Stephen Reader

This new live album from post-rock darlings Mogwai might sound better than their studio records. The effects-laden guitar melodies tower a bit higher, but the inevitable crash of drums and strums is more deafening than ever. Special Moves is a collection of great songs spanning the band's entire career, accompanied by a DVD of gorgeous, black-and-white footage from a performance in Brooklyn. For the uninitiated, live albums don't normally act as good introductions. In this case, one could make an exception.

Swag is supposed to impress people.  Right, Soulja Boy?  That's why I was a little surprised by the Independent Film Channel's promotional offering for their new series The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret.  These folders are sure to make you look unimpressive in the eyes of your co-workers.

Before yesterday, I had never heard of Bill Savory.  For this, I'm thankful: If I had known about Savory, I would have wasted a lot of time and energy being very upset with him.  As a sound engineer in the 1930s, he made nearly 1,000 unique recordings of seminal jazz musicians -- and refused to let anyone hear them.

House of the Devil uses a familiar horror movie plot of a babysitting gig gone horribly wrong and turns it into something surprising. Samantha has no idea that her employers are raving Satanists -- but before the night is over, she'll become painfully aware. Rather than confuse torture and gore for genuine scares, director Ti West creates an atmosphere of terror that relies almost entirely on what you don'tsee. There will be blood, but not for nearly two-thirds of the film, in which practically nothing 'happens.' It's the most scared you will ever be by an (almost) empty house.

An Alzheimer's patient in South Africa gets addicted to a machine that reboots lost memories. A dying woman's seizures force her to relive the time she spent at an orphanage in Nazi Germany. These stories and more make up Memory Wall, a collection of short fiction by Anthony Doerr. Doerr focuses on intensely private, emotional narratives in mostly-alien locales, but the effect on the reader isn't one of exclusion. Memory Wall draws you deep into the lives of its characters with heart-wrenching prose, making you briefly forget where and who you are.

Last Friday, at Radio City Music Hall, space-rock band Spiritualized gave a rare – and, they said, final -- performance of their 1997 album Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space, all 70 minutes of it.  I was lucky enough to attend.

One of the highlights of new releases in poetry this fall is a long poem by John Shade that begins with the remarkable line “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain.” It’s all the more remarkable because John Shade does not exist.

The first-ever disco song, the one that spawned the entire American craze, made its debut in the Top 40 this week in 1973.  Only, back then, it wasn't yet disco.  In fact, it wasn't even American.

You wouldn't guess that Infra, an ambient-classical piece by Max Richter, was originally conceived as a score for Britain’s Royal Ballet; nothing about it screams 'dance' to me. While the music leaves the choreography to our imagination, it translates into an album quite nicely. Richter contrasts melodic chamber arrangements with subtle swaths of static and electric ripples. Yet the colors don't clash: on record they gel to suggest a painting, rather than a dance.

It was only a matter of time, wasn't it? Until one of the art world's most renowned institutions began trafficking in amateur YouTubevideos...

It's been an awesome year for Owen Pallett. His record Heartland has just been named one of the best of 2010 -- and it's only July.

Two years ago, celebrated jazz pianist Fred Hersch was in the throes of a life-threatening, A.I.D.S.-related dementia.  He'd been living with H.I.V. since the mid-'80s, but when the virus spread to his brain, he suffered hallucinations, paranoia, and fell into a coma.

Perhaps the only ...

It's hard to imagine a band getting more exposure than by playing at the opening ceremony of the World Cup.  With the eyes of the world on South Africa last Thursday, the nation's own BLK JKS delivered what was arguably the best performance of the night.

At the ...

In 1969, experimental composer Alvin Lucier designed a simple project with a not-so-simple intention.   He sat in a room and made a short recording of his voice, which he then played back into the same room and re-recorded.  Lucier then re-recorded the re-recording, and repeated this process over ...

Troy Andrews earned his nickname at a jazz funeral.  Only four years old at the time, Andrews was parading with a trombone almost twice his size – his older brother spotted him and shouted "Trombone Shorty!"

A couple feet taller and twenty years older, Shorty still hasn't outgrown ...