Sasha Frere-Jones

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  music September 23, 2019

  Standard Deviation

  HOW WOULD YOU SING, if you wanted to sing? Would you want to sound alluring, get the kids to swooning? Patty Waters, at the age of seventy-three, has her own answers to these questions, and few of them are immediately apparent. Dubbed “Priestess of the Avant-Garde” by JazzTimes, Waters grew up in Iowa, then moved, while in her teens, to San Francisco and eventually to New York, all to pursue her singing career. She now lives in California, as she has for decades.

  Waters is best known for two albums released on ESP-Disk in 1966—Sings, a studio album, and College Tour, a compilation of live

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  music May 06, 2019

  Story of O)))

  EARLIER THIS YEAR, the French composer and artist Éliane Radigue published an essay called “Time Is of No Importance” in a collection called Spectres. In it, she writes: “Like plants, immobile but always growing, my music is never stable. It is ever changing. But the changes are so slight that they are almost imperceptible, and only become apparent after the fact.” The music of SUNN O))) lives in a similar balance, alive and immobile, exceptionally loud but not cruel.

  For their show at Brooklyn Steel on April 25, the core duo of guitarists Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson were joined by Tim

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  music April 19, 2019

  Master Blaster

  WHEN APHEX TWIN played Brooklyn’s Avant Gardner earlier this month, it was his first New York appearance in at least twenty-two years. From day one, Richard D. James has used live appearances as DJing opportunities, focusing heavily on the ragey, detailed tracks he and his cohort favor. But these tracks are, and have always been, a fairly narrow tranche cut from his larger body of work. Don’t flip out if you miss his recent shows and are a lifelong fan of Selected Ambient Works 85-92 (1992)—that show can happen any time, in your house.

  The sound was clear and not too loud. The big ass, windy

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  print April 2019

  Marlon Mullen

  Marlon Mullen begins by painting words, performing an act that neither comes from nor returns to reading. The artist has autistic spectrum disorder and suffers from expressive aphasia; he rarely uses spoken or written language to communicate. His voice, though, is coherent and glorious. This was Mullen’s third solo show at JTT.

  In the late 1960s, California governor Ronald Reagan deinstitutionalized many of those diagnosed with mental illness; as US president, he continued in this vein and shifted responsibility for the mentally ill to the states, leaving thousands with limited options. In

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  print February 2019

  THE INVISIBLE VILLAGE

  WRITING ABOUT JOHN ZORN and his music feels like an act of cartography as much as an opportunity for critique. Zorn’s recorded appearances in the past forty-odd years—as improviser, composer, or both—number somewhere near seven hundred. That hallucinatory number represents the constant creation of music, sure, but it also indicates the borders of a psychic space radiating out of and above New York’s East Village. Zorn’s work has helped sustain a cohort of artists and workers that has wound its way through the downtown experimental-theater circles of the 1960s, the loft jazz scene of the ’70s,

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  print February 2019

  Aura Satz

  In Aura Satz’s numinous exhibition “Listen, Recalibrate” at Fridman Gallery, pieces exploring generations of sound-making women—such as Delia Derbyshire, Pauline Oliveros, and Éliane Radigue—resonated profoundly, while elsewhere in the show the trauma of living with state-sponsored sonic warfare ominously hummed. The works, though unshowy, were rigorously conceived and continued to unfold weeks after viewing.

  The Wail That Was Warning, 2018, was a handsome, hand-cranked siren: a stainless-steel barrel laid horizontally on a stand shaped like an inverted V. I turned it at an unhurried pace, not

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  picks January 28, 2019

  Angela Heisch and Alessandro Keegan

  “HEED,” a joint showing by painters Angela Heisch and Alessandro Keegan, slices through traditions and planes. Here, organic shapes summon up twentieth-century pop-cultural modes while hinting at weird futures. Both artists favor a hard line and a steady curve, but neither uses any machine tools or digital means to create their images. And both love symmetry, creating forms with mirrored halves and repeated figures.

  Heisch stays within the abstract, rendering circles and flower shapes that suggest a 1950s American diner aesthetic reduced and extruded onto canvas. Her most arresting work, Snouty

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  music January 2019

  SYNTHESIZE ME

  HOW LONG did an hour feel in 1971? Was it like three 2018 hours? Ten minutes? The music of the eighty-six-year-old French composer Éliane Radigue forces these questions because as much as it’s about synthesizers and magnetic tape and silence and held notes and resonance, it is also about time. Her work cannot be excerpted or sliced into representative swatches or versified. The movement from a piece’s beginning to its end is the motif itself; to lose even a little of that adventure is to lose the music. Œuvres électroniques (Electronic Works), a new fourteen-CD box set recently released by Ina

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  print December 2018

  Richard Bernstein

  Regime change is never good for the court painter. And shortly after Andy Warhol died, Richard Bernstein lost his gig as the artist for Interview magazine covers. (Four more of his covers, already in the can, appeared after Warhol’s death.) Was he always competing with Warhol, the one who many assumed was behind Bernstein’s covers? Yes, but the artist also served as a bright antipode to the portraitists of the New York Post, arbiter of both celebrity and criminality, and the house organ of Warhol’s dark antithesis, Donald J. Trump.

  Warhol’s layers and print techniques brought his portraits toward

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  picks November 07, 2018

  Catherine Opie

  Among the photographs on display here is The Modernist (2018), Catherine Opie’s first film: 852 black-and-white photographs sequenced over twenty-two minutes. The proximate reference is Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), another film built from stills and less than half an hour long. Marker uses post–World War III Paris to push it along—Opie opts for Los Angeles and modernist architectural hits of the twentieth century.

  Inspired by California’s Lake County fires of 2016, Opie’s nameless character—played by Pig Pen, a trans artist from the Bay Area—decides to burn down several landmark John Lautner

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  performance November 07, 2018

  Cell Tones

  IN OCTOBER, AT LE POISSON ROUGE, Meredith Monk and her five-woman ensemble presented what she called the “essence” of Cellular Songs, a new ninety-minute work that she presented at BAM this past March but has yet to record. In its full iteration, Cellular Songs interleaves song and positioned bodies and slide projections. In the nightclub setting, Monk had to abandon the staging design for an overhead view and present a distilled night of music and movement. But one video element from the longer version was retained and played right before the performance started: five pairs of hands, pointed

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  music October 16, 2018

  Wander Woman

  MILES DAVIS DID IT thirty years into his recording career, in 1981, on The Man with The Horn. Dylan only needed thirteen years to get from Bob Dylan (1962) to Blood On The Tracks (1975). Chan Marshall took twenty-three to move from Dear Sir (1995) to Wanderer (2018). What these artists found, at the end of the arc, was the moment of synthesis, when the particulars that initially marked them moved across a divide (accidents, taxes, getting high, heartbreak) and reappeared as elements of a vocabulary. The broken and twisted and obscure tendencies were folded in and out of various styles, then