Brian Harkin for The New York Times Bill Nace and Kim Gordon performing at the Knockdown Center in Queens on Thursday as part of the Red Bull Music Academy.This week: the Red Bull Music Academy, a traveling music workshop and festival, calls itself “a place that’s equal parts science lab, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and Kraftwerk’s home studio.†It’s also a live-event series, and its bookings stretch out over New York City this month.
The events include concerts, installations, D.J. sets, relay-style improvisations, and lectures by Flying Lotus, Brian Eno, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Erykah Badu, Giorgio Moroder, KTL, Joe Lovano, Kim Gordon, and a lot more. The festival even has its own daily newspaper, with a new issue available every day through the event.
Sounds good and also utopian; sounds inherently unsustainable. But Ben Sisario, a music-business reporter for The New York Times, explains and explores with host Ben Ratliff why and how Red Bull, the Austrian energy-drink corporation, has gotten involved in heavy funding for the intersection of vanguardist music and youth culture, and whether their form of corporate branding suggests a genuinely positive innovation.
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Ben Sisario on the Red Bull Music Academy
SPOTIFY PLAYLIST
Tracks by artists discussed this week. (Spotify users can also find it here.)
