The act of writing has always been an art. Now, it can also be an act of music. Each letter you type corresponds to a specific musical note putting a new spin to your composition. Make music while you write.

With her first album in eight years, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, singer-songwriter Fiona Apple reached into the past to confront her rapist, middle-school bullies, and herself.

For years, the elusive singer-songwriter has been working, at home, on an album with a strikingly raw and percussive sound. But is she prepared to release it into the world? --- When you tell people that you are planning to meet with Fiona Apple, they almost inevitably ask if she’s O.K. What “O.K.” means isn’t necessarily obvious, however. Maybe it means healthy, or happy. Maybe it means creating the volcanic and tender songs that she’s been writing since she was a child—or maybe it doesn’t, if making music isn’t what makes her happy. Maybe it means being _un_happy, but in a way that is still fulfilling, still meaningful. That’s the conundrum when someone’s artistry is tied so fully to her vulnerability, and to the act of dwelling in and stirring up her most painful emotions, as a sort of destabilizing muse.

Art/music can be disruptive technologies. Art doesn’t just come from reorganization of cultural forms. It is radical when it perturbs dominant cultural modes & shakes people out of their ordinary experience. It has the power to connect us to mysteries of imagination and being.

As West sells it, ‘ye’ is an album devoted to the stand-off between visceral self-loathing and baroque levels of narcissism, further complicated by mental illness and a recent opiate addiction. Listening to ‘Killing You,’ it’s unclear whether West’s violent thoughts are directed at his wife or towards himself, or if he even means it at all: maybe a homicidal fantasy is just another badass way to start an album, an inverted “Ultralight Beam.” It is the work of a broken man, whatever the case. But to meet West on his terms here feels impossible. In his world, self-expression justifies itself, and speaking your most twisted thoughts out loud is an act of bravery, one that makes ‘I Thought About Killing You’ not just a fine thing to write and share, but a work made from a place of love. Art, then, is a way of existing beyond reproach, an excuse for everything.

“Isn’t it just so great that you can do everything yourself!” say people who don’t live the reality of having to do everything themselves.

Along with Pink Floyd, Thorgerson and Hipgnosis were central figures in the transition from 60s psychedelia to the expansive, million-selling radio rock that defined most of the 70s. More than any single figure, he established intricately composed, surrealist photographic techniques, collages, and pictorial reappropriations as key ingredients of mainstream album art.

Looking expectantly at the rest of the world to validate your interests, hobbies or art is a set-up to feel bad, to brood and be jaded that you are not understood. You need to reprogram your relationship with money as a creative person, because the one you have is like a hex. You need to grow-up your success dream and stop this focus on how it'll make you feel better.

Composer

Here’s an alternative hypothesis: Insanely long copyright terms are how the culture industries avoid competing with their own back catalogs. Imagine that we still had a copyright term that maxed out at 28 years, the regime the first Americans lived under. The shorter term wouldn’t in itself have much effect on output or incentives to create. But it would mean that, today, every book, song, image, and movie produced before 1984 was freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. Under those conditions, would we be anywhere near as willing to pay a premium for the latest release?

Justin Hopkins AKA Rarebit is also a visual artist.

A rounded look at Björk's latest, and just what it is she’s doing.

Photos of all of the artwork for the deluxe Newspaper Album package.

Another ‘response album’ from Marc Weidenaum's blog minions, this a collection of recordings that use a human sigh as their source material. The response is to the grumpy, narrow-minded art critic Richard Dorment, who questioned the integrity and quality of artist Susan Philipsz’ Turner Prize-winning ‘Lowlands‘, as well as a number of other artistic endeavors that he considers unworthy of anything more than a ‘long low collective sigh’.

"Commercial concerns are both implicit and invisible in the consumption of content."

"The Auerglass is a two person pump organ created by Tauba Auerbach and Cameron Mesirow (AKA the musician Glasser). The instrument cannot be played alone. Each player has a keyboard with alternating notes of a four octave scale. Each player must pump to supply the wind to the other player's notes."

A video by fiilmaker Andrea Dorfman and poet/singer/songwriter Tanya Davis. "Society is afraid of alonedom, like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements, like people must have problems if, after a while, nobody is dating them. but lonely is a freedom that breaths easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it."

"But all of a sudden, for a brief time at least, she's the only real pop star around."

This is absolutely beautiful. "Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files, made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor have brought together some of the sun's finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise. This grainy black and white quality is routinely cleaned up by NASA, hiding the processes and mechanics in action behind the capturing procedure. Most of the imagery has been collected as single snapshots containing additional information, by satellites orbiting the Earth. They are then reorganised into their spectral groups to create time-lapse sequences. The soundtrack highlights the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface, by directly translating areas of intensity within the image brightness into layers of audio manipulation and radio frequencies."

"A collaborative music/spoken word project." A collection of YouTube videos of people playing various instruments all in the B-flat key. Start and stop and fade them each in any way at any time. This is awesome.

We do love trouble.

A heady analysis of Greg Gillis' place in the musical landscape.

"Adaptable, minimalist interfaces." Oh. My. God.

On art which extends the present, and tickling yourself. This is what I love so much about music.

In which album covers become an extension of reality, and vice versa.

"Best known for touring the country spreading the good word of D.I.Y. electronics with uniquely playful performances and Circuit Bending Workshops."

"Songwriter John Darnielle wrote descriptions of each song on the album," and Jeffrey Lewis illustrated them all into a three-page booklet. Read along!

Awesome advertising campaign that arranges album artwork to create a bigger image.

The professional work of Jason Nocito; absolutely fantastic and blissed-out. Check out the landscape-portraits.

"An artist is Advanced when they do something that is neither expected of them nor the opposite of what is expected of them." Tongue-in-cheek, but the article lives on. Note the notes on Val Kilmer and C-Murder.