Aurelia Butler

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    A Tour Through the Most Interesting Acoustics in New York

    The composer Michael Gordon and members of Mantra Percussion tested the piece “Timber” in resonant spaces around the city. Here is what they learned.As three people struck wood with mallets under a viaduct in Queens during the morning rush hour one day in the fall, a man walked up and asked, “What do you call this music?” The players could have told him the title of the piece, Michael Gordon’s “Timber,” or given him some idea of the genre. But one, Caitlin Cawley, simply said, “Percussion.”Cawley and her colleagues from the ensemble Mantra Percussion were at the viaduct, which runs along Queens Boulevard and under the 7 train, to test the sound of its vaulted ceiling. It was part of a project to perform “Timber,” an hourlong work from 2009, in man-made sites with idiosyncratic acoustics around New York City.The result, called Resonant Spaces, begins on Sunday, with performances at three locations, followed by three more on April 21. In addition to the viaduct, they include Castle Clinton and Federal Hall in Lower Manhattan, and in Brooklyn, archways in Prospect Park and Dumbo, and a monument in Fort Greene Park. The free concerts will allow the public to hear New York the way percussionists do: as a limitless source of musical opportunity.“Timber” was originally written for the Dutch group Slagwerk Den Haag. Six percussionists struck amplified two-by-fours — a take on simantras, planks of wood shaped to create specific tones, which have a history of being used in the Eastern Orthodox Church.In the early performances of “Timber,” the simantras were made from pine, but Mantra Percussion has taken a different route. Michael McCurdy, a member, said that the score didn’t specify the wood. “When you are learning Xenakis, or anything,” he said, “when the composer says ‘wood block,’ the variety of sounds that can come from that instrument is vast.’”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

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    Lost Tapes From Major Musicians Are Out There. These Guys Find Them.

    For decades, recordings left at studios have languished in storage rooms and basements. Master Tape Rescue, a company of two industry vets, is coming to save them.In late 2020, Brian Kehew was working at the venerable Hollywood studio Sunset Sound when the owner asked him to help identify some tapes the Who had left behind. It was not an unusual request for Kehew, who has done tape transfers and mixes on hundreds of archival recording projects over the last 30 years, and serves as a tech and sometime backing musician for the band. He expected to find some overdubs or a safety copy of a master, nothing particularly important.When he got his hands on the reels, he was shocked: The studio was sitting on all the original two-inch multitracks of the group’s 1975 album, “The Who by Numbers,” as well as previously unreleased songs from those sessions.“I immediately contacted Pete Townshend, and we arranged to send the tapes back to England,” Kehew, a blond-haired Southern California native, said in a recent interview at his North Hollywood studio, which was lined with rare, vintage and obsolete tape machines. “The band had been looking for the tapes for years, but this was one place they hadn’t thought to check.”For Kehew, a producer of Fiona Apple’s “Extraordinary Machine” and an expert on both the Beatles and Moog synthesizers, the recovery of the Who recordings underscored the fact that significant tapes “might be sitting in someone’s attic or barn or basement” and not where they belong, in a record company vault or an artist’s archive. “The obstacle to getting these tapes back in the right hands has always been the time and effort involved,” he said. “But what if there was a facile way to connect everyone that doesn’t involve a lot of hassle or red tape?”The answer may be Master Tape Rescue, a company recently started by Kehew and his partner, Danny White, a fellow music industry veteran. The company acts as an archival matchmaking service of sorts, cataloging recordings from studios or private collections and then vetting and connecting rights holders with tape holders.Shelves of recordings in an archive room above Sunset Sound, a studio in Los Angeles.Tag Christof 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

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    Theda Hammel’s Road to a Directorial Debut With ‘Stress Positions’

    Theda Hammel is under no delusion that Covid is box-office gold.“I don’t think it’s going to draw people in, the idea of dwelling on that time,” she said last week at the Soho Grand Hotel in Manhattan, sipping an herbal tea on a leather couch. “But I think it has value as a little bit of a time capsule.”Later this month, her debut film, “Stress Positions,” an ensemble comedy that showed at Sundance, will ask audiences to return to the early days of the pandemic, a time that many people would rather forget.And what about the no-straight-people-in-her-entire-movie thing? Was that some sort of canny strategy?No, just a function of circumstance.“I don’t know any straight people,” Ms. Hammel, 36, said. “I don’t know any.”The film is largely set within the confines of a Brooklyn brownstone, where an anxious 30-something, played by the comedian John Early, tries to keep his potentially virus-carrying friends at bay as they clamor to meet his 19-year-old nephew, an injured Moroccan model he started caring for just as the world shut down.Masks dangle from chins, but the word “Covid” is uttered only once. That’s because Ms. Hammel is less interested in life during the pandemic than the way a certain set of bourgeois millennials responded to it. The preoccupation of her movie is privilege: the way it coddles, insulates, divides.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

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    Mister Cee, Pioneering Brooklyn D.J., Dies at 57

    Born Calvin Lebrun, Mister Cee was a pioneer in New York City’s hip-hop scene and helped boost the career of the Notorious B.I.G.Mister Cee, a disc jockey who was an integral figure in New York City’s booming 1990s hip-hop scene and was an early champion of the Notorious B.I.G., has died. He was 57.His death was confirmed on Wednesday by Skip Dillard, the brand manager at WXBK 94.7 The Block NYC, where Mister Cee had a show. No cause was given.Mister Cee, whose head-bopping mixes reverberated on New York radio for decades, was a hit D.J. on New York City’s Hot 97 for more than 20 years before leaving the station in 2014. He was the executive producer of the Notorious B.I.G.’s debut album, “Ready to Die.”Born Calvin Lebrun in August 1966 in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, Mister Cee grew up at his grandparents’ home and took to the turntables under the mentorship of an uncle who was a D.J., he told Rock The Bells, a satellite radio show, in November.He added that his early influences came from the radio, listening to the likes of the hip-hop acts World Famous Supreme Team and Awesome Two.“This turned into my passion for deejaying and having that dream that one day I wanted to be on the radio,” he said.Mister Cee lived out the dream on Hot 97 before leaving the station, citing the station’s new musical direction.“I might be the answer for now, but I don’t think I’ll be the answer five or 10 years from now,” he told The Times in 2014.Chris Green, a promoter at Capitol Musical Group who had known the D.J. since the mid-90s, said in an interview with The New York Times that year that Mister Cee “was the glue between the old and the new” on Hot 97.But Mister Cee, a highly-respected figure in the hip-hop community, continued spinning records in clubs and on radio shows. Before he died, he had his own show playing throwbacks on 94.7 The Block NYC.After his death was announced Wednesday, the station honored Mister Cee by playing a recording of his 2022 mix paying tribute to the Notorious B.I.G. for what would have been late rapper’s 50th birthday.A full list of survivors was not immediately available.A full obituary will follow. More

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    Wyatt Flores, a Rising Country Artist, Has a Superpower: Tapping Emotions

    The 22-year-old singer and songwriter makes music that touches listeners deeply. But his own trauma — coupled with his rapid rise — has thrown some bumps in the road.In early February, the singer and songwriter Wyatt Flores relaxed on a green room couch in Nashville before headlining the 1,200-capacity Brooklyn Bowl for the first time. The show had sold out nearly instantly, thanks in part to “Life Lessons,” his seven-song EP filled with raw, emotional country songs that added fuel to the “blowup” — his word for the last year of his career and life.Flores, now 22, had been playing professionally since age 16 and releasing music since 2021 when his song “Please Don’t Go” caught fire on social media in early 2023. The spare track, written by Flores as a plea to a loved one not to take their life, features a simple fingerpicked guitar arrangement, centering the song on his raw vocals. His emotion resonated with fans, helping Flores stand out among the young, stripped-down singer-songwriters that country music is rapidly embracing.“I’ve always talked about mental health, and that’s what that song is,” Flores said, “so I made a video explaining it — me sitting there in the studio doing a little acoustic of it. Next thing you know, it just started spinning. I could not believe it. I went from doing lives on TikTok at 2 in the morning, and there’d be 24 people in there. Next thing I know, I’ve got a thousand, then 1,500.”Suddenly, he found himself included in discussions about the future of country music. The rise left Flores, who had always struggled with anxiety, in a constant state of near panic.Less than a week after the Nashville show, he broke down during a gig in Kansas City, Mo., telling the crowd in a lengthy address that he felt numb despite his musical dreams coming true. The next day, his managers made the call to pull him off the road.“I had to focus on being me, and finding things that I love, and putting myself back into my own skin, honestly,” he said in March, chatting once again on a backstage couch — this one in a tiny green room at Wooly’s, a rock bar in the heart of Des Moines, Iowa. Downstairs, fans at the sold-out venue were filing in for his first club show back. During his break, Flores cut his long hair, and was now wearing it in a mop covering his eyes.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

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    ‘It’s Only Life After All’ Review: Indigo Girls Documentary

    The director Alexandria Bombach benefited from the musician Amy Ray’s archivist instincts in this warm, compelling new documentary.Indigo Girls have been going strong for over 40 years now, and maybe the key to their resilience is that they never were cool. Often, they got it worse: Even at their commercial peak in the 1980s and ’90s, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers were routinely mocked for being too earnest, too poetic, too folky, too lesbian. Back then, being labeled a female, gay singer-songwriter was an artistic and commercial curse, as Ray recalls in “It’s Only Life After All,” a smart, compelling new documentary.The director, Alexandria Bombach, greatly benefited from Ray’s archivist instincts: The musician has held on to decades’ worth of artifacts and opened up her vault — 1981 rehearsals, recorded on cassette when Ray and Saliers were in their teens, are startlingly crisp documents of a budding chemistry, for example.From this clay Bombach has sculpted an affecting portrait of two women who have stuck to their beliefs and, just as important, their loyalty to each other. Existing fans will be mesmerized, but non-fans like me should also get a kick out of “It’s Only Life After All.” The film is especially good about contextualizing the band’s emergence in the midst of condescension (at best) from the mainstream media — their dramatic, and very funny, reading of a withering 1989 review in The New York Times is a highlight — along with their personal struggles and steadfast political engagement for causes, including the Indigenous-led organization Honor the Earth.Now that the band is experiencing a cultural moment — its hit “Closer to Fine” was prominently featured in “Barbie,” and an indie jukebox musical movie set to their songs, “Glitter & Doom,” came out last month — it is delightful to see them have the last laugh.It’s Only Life After AllNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters. More

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    NewJeans Asks U.S. Court for Help Finding YouTuber in Defamation Case

    The request by NewJeans is the latest effort by the K-pop industry in its struggle to stem rumors on platforms based outside South Korea.NewJeans, one of the biggest K-pop acts, has asked a federal court in California to order Google to release the identity of the person behind a YouTube account that the members say is spreading defamatory statements about them.The group said that a YouTube user with the handle @Middle7 made the statements in dozens of videos that were viewed more than 13 million times, according to the court filing. The group’s lawyer, Eugene Kim, wrote that the account had also engaged in “name-calling or other mocking behavior” targeting NewJeans. The videos “continue to inflict significant reputational damage,” according to the filing.The move, made on March 27, is the latest example of K-pop stars responding to the pressures they face from the fervid online fan culture in South Korea. The request, if granted, would allow the group to sue the YouTube user in South Korea for defamation and insult, which are criminal offenses in the country.“We regularly take legal action for violations of artists’ rights,” Ador, the management agency for NewJeans, said in a statement, confirming that it was pursuing a case against the videos.Mun Hui Kim, a lawyer representing NewJeans in South Korea, declined to comment. Google did not respond to requests for comment. The YouTube account’s owner could not be reached.NewJeans, which has five members, reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 list last year with its second album, “Get Up,” as part of the newest generation of South Korean girl groups dominating K-pop.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

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    What to Know About ‘Sasquatch Sunset’

    An earthquake and an eclipse weren’t the only natural rarities that happened in New York City this past week. Did you hear about the sasquatch in Central Park? The makers of “Sasquatch Sunset” sure hope you did.That’s because the sasquatch was a costume and his stroll through the park was a publicity push for the new film from the brothers David and Nathan Zellner. Opening in New York on Friday, the movie spends a year in the wild with a sasquatch pack — a male and female (Nathan Zellner and Riley Keough) and two younger sasquatches (Jesse Eisenberg and Christophe Zajac-Denek) — as they eat, have sex, fight predators and reckon with death.Droll but big-hearted, the movie sits at the intersection of the ad campaign for Jack Link’s beef jerky, the 1987 comedy “Harry and the Hendersons” and a 1970s nature documentary, down to the hippie-vibe soundtrack.What goes into a movie about Bigfoots? (Bigfeet?) Even after a day of following the costumed sasquatch around Central Park, we had questions for the cast and crew. They had answers, which have been edited and condensed.Even sasquatches can appreciate the halal cart. And sometimes they need a rest.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