You know Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, Dan Deacon and other great indie innovators are getting textural and contextual inspiration from somewhere other than what's reviewed in Rolling Stone or Pitchfork, but where? In The Blink Of An Ear, written by Seth Kim-Cohen, subtitled Toward A Non-Cochlear Sound, might put you on their same journey outside the boundaries.

A cochlea is a the snail-shaped inner ear which receives sound, and this book is all about how we receive sound and what we do with it in our minds. The music business is an industry built on sound, but there are many people who build sound from industry for a livelihood and legend. Kim-Cohen is the Director and Assistant Professor of Art and Theory at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, has taught art history at Yale and the Pratt Institute, and has had many art showings in places like Tate Modern and the ICA in London. 

Why is an academic and artist like this of interest to the music fan? Well, alternative rock has its roots in the art school scene -- the Sex Pistols and Talking Heads and Superchunk who have all done songs about the milieu, and bands like Wire and Gang of Four and many others would have never existed without it. That's where they formed (in their physical lives), but it wasn't just a location these young, potentially innovative people obsessed with change and culture came to, it's where a Brian Eno would teach the mutual joys of ambient noise and doo-wop, as recently described in the Wire Pink Flag 33 1/3. It's where ideas met sound, and that's Kim-Cohen's living and playground. 

more...