Category: Music

It’s been asked and echoed for almost two decades now. And yet, the conversation has yet to leave the table. Hundreds of musicians have declared it so. Even Gene Simmons, the epitome of “rock icon,” has officially declared Rock ‘n’ Roll dead.

What’s to say about them? Honestly, there’s not too much to say. Not traditionally a “band,” but they operate in the same way as one – each member bringing something to the table, approaching the content from a different angle with a different viewpoint. But what about them that sets them apart? Well, the best way to become an object of obsession, is to give yourself some shade of mystery. Not knowing too much about an artist is key to feeding this fire. You look at Aphex Twin who people say owns a tank and a submarine and used to live in a bank vault. Whatever you don’t know about an artist, your mind somehow magically fills in the missing spaces. And that’s where Boards of Canada’s image comes in.

There was once a German experimentalist composer by the name of Karlheinz Stockhausen in the mid-20^th century. He believed that man harnessed an inner power to reach the next phase of human existence through off-beat, arrhythmic music. He refrained from dabbling in symmetric, accessible 4/4 beats in favor of more complicated time signatures and melodies in order to explore this phenomenon, revealing that once humans wrapped their heads around complex rhythms, we’d be able to adapt and hear different rhythmic patterns in nature, thus bringing us to a new level of heightened awareness in hopes to make contact with the higher beings who created us.

John Maus is….

It seems like every year for the past 12 years, the same thought runs across the minds of every rock music fan: will we be getting a new Tool record? Every year since 2008, two years after they released their last record 10,000 Days, the band has teased in one form or another that they’re working on new material, despite these rumors being shot down by their own band mates (Rolling Stone even released a timeline of the new record’s progress). However, 12 years on, Tool fanatics are still barking up the same tree, starving for a glimpse of something new and ready to devour anything tossed to them.