I just found this fascinating new documentary by the BBC on the history of german electronic music. Starting with Stockhausen, Can, Neu, Faust, Kraftwerk until today.
to me scaruffi is the fast-lane to great music. just like many people i started collecting music via recommendations of friends and magazines. later via artists that my favourite artists liked and/or were inspired by. but this is a slow process. finding out about scaruffi a couple of years back accelerated this process enourmously. now i listen into maybe 100 records every year, most of scaruffi's picks (30) plus other critics favourites (30-40) and, of course, still recommendations by friends (20).
while i might not agree with the ratings of scaruffi between different artists. seldomly he greatly underates of overrates albums by the same artist with respect to eachother. so with scaruffi, it is usually easy to listen to the best albums of a new artist first.
"The Beatles (2), thanks to the creativity of their producer George Martin (who was for them what Brian Wilson was for the Beach Boys), popularized the new styles that were emerging from the underground. They began with effervescent party-tunes such as Love Me Do (1962), A Hard Day's Night (1964), I Feel Fine (1964) and Help (1965), but their melodic genius truly blossomed with the sophisticated slow ballads of Yesterday (1965), Michelle (1965), We Can Work It Out (1965) and Eleanor Rigby (1966), while Penny Lane (1967) topped everything else in terms of harmony. Heralded by the proto-psychedelic pastiche of Tomorrow Never Knows (1966) for sitar, organ drones and backward guitar, their best albums, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (feb/mar 1967 - jun 1967) and Abbey Road ( apr/aug 1969 - sep 1969), were tours de force of studio arrangement that further enhanced their melodic talent by employing everything from the symphonic orchestra to tape loops. The double album The Beatles (jul/oct 1968 - nov 1968) showed how neo-classical, psychedelic, music-hall, blues and folk music could coexist and complement each other in the ditty-oriented context of pop music."
I'm gonna leave this here http://www.reddit.com/tb/l19of
Jeff Mangum playing live on Wall Street yesterday..
What about Malick's Thin Red Line?
I just found this fascinating new documentary by the BBC on the history of german electronic music. Starting with Stockhausen, Can, Neu, Faust, Kraftwerk until today.
German Electronic Music History -- http://vimeo.com/7583109
just saw "The squid and the whale". an 8 in my book.
an article on video games as art from the nytimes http://www.reddit.com/tb/a4m71
to me scaruffi is the fast-lane to great music. just like many people i started collecting music via recommendations of friends and magazines. later via artists that my favourite artists liked and/or were inspired by. but this is a slow process. finding out about scaruffi a couple of years back accelerated this process enourmously. now i listen into maybe 100 records every year, most of scaruffi's picks (30) plus other critics favourites (30-40) and, of course, still recommendations by friends (20).
while i might not agree with the ratings of scaruffi between different artists. seldomly he greatly underates of overrates albums by the same artist with respect to eachother. so with scaruffi, it is usually easy to listen to the best albums of a new artist first.
Pulp Fiction not a 9 anymore, Blasphemy! ;-)
Small note: Run Lola Run is by Tom Tykwer.
I just saw Darren Aronofsky's 'The Fountain'. it was brilliant, currently a 8/10 for me.
scaruffi collected the best of the 2000s movies into one page with a consistent rating...
http://www.scaruffi.com/cinema/chro000.html
the latest from scaruffi on the beatles from the revised 2009 version of his book. not as much vitriol anymore...
from http://www.scaruffi.com/history/cpt14.html:
"The Beatles (2), thanks to the creativity of their producer George Martin (who was for them what Brian Wilson was for the Beach Boys), popularized the new styles that were emerging from the underground. They began with effervescent party-tunes such as Love Me Do (1962), A Hard Day's Night (1964), I Feel Fine (1964) and Help (1965), but their melodic genius truly blossomed with the sophisticated slow ballads of Yesterday (1965), Michelle (1965), We Can Work It Out (1965) and Eleanor Rigby (1966), while Penny Lane (1967) topped everything else in terms of harmony. Heralded by the proto-psychedelic pastiche of Tomorrow Never Knows (1966) for sitar, organ drones and backward guitar, their best albums, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (feb/mar 1967 - jun 1967) and Abbey Road ( apr/aug 1969 - sep 1969), were tours de force of studio arrangement that further enhanced their melodic talent by employing everything from the symphonic orchestra to tape loops. The double album The Beatles (jul/oct 1968 - nov 1968) showed how neo-classical, psychedelic, music-hall, blues and folk music could coexist and complement each other in the ditty-oriented context of pop music."
he explicitly lists them by year recorded, not year released.
who are the critics whose opinion you respect as much or more?
some recent david thomas...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHqgy6_CM5M&fmt=18
I think the one thinker that is also worthy of your list is Hume.
Apart from Russell also two mathematicians from the 20th century come to mind. Von Neumann and Hilbert.