avant-garde
The Smashing Pumpkins first tour in nearly 20 years made their Portland appearance on Saturday August 25th. Heavily touring in the early 90s through the first part of 2000s they have a seamless stadium show that lasts over 3 hours. Guitarist James Iha debuting a fabulous pimp worthy white suit warned the audience of the […]
The music of Magma is evocative of an extraterrestrial collective intelligence’s algorithm for summoning the ghost of John Coltrane. J Church, a band named for a beloved light rail line, lamented the turnover of endless cycles of urban and cultural decay, appropriation, exploitation, and inevitable gentrified banality. The historical context was the post Dot Bomb 1.0 era, […]
All is not what it appears. In 1984, technology had not yet advanced sufficiently to render a computer animated agent as convincing as Max Headroom. By necessity, famously, Matt Frewer donned the prosthetics and gave us the first performances by a simulated simulated character. The expertise of a team of professionals, and hundreds of thousands […]
The Fermi Paradox is hardly so; to an enlightened consciousness, the solution seems self-evident. Roddenberry and Coon codified the Prime Directive, enshrined it in canon. And yet, isn’t it blindingly obvious that a Kardashev Type Zero civilization is of little interest to anyone out there? Furthermore, we should be grateful for our insignificance, lest new cookbooks be […]

Tonight on Learning to Grow with DJ Mkulima we are featuring experimental electronic artist qop/dob/bod aka Nick Zhu and collaborator Daphne. qop is the first iteration of a series of unified yet distinct acts that each have their own character. qop itself is slow, ambient, whereas dob is more aggressive and quick. bod is a […]