I wrote the liner notes for this collection by the Minneapolis electronic/ambient/neoclassical collective Paris 1919, released in 2022. Here’s the first paragraph. You’ll have to buy the album to read the rest, but the music is worth it. Chris Strouth’s roots as a musician and electronic artist go back to the 1980s, when he got …
Music and technology have always gone hand in hand—and the explosive flowering of music as an art form in the last century is also the story of the explosive growth of technology. Indeed, people have recognized the potential of computers to revolutionize music since before there even were computers. In 1842, writing about the theoretical …
If the Twin Cities has an answer to the literate, charmingly tuneful pop songcraft of Belle And Sebastian, or the Kinks songs that populate Wes Anderson movie soundtracks, it’s surely Walker Kong, which enlivened the Minnesota music scene with four albums of breezy indie-rock in the late ’90s and early 2000s. The band took a …
British fantasy author Terry Pratchett has spent nearly his entire career writing about the Discworld, a pancake-shaped land carried on the back of a giant cosmic turtle. Over the decades, his Discworld series has blossomed from a clever Douglas Adams-style parody of the sword-and-sorcery genre into a broad-ranging social satire that uses jokes about wizards …
You don’t have to be Indiana Jones to be an archaeologist, and you don’t have to be Marty McFly to travel back in time. Minnesota is rich with its own treasures from antiquity, with sites across the state that tell the story of American Indian and European settlement in the region. Visiting these historic places …
Originally published in the Spring 2011 issue of Momentum, published by the University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment. Read the article on the original website here. Since he was a child, Craig Minowa’s two driving passions have been music and environmentalism. As the leader of critically acclaimed indie-rock band Cloud Cult, he’s built a …
When the electrifying, trancelike street music spearheaded by veteran Congolese band Konono No. 1 reached Western ears in the early 2000s, it sounded like something beamed in from Mars. Konono’s music was based around traditional instruments like the likembe thumb piano, but the need to use hand-built, jury-rigged amplifiers to be heard on busy Kinshasa streets brought …
On this day 234 years ago, America declared its independence from England. And sure, at the time, we had our reasons. But thankfully the hostilities didn’t last; Britain and its former colonies share too much in common. London was the cultural capital of the English-speaking world for centuries, and remains an unmatchable destination for any …
Why it’s daunting: Everyone knows who Sherlock Holmes is, and it seems like everyone has written about him, too. It’s amazing just how much Holmes material is out there. The London sleuth, invented by Arthur Conan Doyle in the 1887 novel A Study In Scarlet, has come to personify the very idea of the private detective who …
Roky Erickson is a true rock ‘n’ roll survivor. Founder of the groundbreaking 1960s psychedelic band 13th Floor Elevators, Erickson fell into a spiral of drug and legal problems that culminated when he was committed to a hospital for the criminally insane. Even after his release, Erickson’s mental state was fragile, and his most productive post-Elevators …