Music
Highly Selective Listings
Brooklyn Rail Highly Selective Music Events
A thoughtful, discerning, and carefully compiled list of the most notable, promising and unique musical events for the month of October in New York City.
VETERANS OF DISORDER:
Royal Trux Reunites
By Michael Blair
“Now you know I’m ready,” Jennifer Herrema and Neil Michael Hagerty snarl in the opening seconds of Royal Trux’s 1998 album Accelerator. Warped through some busted-up, crackling processor, their voices mash into and over each other—you’re never quite sure who’s singing what, or, as the song opens up into noisier and noisier stacks of static feedback, what they’re even saying at all.
Diary of a Mad Composer
By George GrellaAugust meant a working vacation for me. I was out of the country, but someplace no one thinks of for R&R: the medium-sized, post-industrial Moravian city of Ostrava.
Trans-Europe Exotic
By Marshall YarbroughFuture Days, David Stubbs’s excellent Krautrock compendium, confronts readers in the U.S. with two distinctly foreign qualities.
Outtakes
By Steve DalachinskyPhone rings. I’m half asleep. It’s early morning and my seventh day of dealing with a severe kidney stone. “Hello.” “Is this Steve?” “Yes.” “Wow you’re as hard to get hold of as a pickle in a pickle drive.” (New one on me.)
Modern Miles
By George GrellaBitches Brew is a great work of abstract music inside the sounds, beats, and riffs of commercial music, and one of the most unique documents of the recorded era. The effect the album had on jazz and rock was shattering, disruptive in ways that make an abject mockery of the contemporary vainglorious use of that word by people who only wish to make money.
