All Posts by

Mark Lager

Mark Lager has been writing music reviews for Julian Cope's Head Heritage website since 2007. His music writing also appears in PopMatters. His film writing is featured in CineAction, Cinema Retro, and Film International. His poetry has been published in Chiron Review and Opossum. His translations of the French poet Raoul Ponchon have been published in Circumference, Columbia Journal, and Denver Quarterly. He has also written a Southern Gothic screenplay (To Death With You) and a novella about the crisis in Syria that takes place during 24 hours in Aleppo (The Dust Shall Sing like a Bird).

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Mark Hollis Mark Lager Music Talk Talk

Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis and His Experimental, Innovative Legacy on ‘Spirit of Eden’

It’s not the notes you play, it’s the notes you don’t play. Miles Davis At the age of 32, Mark Hollis had achieved commercial success with his band Talk Talk’s first three albums, which combined the new wave synthpop of the 1980s with subtle art rock arrangements. This was not the style of music that …

Film Mark Lager Music Ry Cooder

Ry Cooder – Paris, Texas (1984)

Countless wealthy white musicians have copied, have been heavily influenced by, or have shamelessly ripped off black blues guitarists/singers who lived in poverty during the 1920s and the Depression era of the 1930s. These wealthy white musicians more often add flash without feeling, style without substance. This criticism cannot be leveled at Ry Cooder’s deeply …

Classical Music Mark Lager Music

Franz Schubert’s Spiritual ‘Sehnsucht’

According to the Cambridge dictionary, the German word Sehnsucht can be translated as “craving, desire, longing, pining, wistfulness, yearning.”, with the second syllabe ‘Sucht’ meaning addiction: the addiction to yearn and desire. Franz Schubert’s life and music are a complex experience of Sehnsucht, starting in his twenty-sixth year when he contracted an illness which inspired …

Film Mark Lager

Night of the Living Dead & Texas Chainsaw Massacre: Race and Capitalism in Trump’s America

History has puzzling patterns. Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman (two film directors who both explored the post-World War II malaise of European society) died on the same day in 2007. Ten years later another juxtaposition was just as revealing about American society. George Romero (who directed the most politically charged horror film of the 1960s) …

Interview Mark Lager Most popular Rose City Band

An Interview with Ripley Johnson (Rose City Band)

Ripley Johnson is a guitarist, singer, and songwriter for Wooden Shjips, Moon Duo, and his most recent project Rose City Band. Rose City Band’s newest album Earth Trip will be released through Thrill Jockey Records on June 25. Ripley Johnson’s music has been described as “dazzled psychedelic wandering” (AllMusic), “some of the decade’s most mesmerizing …

Delia Derbyshire Mark Lager Music

Delia Derbyshire’s Otherworldly, Spectral Soundscapes

Delia Derbyshire was born on May 5, 1937 in Coventry, England to working class parents Edward Derbyshire and Emma Dawson. As a child and adolescent, Delia was fascinated and obsessed with sound: the sounds of her father’s sheet metal factory, the sounds of the German blitz bombers as they flew over Coventry during World War …

Ennio Morricone Mark Lager Music

Ennio Morricone’s Elegiac and Powerful Soundtracks of 1968

Ennio Morricone is one of the most influential and renowned film composers. There is an alchemy, a magic, inside Ennio Morricone’s best compositions. It is a blurring of the boundaries and definitions existing between genres. His film scores do not abide by conventions and break the rules. The metamorphoses and transformations are what make Morricone’s …

CAN Mark Lager Music

Mark Lager’s Summer Vinyl: Can – Future Days (1973)

Everyone, no matter who you are, needs a vacation. Can’s Future Days is a quintessential summer vacation record. Many of us would love to spend time on a beach, a faraway island, yet we are still stuck in our homes because of the coronavirus quarantine. Future Days magically transports you to a hidden refuge. Damo …

Classical Music Gustav Holst Mark Lager Music

Gustav Holst’s Groundbreaking Symphonic Textures in The Planets (1916)

Gustav Holst (born September 21, 1874, died May 25, 1934) was a British composer who became fascinated with astrology in 1913. In the spring of 1914, prophetically before the outbreak of World War I that summer, Holst composed the first of seven pieces for his orchestral suite The Planets– “Mars, the Bringer of War”.  In …