Culture
Culture
‘Madame de Sade’: chains, whips, and suffering
In today’s Western civilization, we pride ourselves in the excessive amount of freedom we believe we deserve – but is our extreme freedom one in which morality is applicable, and can freedom have a detrimental effect on the self? In a broad sense, these are the questions that the UR International Theater Program’s new show […]
CT Recommends
CT Recommends: Ibibio Sound Machine – “Ibibio Sound Machine”
Ibibio Sound Machine, a 2014 afrobeat dance collective fronted by Nigerian singer Eno Williams, knows its stuff, but not necessarily in the way you'd expect. The band doesn't do songs with ambitious structures that extend over six minutes. It doesn't have a field day with vocoders and drum machines in the way that's practically expected […]
Culture
Mac Demarco: “Salad Days”
Mac Demarco has to have some of the most obscene stage antics in indie rock. When he’s not smoking Viceroy cigarettes or crafting his self-coined “Jizz Jazz” in his Brooklyn apartment, he’s apparently pretty fond of exposing himself to his fan base-in the most grotesque of fashions. His track “Freaking out the Neighborhood” on 2012’s […]
Culture
Pentatonix: when music tells the story
On Wednesday April 9, Pentatonix (PTX) hit the Buffalo stop on its tour, in honor of its third-year anniversary. For the show, they gave the audience a tour down memory lane. The concert was a stroll along the path that led the group to its place today, covering both elements of the group as […]
Culture
Jesse Denaro: embracing real struggles, finding real answers
Vulnerable, urgent, tender and raucous, Jesse Denaro's "Dear, Love" LP is real. On the album, set to drop May 13, Denaro combines unvarnished rage with delicately voiced 11 chords and the kind of songwriting smarts that made John Mayer's "Room for Squares" so immaculate. Denaro as an artist captures a special sense of balance […]
Culture
‘Undergraduate Musicians Council’ broadens presence
On Friday, April 11, UR's Undergraduate Musicians Council hosted its first annual showcase at the Interfaith Chapel. The showcase presented an opportunity for UR student musicians to perform for their peers in an environment more formal than that of other on-campus music outlets – for example, No Jackets Required's open mic or Starbucks's “Friday Night […]
Culture
‘Merry Mount’: the grand operatic experiment
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect for RPO’s upcoming operatic performance of Howard Hanson’s “Merry Mount.” As a singer, one of my main goals this semester was to see a live opera at Eastman, knowing that watching professional singers in action can be a great learning experience. Having prior knowledge that this performance was […]
Culture
“Sophia/Portrait” tackles questions of love and death
This past week, Drama House visitors had the pleasure of watching two original plays written and performed by members of The Opposite Of People (TOOP), the University’s student-run theatre troupe. The first play, “Sophia,” written by senior May Zhee Lim, focused on a mortician’s relationship with her father and death, while in the second, […]
Culture
A universal language, a personal story
As per usual, the YellowJackets blew audience members away when they performed on Friday, April 4 in Strong Auditorium. After they graced the stage with their trademark yellow suit jackets and ties, they roused the audience with a fresh take on Bastille’s “Pompeii.” This was followed up with their classic Beach Boys medley that showed […]
Culture
Turkuaz: dancing the distractions away
They say today’s music looks to the past to move forward, but does it really? In a sense, sure – Daft Punk and Robin Thicke scored the biggest hits of the summer by embracing 1970s pop textures. But perhaps we’re not moving forward at all. Just take a listen to Pharrell’s new LP: the bass […]