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Through weblog channels too circuitous to list, I came across this page of Soviet synthesizers. Who knew? Above is the Kvintet. Also, here's the New England Synthesizer Museum, which seems pretty comprehensive. Earlier Bill Schwarz posted a link to this site of electronic instruments from 1890-1990, which overlaps somewhat with the New England site. And as long as I'm dumping links, here's a site called the Obsolete Computer Museum. Check back later and I may have formulated something to say about all this. Or maybe not.
At White Columns this month, Douglas Melini presents a room-filling colossus of a painting titled, well, Colossus. Melini considers it a single painting but it's comprised of separate panels, intended to be arranged in different configurations and adapted to the space in which they're hung. The White Columns installation features ten of a total of thirteen panels. Each panel is comprised of many rectangular "patches," or groups of stripes, each superficially resembling a miniature Kenneth Noland or Gene Davis painting (the reference isn't that overt; just to get you in ballpark). The stripes are carefully applied using masking tape and acrylic paint. Where those earlier painters used fewer (but larger) stripes to bowl over the viewer, Melini creates a kind of hyper-optic, wraparound, LCD Age spectacle with his arrays of tightly-spaced bands. On the epistemological front, the crisscrossing patches act as frames for other patches in a constantly shifting play of context. (One gets this intuitively and not from any jargon-laden handout, by the way; could it be we're finally outgrowing the '80s?)
A more dramatic photo of the installation, by Walter Robinson, is here.
I'm running my turntables at half-speed this week to lament the passing of Throb, or at least its retail space. This record shop specializing in electronic dance music was located on 14th Street in Manhattan, then Orchard Street, and now it's just going to be operating online. This is too bad, because the meat space component of the dance dj scene is important--that is, having a place to test-spin the vinyl, look at record covers, and talk to salespeople who know the music (and are djs and producers themselves). Thanks to Zach, Carter, Aldo, dM, Derek and everyone else who made listening and buying so pleasant and fun the past few years. I'm really bummed about this.