"We live in an age of technology in which machines touch every part of our lives. It is not suprising that music has also been influenced by technology."This...

I sat down with Jad Abumrad and talked about sound, music and the function of music. Then I turned that conversation into a film.

The first thing you see when you watch W.T. Morgan’s 1986 documentary The Unheard Music about the difficult-to-Google Los Angeles punk band X is a caption reading “PLAY THIS MUSIC LOUD.” Always good advice, of course. Morgan worked on the documentary for five solid years while the band was at its peak, and The Unheard Music emerges as a darn good document. X was one of those bands, like the Who, where all four members contributed something essential to the music as well as the band’s…

It seems that Love is in the air…. Just a few days ago we featured a swell duvet cover featuring the cover art of Forever Changes as the prevailing design. Love was perfectly primed to become an object of cult adoration. They were an interracial band that was smack in the middle of a very fertile California music scene in the 1960s. The quality of their output was very high, and reflected a very important transition in the maturation of the rock scene as a whole. Love’s “classic” line-up…

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Three aspiring musicians: Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd were looking for a place “where nothing was happening” for their band Television to play. If nothing was happening then the bar owner had nothing to lose. One day, down in the Bowery, Verlaine and Lloyd spotted a place initialed CBGB-OMFUG. They sidled across, went inside and talked to the owner a former singer and musician Hilly Krystal. As Lloyd recalled in Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s essential oral history of punk…

On this 1980 episode of 3-2-1 Contact — the excellent PBS kids TV show about science — legendary experimental electronic musician Suzanne Ciani explains the basics of synthesizer techno…

There was a time, long, long ago—as ridiculous as this might sound today—when being a Bee Gees fan was something one didn’t admit to in polite company. By the mid-80s, the Brothers Gibb had more or less been relegated to the “guilty pleasures” category and their second career wilderness. If you liked them, it had to be, you know, “ironic” or something. But fuck that. It was around that time, when I was in my early 20s, that I personally started to go absolutely nuts for their music. In my…

In 1997 The South Bank Show produced an hour-long documentary on Björk, who of course was right in the middle of an impressive run during which she established herself as a global pop star and icon of the first order. The program is divided up into two parts. The first half is a straightforward account of Björk’s life up to 1997, including her solo album at the age of 11, her teenage work with Tappi Tíkarrass and KUKL, her breakthrough success with the Sugarcubes, and her initial success…

One of the first images in “Nick Cave: Stranger in a Strange Land” is a glimpse of the Berlin Wall, which (it’s strange to imagine) would only be in use for a couple more years. “Stranger in a Strange Land” was produced in 1987 by Bram van Splunteren, and it appeared on the Dutch TV channel VPRO. I saw the second half of this movie when I was living in Austria in the early to mid-1990s, so it’s a pleasure to come across it again! Cave lived in Berlin in the 1980s, during which he appeared in…

20/20 reports on a new music phenomenon - New WavePart one of two. Part Two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-48SAa-_6U

The first show Henry Rollins ever played in the Los Angeles area as a member of Black Flag took place at the Cuckoo’s Nest in Costa Mesa, on Friday, August 21, 1981. It was a 3 p.m. show, as the flier above indicates. Black Flag were the headliners, with Wasted Youth and Circle One, two hardcore bands from the O.C., serving as openers. Purportedly the location of the first-ever slam pit, the Cuckoo’s Nest was open from 1976 through 1981, and even that run was only possible because owner…

The Portuguese release of ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ (via Discogs) In 1993, the BBC documentary series Arena devoted four episodes to “Tales of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” The third of these focused entirely on the real-life figures in Lou Reed’s most famous song, “Walk on the Wild Side,” collecting footage of and fascinating biographical detail about each superstar sketched in the song’s verses—Holly Woodlawn, Candy Darling, “Little” Joe Dallesandro, Sugar Plum Fairy and Jackie Curtis. I don’t know how…

In the 1970s and 1980s, Legendary musician Fela Kuti pioneered the sound of Afrobeat, an entrancing amalgam of West African highlife music, jazz, and American funk. Among his fans, he counts David …

Little Doorways To Paths Not Yet Taken is a bite-sized insight into the US composer's studio work and processes

I’m forever a sucker for any historical documentation of the 80s hardcore punk scene, particularly pieces like this that were created under the radar and then lost to the sands of time. YouTube has gloriously resurrected so much of this kind of material, including scores of TV evening news reports, such as this one on the “crazy” new music and fashion fads of the 1980s. What we have here is a four-minute-long documentary from 1985 on the Austin, Texas punk scene which was produced by Robert…