Skip to content

Category Archives: Reviews

Target One

no thing clever to say isn’t nothing enough to have said and been done with

Dead Format Revival

  “My program is simple: to surrender to the city and survive its inundation.” The poet walks faster than her job. She meets another one at the bar. They are far up in a tree in the park. One human howls like a wolf while another hoots like an owl. Oil in the air where the breaks […]

LINER NOTES: RHYS CHATHAM, “A CRIMSON GRAIL FOR FOUR HUNDRED ELECTRIC GUITARS

  A nose for Gog the spool unwinds Magog you go fast to Rhys and Shanghai night clumps about. No reference stalks the air tonight, the static pull of endless and-so-forth awash with defectionwith each step walking on water. Pool for a while cancel and tear up (rhyme with ear, rhyme with air) there where world […]

LINER NOTES: PERE UBU, “30 SECONDS OVER TOKYO

Great reggae’d punk shiv of a riff, stab and scratch. Discord arpeggio strings nailed dirty uncoiling into super-compressed worm of a counterpoint-riff. Like that. Bass lags a beat. The low-grade grating of an ambient theramin hum building up underneath, onomatotechnopoetic big-string-rib-pick-drags thru vacuum tubes & charcoal gray paperboard cones (twin Wright R‑2600 radials on a B‑25 Mitchell). It’s a claustrophobic space, collapsing […]

The Five Antis, the Four Uncleans, the Dirty Three

Shortly after arriving in Shanghai, I blogged for about a year via Typepad at Sound Friend, named after the cheap Chinese speakers Monika and I bought at Electronic City on Fuxing Lu to power our downtime and occasional parties. (Typepad because Blogger was blocked, and then Typepad was blocked, and then I gave up on blogging for a while, not […]

A mix without edge or limit”: Peter Culley’s Hammertown

  Reposting this old Poetry Project Newsletter review of Peter Culley’s Hammertown. One of my favorite poets, he’s also a favorite reviewer — his review of Clark Coolidge’s Far Out West, for example, has always really done it for me, packing more references into less space than almost anything else, ever (to say nothing of the ongoing catablogging […]

Museum of Oblivion” review @ randian 燃点

Chernobyl with youth group. Now in light of Fukushima, we are afraid. “Museum of Oblivion” review. Mixed material dioramas by Tatu Tuominen and Tuoman Laitinen; HD video and light box video stills and photographs by Tuomas Laitinen; acrylic, cut paper and epoxy on aluminum-composite works by Tatu Tuominen at Art Plus Shanghai, Shanghai. Jan 8 – […]

Moon Life Concept Store” review @ randian 燃点

MOON LIFE CONCEPT STORE,” with Alicia Framis and others; to tour Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Moscow, Paris, Lerida and New York as a popup-shop show after debuting in Shanghai. MOON LIFE CONCEPT STORE (3/F, 171 Jianguo Middle Road, Taikang Terrace, Shanghai). From December 10 to January 11, 2011. The Shanghai Expo is over, and, with the exception of the China […]