Michael J. Seidlinger & Dashiel Carrera

By John Domini

SEPT 2022 | Books

Michael J. Seidlinger’s Anybody Home? and Dashiel Carrera’s The Deer both deliver the goods, I’m happy to say; they prickle the back-hairs deliciously. What’s more, the dreadful material is matched by unsettling craft.

Oh, Say Can you Sing?

By Hannah B Higgins

DEC 21-JAN 22 | Critics Page

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about idols as something to sound: We imagine the hollow, golden calf that horrified Moses as full of air, a mere bloviator on behalf of the Canaanite fertility god, Baal. But Nietzsche pushes the reader to go further, to listen to the idol’s “famous hollow sound” as someone with “ears behind his ears,” which invitation theorizes sound about sound. WJT Mitchell theorizes metapictures along similar lines; they consist of “a picture in which the image of another picture appears” and which “may function as a foundational metaphor or analogy for an entire discourse.”

A Percussion Orgy in Tennessee

By Walker Mimms

MAY 2022 | Music

After two years of pandemic silence, the Big Ears Festival came roaring back in March. Hordes of musicians carpetbagged Knoxville’s sleepy downtown for a long weekend of experiment and extravagance.

This Strange Thing, the Word*

By Trinh T. Minh-ha

NOV 2021 | Critics Page

It pains you terribly to hear it. The word. It was dropped casually, as if of no importance. The moment it hit your ears, your heart got stoned. The immediate reaction was a full silence. It weighed on you as you turned mute. You wanted to throw it out, back to where it came from, but to no avail. All you could hear yourself uttering were some rasping throat sounds.