On the Line: Ulitskaya, McBride, Tools

“At the age of ten he made himself a reed pipe. He kept blowing into it, and tender sounds poured out.”

That is from “The Autopsy,” a short story by Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya, translated by by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (it’s in the August 28, 2023, issue of The New Yorker, and in Ulitskaya’s collection The Body of the Soul: Stories, due out at the end of October.)

. . .

"Though they never availed themselves of anything as obvious as a drumbeat, they tended to shape even their most abstract pieces around a tidal ebb and flow."

That is Philip Sherburne, writing at Pitchfork about the great ambient musician Brian McBride (half of the duo Stars of the Lid), who recently died at age 53.

. . .

“I thought how differently different people react and use the same tools, and it might be a great way of finding out the range of this small synthesiser.”

That is the musician Grant Wilkinson, writing about how he put together a synthesizer and then released an album of different musicians using the same equipment (himself, Darren Hayman, and three musicians sharing the name Phil: Maguire, Julian, and Bilsby).