The 83rd, Figure of Noise

By S. David

OCT 2020 | Music

While perhaps telling, The 83rd's coded use of “culture” is just as instructive as his near-militant posture of independence. As the founder of the multi-pronged media organization Sermon 3 Recordings, through which he self-releases his music via Bandcamp, The 83rd’s sui generis trajectory seeks the kind of valanced heat that the real and art worlds seem to so rarely offer to self-styled enfants terrible.

The Expanded Moment of Being

By Farzia Fallah

SEPT 2021 | Critics Page

The choral piece Miserere by the Italian composer Gregorio Allegri (1582, Rome–1652, Rome) is assumed to have been written in the 1630s and was regularly performed in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. It is a work for nine voices, divided between two choirs. The piece consists of six sections, which are basically repetitions, in each of which a different line of Psalm 51 is sung. Today, when I listen to this piece outside any religious context, I feel as if the piece could go on and on. Listening to it, there is no difference for me, for instance, between minute three and minute eight. I am in a state of supreme concentration during these 12 minutes or so, with no sense of now or later or before. The piece creates its own time, and in these repetitions, one loses the sense of time. It has the effect of a piercing Now.   

Shukri Mabkhout’s The Italian

By John Domini

OCT 2021 | Books

Despite The Italian's historical focus, the novel casts light on both future and past, dramatizing a sweeping change that doesn’t appear to make much difference.

Dear Friends and Readers,

By Phong Bui

JUL-AUG 2021 | Publisher's Message

There was a king with one eye. To replace the missing eye the king searched across the land and found a renowned magician whom he commissioned to craft him an artificial eye. When it was complete, no one in the whole kingdom could tell the difference.