|Courtney Kowalke| Recently, I’ve been getting into jazz. This exploration is born of necessity: I work third shifts. I want to listen to music on the job, so I need workplace-appropriate tunes. I also get annoyed by incessant ad breaks, overly chatty DJs, and radio stations… Continue reading
|David Potvin| Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 magnum opus Magnolia is sonically chaotic. There’s no two ways about it. Within the first eleven minutes we meet no less than nine members of the film’s ensemble cast amidst a cacophony of these characters’ morning routines… Continue reading
|Malcolm Cooke| Steven Larsen and Peter Bruhn met through their mailman. An avid sports fan, he assumed that two men hailing from Wisconsin must be Packers fans and encouraged them to meet. But when they finally got together to watch… Continue reading
|John Costello| There’s something wonderful about watching a chaotic roller disco fantasia with multiple, costume-intense musical numbers in the middle of winter. As a kid watching Xanadu (1980) with my oldest sister, I loved the upbeat music and the flurry of joyous visual… Continue reading
|Sam L. Landman| As he ventured onto the American Zoetrope lot in the fall of 1980, fully prepared to write the soundtrack to Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart, Tom Waits had already spent a majority of his career as an imposter. (And I say that lovingly, as a fan who’s… Continue reading
|Jay Ditzer| Where would movies be without music? Even in the silent era, movie theaters had a pianist on hand to provide accompaniment. Since the advent of “talking pictures,” music of some sort—whether it be a full score or contemporary tracks either licensed or custom-written… Continue reading
|Matthew Tchepikova-Treon| Blaxploitation cinema and hip-hop developed in tandem throughout the 1970s. From Harlem to the Bronx, music technicians like Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, and others developed vinyl scratching and sampling techniques… Continue reading
