Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records John Cook with Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance Algonquin Books, 294 pp. The oral history Please Kill Me has to be the seminal document of punk music. Compiled from hundreds of interviews with punk legends, also-rans and hangers-on, it portrayed the culture as it was lived, in all […]
Brian Howe
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Midtown Dickens’ Lanterns
Listen up! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. When the Durham duo Midtown Dickens released its debut, Oh Yell!, in 2007, the music reflected the city that members Kym Register and Catherine Edgerton had always called home: charmingly familiar, but with a layer of tough, post-industrial grit; steeped […]
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Durham’s Tuba Exchange shares one family’s story in valves and tubes
Ring the bell at 1825 Chapel Hill Road in Durham, and Vince Simonetti will meet you at the door. His professional dress and a small brown splotch of a cranial birthmark suggest Mikhail Gorbachev if he were from New Jersey. Inside, glinting metallic shapes resolve behind him. Simonetti’s complex of bright lemon buildings with white […]
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Thrown before
“It happened exactly like I thought it would,” says Richard Buckner with a rueful chuckle, remembering the time he spent on major label MCA Records. It was a simultaneous crash course in the music industry and human nature, he reckons, a cutthroat arena where you saw exactly how far people would go to get ahead. […]
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Calmly, confidently and in Cary, kids join the state’s symphony
Entering Cary’s Koka Booth Amphitheatre, you pass through a wooded trail that seems pure Tolkien. But a stone arch abruptly lets out into a clearing, where you’re met by a bronze bust of former mayor Koka “The Visionary” Booth. His countenance suggests a preordained political career. An intricately cantilevered canopy above a pine deck reserved […]
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Cultural cross-pollination in Shanghai Huai Opera performance
Shanghai Huai Opera Stewart Theatre, N.C. State Campus March 28 Despite the current wariness surrounding Sino-American relations, Shanghai’s Huai Ju Troupe received an unambiguously warm welcome from the audience for their second U.S. performance ever (their U.S. debut happened in Greensboro the night before). The style of traditional Chinese opera known as Huai ju is […]
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Marie Chouinard’s aggressively ugly and profaneand brilliantOrpheus et Eurydice
Orpheus et Eurydice Compagnie Marie Chouinard Memorial Hall, UNC Campus March 25 The story of Orpheus and Eurydice ranks highly among the most frustratingly inevitable Greek myths. When Eurydice is killed by the bite of an asp, Orpheus ventures into the underworld to save her. His lyrics on the lyre are so beautiful that he […]
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Silver mettle: Raleigh’s Silber Records
Brian John Mitchell, the 33-year-old proprietor of Raleigh’s Silber Records, is a painter, comic book creator and experimental musician. His music, recorded and released under the name Remora, uses guitar effects to build ambient dreamscapes and noisy terrors. On Remora’s forthcoming concept album, Mecha, Mitchellguitar in handcasts himself as a warrior leading a revolution on […]
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Live: Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time
Duke Performances Presents Akoka: After Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time Page Auditorium, Durham Saturday, Feb. 7, 2009 Olivier Messiaen‘s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, a work of apocalyptic beauty inspired by the book of Revelation, employs a spare and slightly unusual chamber ensemble: piano, clarinet, cello and violin. This was a matter […]
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Twelve ways of looking at Abraham Lincoln
I. Abraham Lincoln: savior, martyr, saint. Julia Ward Howe, author of “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” echoes the Christian nativity scene in “Through the Dim Pageant of the Years”: “A cabin of the western wild/ Shelters in sleep a new-born child.” II. Lincoln’s name would become sentimentally synonymous with American gumption. Nancy Byrd Turner and […]
