An Array of Utopian Flowers
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The Literary Labyrinth of Stephen T. Vessels
Posted on November 27, 2022 | No Comments - Indigenous Voices from the Northeast: Past, Present and Future
Posted on November 26, 2022 | 1 Comment - Microplastics Are Everywhere: What’s The Risk?
Posted on November 22, 2022 | No Comments - Solving the Climate Crisis Through Global Soil Health with Didi Pershouse
Posted on November 20, 2022 | No Comments - Visionary Art of Lakota Sundance Chief Marvin Swallow
Posted on November 14, 2022 | 2 Comments
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WilderUtopia in 102 Languages
‘Medicine Walk’ Featured in SBLitJo
Santa Barbara Literary Journal released ‘Bellatrix: Volume 3’ in June 2019, which among adventurous fiction, poetry, essays, and lyrics, features an excerpt of Jack Eidt’s psychic-animism fiction, Medicine Walk. Buy the book!
composers Archive
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Sampling of Found Sound – Composer Pierre Henry
Posted on October 17, 2019 | No CommentsThe Art Of Sounds is a 2007 documentary on French electronic music pioneer Pierre Henry (1927 – 2017). Henry, along with his colleague Pierre Schaeffer, creating a form they dubbed musique concrète – an approach to electronic music based on using recorded sampling (also known as ‘found-object’) as source material. -
Pauline Oliveros and her Beautiful Canopies of Sound
Posted on April 15, 2019 | 2 CommentsPauline Oliveros was a vital creator of new music, a renowned electronic art music innovator and composer, an accordionist, the founder of deep listening and other experimental practices, a genius inventor of sound-making software, and a fearless champion on issues of gender, race, ability, and sexual orientation. Following is an essay on her "Sonic Meditations." -
Iannis Xenakis and the Notion of a Cosmic Utopia
Posted on February 21, 2018 | No CommentsIannis Xenakis, the Greek-French experimental composer and protege designer for the famous architect Le Corbusier, advanced theories of the vertical "Cosmic" city as the only sustainable way forward. Here, he wrote this essay in 1966, decrying decentralization (read: suburban sprawl) in favor of building up, up, up...5 million inhabitants to be housed in a single megastructure, a hyperbolic paraboloid of more than 3,000 meters high and 50 meters wide. -
Arnold Schoenberg’s Sound, Ecstatic, Innovative, Aware of Catastrophes
Posted on June 5, 2017 | No CommentsA recent concert featuring the works of revolutionary Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg in his exiled home Los Angeles showcased his challenging and revolutionary oeuvre, channeled through classical forms such as fugues, sonatas, and waltzes. -
Transformations: Stephen Scott’s Bowed Grand Piano, Plucked
Posted on February 10, 2017 | 2 CommentsCelestial, dark atmospheric, a legendary Odyssey down a road to nowhere, in search of Minerva, the Roman Goddess of Wisdom and Poetry, Stephen Scott's bowed grand piano soars into the imagination, and transforms in the spirit of Ovid's 'Metamorphoses'. -
Once a Classical Giant, Then Obscure, Felix Draeseke Rediscovered
Posted on November 3, 2016 | 1 CommentStephen Vessels continues his series on rare examples of underappreciated classical music composers from around the world. Felix Draeseke of Germany, once dubbed a "giant" by Franz Liszt, fell into obscurity until only recently. -
Fela Kuti, Revolutionary Insurrectionist, Talismanic Afrobeat Pioneer
Posted on September 3, 2016 | 3 CommentsFela Kuti, Nigerian music legend, political insurrectionist and provocateur against the corporate and missionary sell-out of African wisdom and religion, ending up in jail and tortured...and loved by the African people. Here, Jamaican-born, Africa-based writer Lindsay Barrett puts us on Fela's life path, his wild and unstructured Afrobeat sound, the commune, the wives, and the push against the Nigerian military dictatorship. -
Vasif Adigezalov’s Mad Mugham Laboratory of Classical Music
Posted on June 20, 2016 | No CommentsStephen Vessels continues his series on rare examples of underappreciated classical music composers from around the world. This stop, Azerbaijan's Vasif Adigezalov, best known for incorporating traditional modal mugham music into his works. -
Digital Meets Tribal in Fourth World “Possible Musics”
Posted on March 18, 2016 | 2 CommentsComposer/Trumpeter Jon Hassell proposes that Western music (and culture), must simultaneously look forward with technology and innovative forms, while cultivating a relationship to the rich multiplicity of the earth's tribal musics. -
Brian Eno: A Visual Music of Ambient Melody
Posted on January 14, 2016 | 5 CommentsThe principal innovator of Ambient and Generative Music, multi-media composer and producer/collaborator with David Bowie, Talking Heads, and U2, Brian Eno is most fascinated by chance music by performers who 'don't completely understand their territory' -
Pursuit of Beauty: William Alwyn’s Classical Romanticism
Posted on August 11, 2015 | No CommentsRising from the East Anglian shadows of Benjamin Britten, William Alwyn's prolific compositions and pioneering film scores from the 1940s-50s set him apart in 20th Century classical music. Stephen Vessels curates the discussion. -
German Composer’s Paean to a Healing Work of Renaissance Art
Posted on March 18, 2015 | 1 CommentOne of the 20th Century's most influential composers, Paul Hindemith created the neo-classical-folk-inspired symphony Mathis der Maler, based on the life of the mysterious 16th Century painter Matthias Grunewald, whose masterpiece associated Saint Anthony and the Virgin Mary with the miraculous cure of the epidemic skin disease called St. Anthony's Fire. -
Karlheinz Stockhausen: Cosmic Pulses of Sound from the Dog Star
Posted on November 28, 2014 | 5 CommentsOn the inimitable and controversial Karlheinz Stockhausen, German composer who fused science fiction with classical music, whose 20th Century groundbreaking creations expanded the bounds of electronic music and serial compositions from the brightest star Sirius. -
Delia Derbyshire: ’60s Science Fiction Sound Art
Posted on November 8, 2014 | 1 CommentWatch "The Delian Mode" a documentary on the innovative electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire, who worked from 1960 to 1973 at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. She utilized both real-life and ‘artificial’ electronic sounds in her compositions using a musical style known as Musique Concrète. -
Iannis Xenakis: Musical Sorcery Using Mathematical Totems
Posted on October 11, 2014 | 7 CommentsIannis Xenakis, the Greek composer trained as an architect, created expressive works of mind-bending mathematical complexity that according to one critic, have "all the teeming unpredictable power of a glacier, the thrilling complexity of shape and movement of a mass animal migration." -
Symphonic Thunder and Lightning of Janis Ivanovs
Posted on October 2, 2014 | 1 Comment"Janis Ivanovs is like thunder and lightning, cleansing the air with his Lucifer sounds. His symphonies are like ancient Greek tragedies, filled with ecstasy and purification." So wrote another Latvian composer and music critic, Margers Zarins.
