May 2013

Going back through old blog posts, was proud to note I was making fun of BuzzFeed 7 years ago:

Dear Tom, We are continuing to monitor your site for signs of Buzz. You often seem close to achieving a "buzz breakthrough," but you have a number of self-defeating elements built into your program. You don't stick to one topic, you are frequently harsh in your opinions, the mix you are attempting of art world insider theorizing and political rants seems ill-conceived, your own art is inconsistent, your music occupies an uncomfortable ground between club tunes and art music, satisfying neither constituency, and your alternating tone of outraged moral seriousness and adolescent silliness is frankly just a turnoff. We'd like to help you along with your BQ (buzz quotient) but, frankly, we don't know what the f*k you're doing and we don't care.

And the year before that was making fun of the sales of MySpace and Delicious:

Yes, we're looking at Moody's blog, too, but the numbers aren't up there where I'd like. The guy keeps changing the subject, and thwarts every reasonable attempt at branding, or self-branding. One day he's an artist, the next he's posting his damn plinky techno "compositions." He'll create a perfectly good, catchy animation and then put up some stupid thing from a kid's web page. Then he rails about politics and the system. God knows we'd like to shut him up by buying him, the way we're going to put a cork in those little bastards at Myspace and del.icio.us, but it has to make economic sense. This Moody weirdo just doesn't command a big enough slice of the wild and crazy youth demographic. So fuck him.

Video clip by jeronimo jh of the Columbia Gagaku Ensemble performing at St. Paul's chapel last week [Vine]

This crop hides actual audience size (much larger than what's shown) to squeeze in as many of the ensemble members as possible. The acoustics in St Paul's astound, creating an ideal setting for this medieval proto-ambient form of Japanese classical music. The performers file in, in stocking feet, and take their positions, seated in half-lotus, and the shō players lead off (as I recall). The music consists of antiphonal call-and-response among various woodwind groups, with drums, koto, and other percussive strings adding punctuation. The effect is a drifting or floating wall of sound, meant in earlier times as a component of Shinto ritual (to inspire a rice crop, say). In modern times we hear this music echoed in Harry Partch or Steve Reich.
The Columbia Gagaku Ensemble is a diverse mix of ages, sexes and backgrounds -- the percussionists tended to be older, for whatever reason, and wonderfully poker-faced. Everyone had their characteristic look and stance with an instrument but the dress was uniform black and the mien was serious, as befits religious ritual (in a Western church, no less). The dedication to the details of an obscure niche of music and performance impressed. Very ethereal evening.

(Thanks to Ensemble member and shō player Alessandra Urso for the invite.)