As 2011 comes to an end, we are taking a look back at some of our favorite posts of the year by our guest editors.
This week, singer/songwriter Richard Buckner releases Our Blood (Merge), his first new music since 2006’s Meadow. The nine-track LP was recorded by Buckner at his upstate New York home studio with pedal-steel guitarist Buddy Cage (New Riders Of The Purple Sage) and drummer Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth). Buckner kicks off a co-headlining tour with labelmate David Kilgour (the Clean) on August 16 in Los Angeles. In the meantime, Buckner will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
Buckner: Sometimes, I hook up two stereos somewhere in the house. Over the years I’ve been collecting recordings of writers reading their own works; the likes of E. E. Cummings, Robert Creeley, Bukowski’s kitchen recordings, Brion Gysin, Kenneth Rexroth (my favorite quote by him being “an entomologist is not a bug”), Robinson Jeffers, etc., or occasionally lectures by Zinn or Chomsky. I put one of these on one stereo, then, on another (usually both are boombox-ish sort of affairs), I cue up older minimalist kind of stuff like Glenn Branca, Tony Conrad with Faust or John Cale, Cage, Feldman, Rhys Chatham, Pauline Oliveros (who has a studio in Kingston, N.Y.) or more recent flame-carriers like Vibracathedral Orchestra, Skullflower or Pelt (R.I.P. Jack Rose). Once in a while, I sway into various horror-film collections for a little drama. Now, with my stereo-ed stereos set up, I turn each one on. Each time I do this, the words and music never hit each other the same way; there is no timing involved. Even with the same combo of sounds, it never seems like the same performance; the music always manipulates the words in a different way. It’s a simultaneous palate cleanser and vocabulary lifter. Good, clean fun for a toxic afternoon.
Videos after the jump.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9lwuojEREI
