Minimalist music has become sort of, how to say it, so empty these days. It’s hard to explain. It’s not that the music hasn’t gotten more, what’s the word, complex, because that wouldn’t be enough reason to consider it lost. It’s in the same places it was before, and the last time anyone saw Philip Glass ‘s attitude on display, it was in the cinema. That’s a beautiful place for it, and it’s certainly suited for that kind of celluloid longing, but at the end of the day, things that refuse to mean, they just seem, how do they say, tricky. At best.

Which is still a good day in New York. Seeing through the gimmick is almost becoming a gimmick, or perhaps it’s even better when the gimmick is so transparent before us, and we should, by all accounts, listen to the music and decide it is what it is, empty, and that kind of ethereal inspired blather that sounds like the stars when we are all looking up at the sky. Not because we are hopeful, either, but because we are bored. This is the given conditions for a lot of music these days, and then, when the kids can come through that and make us so aware of the technique, but also aware that we are still thinking, wow…then there’s something going on.

It’s hard to find in NYC and it’s easy to find, too. It can be something that would be reduced to, what’s the word, a reflection of mood of the listener, if it were not happening so often, and from so many different places. There are bars playing into the wee hours, and clubs where you can hear it when you leave your downtown hotel , so somebody somewhere is letting these things happen, and that somebody has got to be us. Minimalism might come back from the movies yet.

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