Word: sonic
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Beck’s last album, Midnite Vultures, an ironic trumpet-blaring parade of sex-funk and Prince send ups, wasn’t just another surprise milestone for America’s greatest sonic scientist—it was a worthy document of late 90s exuberance. Beck’s new album, Sea Change, is also telling of its time, fueled as it is by the kind of regretful, sober sensations that come after the big party has ended. But having reportedly broken up with his long-time girlfriend last year, the man has his personal reasons to sing...
...engine. Or the sudden appearance of a predator. Some scientists have even linked whale groundings to magnetic anomalies that can play havoc with the internal compasses on which whales seem to depend for navigation. One scenario, however, has been pretty much dismissed in this case: disruption by underwater sonic booms from the powerful new U.S. Navy submarine-hunting sonar that recently inflicted fatal hearing damage on beaked whales in the Bahamas--and prompted an outcry from environmentalists when the Bush Administration allowed these exercises to continue. "Extremely unlikely," says Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Darlene Ketten, an expert on marine...
...impossible to doze off, however, when the band launched into a horn showcase that riffed on Metheny’s composition “Offramp.” Vu crafted a searing, unsettling sonic landscape by half-blowing, half-buzzing into his horn. He simultaneously filtered and looped the sound with a mixer at his side and proceeded to solo over the resulting vamp. Initially captivating for its ingenuity, it decayed into a druggy, hellish stream of screaming guitars, strobing lights and tumult of menacing drums. It was an unsettling, visual and auditory apocalypse that left the audience puzzling...
...show attracted the attention of Sony Music, which gave the band a three-album deal; the first, Meteor Rain, was released late last year. It was pop-fluff stuff, a sonic fusion of Japanese groups SMAP and Tokio. But Taiwan's teens had not had a local boy band to worship since Little Tigers disbanded a decade ago, and 400,000 copies of Meteor Rain flew off the shelves; it sold more than 1 million Asia-wide. That success was quickly replicated on the mainland, where bootleg copies of the show, album and merchandise hit the streets...
...onto a wide screen quickly became the center of attention, and the music its soundtrack. It conveyed something that’s impossible to discern in Takemura’s albums. If Calix’s glitch symphonies were ones and zeros come alive, Takemura’s playful sonic freak-outs were the machines themselves speaking. Blocky polygon men sang along with the disembodied voices; kids frolicked with pixelated woodland creatures during musical lulls. Seemingly senseless static became a conversation between two clay figurines...