John Baeder

Since the late 1960s, Photorealist painters have been known for their scrupulous fidelity to the way life supposedly looks. Yet the genre’s domain is decidedly narrower than that of reality. Its earliest practitioners immersed us in the warped mirror that the United States held to itself at midcentury. Most Photorealists were born during the Depression and aged into a postwar America incongruous to the poor country of their youth, filled with thriving suburbs, unrepentant automobile worship, and metastasizing highways.

Among this group of artists is John Baeder (b. 1938), who is interested in

music September 27, 2022

Ghost World

IMPROVISATION, says ordinary wisdom, happens in a particular time and place. A player lays down a melody, a rhythm. Another responds. The isolation of the pandemic, coupled with our digital age in which musicians can share files with each other instantly, has forced even stubborn traditionalists to expand their rigid understandings and embrace improvised music layered with overdubs and other studio tricks. Australian guitarist, drummer, and pioneering composer Oren Ambarchi predicted this shift by two decades. The fifty-three-year-old tours relentlessly, accompanied by a who’s who of contemporary