music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Why Do We Listen to Sad Songs?

      by

      When Joshua Knobe was younger, he knew an indie rock musician who sang sorrowful, “heart-rending things that made people feel terrible,” he recalled recently. At one point he came across a YouTube video, set to her music, that had a suicidal motif. “That was the theme of her music,” he said, adding, “So I had this sense of puzzlement by it, because I also felt like it had this tremendous value.”Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      At Eurovision, Ukrainians Find Community Far From Home

      by

      This year, the competition is hosted by Liverpool, England, on behalf of Ukraine. A discounted ticket plan means thousands of displaced Ukrainians can attend.This week, there were reminders round every street corner in Liverpool that this northern English city is hosting the Eurovision Song Contest as a stand-in for last year’s winning country, Ukraine, where war continues to rage more than a year after Russia’s full-scale invasion.Inflatable songbirds decorated with patterns from traditional Ukrainian embroidery dotted the streets. In the city center, sandbags covered a monument as part of an art installation that replicates measures taken to protect statues in the war-torn country. There were blue-and-yellow flags everywhere.But perhaps the most visible reminder of Ukraine’s centrality to an event hosted in an English city nearly 2,000 miles from Kyiv was the presence of thousands of Ukrainians who have fled the war at home.Among them is Anastasyia Sydorenko, 33, who fled with her 6-year-old daughter Polina to Liverpool after war erupted in February 2022. She has tickets to the Eurovision final on Saturday night.“I feel now like I am in Ukraine,” Sydorenko said. “Everywhere I go I see Ukrainian flags, Ukrainian signs, more Ukrainian people in our national clothes. It’s so cool, it warms my heart, really.”She will join thousands of displaced Ukrainians living in Britain who are attending the Eurovision Song Contest this week after some 3,000 heavily discounted tickets were offered to them. The attendees make up just a fraction of the more than 120,000 Ukrainians who have come to Britain as part of a sponsorship program that was put in place last year.The Albert Dock in Liverpool. The city has a rich musical history, and was made a UNESCO City of Music in 2015.Mary Turner for The New York TimesIn Liverpool, inflatable songbirds decorated with patterns from traditional Ukrainian embroidery are one way the competition is reflecting Ukraine’s role. Mary Turner for The New York Times“We felt that if this was going to seriously reflect Ukraine, you had to have Ukrainians within the audience,” said Stuart Andrew, Britain’s Eurovision minister. “This is an opportunity for us, in a more celebratory way, to stand in solidarity with those people who are here,” he added.Last summer, the Eurovision organizers ruled out holding the contest in Ukraine, and Britain, whose act, Sam Ryder, had placed second in the 2022 competition, was asked to step in as host.“We want everyone to have fun, but at the same time there is a serious message here, that this should be happening in Ukraine right now,” Andrew said. “And the fact that it isn’t is a stark reminder of the cruelty of Putin and his regime.”Andrew said that demand had been high for the discounted tickets, with more than 9,000 Ukrainians applying, and that it was heartening to see an event “that even just for a couple of hours one evening takes their mind off the displacement issues.”Those who, like Sydorenko, were lucky enough to get tickets described it as a bright spot in a difficult year. Sydorenko is from the northeastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, where she hid in a basement for 10 days when the war first gripped her country.Eventually, she escaped in a convoy of cars filled with women and children and made her way across the border, then on to Latvia, she said.“Mentally and psychologically, it was really hard, because it’s something different, everything is new,” Sydorenko added.She later fled to Britain after connecting online with Elisse Jones, a Liverpool resident who offered to host Sydorenko, her daughter, her sister-in-law and her nephew. It was not easy at first for the children, who didn’t understand the language.“They didn’t speak a word of English before, and now they’re full-on scouse,” Jones said, referring to the Liverpudlian lilt now clearly detectable in the children’s English.“They are like little sponges,” Sydorenko said with a smile, putting her hand on her daughter’s head and describing how well she has been doing in school.At the opening of the photography project “The Displaced: Ukrainian Women of Liverpool.” Anastasyia Sydorenko, second from left, fled Ukraine with her 6-year-old daughter Polina, far left, before cofounding the project. Mary Turner for The New York TimesTwo days before the Eurovision final, Sydorenko joined a group of Ukrainian women unveiling a collaborative exhibition called “The Displaced: Ukrainian Women of Liverpool” at an art space in the city. The project features the portraits of — and interviews with — 24 women who fled to Liverpool.Sydorenko, a co-founder of the project, described it as a form of therapy for many of the women. The exhibition is just one of many poignant reflections on the war’s impact on Ukrainians that is on display across Liverpool this week.The Eurovision festivities are also drawing in Ukrainians living around Britain who traveled long distances to take part. Oksana Pitun, 39, and her daughter, Daniella, 12, who are living with a host family in Southampton — on England’s south coast — left their home on a bus at 5:40 a.m. to see the semifinal on Thursday night. The journey took them more than seven hours, and they had plans to take the night bus home once the competition ends.But Pitun said they were overjoyed that they had managed to get the reduced-rate tickets.“We feel we are supporting our country by doing this,” Pitun said. “And it also feels so nice to go somewhere, be part of something, and just not think about the war.”On Thursday afternoon, Pitun and her daughter visited the Ukrainian Boulevard in Liverpool’s docklands, set up as a place for Eurovision fans to experience Ukrainian art and culture. Daniella chatted with the volunteers in her mother tongue and switched seamlessly back and forth to English.Sandbags covered a Liverpool monument as part of an art installation that replicates measures taken to protect valuable statues in Ukraine.Mary Turner for The New York TimesOksana Pitun, center, and her daughter, Daniella, center left, were overjoyed that they had managed to get the reduced-rate Eurovision tickets for Ukrainians. “We feel we are supporting our country by doing this,” Pitun said. Mary Turner for The New York TimesWhile many Ukrainians who have sought shelter here are eager to return to their home country as soon as it is safe to do so, others have begun to feel at home in Britain.Tanya Kuzmenko, 34, was traveling in Sri Lanka with her boyfriend, who is British, in February 2022 when they woke up to news of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.“We didn’t believe it, we were in shock,” she said. She felt they couldn’t return to Ukraine, so she applied to join her boyfriend’s family at their home near Liverpool under the sponsorship program. She moved here last summer.Late last year, she started her own digital agency, and she said she has been thrilled to see Liverpool, which has become like a second home in the past year, host Eurovision on behalf of Ukraine. While she wasn’t able to get tickets to any of the contest events, she has spent the week attending concerts in the EuroVillage fan area.She joined crowds of Ukrainians there on Thursday night to see a performance by Jamala, a Crimean Tatar singer who won Eurovision in 2016. A Ukrainian flag draped over her shoulders and her head of blonde curls blown by the breeze, Kuzmenko swayed to the music, a smile on her face.Jamala, a Crimean Tatar singer, performing at the EuroVillage fan area in Liverpool. She won Eurovision in 2016.Mary Turner for The New York TimesShe said British people have been coming up to her when they see her with her flag to voice their support for Ukraine or share their connections to the country.“When I arrived last year, there were only one or two flags, and now the whole city has flags,” she said. “I feel proud. We are included, and it’s amazing.” More

    • 125 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Thomas Stacy, Master of the English Horn, Dies at 84

      by

      Through his decades with the New York Philharmonic and his busy touring schedule, he helped make an unfamiliar instrument much less so.Thomas Stacy sometimes told the story of how, when he was a boy growing up in Arkansas, an Italian who had been dead for about 80 years changed his life.He’d been studying piano with his mother, but when he heard a piece of music by the composer Gioachino Antonio Rossini, his focus shifted to a different instrument and he determined to make a career of it.“I was fascinated by the sound of the oboe on a record we had of the overture to Rossini’s opera ‘The Silken Ladder,’” Mr. Stacy recalled in a 1996 interview with The Associated Press. “I knew then that I wanted to be a musician.”If the oboe was a somewhat unusual selection for a young musician, Mr. Stacy soon made the even more unconventional choice to specialize in the English horn, a confusingly named instrument that is not in fact a horn but rather a double-reed instrument, an alto member of the oboe family.In the ensuing decades he became one of the finest English horn virtuosos in the United States; he played with the New York Philharmonic for almost 40 years, appeared as a guest soloist all over the country and beyond, and contributed to countless recordings. Numerous composers wrote works specifically for him, and he became something of an ambassador for his uncommon instrument — performing all-English-horn programs, leading an annual summer seminar and encouraging an expansion of the repertory.Mr. Stacy died on April 30 in hospice care in Southampton, N.Y. He was 84. His son Barton Stacy said the cause was heart failure.Mr. Stacy was also an expert on the oboe d’amore, a Baroque-era instrument with a mezzo-soprano range. At some recitals he would switch among English horn, oboe d’amore and traditional oboe. Whatever he was playing, critics praised his tone and his dexterity.“Mellifluous melancholy is the English horn’s main orchestral stock in trade,” John Henken wrote in The Los Angeles Times in 1988, reviewing a recital at Trinity Lutheran Church in Reseda, Calif., where Mr. Stacy played the other two instruments as well, “but Stacy demonstrated a much wider range of expression and sound. He could make the horn sing with almost human suavity, or stutter with martial brilliance, all supported by the booming acoustic of the Trinity sanctuary.”As for why he chose the English horn as his main instrument, Mr. Stacy had a simple answer.“It is most like the human voice,” he said in the 1996 interview, “and has the most expressive potential in a more expressive range than other instruments.”Mr. Stacy in concert with the pianist Hélène Grimaud at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007. He performed all over the country and beyond, as well as contributing to countless recordings. Richard Termine for The New York TimesThomas Jefferson Stacy was born on Aug. 15, 1938, in Little Rock, Ark. His father, also named Thomas, was a farmer and cotton broker, and his mother, Nora Lee (Conditt) Stacy, was a homemaker and church organist.He grew up in Augusta, Ark., a small city northeast of Little Rock, and started his musical training on the piano, violin and clarinet before settling on the oboe and then zeroing in on the English horn. When he was 14, he sold his motorcycle in order to buy one.“It wasn’t a Harley or anything,” he told The New York Times in 1999, “just a small, lightweight motorcycle.”He largely taught himself to play the oboe and English horn, using a book that showed the fingerings. He was 17 and still a junior in high school when the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., gave him a full scholarship.“I started out on oboe at Eastman,” he said, “but I also played English horn in some of the performing groups. It was already my preference. It fits my musical persona like a glove.”While at Eastman he met a fellow student, Marie Elizabeth Mann. They married in 1960, the same year that both graduated and that Mr. Stacy joined the New Orleans Philharmonic. He later played with the San Antonio Symphony and the Minnesota Orchestra before joining the New York Philharmonic in 1972.He appeared as soloist with the Philharmonic more than 70 times before leaving in the fall of 2010. By then a number of works had been written specifically with him in mind, including Ned Rorem’s Concerto for English Horn and Orchestra, which had its world premiere at Avery Fisher Hall in Manhattan in 1994. Alex Ross, reviewing the performance in The Times, found parts of the work “curiously fragmentary and unfocused.” But, he added, “Mr. Stacy tied these disparate impressions together with a rich tone and dazzling technique.”In addition to his wife and his son Barton, Mr. Stacy, who lived in Hampton Bays, N.Y., is survived by another son, Phillip, and two grandchildren.In the 1996 interview, Mr. Stacy talked about how a musician of his caliber stayed sharp.“The better you are, the harder it is to improve,” he said, “and that’s what I think about most, how to improve. It’s like chipping golf balls to the green with an 8-iron. You must practice the starting and stopping of notes so they sound good.” More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Eurovision 2023: How to Watch and What to Know

      by

      The Eurovision Song Contest has been an annual fixture in the global pop calendar since 1956 — with the exception of 2020, when the competition took an enforced Covid-19 gap year — and this month, the competition takes place in Liverpool, England.Organized by public broadcasters gathered in the Switzerland-based European Broadcasting Union, Eurovision is a colorful, fiercely contested competition in which each participating country sends an act to perform an original song that’s no longer than three minutes. The winner is decided by vote at the end of the “grand final.”More than 160 million viewers from across the world watched last year’s contest, and Eurovision’s popularity continues to grow steadily. Eurovision has even begun to make inroads in the United States, a country generally immune to the event’s flamboyant celebration of pop music.Below are rundowns on this year’s hotly tipped acts, advice about how to watch from the United States and why the event is being hosted in England this year.The crowd during a Eurovision semifinal in Liverpool. Many fans can sing along to their favorite entries.Mary Turner for The New York TimesWho gets to compete?Only seven European countries competed in the first Eurovision Song Contest, which was staged as an experiment in live, international TV broadcasting.Today, 52 countries have participated in Eurovision at least once. To narrow the field before the grand final, since 2008 there have also been two semifinals. This year, the top 10 countries at each semifinal move on to the grand final.The 2023 edition of Eurovision features a total of 37 entries, including the “Big Five” — France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Britain — who are the top financial contributors to the E.B.U. These five countries go straight to the final, skipping the treacherous elimination round.Bulgaria, Montenegro and North Macedonia are not competing this year, officially because of the costs associated with entering. Belarus has been suspended since 2021, after its disputed 2020 election and subsequent brutal crackdown on dissent, with the E.B.U citing “the suppression of media freedom” in the country.Why does Australia take part?Eurovision has a history of inviting seemingly unlikely participants, provided they are members of the E.B.U. Morocco, for instance, joined the fray in 1980; Israel has won four times since its first appearance in the contest, in 1973.Those two countries are at least nearer Europe than Australia is. But Australians have long viewed the contest in impressive numbers, even though it airs live at 5 a.m. Sydney time, and they have competed in it since 2015. Australia’s current agreement with the E.B.U. is supposed to end after this year, however, so who knows what will happen next time.Ukraine’s entry this year is Tvorchi, featuring Andrii Hutsuliak, left, and Jimoh Augustus Kehinde, right.Melissa Schriek for The New York TimesLoreen, performing for Sweden, is one of the bookmakers’ favorites to win the competition.Mary Turner for The New York TimesThe hosts of the Eurovision semifinal, from left, the singer Alesha Dixon, Julia Sanina, another singer, and the actress Hannah Waddingham.Mary Turner for The New York TimesHow can U.S. residents watch?As in 2022, Peacock hosted livestreams for both semifinals, and will do the same for the grand final on Saturday, from 3 p.m. Eastern.For the final, viewers can opt to watch with commentary from the Olympic figure skater and longtime Eurovision fan Johnny Weir, who made an assured debut hosting last year’s livestream.How has the war in Ukraine affected the competition?Traditionally, the country that wins Eurovision holds the event the following year. Ukraine won last year with Kalush Orchestra’s track “Stefania,” but since the country is still at war, Britain — last year’s runner-up — stepped in to host. (And not for the first time: Britain has won five Eurovisions but hosted nine, including this year’s.)Russia was disqualified from the 2022 edition after its invasion of Ukraine. The E.B.U. then suspended Russia, so it will not be competing this year.Since openly political songs are forbidden at Eurovision, some acts are using generic messages of empowerment, like the Ukrainian duo Tvorchi’s song “Heart of Steel,” about bravery. Flirting more brazenly with disqualification was the Croatian entry, Let 3’s “Mama SC,” a bonkers, highly theatrical antiwar number that employs one of Eurovision’s favorite creative devices: allegorical satire.Representing Croatia, Let 3’s “Mama SC” is an insane, highly theatrical antiwar track.Mary Turner for The New York TimesHow does the voting work?Eurovision’s notoriously complicated voting rules and protocols have changed many times over the decades, and again this year. Previously, each country was awarded points based on a combination of votes from viewers at home and by juries in each competing country.After the contest’s organizers found “voting irregularities” among six countries’ juries in last year’s semifinals — many of whom seemed to be voting for one another — the rules were tweaked, with the semifinals now being decided exclusively by viewers and the grand final results combining points from viewers and juries.Oh, and all this voting happens live, which helps explain why the grand final broadcast takes about four hours.Can American viewers vote?Traditionally, voting was limited to viewers in countries participating in the contest — who couldn’t vote for their own act — meaning American Eurovision fans couldn’t cast a vote.But in a change that’s indicative of Eurovision’s world-spanning ambition, this year nonparticipating countries can vote for the first time, via an official online hub. That includes viewers in the United States.Finland’s Kaarija is competing with “Cha Cha Cha,” a track which is basically electronic body music, set in a glittery thunderdome. Mary Turner for The New York TimesWho are this year’s favorites?The bookmakers’ favorite to take the title is “Tattoo” by Loreen, from the Eurovision powerhouse Sweden. Loreen is a known quantity, having won the contest in 2012 with “Euphoria” — a 21st-century Eurovision classic. There are no restrictions on acts competing several times, and other familiar faces this year include Italy’s Marco Mengoni and Moldova’s Pasha Parfeni.Were Loreen to grab the top spot again, she would become the second performer to win twice, after Johnny Logan, who won for Ireland in 1980 and 1987.Finland is another favorite, with a demented entry, Kaarija’s “Cha Cha Cha,” which is basically electronic body music, set in a glittery thunderdome. For Weir, who presents Peacock’s Eurovision coverage, this all shows the daring tastes of Eurovision viewers. “The fact that the oddsmakers think that Finland will do so well this year shocked me just because I didn’t know if everyone could get behind that kind of wild, over-the-top character of Kaarija,” he said in a recent phone conversation.The competition’s dark horses include Spain, which has not won since 1969; this year bookies are placing a few euros on Blanca Paloma and her song “EAEA,” which sounds a bit like Cocteau Twins experimenting with flamenco.Who are the more surreal acts?It’s often countries most Americans would struggle find on a map that deliver Eurovision’s most memorable performances, even if they don’t necessarily make it out of the semifinal.“The response I got last year was just how impressed people were that there was an act for Moldova that had them standing on their couches and dancing,” Weir said.This year, the eye-popping numbers include the Austrian song “Who the Hell is Edgar?,” in which Teya and Salena sing about being possessed by Edgar Allan Poe, and Germany’s outré mini-rock opera “Blood and Glitter,” by Lord of the Lost.Competition for the most awkward Eurovision lyrics is close, as always, but let’s give Israel’s Noa Kirel a nod of approval for coming up with a tongue-twisting rallying cry in her song “Unicorn”: “It’s gonna be phenomen-phenomen-phenomenal/Phenomen-phenomenal/Feminine-feminine-femininal.”Classic Eurovision poetry. More

    • 88 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Fever Ray’s Karin Dreijer, Behind the Mask

      by

      The musician, whose new album was released in March, discusses disguises, recording and why they find karaoke so off-putting.Karin Dreijer’s is a face of many masks. Around 20 years ago, when the Swedish musician first began releasing songs with the eerie, beloved electronic duo the Knife, Dreijer and their brother, Olof, were often photographed wearing black, face-obscuring beaks — a little bit bubonic plague doctor, a little bit “Eyes Wide Shut.” The solo project Fever Ray, begun in 2009, offered Dreijer more opportunities for striking visual imagery and character work. They once accepted an award from Sweden’s Sveriges Radio wearing an eerily realistic mask that made it look like their flesh was melting.As Fever Ray, Dreijer invents another uncanny guise on the cover of their latest album, “Radical Romantics,” which finds them embodying a kind of zombified office drone character with thin, stringy hair and eyes and mouth rimmed with a sickly yellow. That image, Dreijer said in a recent Pitchfork interview, was influenced by a seminude self-portrait of the 79-year-old Norwegian figurative painter Odd Nerdrum. “I thought of it as a Grindr pic,” they said of the Nerdrum piece. “It contains so much longing: throwing yourself out there, head over heels. I tried to do a face like his.”Dreijer and their longtime friend and collaborator Martin Falck, taking their daily lunchtime walk in the wilderness.Rebecka UhlinDreijer is, by contrast, barefaced and bundled in a nondescript, oversize black hoodie when I reach them by video call in their studio in Stockholm. Their white-blond hair is cropped artfully, and they sit in front of a white wall as blank as a primed canvas. They would be leaving for the States in two days to embark on the five-city North American leg of the “Radical Romantics” tour, but they were looking further ahead, too. “I am thinking about what I will do next,” Dreijer says. “Which is a good thing, so you don’t just drop after the tour. Touring is intense and a lot of fun — there are so many people around. I am planning what I’m going to do afterward.”Fever Ray’s music is somehow both brooding and ecstatic — a sonic kaleidoscope that explodes with infinite variations of gray. Throbbing synthesizers and driving electronic beats provide a steady backbone for Dreijer’s bracing, shape-shifting vocals and restless experiments in genres as varied as punk, ambient and industrial-tinged psych-rock.Some sketches and visual ideas illustrating the mood of the latest Fever Ray album, “Radical Romantics.”Rebecka Uhlin“Radical Romantics” finds Dreijer working with some familiar collaborators (like Olof, for the first time since the Knife released its final studio album, “Shaking the Habitual,” in 2013) and some new ones, like Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who add an edge of industrial menace to two of the album’s boldest tracks. The visual language of “Radical Romantics” was, like much of Dreijer’s work, developed with longtime friend Martin Falck. “We’re always sending each other pictures and film clips and stuff on Instagram,” Dreijer said. “‘Look, we should do this next time! This looks amazing, we should try this!’ We collect everything in a folder and then try to organize it, which is almost impossible.”For all its imaginative character play, “Radical Romantics” is Dreijer’s most vulnerable album — an open hearted exploration of love and its possible failures. “I think we started to really work on a gut feeling for what we find fun,” they said. “And then we talk about what we find fun in relation to what we are really, really afraid of, what we find scary.”“Me and Martin, we are afraid of everything,” they add. “I think we are both the world’s most scared people. But then I think we have become quite brave, as well.”A banally patterned tie, one of the key accessories of the zombified office drone character that Dreijer embodies in some of the album’s visuals.Rebecka UhlinMakeup — and lots of it — is another important visual tool in Dreijer’s many transformations.Rebecka UhlinWhat time of day do you work?I have two kids, so I’ve had to work proper office hours, because that’s when you have child care. And I think also, to have a good routine, to go [to the studio] in the morning and you work during the day and then you go home and you have a social life, you can meet friends and hang out with your kids. I think that has been quite important for me. Then I also do really like to go there on holidays. Like for Christmas, or in the middle of the summer. Because that’s when you feel like you get so much time and nobody interrupts. And everybody thinks you’re away doing Christmassy stuff, but you’re actually there working.My oldest kid is turning 20 this year, so I have had that routine for a long time. But now I feel like when they are about to move out, and they also don’t need me the same way in the evenings and weekends and stuff, then yeah, I think I started to enjoy going there in evenings and nights, as well.A shocking pink jacket makes the familiar a little uncanny.Rebecka UhlinAre there set hours that you sleep?I have understood that I need to sleep, eat and work out to be able to function properly. Which is a bit annoying, because it doesn’t feel like fun stuff when the only thing you want to do is just continue working. But it’s not so helpful to skip those three things.What type of exercise do you do?It’s a good biking distance to my studio, so I try to bike there. I really do like hot yoga. Going to the gym is really boring, but I do that, especially now, when I’m on tour, I have to do that. In the winters, I ski a lot.What embarrasses you?It’s interesting what embarrasses people. I don’t like to sing to a small group of people. [Laughs.] I really find it difficult to do karaoke. It’s this idea of authenticity that I find very difficult. Maybe it’s not embarrassing, it’s more like, it’s really frightening.Planning the many component parts of the “Radical Romantics” experience.Rebecka UhlinHow is that different from performing your own material onstage?Because then it becomes a performance, and I can play around much more with the ideas of authenticity and what’s a natural voice. It’s easier, I think, to play with those ideas than it is if you can’t use props or lights or effects. If I say, “This is the authentic me, this is authenticity,” then people will believe you.There’s something uncomfortably sincere about a lot of karaoke.And you’re also supposed to sound a specific way. You’re supposed to sound like the original. That is at least what people are striving to do. And I have never been able to sing in that classically “good” way of singing. I don’t know how to do it.I was reading another interview with you that said on one of the effects machines you use to process your vocals, there’s actually a knob that says “gender” on it, that you can twist.Yes, there is a machine that has that. It’s fun. [Laughs.]Driving beats provide a sturdy backbone for Dreijer’s shape-shifting vocals and restless experiments in genres as varied as punk, ambient and industrial-tinged psych-rock.Rebecka UhlinHow do you think of music as a place to play with gender?I think I have found out that making music, for me, is to create spaces where I feel free. And playing around with gender is one aspect of it. Early on, when working with the Knife, we tried to find this space where you couldn’t exactly tell what kind of voice this is, if it’s male or female or something in between. To find that space, for me, is a very freeing thing. And it can be done in so many different ways. It also has to do with how you perform the vocals, if the vocalist sounds very close or far away or [like] whispering or screaming. All these things work together to find this space.What are you reading right now?I have it here because I got it for my birthday a couple of weeks ago from my brother, actually. [Holds the book up to the screen.] “Dear Senthuran” by Akwaeke Emezi. I think it’s amazing. It’s a way of seeing a nonbinary identity from a place that I didn’t know about. It’s more of a spiritual way of seeing gender. I’m also into reading a lot of poetry about love. I have a new favorite writer called Chen Chen, who also writes really amazing poetry.The striking album cover was inspired by the work of the Norwegian figurative painter Odd Nerdrum. “I thought of it as a Grindr pic,” Dreijer said of the Nerdrum self-portrait they tried to emulate here.Rebecka UhlinYou’ve also mentioned that bell hooks was a big inspiration on this album. When did you first encounter her work?I was so enthusiastic on the last Knife tour, 10 years ago, that I gave [hooks’s 1999 book] “All About Love” to all the band and the crew to read. It’s been with me for a long time. And I still think it’s great. It’s so strange when everybody has some kind of relationship with love, but there are so few people who have a definition of what it is they mean when they say they are in love. What does it mean to say, “I love you”? I think it’s really important to share a definition with the people you want to have close relationships with. What do I need to feel loved? And what do you need to feel loved? And I think she writes about that really well.I’ve found your music to be so referential to other texts in a way that is rare. It seems like books are an important part of your musical world. Is it difficult to incorporate that in a way that doesn’t feel too academic?When we did the last Knife album [“Shaking the Habitual”], it was pretty academic, I would say. Even though I have never studied at the university, we read a lot and we had a lot of literature lists and stuff like that. And I think after that, both me and Olof talked about how we’re not so into that kind of process anymore, that starts through the head and then into the body. I am more interested in things that go into the body directly. But I think I’ve been as inspired by film and images because I normally have a clear feeling of a song when I start. It’s more of a feeling or an emotion. And then I know the colors of it and what kind of setting it should take place in.Martin Falck’s notebook — one of six he kept during this Fever Ray project.Rebecka UhlinDo you consider yourself a visual artist? You’re a musician, but there’s such a visual component to Fever Ray.I think I’m still trying to find out what I am, or what I do. I know I do music, and I’m very involved in making the visuals. The music is sort of the hard, difficult work that I have to do. I work mostly by myself for a really long time, and then when I have the sketches and I know what the tracks are about, then I invite people to collaborate. Then when the music is finished, we get to do the fun stuff, which is the visuals. I work with Martin on those.Is it easy for you to invite new collaborators in and figure out how to work with them?I ask people who I think do interesting and fun things. You never really know how it will turn out. So I did start a couple of collaborations with people that didn’t really work out. During Covid and the pandemic, I didn’t meet anybody in person except my brother. We have built studios just next to each other.Dreijer’s shoes also blend the flashy with the banal.Rebecka UhlinIs it important for your creative process to have your brother close by?I don’t know if it’s important. It was just a practical thing that he moved back from Berlin like five years ago and we both needed studios, so we decided to build together. Because I was just renting different rooms here and there. So it’s my first studio that’s my own. With a window, so I can see the sky. I’ve only been in basements before.Tell me more about your studio space.First it was a huge sort of industrial space, and then we built this cube in the middle with two studios in it. It’s a wooden cube inside this huge space. And in the big space, I think the most important thing, because it’s so dark here most times of the year, is that we have daylight light tubes. I don’t know what they’re called in English. It’s like full daylight — to go there is a bit like having light therapy. Or just having proper daylight, which I think helps a lot. To be able to be here in the winter. So I think that is the best thing about the studio. In my little work studio room, it’s not full daylight. Then it’s more cozy.Early in the process of dreaming up the “Radical Romantics” aesthetic, the Knave was an important character for Dreijer and Falck. Rebecka UhlinWhat’s the worst space you’ve ever worked in?I’ve rehearsed and recorded in really, really [expletive] places. I think one of my first rehearsal spaces, with one of my first bands — this is like early ’90s — we were sharing a space with another band with only guys. They peed in glasses and left them in the rehearsal space, because there was no real bathroom around. That was very disgusting, but it also tells a lot about the time, how it was when I started to make music. It was super male-dominated and it was really difficult to find a space where you felt safe and free.How do you know when a song is done?That is a very difficult thing to know — but when you listen to it in many different places and leave it for some time and can come back to it and still feel like it makes sense. But then if you listen to it one year later, you probably would feel differently and want to redo a lot and change things because you are in a different place yourself. This time I worked with 10 tracks: To have them all done at the same time, that is a bit of a challenge.What is your relationship to deadlines?I set my deadlines myself. And then when I’m completely done with everything, I start to work with my management and the different labels. I’m very happy not to have anybody involved in the musical process that tells me, “Oh, you have to be ready now.” That would never work for me.This interview has been edited and condensed. More

    • 125 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      Frank Ocean Shows Us a More Human Way to Perform

      by

      As live concert broadcasts have grown increasingly staid, his electrifying Coachella set gave us an unruly digital experience to share.Frank Ocean was constructing an ice-skating rink in the Sonoran desert. This was his reported plan — to headline the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on the night of April 16 inside, or in front of, or atop a frozen pool, defying the basic logic of weather. What better metaphor could there be for an artist seemingly allergic to the typical mechanisms of the music industry than to accept the headlining slot at Coachella and then subvert it, to stage the opposite of the festival’s arid environment by scheming an icy exhibition among the sickening dust and heat? The rumored set design was ultimately scrapped, but the very concept of Ocean’s doomed ice rink felt symbolic — maybe of how distant this king of pop-world disenchantment felt from Coachella’s surroundings to begin with.I was not in the desert. Nor did I really believe that I would be able to watch Ocean’s set — his first major public performance since 2017 — on an officially sanctioned livestream. Before he came onstage, YouTube clarified that Ocean’s 10:05 p.m. Pacific Standard Time set would not be broadcast on Coachella’s own stream — his representatives say he was, in fact, never scheduled to appear on the stream — though this was not surprising. Enigma has always been a tenet of Ocean’s public persona. Having previously spurned the Grammy Awards, dismissed major record labels and called attention to the very nature of livestreaming with his 2016 visual album, “Endless,” Ocean was primed to opt out without apology.It did not stop fans; links to spontaneous Instagram Live streams, by those on the ground, abounded. As it approached 1:05 a.m. in New York, I opened one of these links on my desktop and sat for an hour, waiting. Tens of thousands of us clicked on and waited. It was democratizing — there are no V.I.P. sections that I know of on Instagram Live — and the rumor was that Lorde was waiting in the same stream, too. We were all in it, waiting in the Frank Ocean IG Live, together.When the music finally started, this particular improvised stream proved to be shaky — while the set quickly revealed itself to be an unconventional, at-times rough-hewed spectacle — cutting in and out as Ocean sang a rock version of “Novacane,” his 2011 breakthrough single about emotionless sex and a couple who meet at Coachella. Fortunately, I soon found @Morgandoesntcare, a young musician from North Carolina who facilitated the guerrilla video stream that brought Ocean’s set to the masses, reaching 130,000 viewers. Ocean’s absence from the official stream felt like a refusal of that frictionless status quo. Maybe Ocean said no to the sanctioned livestream because he knew his set wouldn’t be what he “intended to show,” as he acknowledged in a statement later that week. (According to that statement, he sustained a leg injury in the days before Coachella, requiring a rework of the show.) Maybe the choice was intuitive. It’s enticing, however, to wonder if he made the decision in order to reject our on-demand culture of convenience. Some industry prognosticators have wondered if livestreams could supplant in-person concerts in the future — though it doesn’t seem likely — as ticket prices surge at the hands of exploitative corporations and make large-scale concertgoing increasingly unattainable to anyone but the rich. Livestreamed concerts by mainstream artists are often more like note-by-note recitals. With streaming more broadly, the data-driven music companies want to find patterns, to engineer us further into a culture of predictability. Intentionally or not, Ocean’s absence from the official stream felt like a refusal of that frictionless status quo. Watching a teenager’s ad hoc broadcast instead made for a more unruly digital experience that could not be predicted, planned for, optimized or controlled.The day after Ocean’s set, it still consumed my thoughts. Though I had watched it on a trembly hand-held broadcast that cut in and out, I felt that I had not only witnessed but participated in something significant — not in spite of but because of the spontaneous stream. Most reviews disagreed, criticizing how Ocean stoked “confusion” and commenting that his songs didn’t sound the way they do on his records. When I watched alone in my bedroom more than 2,000 miles away, these qualities made the music feel alive. Liveness has always carried with it an expectation of, and invitation into, risk and imperfection. But the media landscape’s flood of manicured concert-film and livestream events has largely normalized staid, smooth performances, a trend that mirrors the streaming era’s broader preference for formulaic culture. Lauryn Hill’s commitment was to presenting the truest version of herself, not appealing to commercial interests.Ocean’s set seemed like a rebuke of this trend. New arrangements of his most beloved songs, like “Bad Religion” and “White Ferrari,” sounded more astral and expansive than ever. “Solo” approached something resembling starry electric jazz and nearly brought me to tears. The speech Ocean gave about his younger brother, who died in a car accident in 2020 and with whom he went to Coachella multiple times, immediately did. The songs sometimes showed their seams, letting his voice reach higher and skate the sky. Delicate acoustic takes of “Pink + White” and “Self Control” brought to mind the intimacy of a theoretical Ocean appearance on “MTV Unplugged.”Pop music history is filled with incidents in which celebrated artists polarized their audiences from big stages, but one important precedent is Lauryn Hill’s 2001 performance on “MTV Unplugged.” On that show, and the unvarnished album that followed the next year, “MTV Unplugged No. 2.0,” she sang her biblical hip-hop folk profundities in a gorgeous raspy voice, accompanied by her acoustic guitar. In between songs, she delivered monologues of uncompromising creative wisdom. At the time, this live session was considered bewildering and met with divided reviews. Hill’s commitment was to presenting the truest version of herself, not appealing to commercial interests. “Fantasy is what people want,” Hill said then, “but reality is what they need.”You can imagine the now-35-year-old Ocean growing up, absorbing Hill’s messaging and reflecting his own unpolished reality in concert. When he played Coachella in 2012, he covered “Tell Him” from “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” Ocean has a documented fondness for her “Unplugged” performance: His song “Rushes,” from “Endless,” interpolates Hill’s “Just Like Water”; he once rapped over a sample of “I Gotta Find Peace of Mind,” a track on which Hill cries. “What I am is what I am, and I can’t be afraid to, you know, to expose that to the public,” Hill said during the “MTV Unplugged” performance. She defended her right to let her voice crack, which was a reflection of her lived experience. Such honesty calls people to be artists. But contemporary streaming culture, and the rigid aesthetic standards it widely supports, are hostile to frayed edges.On the spontaneous Ocean Instagram stream, I caught glory in flickers. Ocean’s set, which he himself called “chaotic” while emphasizing the “beauty in chaos,” was a presentation of his own humanity. In a just popular culture, that is what a “live” album, “live” stream, “live” concert and “live” artist is: raw, fallible and human.Source photographs: Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images; Getty Images; Timothy Hearsum/The Image Bank/Getty Images.Jenn Pelly is a freelance writer, contributing editor at Pitchfork and author of “The Raincoats.” More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Sum 41 Says It Will Disband After Final Album and Tour

      by

      With catchy songs like “Fat Lip” and “In Too Deep,” the Canadian band was part of a pop-punk wave that included Blink-182, Simple Plan, Good Charlotte and others.The band Sum 41 announced on Monday that it was breaking up after 27 years, unleashing a well of nostalgia for the early 2000s, when pop punk seemed ubiquitous on MTV’s “Total Request Live” and in memorable scenes in blockbuster movies.The Canadian group, fronted by the spiky-haired singer Deryck Whibley, was part of a pop-punk wave that included Blink-182, Simple Plan, Good Charlotte and Avril Lavigne. Their hits included “Fat Lip” and “In Too Deep,” which fans loved to belt out in their car or jump up and down to at shows.The band’s music was also featured in popular movies from the early 2000s, among them “Spider-Man,” “Dude, Where’s My Car?” and “Bring It On.”In a statement on Twitter, Sum 41 did not explain why it was disbanding. It said it planned to finish its tour this year and that it would release a final album, “Heaven :x: Hell,” and announce a final tour to celebrate the end of its run.“Being in Sum 41 since 1996 brought us some of the best moments of our lives,” the band members wrote. “We are forever grateful to our fans both old and new, who have supported us in every way. It is hard to articulate the love and respect we have for all of you and we wanted you to hear this from us first.”News of the band’s decision led fans to mourn the end of an era. While many punk fans scorned Sum 41 and other groups like it as safe and conventional, pop-punk fans said the music was part of the soundtrack of their youth.“Fat Lip” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart after Sum 41’s breakthrough album, “All Killer No Filler,” was released in 2001. And decades later, fans still packed Sum 41’s shows clad in fishnet stockings or dark skinny jeans and heavy eyeliner, accented with tricolor wrist sweatbands.“Sum 41 is most definitely on the Mount Rushmore of early 2000s pop punk,” said Finn McKenty, the creator of the YouTube series “The Punk Rock MBA,” which features an episode on “The Strange History of Sum 41.”“To be able to ride the wave of the MTV-type hype that they had and turn that into a career with real longevity and respect is a rare thing that they were able to pull off,” Mr. McKenty said.The band’s music seemed to capture the spirit of suburban teenage high jinks.In an interview with Billboard in 2021, Mr. Whibley said that when the band, which formed in suburban Toronto in 1996, was trying to gain notice, its members filmed themselves “doing stupid stuff like drive-by water gunning people, egging houses, and cut it with some film of our shows.”The band’s manager then sent a three-minute version of the video to record companies.“And then, it was a matter of weeks,” Mr. Whibley said. “Every label in the U.S. was trying to sign us, and it turned into a big bidding war.”Mike Damante, the author of “Hey Suburbia: A Guide to the Emo/Pop-Punk Rise,” said that Sum 41 was one of the first popular pop-punk bands to fuse metal and hip-hop and that it was disbanding during “a really nostalgic time period for this time in music.”In recent years, Sum 41 had toured with Simple Plan and The Offspring.Mr. McKenty said the band had recently been producing music that was “as good or better” than its music from the early 2000s.“I always like to see people go out on top, rather than go out sad,” he said. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Don Sebesky, Arranger Who Helped Broaden Jazz’s Audience, Dies at 85

      by

      He won Tonys for his orchestrations and Grammys for his compositions and arrangements. But he was best known for his genre-straddling work at CTI Records.Don Sebesky, who in a wide-ranging musical career played with leading big bands, was a behind-the-scenes force at CTI Records and other jazz labels, won Grammy Awards for his own compositions and arrangements, and orchestrated some 20 Broadway shows, died on April 29 at a nursing home in Maplewood, N.J. He was 85.The cause was complications of dementia, his daughter Elizabeth Jonas said.Mr. Sebesky’s musical interests ranged far and wide. He created arrangements not only for jazz musicians but also for a diverse range of pop vocalists, including Nancy Wilson, Roberta Flack, Rod Stewart and Barry Manilow. To jazz aficionados, though, he was best known — and sometimes criticized — for the work he did as a sort of house arranger for Creed Taylor Inc., better known as CTI, a jazz label that was a major force in the 1970s.From the beginning, Mr. Taylor and CTI were on a mission to broaden the audience for jazz by exploring intersections with pop, rock and R&B, and by making music that was more accessible to mainstream audiences than some of jazz’s more esoteric strains. It was an approach that displeased some purists, but it sold records, and Mr. Sebesky’s arranging skills were pivotal to that success.Mr. Sebesky arranged the saxophonist Paul Desmond’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (1970), an album of interpretations of Simon & Garfunkel songs. He arranged the guitarist George Benson’s “White Rabbit” (1972), an album anchored by Mr. Benson’s rendition of the title track, the psychedelic Jefferson Airplane hit. Pairing Mr. Benson with that song was an idea Mr. Sebesky had proposed to Mr. Taylor, but with a twist.“I suggested we do ‘White Rabbit’ in a Spanish mode,” Mr. Sebesky told Marc Myers for the website JazzWax in 2010. “He agreed. George Benson doesn’t read music. He just heard the song and automatically fell into the groove.”Mr. Sebesky in the studio with the pianist Herbie Hancock and the guitarist Wes Montgomery in 1967, working on Mr. Montgomery’s album “A Day in the Life.” The album would be one of the most successful Mr. Sebesky arranged.Chuck StewartThose were just two of the countless records on which Mr. Sebesky worked for CTI from the late 1960s (when it was a subsidiary of A&M) through the 1970s. He also made his own albums as a bandleader, for CTI and other labels. These, too, often merged jazz and rock.His debut album, “The Distant Galaxy” (1968), included versions of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and the Beatles’ “Lady Madonna.” “Don Sebesky and the Jazz-Rock Syndrome,” released the same year, included his version of the Peter, Paul and Mary hit “I Dig Rock and Roll Music” as well as other covers.In 1984 Mr. Sebesky made his nightclub debut as a bandleader, bringing a 12-piece band to Fat Tuesday’s in Manhattan to play selections from “Full Cycle,” an album he had just released on the Crescendo label that featured his arrangements of Miles Davis’s “All Blues,” John Lewis’s “Django” and other jazz standards.“At Fat Tuesday’s, a low-ceilinged, narrow room in which the 12 musicians must be strung out in a line, instrumental separation and clarity are a far cry from the possibilities of a recording studio,” John S. Wilson wrote in a review in The New York Times. “But what may be lost in this respect is made up for in the vitality and involvement projected by the musicians and the visual razzle-dazzle of the variety of instruments brought into play.”The next year, reviewing a return engagement at the same club, Mr. Wilson wrote, “This is a band full of fresh ideas and fresh sounds that set it apart.”By then, Mr. Sebesky had begun working on Broadway as well. His first credit was for some of the orchestrations for “Peg,” a 1983 autobiographical one-woman show starring the singer Peggy Lee.That show was short-lived, but many of his other Broadway shows did better. The 1999 revival of “Kiss Me, Kate” ran for more than two years and won him a Tony Award for best orchestrations. “An American in Paris” in 2015 also had a long run, and he shared a second Tony, with Christopher Austin and Bill Elliott, for the orchestrations of that show.His one attempt at writing the score for a Broadway show was less successful. “Prince of Central Park,” for which he wrote the music and Gloria Nissenson wrote the lyrics, closed after four performances in 1989.In 1999 Mr. Sebesky, after many nominations, won his first Grammy Award, for his arrangement of the pianist Bill Evans’s “Waltz for Debby” on his album “I Remember Bill: A Tribute to Bill Evans.”The next year was a career highlight: He became one of the few people who could say that he didn’t lose a Grammy to Carlos Santana.Mr. Santana, thanks to his album “Supernatural,” was a Grammy juggernaut that year, winning eight awards. In the category of best instrumental composition, Mr. Sebesky won for “Joyful Noise Suite” — beating out, among others, Mr. Santana.“That was very much of a surprise,” Mr. Sebesky, who also won a Grammy that year for best instrumental arrangement, told The Home News Tribune of New Jersey in 2000. “We expected the Santana steamroller to run over everything.”Mr. Sebesky played accordion on the guitarist and singer John Pizzarelli’s 1998 album of Beatles songs. “My mother,” he once said, “thought I’d be the best accordion virtuoso in the Western Hemisphere.” But he had other plans.via Sebesky familyDonald Alexander Sebesky was born on Dec. 10, 1937, in Perth Amboy, N.J. His father, Alexander, was a laborer in a steel cable factory, and his mother, Eleanor (Ehnot) Sebesky, was a homemaker.He studied composition at the Manhattan School of Music but left before graduating in the late 1950s to pursue a nascent career as a trombonist, playing in the bands of Stan Kenton and Maynard Ferguson.Before studying with the big-band trombonist Warren Covington, his instrument had been the accordion.“My mother was real disappointed” when he switched instruments, he told The Evening Press of Binghamton, N.Y., in 1982. “She thought I’d be the best accordion virtuoso in the Western Hemisphere.”By the early 1960s, Mr. Sebesky was concentrating on writing and arranging.“There seemed like nothing could be better than taking a group of instruments and seeing what sounds could be made to come out of them,” he told The Evening Press.Mr. Sebesky’s first marriage, to Janet Sebesky, ended in divorce. He married Janina Serden in 1986. In addition to Ms. Jonas, his daughter from his second marriage, he is survived by his wife; another daughter from his second marriage, Olivia Sebesky; two sons from his first marriage, Ken and Kevin; a brother, Gerald; and nine grandchildren. Two daughters from his first marriage, Cymbaline Rossman and Alison Bealey, died before Mr. Sebesky. Before moving to the nursing home in Maplewood, he lived for about 30 years in Mendham, N.J.Jamie Lawrence, an Emmy Award-winning musician and music director who worked with Mr. Sebesky on various projects, including playing synthesizer on demos for commercials Mr. Sebesky worked on, recalled that Mr. Sebesky’s charts could be hard to read — a result, he thought, of his working quickly because he always had so many jobs going on.“But if you could decipher them and get all the notes down,” he said in a phone interview, “they all made sense. They were the right notes. He was a musician’s musician.”Alex Traub More