The Tonearm

The Tonearm is an online journal of unexpected music and culture, a shared exploration of what it's like to create cool + meaningful things. Check out our latest articles + podcasts: www.thetonearm.com/linkinbio/ and don't forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Talk Of The Tonearm ✨

The Austin-born photographer shot the Big Boys, the Dicks, and the Butthole Surfers from the middle of the crowd, and in ‘Someday All the Adults Will Die! The Birth of Texas Punk,’ he lets the scene tell its story in its own Texan voices. Pat Blashill’s Texas Punk, Weird by Design:

“The Church Of Noise programme of events… was originally due to take place in a disused city centre church. But when organiser Mark Gubb was on a final site inspection…, the building caught fire. Perhaps, he speculates, because he’d just booked a black metal band to play a midnight set.”

“For a black artist like myself, forming and writing songs for a boy band is a form of code ditching, a way of seizing aesthetics and timbres that have been unduly withheld from my predecessors.”

“His work blends the churning rhythms of minimalism with the sounds of jazz and, occasionally, the gamelan music of Indonesia… In live performance, Akusmi becomes a band, in this case a trio with violinist/composer Christopher Tignor and trombonist Rick Parker.” New Sounds #4947 — Akusmi:

In response to society's struggles in an era of manipulated information, composer Lea Bertucci's 'The Oracle' uses vocal processing and mythological references to examine how clarity has become a luxury in contemporary communication. Slip of the Tongue — Lea Bertucci's Hidden Language:

“It was during Vietnam … A lot of the soldiers came home to a war in their own back yards. So we started waging war against wars everywhere, with our choice of weapons being our instruments.” War’s Lonnie Jordan — ‘We don’t shoot bullets; we shoot rhythms’:

“…the Prophet-5 offered patch memory in a polyphonic synth, coupled with the tremendous Poly-mod section, which quickly caught the imagination of programmers, with its ability to create incredible metallic and bell-like tones from a mere analogue machine.” The history of Sequential:

'Veins of Rain' was recorded the day percussionist Nava Dunkelman + saxophonist Masayo Koketsu first met, and their conversation about the album's friction, negative space, and a surprise session with Tim Berne reveals a shared indifference to scenes, lineage, and the past. Into Entropy, Together:

“I felt guitars and drums had run their course. Rock had become a cliché and we also had to deal with punk … The way to rebel against that was to adopt synthesisers in a punk manner.” John Foxx on spearheading the synthpop movement:

“Stanley and I really were on the same wavelength about using the music as a counterpoint to the action … Often the really obvious pieces of music worked surprisingly badly when you tried them with a particular scene.” Eerie Sound Waves — Editing the Music of ‘The Shining’:

“But [Cuban music] was bursting to get out of me; I had to stick it into Roxy somehow by stealth. So I played a 6/8 echo groove against [drummer] Paul Thompson’s 4/4 beat – the 6/8 time signature is the basis of cumbia.” Phil Manzanera on Roxy Music and Cuban grooves:

“Keep walking a hundred feet or so, crunching leaves underfoot, and you’ll hit the murmuring creek that Emily calls a ‘main character in my life.’ … She eventually took the sounds and solace she found in nature and transmuted it into humbly reassuring ambient records released under her own name.”

“It took me and Larry…mostly Larry Hardy… it took him seven, six years of massaging [Poison] Ivy for her to let us get the Cramps tapes out of her garage. Because it’s a garage; it’s not good for tape.” Henry Rollins Is Spreading Joy:

“You’ve got to have taste to be a producer. When someone wants to do something current in the studio, I’ll ask, ‘Don’t you think that’s a trend?’ Why do we still have 808 kicks and handclap snare sounds on radio-ready modern R&B? Why is that always the sound? It seems so limiting.”

“…what I saw behind the main Bodhisattva statue, was one of these ’90s or ’80s-era phone-answering devices, the kind that had the tape loop that would record messages… They had repurposed this device for chanting.” How the Buddha Machine Built Modern Ambient:

“I don’t want to limit the listeners to hearing it as film compositions. I’d love for audiences to hear the music even without the film, and I’m very curious how they interpret it, or what story they make up in their minds.” Don’t miss Lawrence Peryer’s interview with Midori Hirano on The Tonearm:

“In the wake of the fire, I set to writing in an attempt to correct the prevailing mainstream media narrative and to memorialize my dead friends… in many senses, everything I’ve written in the past decade is about Ghost Ship to a greater or lesser degree.”

"It's almost oppressive how often I meet somebody and go, 'God, I want to do something with them!'" Exploring Seattle composer Wayne Horvitz's unique vision of music as a continuous spectrum, where the boundaries between improvisation and composition disappear. Wayne Horvitz's 'One Essential Arc':

“Lemos, Antropoceno’s Lua Viana, and a few others… belong to a loose cluster of Brazilian heavy music artists whose projects have gone international through niche communities on Bandcamp and RateYourMusic.” Brazilian metal, rewired by the internet:

This week's edition of our Talk Of The Tonearm email newsletter features many curations and recommendations, plus Alan Pierson, conductor of Alarm Will Sound, who tells us all about playing Steve Reich and Aphex Twin acoustically. Check it out + do subscribe for inbox satisfaction:

“…I wanted to go hard up against the cliff face: using ‘Ursonate’ as this weird filter to push through as many genres as I can, to get to know these systems really up close. It was really addictive – these platforms are like slot machines.” The Strange World Of… Jennifer Walshe:

There's a great new interview with Wadada Leo Smith on the Tonearm Podcast, talking about his brilliant new album Constellations And Hemispheres: podcast.thetonearm.com/wadada-leo-s...

“Jimmy stood there in rapt attention, stroking his goatee with an impish grin… his voice dripping in sarcasm: ‘Huh! Interesting! Jazz that doesn’t swing!!’” A Jimmy Heath Centennial Tribute:

“America — racist, greedy, violent, punitive America — made him, and he returned the favor, sometimes with a kiss (‘Back In The USA’) and sometimes with a slap (‘Promised Land,’ the lyrics of which are a series of oblique, if-you-know-you-know references to the Civil Rights movement).”

“Lunny was born in Tullamore, County Offaly, and was a multi-instrumentalist but was best known for his mastery of the bouzouki. He was a talented melody writer and considered central to the revival of traditional music as he produced 17 albums under his record label Mulligan Records.”

“Thirty years ago, Ween committed to the bit harder than they had ever committed to a bit before… a country album recorded in Nashville with the same session greats who’d played on Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison LPs decades earlier.” The Making of Ween’s Country Curveball:

“This work, ‘To The Body’ contains fragments of Dietrich Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri (1680) within - disembodied from their original context and played by three overlaid violas da gamba, three voices, piano, celeste, and electronic manipulation.” New Sounds #4946, With Nico Muhly, “To The Body”:

In his 1959 comedy 'Good Morning,' Ozu uncannily portrays how the promises of connection through technology often deliver isolation instead. Bill Cooper explains how the movie's themes resonate with today's techno-anxiety. The Unboxed Television — Yasujirō Ozu's Post-War Vision of Consumerism:

“Bush’s stubbornness in advocating for herself, her vision and her preferred ways of working kicked the doors open for artists coming after her to exist and create on their own terms. Her imagistic songwriting and immersive productions stretched the boundaries of what pop music could be.”

“Our results suggest that music acts as an emotional lure, becoming intertwined with memories and subtly altering their emotional tone. … Memories, much like your favorite songs, can be remixed and remastered by music.” Music can change how you feel about the past:

Good and evil sit in the same character, the same song, and — Moss suspects — the same person, a Catholic inheritance she hears throughout 'The Knife, The Needle.' The Tonearm's Meredith Hobbs Coons sets her alarm for the quiet hours. Elanor Moss's English Solitude:

“Rushent rides the desk like a dub producer, playing sends and returns like a musical instrument, selectively bringing in bursts of reverb or using extreme delay feedback – often on drum parts – to supplement and drive the rhythm.” The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” — tantrums and tech:

“…in the print ads, the blowing effect was created without any actual wind being involved. Instead, Steigman and his team used strategic placement of the man’s scarf and other props (and an abundance of hair product!) to give the illusion the man was literally being blown away by the sound.”

1977, NME

“It was based on some gospel music Spencer had played during his days with Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions. Frankly, it was barely a song. It was the same feverish piece played two times separated by a 7-second drum break.” History of The Amen Break — Immortality In 7 Seconds:

“Where most rock music tends to lean immediately into distortion and volume though, Swell elect to mostly deploy an acoustically-led sonic profile, only rolling out distortion as if to punctuate moments or deliver a brief moment of tension or drama.” Swell — ‘Well?’:

“There’s also a smaller conversation about ownership: On digital platforms, you don’t own the music. Only about 5% of people really think about that, but those people say, ‘I’m paying for this, but I don’t own anything.’” Physical Media Lives — A Conversation with Jeff Walker:

“An adroit tenor saxophonist, resourceful composer-arranger, decisive bandleader, and insightful educator, he had a clear-eyed sense of his contribution… it’s striking how little hoopla we see for Jimmy, though you couldn’t call it a surprise.” Jimmy Heath at 100:

“Dan Richter’s memoir emerged – if that is the appropriate term under the circumstances – as long ago as 2012, but then his publisher went belly up and this book was never truly released nor distributed, sadly becoming more of a non-book in the end.” Book review #78 — ‘The Dream is Over’:

On 'Sunbeam Of No Illusion', Ben Seretan and John Thayer find melody where ambient music usually forgets to look, treating amplified mistakes, grass-bundle drumsticks, and borrowed sustain as the raw material of a minimalist document of place. The Minimalist Gospel of Ben Seretan and John Thayer:

“The word brutalist has been rinsed in the last decade, but few words fit Stott’s sound as well. Big, chunky slabs of granite… heavy and slowed like Richard Serra throwing steel; cold-weather music of the highest caliber.” Herb Sundays 201 — Andy Stott:

“In the mid-1980s, Blunt, then 35, was working as a nurse’s aide in San Francisco… he signed up for a How To Form A Band evening class held in a small home garage in Golden Gate Park in 1985.” I’ve got to be mellow — Doug Hream Blunt:

For many years I have loved Félicia Atkinson's work. 'Sans Visage' is another stellar piece. Today I am immersing myself in deep listening while researching/reading about the process. @thetonearm.com www.thetonearm.com/felicia-atki...

“Blues and duende are kindred spirits… It is striking that two musical traditions so close in their origins have received such different levels of institutional protection.” Flamenco And Jazz Continue Along Different Paths Toward Institutional Recognition:

“The warmth and handmade quality was and is always important to us… that warm naturally resonant sound of a string ringing in the wooden body of the guitar really drew me in. I’ve never been interested in being a guitar player. For me it was more about that sound.”