Features Posts

March 25, 2024

Grave Expectations: The Resurrection of an Ancient Chant of Death

What do 'It's a Wonderful Life,' 'Star Wars,' 'Back to the Future,' 'The Nightmare Before Christmas,' 'The Lion King,' 'Looney Tunes: Back in Action,' 'Harry Potter,' and 'Stranger Things' have in common? The answer: One of the most recognizable pi…

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Feb. 26, 2024

The Mystery

When considering the most current discoveries in astronomy one may not think about Hip-Hop. However, over the course of its first fifty years, Hip-Hop artists have rhymed about the movements of the sun, moon, and stars in multitudinous songs and fre…

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Feb. 12, 2024

The Innovation of Bernard Herrmann in Three Movements

How One of Hollywood's Most Legendary Composers Blazed His Own Trail When ranking the greatest film score composers of the 20th Century, you'll unanimously see the name 'Bernard Herrmann.' The famed film composer was born in New York City in 1911 …

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Feb. 5, 2024

Death Cab For Cutie and Yoko Ono Walk Into a Bar …

Photo: Dave M. Benett/Getty Images Admittedly very late to the game, my introduction to Death Cab for Cutie (DCFC) was their 2015 single “The Ghosts of Beverly Drive”. Its driving rhythm, and the breakdown about two-thirds of the w…

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Jan. 22, 2024

Judging Records by their Covers: The Enduring Spell of Hipgnosis

Twenty five minutes into the 2022 documentary Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) Noel Gallagher, late of Oasis, says, “There’s a great quote from someone…’Vinyl is like the poor man’s art collection.’&r…

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Jan. 15, 2024

The Instrument That Wouldn’t Die: The Story of Early Cinema, Film Scores, and the Theremin

If you've watched old black-and-white sci-fi and horror movies, you've probably heard a theremin, even if you didn't know what to call it at the time. To meet the surging demand for film scores in the 1930s, recently immigrated European classical m…

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Jan. 8, 2024

It Began in Africa

Recently, I came across the documentary Beware Mr. Baker (2012), by filmmaker Jay Bulgar. It's about the musical career and life of Ginger Baker. Baker first made a name for himself as the drummer for Cream, the British rock group from the 1960s. W…

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Dec. 25, 2023

"Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence": the Perfect Christmas Anti-Christmas movie

Nagisa Ōshima's movie "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" is the perfect anti-Christmas film for those who feel like spending their holiday pondering the relativity of good and evil, right and wrong in the world we live in. Despite the fact that the mov…

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Dec. 18, 2023

Nekkuja: New Album of Marina Herlop or Revitalized Pasture

On October 27th, after a break of almost a year and a half, Catalan artist Marina Herlop released her new album Nekkuja. As she speaks about the album – working on it was a process of finding and affirming the inner light. She also talks about…

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Dec. 4, 2023

The Day “The Thing” Rode Into Town: The Score of an Unlikely Alien Western Set at the Bottom of the World

If you followed the horror movie genre in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the name “John Carpenter” was inescapable. Renowned for crafting suspenseful atmospheres and composing spine-tingling scores in his films, Carpenter was Hollywood&…

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