Funk is a music genre that originated in African-American communities in the mid-1960s when musicians created a rhythmic, danceable new form of music through a mixture of various music genres that were popular among African-Americans in the mid-20th century. It deemphasizes melody and chord progressions and focuses on a strong rhythmic groove of a bassline played by an electric bassist and a drum part played by a percussionist, often at slower tempos than other popular music. Funk typically consists of a complex percussive groove with rhythm instruments playing interlocking grooves that create a "hypnotic" and "danceable" feel. It uses the same richly colored extended chords found in bebop jazz, such as minor chords with added sevenths and elevenths, and dominant seventh chords with altered ninths and thirteenths.
Mickey Hart is an American percussionist. He is best known as one of the two drummers of the rock band Grateful Dead. He was a member of the Grateful Dead from September 1967 until February 1971, and again from October 1974 until their final show in July 1995. He and fellow Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann earned the nickname "the rhythm devils".
Ambient music is a genre of music that emphasizes tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. It is often "peaceful" sounding and lacks composition, beat, and/or structured melody. It uses textural layers of sound that can reward both passive and active listening and encourage a sense of calm or contemplation. The genre is said to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual", or "unobtrusive" quality. Nature soundscapes may be included, and the sounds of acoustic instruments such as the piano, strings and flute may be emulated through a synthesizer.
Dancehall is a genre of Jamaican popular music that originated in the late 1970s. Initially, dancehall was a more sparse version of reggae than the roots style, which had dominated much of the 1970s. It wasn't until the 1980s when the style was officially named when the two words Dance and Hall the common venue was joined to make one word DanceHall; for the first time staged and promoted on an international scale. In this time digital instrumentation became more prevalent, changing the sound considerably, with digital dancehall becoming increasingly characterized by faster rhythms. Key elements of dancehall music include its extensive use of Jamaican Patois rather than Jamaican standard English and a focus on the track instrumentals.
Can were a German experimental rock band formed in Cologne in 1968 by Holger Czukay, Irmin Schmidt (keyboards), Michael Karoli (guitar), and Jaki Liebezeit (drums). They featured several vocalists, including the American Malcolm Mooney (1968–70) and the Japanese Damo Suzuki (1970–73). They have been hailed as pioneers of the German krautrock scene.
Krautrock is a broad genre of experimental rock that developed in West Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It originated among artists who blended elements of psychedelic rock, avant-garde composition, and electronic music, among other eclectic sources. Common elements included hypnotic rhythms, extended improvisation, musique concrète techniques, and early synthesizers, while the music generally moved away from the rhythm & blues roots and song structure found in traditional Anglo-American rock music. Prominent groups associated with the krautrock label included Neu!, Can, Faust, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Cluster, Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh, Amon Düül II and Harmonia.
James Peter Giuffre was an American jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, composer, and arranger. He is known for developing forms of jazz which allowed for free interplay between the musicians, anticipating forms of free improvisation.
Dark ambient is a genre of post-industrial music that features an ominous, dark droning and often gloomy, monumental or catacombal atmosphere, partially with discordant overtones. It shows similarities with ambient music, a genre that has been cited as a main influence by many dark ambient artists, both conceptually and compositionally. Although mostly electronically generated, dark ambient also includes the sampling of hand-played instruments and semi-acoustic recording procedures.
"Superstition" is a song by American singer-songwriter Stevie Wonder. It was released on October 24, 1972, as the lead single from his fifteenth studio album, Talking Book (1972), by Tamla. The lyrics describe popular superstitions and their negative effects.
E.S.P. is an album by Miles Davis, recorded on January 20–22, 1965 and released on August 16 of that year by Columbia Records. It is the first release from what is known as Davis's second great quintet: Davis on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on bass, and Tony Williams on drums. The album was named after a tune by Shorter, and was inspired by the fact that, "since Wayne Shorter's arrival, the five members of the quintet seemed to communicate by mental telepathy."
Nicholas Bullen is an English musician and a founding member of the grindcore band Napalm Death.
Dick Hebdige is an English media theorist and sociologist, and a professor emeritus of art and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he taught from 2004 to 2021. His work is commonly associated with the study of subcultures, and its resistance against the mainstream of society. His current research interests include media topographies, desert studies, and performative criticism.
Vijay Iyer is a composer, pianist, bandleader, producer, writer, and professor based in New York City. The New York Times has called him a "social conscience, multimedia collaborator, system builder, rhapsodist, historical thinker and multicultural gateway". Iyer received a 2013 MacArthur Fellowship, a Doris Duke Performing Artist Award, a United States Artists Fellowship, a Grammy nomination, and the Alpert Award in the Arts. He was voted Jazz Artist of the Year in the DownBeat magazine international critics' polls in 2012, 2015, 2016, and 2018. In 2014, he was jointly appointed with tenure to Harvard University's departments of music and African American studies as the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts.
Agharta is a 1975 live double album by American jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Miles Davis. By the time he recorded the album, Davis was 48 years old and had alienated many in the jazz community while attracting younger rock audiences with his radical electric fusion music. After experimenting with different line-ups, he established a stable live band in 1973 and toured constantly for the next two years, despite physical pain from worsening health and emotional instability brought on by substance abuse. During a three-week tour of Japan in 1975, the trumpeter performed two concerts at the Festival Hall in Osaka on February 1; the afternoon show produced Agharta, and the evening show was released as Pangaea the following year.
Miguel Zenón is a Puerto Rican alto saxophonist, composer, band leader, music producer, and educator. He is a Grammy Award winner, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Doris Duke Artist Award. He also holds an Honorary Doctorate Degree in the Arts from Universidad del Sagrado Corazón. Zenón has released many albums as a band leader and appeared on over 100 recordings as a sideman.
Gala Mill is the third studio album by Australian band the Drones, which was released in September 2006. Recorded in an abandoned mill in Tasmania, it was their last album to feature founding member Rui Pereira and the first to feature Mike Noga on drums. The music, which makes "an epic leap beyond garage rock", adds influences from folk rock and contemporary folk music to their usual punk blues style. Gareth Liddiard's lyrics for the album are centered more on Australia's colonial and recent history, evident in tracks such as "Jezebel", "Words From The Executioner To Alexander Pearce" and "Sixteen Straws".
Dark Magus is a live double album by the American jazz trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Miles Davis. It was recorded on March 30, 1974, at Carnegie Hall in New York City, during the electric period in Davis' career. His group at the time included bassist Michael Henderson, drummer Al Foster, percussionist Mtume, saxophonist Dave Liebman, and guitarists Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas; Davis used the performance to audition saxophonist Azar Lawrence and guitarist Dominique Gaumont. Dark Magus was produced by Teo Macero and featured four two-part recordings, titled with the Swahili numerals for numbers one through four.
Cris Cheek is a British-American multimodal poet and scholar. He began his career in the mid 1970s working alongside Bill Griffiths and Bob Cobbing at the Poetry Society printshop in London and with the Writers Forum group, who met with regularity on the premises in Earls Court. During that time he co-founded a poetry performance group known as jgjgjgjgjgjgjg. . .(as long as you can say it that's our name) with Lawrence Upton and Clive Fencott. Subsequently, cris collaborated on electronic music improvisations with Upton and ee Vonna-Michel as "bang crash wallop" and released several cassettes through Balsam Flex. In 1981, he was a co-founder of Chisenhale Dance Space.
Matthew Sleeth is an Australian visual artist and filmmaker. His often collaborative practice incorporates photography, film, sculpture and installation with a particular focus on the aesthetic and conceptual concerns of new media. The performative and photographic nature of media art is regularly highlighted in his work.
Ulrich Krieger is a German contemporary composer, performer, improviser and experimental rock musician based in Los Angeles.
