Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 88 Shares76 Views

    in Music

    A Trip Through Trip-Hop’s Past and Future

    Listen to songs from Portishead and Cibo Matto, plus inheritors like Fcukers and a.s.o.Beth Gibbons of Portishead onstage in 2008.Oliver Hartung for The New York TimesDear listeners,Over the past couple of years, it’s started to feel like every out-of-favor electronic music style from the 1990s is returning at once. PinkPantheress is singing pop songs over drum-and-bass beats. Oklou uses trance synths. Hyperpop has made “uncool” taste a creative virtue. (On the less-out-of-favor, more-commercially-successful end of things, there’s Beyoncé and Charli XCX’s love for “Show Me Love.”)Signs have been building that trip-hop, a genre that reached popularity in the mid-90s by mixing atmospheric hip-hop beats with moody pop vocals, was next up for a resurgence. In one sense, it’s a sound that never fully went away — step into any swanky hotel bar over the past few decades — but it was seen as a creative dead end. “Today, trip-hop is the most toothless of beats-based styles,” the critic Jody Rosen wrote in a 2003 article in The New York Times about Massive Attack, one of the genre’s standard-bearers. “It’s easy listening for hipsters in space-age sneakers.”Well, lace up my space-age sneakers, because this music is sounding good again. Confirmation that I wasn’t imagining things hit my inbox via a recent edition of the always perceptive Herb Sundays music newsletter, which found ample evidence that trip-hop is in the zeitgeist, like Logic1000’s new, low-B.P.M. mix for the long-running DJ-Kicks series. (They referred to the sound as “downtempo,” one of a few related labels, but let’s not get lost in the subgenre soup and just vibe, OK?)Here are six classics from trip-hop’s initial wave and four tracks from current artists who are picking up the torch.A woman in the moon is singing to the earth,DaveListen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 113 Shares105 Views

    in Music

    Paul Simon at the Beacon Theater: Quiet, Intricate, Masterly

    Subtlety reigned as the musician played his post-farewell tour in New York, which included a full performance of his 33-minute LP, “Seven Psalms.”Paul Simon, 83, has simply changed his mind about a farewell to touring that he announced in 2018, with a valedictory arena tour that ended with a park concert in Queens. He had more to say and sing.He’s back on the road with a relatively intimate, scaled-down postscript: his A Quiet Celebration tour. It’s booked into theaters selected for their acoustics, and it’s made possible by an advanced monitoring system that helps him cope with his recent severe hearing loss.Simon played to a reverently attentive audience on Monday night at his hometown sanctuary, the Beacon Theater. When the refurbished, regilded venue reopened in 2009, Simon was its first performer. And on Monday, he stepped onstage smiling broadly and announced, “I love playing in this room.”Simon has been making poetic, tuneful pop hits — songs that found mass audiences with lapidary craftsmanship and terse, enigmatic insights — since the 1960s. He had less commercial success with larger formats: his 1980 movie about a songwriter, “One-Trick Pony,” and his 1998 musical, “The Capeman.” But he has still been thinking bigger than individual songs.After performing the entirety of his album “Seven Psalms,” Simon returned with a set of hits and deeper cuts.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIn 2023, Simon released “Seven Psalms,” a continuous 33-minute suite of songs about the brevity, fragility and preciousness of life — “Two billion heartbeats and out / Or does it all begin again?” — and the unknowability of God. “The Lord is a meal for the poorest of the poor,” he sang, but also, “The Lord is the ocean rising / The Lord is a terrible swift sword.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 50 Shares119 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Sally’ Review: Rocket Woman

    The remarkable life of the first American woman in space is profiled in this diverting but tame documentary.“Sally,” a welcome but unadventurous documentary about the astronaut Sally Ride (who died in 2012), wraps a risk-taking personality inside a risk-averse package.What’s lacking is style, not substance, as the movie bustles with diverting details. Lengthy interviews with Sally’s life partner, Tam O’Shaughnessy, are candid and sometimes piquant, but they’re too often delivered inside a visual dead space. Other talking heads — including Sally’s family and fellow astronauts — are handled similarly, the conventionality of Cristina Costantini’s filmmaking disappointingly at odds with the singularity of her subject.Even so, a portrait soon takes shape of an extraordinary woman whose drive and intelligence were aided by a personality that, according to one colleague, was “strictly business.” One of the first women to be accepted into NASA in 1978 — and the first American woman to fly in space — she faced rampant sexism and an organization laughably unprepared for women in its ranks. (Would 100 tampons be sufficient for a week in space?, a male engineer wondered.) Journalists focused relentlessly on her gender, with one asking whether she would weep if she encountered a problem on a flight. As the film makes clear, Sally was not the weeping type.That was a blessing, as she was also deeply private about her personal life. Perhaps noting the torment suffered by her friend Billie Jean King when her relationship with a woman was made public, Sally committed to secrecy. In the end, blasting through Earth’s atmosphere was easier than breaching public opinion.“It hurt me, but I’m not sure it hurt Sally,” a former girlfriend tells us, with refreshing frankness. In one brief exchange, Sally’s mother, Joyce Ride, describes her as “closed mouthed” about her feelings. When Costantini asks why that might be, an unamused Joyce replies “It’s none of your business.” Her daughter would have been proud.SallyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Watch on Hulu and Disney+. More

  • 150 Shares112 Views

    in Music

    Does It Matter How a Cello Is Held? It’s a Centuries-Old Debate.

    Historical response to the cello endpin, which anchors the instrument to the floor, has alternated between acceptance and pushback.Picture an orchestra. How are the cellists holding their instruments? Chances are, in your mental image, they’re playing with endpins — the pointy-tipped metal rods that anchor the cello to the floor and raise it to a comfortable playing height.Musical instruments, like technologies and fashions, adapt to the changing times. These days, playing the cello with an endpin is considered the default, but it hasn’t always been that way. Before endpins became standard, cellists often played by gripping the instrument between their calves, a position that requires strength and finesse.Even today some cellists opt not to use an endpin. At Trinity Church’s holiday performance of Handel’s “Messiah” in December, the cellists cradled their instruments between their legs for the three-hour performance — no small feat of endurance. Uptown on the same night, the New York Philharmonic was playing the same repertoire. Those cellists used endpins.This divide between Baroque cellists (like Trinity’s) and modern players (like the Philharmonic’s) is often explained by a generalization: Cellists after 1850 or so used endpins, whereas before 1850 they didn’t. And so, cellists playing earlier music in a historically minded way often forgo an endpin.But the history of the endpin is far more complicated, having to do with issues of gender, disability and plain stubbornness. Valerie Walden, author of “One Hundred Years of Violoncello,” writes that the endpin, throughout its history, has had “decidedly amateur or womanish overtones and professional musicians probably regarded it as an affront to their male pride.”Some of this may have to do with what musicologists call the “interface” between cello and thighs, an area often sexualized, which seems to be a major source of cellists’ anxiety both historically and today. But the endpin’s story is also about cellists not wanting to change their ways, even when they would benefit from something to lean on.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 150 Shares106 Views

    in Music

    Jurors at Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Trial See Video of ‘Freak-Off’ Sexual Encounters

    Earlier on Monday, the judge dismissed a juror over a “lack of candor” and prosecutors strove to show that the mogul’s “right hand” aide helped organize sex nights.After weeks of graphic testimony that detailed drug-fueled sex marathons, jurors weighing the fate of Sean Combs saw for the first time videos taken of the sex sessions at the heart of the case.The footage, from 2012 and 2014, involved Casandra Ventura, Mr. Combs’s on-and-off girlfriend of 11 years, who testified that she participated in the encounters — known as “freak-offs” — out of fear of retribution from Mr. Combs, who repeatedly beat her during their relationship.The sensitive footage was not shown to the full courtroom, after the judge in the case sealed it from reporters and members of the public who attend the trial. Jurors watched the videos while wearing headphones and looking at screens that had been outfitted with privacy guards. Several jurors winced. One, frowning, snatched the headphones off after the first clip was played.The videos were shown in several brief clips, about 30 seconds each. Some footage was from an October 2012 stay at the Trump International Hotel in Manhattan, where two male escorts were invited to meet Ms. Ventura and Mr. Combs.Mr. Combs is facing charges of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy, which revolve around his relationships with Ms. Ventura and another former girlfriend, known in court under the pseudonym Jane. He has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers have asserted that the two women repeatedly consented to the nights of sex.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 100 Shares68 Views

    in Music

    American Modern Opera Company Arrives at Lincoln Center

    The stage of the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center had been transformed into a split-screen tableau depicting ancient Rome and contemporary New York. A harpsichordist was playing ominous chords at furious speed. Singers, dressed in capes, suspenders and robes, scaled a rotating set.This was the start of the American Modern Opera Company taking over Lincoln Center for a residency from Wednesday through mid-July.“The Comet/Poppea” is a pairing of George Lewis’s opera adaptation of the W.E.B. Du Bois story “The Comet” and Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea.”Shuran Huang for The New York TimesThe company, known as AMOC, is an experimental collective of singers, dancers and instrumental players. And the project it was putting together at the Koch Theater is the New York premiere of “The Comet/Poppea,” a work that pairs George Lewis’s adaptation of the W.E.B. Du Bois story “The Comet” and Monteverdi’s “L’Incoronazione di Poppea.”Directed by Yuval Sharon, “The Comet/Poppea” is classic AMOC fare: an irreverent mash-up of stories that unearths difficult questions about race, society and art. “We’re getting it,” the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, a star and producer of the show, told his fellow cast members while frolicking in a golden cape at the end of a rehearsal on Sunday. “It’s all coming together.”Anthony Roth Costanzo, left, and Tines, two members of the American Modern Opera Company.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • 88 Shares93 Views

    in Movies

    Match These Books to Their Movie Versions

    Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions, video games and more. With the summer-movie season here, this week’s challenge is focused on novels that went on to become big-screeen adventures. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their filmed versions. More

  • 113 Shares119 Views

    in Music

    Stefan Herheim, Opera Provocateur, Puts Down Roots in Vienna

    For decades, Stefan Herheim worked as a freelance opera director on the highest-profile stages of Europe, with a reputation for complex, entertaining productions that combined bold spectacle with thought-provoking ideas. Then, three years ago, he decided to put down roots.He took on the position of artistic director at Theater an der Wien, a renowned theater in Vienna that once hosted the premieres of works by Beethoven and operettas like “Die Fledermaus” and “The Merry Widow.”“It was time I tried,” Herheim, 55, said in an interview, “to build up something with a bigger continuity than what I ever achieved going from house to house.”His first order of business was to oversee a two-year, 80-million-euro (about $91.1 million) renovation that the theater, built in 1801 and last renovated in 1962, needed badly. After some delays, Theater an der Wien’s main stage reopened in January. And on Friday, Herheim’s the season concluded with “Voice Killer,” a new opera by Miroslav Srnka based on the true story of an American soldier who becomes a murderer while stationed in Australia during World War II.In late May, Herheim sat in his office with a canned energy drink in hand while a rehearsal for “Voice Killer” unfolded several floors below. His face bright with excitement, he described the music in Srnka’s opera as “a psychotic room you’re entering where the sound takes you somewhere you’ve never been.”An exploration of femicide, the darker aspects of the human psyche and the repercussions of violence, “Voice Killer” is an unusual pick for an old opera house. But it is exactly the kind of work Herheim can commission as the artistic head of a stagione theater, where only one production is presented at a time, for a limited run.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More