2 posts published by burning ambulance during September 2025| burning ambulance
Cellist Maya Beiser is a fascinating artist. She’s recorded close to 20 albums on her own, is a member of Bang On A Can, and has been a featured performer on a bunch of movie scores, collaborating …| burning ambulance
4 posts published by burning ambulance during August 2025| burning ambulance
I tried to interview Pharoah Sanders for The Wire in 2014. It didn’t go well. He didn’t like talking about his music — something Rob Mazurek warned me about, before giving me Sanders’ phone number — so when we connected, he was gentle and polite, but any direct question I asked was met with a blank wall of indifference. After about 10 minutes, I gave up … Continue reading →| burning ambulance
On the fourth Friday of each month, we review five new albums, sometimes focusing on a single genre and other times grabbing whatever’s been sounding good. This month, we’re dealing with metal. More specifically, death metal, because as summer comes to an end, it’s time for downtuned riffs and guttural roars. So let’s get in the pit! Alto saxophonist Charles McPherson once … Continue reading →| burning ambulance
Ramleh arose out of the early ’80s UK industrial/noise scene that also produced Whitehouse and Sutcliffe Jugend, and like those acts, they seemed like the next step after T…| burning ambulance
Jayne Cortez was born on a US military base in 1934. That wasn’t her name then, but what matters is who we are when we’re making art, so Jayne Cortez she is. She grew up in Los Angeles, steeped in music and art, particularly jazz; she said in an interview, “When a new Charlie Parker record came out, I had … Continue reading →| burning ambulance
I saw James Brown live once. It was in early 1994, at Radio City Music Hall. My father took my wife and me. This was a surprise, because my father was not a big live-music guy (he took me…| burning ambulance
Meshuggah are not an easy band to love. Their music is extremely heavy, discordant and often punishing to listen to. They rarely pursue the easy catharsis of a bluesy riff or a syncopated rhythm. Their guitar riffs sound like a hydraulic press slamming shut over and over again, and their drum patterns are hyper-intricate, but mechanistic, only occasionally syncing up with the guitars. … Continue reading →| burning ambulance
Violinist Darragh Morgan’s work has fascinated me for years. I first connected with him in 2017, when he released For Violin And Electronics, an album featuring six pieces that were, in o…| burning ambulance
One of the great tragedies of the early days of punk was the death of Minutemen guitarist and vocalist D. Boon, who died in an automobile accident in 1985. Minutemen sounded like no one else in the scene; their intelligent lyrics and unusual musical approach set them apart from their contemporaries and set the stage for the wider inclusion of … Continue reading →| burning ambulance
Every fourth Tuesday of a given month, I’ll be reviewing five new albums, sometimes focusing on a single genre and other times grabbing whatever sounds good. This week, we’re all about classical. W…| burning ambulance
I’m kind of astonished to realize I’ve been listening to composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s music for almost a decade. I first heard her work in 2015, when she released two albums within 12 months. Ae…| burning ambulance
Percussionist Steven Schick is a professor of music at the University of California San Diego and the artistic director of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus and the San Francisco Contemporary Music …| burning ambulance
This interview originally ran in the Burning Ambulance weekly email. You should subscribe. (It’s free.) Cellist Maya Beiser operates in a zone all her own, encompassing classical music, adapt…| burning ambulance
The Sono Luminus label has been documenting the work of Icelandic composers and performers on exquisitely produced CDs (some of which also include Blu-Ray audio) for several years now. In 2019, I h…| burning ambulance
Recently my 160GB iPod Classic started to die. The battery wouldn’t hold a charge, especially not in cold weather. If I selected an artist/album to listen to, then decided to scroll through a…| burning ambulance
Composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir has released two albums in the last 12 months, both of great potential interest to fans of adventurous music, whether they start from a classical, metal, or even elect…| burning ambulance
