phyllis chen

Last night Glenn Branca performed with his new ensemble at Le Poisson Rouge for the CD release of his sequel album to his ‘81 record Ascension. I thoroughly enjoyed his no-bullshit-tell-it-like-it-is character on stage and also in the preview article in the Village Voice this week. This new album titled The Ascension: Sequel, was released [...]

Santa Cruz emeritus professor/composer David Cope created an artificially intelligent composer “Emmy” (Experiments in Musical Intelligence EMI) years ago. After facing a lot of criticism and praise from musicians and scientists, he decided to move Emmy to his trash folder because Emmy’s existence raised deep questions in regards to the originality of music composition if [...]

Joanna Newsom, American singer-songwriter/harpist/pianist really out-does herself on her newly released 3-CD album, Have One On Me. I have fallen in love with Joanna’s music since discovering her debut album Milk-Eyed Mender. This 2-hour journey really allowed me to get lost in her world of epic fairy tales and logic-bending storytelling. There is a slightly [...]

While being back in Bloomington (IN) to fulfill some of my doctoral obligations, I noticed there are many things about Bloomington that makes this place very live-able, such as the good air quality, organic foods, close hiking trails, good coffee shops and laid back sort of feeling. (It’s a shame that many of these things [...]

Since moving to New York, I have been looking for great music venues that have a lot of interesting stuff on a regular basis. Often times, artists that are performing there are publicized and previewed in online magazines but the venues themselves don’t get as much limelight attention. Sometimes I think venues have a hard [...]