Ghostly in the machine: An electronic music label finds a home, and maturity, in New York

“Keeping our sort of Midwestern identity has always been important,” said Ghostly International founder Sam Valenti. “[But] a lot of formative lessons and experiences have happened in New York. It’s constantly inspiring. People here are interested in exploring, going deeper, and there are a lot of creative and inspired people here.” More

By Michaelangelo Matos

February 2, 2012 2:17 pm

Leonard Cohen's latest, 'Old Ideas,' takes the singer back to one good old idea: Melody

Now we have a new batch of songs on Old Ideas, out this week. Whatever their provenance, mystical or mundane, what constitutes a good song for Leonard Cohen, at age 77, with his history? There's no explicit sense in the songs themselves of why this is a collection of "old ideas" (though the phrase itself is an old idea: it was the working title for the album before it), other than containing "ideas" from someone who is "old." But while very much in line with the Leonard Cohen Sound we've come to expect in the 21st Century, these songs contain some interesting echoes of a far more musical Cohen, one we haven't heard in a while. More

By Rick Flom

February 1, 2012 9:32 am

Philip Glass, at 75, on productivity, politics, the critics and his latest, 'Symphony No. 9'

“It's very simple: you do the first premiere of an opera, and basically no one will touch it for eight or nine years,” Glass said. “If an opera house is going invest in a new opera and take the risk, they won’t do it unless it's a world premiere. So there’s a 10-year lag between the first production and the second. And then after that, the distinctions don't matter anymore.” If this schedule holds, it will mean that a new raft of Glass operas may come online in the next decade. More

By Seth Colter Walls

January 31, 2012 9:53 am

The crossover artist: Antony Hegarty's artistic journey culminates in a massive performance tonight at Radio City

In 1987, as a teenaged Hegarty walked along the streets of Angers in northwest France, he said, he was captivated by a poster with an unusual portrait of a middle-aged Japanese man. The man, heavily made up and wearing an elegant woman's outfit with long lace gloves and a wide-brimmed hat, lifted and curled his hands toward his face as if he were gently lifting a veil. Not knowing anything more about the image or what the poster was designed to advertise, Hegarty asked the man putting it up, in his best French, if he could have one.

He took it home and taped it over his bed. A few years later Hegarty, then 21, saw a film by Peter Sempel called Just Visiting this Planet. It showed a man in white-face in a long white dress doing a kind of delicate pantomime interjected with violent bursts of movement around another man standing very still. His movement was inflected with feminine nurturing, but heavy with a tragic sense of suffering, endurance, and affection. Hegarty cried when he saw it. More

By Rozalia Jovanovic

January 26, 2012 9:50 am