poorboyoftroy

As I age, so do my musical tastes, which is to say, genres and musicians I had previously dismissed in my 20's as moribund or risibly out of vogue have become suddenly much more intriguing simply by virtue of the passage of time. New Age music appears to be the latest beneficiary of this ineluctable process. Just as I've started to flirt with eastern religions and literature, so have I started listening to artists who incorporate musical, cultural, and spiritual traditions from the Subcontinent and Southeast Asia into various western musical genres, sometimes to stunning artistic success. Alice Coltrane, Bill Laswell, and Steve Roach, though fusing their appropriated material with very different western genres, have all produced excellent albums that honor their respective traditions. My interest in Laraaji actually precedes any engagement with New Age music as such, and this is entirely due to the fact that Brian Eno produced his debut album, "Ambient 3: Day of Radian...

Portland has a very distinctive retail infrastructure, one that elicits strange, public rituals and leads to experiences of unbridled, non-value add whimsy. An example of this: rounding the corner at SE 32nd and Hawthorne, one encounters a small parking lot dominated by a red, double-decker bus that houses, you guessed it, a coffee shop. It has tables, like a restaurant Tov Coffee  is much like every other food cart in Portland: larger than food trucks in other cities and just as questionably mobile. But Tov is so much more than a "mobile" retail space for upscale casual dining: it's its own vibrant, fully immersive world. Close, but not too close, quarters I was overwhelmed by the density of build-out and human activity in the back-half of the lower-level. Two baristas, a commercial espresso machine, and at least 3 people waiting on drinks -- it shouldn't all fit, not this comfortably, but it does. The custom purple paint job, which extends ...