Put Eric Block (Veloce), Bruce Lamont (Yakuza), Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth) and Douglas McCombs (Tortoise, BASIC) in the same room, and you get Sick Gazelle. The name is weirder than the music — a thoroughly engrossing blend of post-rock, shoegaze, ambient and jazz. The seemingly endless intro to “I’ll Come Running”...

This ↑ is what happens when Joe Dart breaks the sound barrier playing “Dean Town”. (And not when i drop my phone on a 2,000-year-old theatre’s stone steps trying to put it in my pocket — my back pocket.) Vulfpeck’s concert at the Jazz à Vienne festival was the best non-jazz concert i’ve ever been to, but also one of...

This ↑ is what happens when Joe Dart breaks the sound barrier playing “Dean Town”. (And not when i drop my phone on a 2,000-year-old theatre’s stone steps trying to put it in my pocket — my back pocket.) Vulfpeck’s concert at the Jazz à Vienne festival was the best non-jazz concert i’ve ever been to, but also one of...

I guess i have a new hobby: going to a concert not to see the headliner. As Big Freedia cancelled her whole European tour, the Jazz à Vienne festival’s organizers scrambled to find a suitable replacement. Fortunately, the New Orleans Jazz Museum sponsored the creation of a new group comprising trumpeter James...

I thought there’d be no better way to celebrate Miles Davis’s centennial than to listen to his whole discography in chronological order (more on that later). Little did i know it’d change the way i see music. And it has nothing to do with Miles Davis himself. You see, i still have a sizeable CD collection, including...

I thought there’d be no better way to celebrate Miles Davis’s centennial than to listen to his whole discography in chronological order (more on that later). Little did i know it’d change the way i see music. And it has nothing to do with Miles Davis himself. You see, i still have a sizeable CD collection, including...

Rebecca Solnit at The Guardian: The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch. The United States of America is a program that has been hacked. […] It is the country that gave the world jazz and blue jeans and atom bombs and the birth control pill; it is its best and its worst people and...

In a previous life, i was a history major researching the French-Catholic migration to the Canadian Prairies between 1870 and 1915. Published in 1891, Rerum novarum is the foundational text of the Catholic church’s social doctrine. Without overstating its immediate impact, it played a part in the gradual split of...

In a previous life, i was a history major researching the French-Catholic migration to the Canadian Prairies between 1870 and 1915. Published in 1891, Rerum novarum is the foundational text of the Catholic church’s social doctrine. Without overstating its immediate impact, it played a part in the gradual split of...

Francisco Trujillo at The Conversation: We have developed what we call an ultrasonic espresso: a room-temperature brewing process that uses high-frequency sound waves to extract the flavour, oils, aroma and caffeine from coffee grounds. The result is an espresso-strength coffee made in under three minutes, but...

Franz Schneider Brakel GmbH + Co KG: Forty years after the Brakel door handle workshop, FSB is bringing back an unmistakable design by Dieter Rams. […] Revised and future-oriented, the entire lever handle is now manufactured locally in Brakel from aluminum. The gray tone of the rgs reappears in the new Aluminum Pure...

If you don’t speak French, you might never have heard of the AZERTY keyboard — the weird cousin of QWERTY with its shifted number row and a scattering of accented letters across the board. Even if you do speak French, you might not use AZERTY — the Swiss and Luxembourgers type on a QWERTZ-based layout and French...