What’s Spinning for… Michael Manring

Michael Manring is this week’s guest columnist for “What’s Spinning”

Thanks so much for your interest in the music I’ve been listening to lately. In addition to having precious little time for casual listening these days, my listening habits are a bit odd. I find that even for pieces of music I’m crazy about, if I listen once every few months that feels like enough, so I can’t say there’s anything I listen to frequently. But here are a few things I thought might be fun to mention:

There’s a French composer named Francis Dhomont whose music I love and I have a recording of his “Les moirures du temps” and “Phonurgie” from Cycle du son being performed at the Other Minds festival in 2004. Dhomont was one of the founders of the musique concrète movement in the 1940’s along with Pierre Schaeffer and others. This is a kind of electronic music that involves using timbre as a primary resource and Dhomont’s work also incorporates a high development of spacial and movement aspects of sound.

I’m a big fan of the music of guitarist Dusan Bogdanovic. I like lots of his pieces, but one of my favorites is “Mysterious Habitats” of which I have a wonderful recording by my friend Evan Hirschelman. In fact, Evan has done lots a great things and I highly recommend his other recordings, too. Bogdanovic is a real master of polymetrics, which is the kind of idea I used in my piece “Dabuda’s Memory” from Soliloquy.

My friend Henry Kaiser recently released a set of solo guitar improvisations called Where Endless Meets Disappearing and I just love it. He uses a wide variety of cool approaches and I find the combination of mystery, unusual beauty and creativity very inspiring.

I continue to listen to a lot of Indian music, both Carnatic and Hindustani. I have a set of live recordings of U. Shrinivas that I very much admire. Listening to this music gives me a kind of thrilling feeling of how much more there is to learn and accomplish.

As for me I’m keeping busy with my usual combination of touring and session work as well as work on a new release of my own which I hope to have done by next fall. As always, all the latest news can be found at www.manthing.com