THE HYDRA

• Home
• Features
• Blog
• Arts & Culture
• Books
• Film
• Music
• Writings

In 1913, a young Italian painter wrote an impassioned letter of admiration to composer Balilla Pratella after being witness to a performance of his symphony at the Costanzi Theatre in Rome: “While I was listening to the orchestral performance of your overwhelming Futurist music, there came to my mind the idea of a new art, one that only you can create: the Art of Noises, a logical consequence of your marvelous innovations.” The artist’s name was Luigi Russolo and what he envisioned for the future of sound on that day set the template for modern [Read More]

After eleven years of anticipation, yours and mine surely, Blizzard Entertainment finally released, at the end of last month, Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty. Still, one question lingers concerning video games. And we can thank film critic Roger Ebert for lighting the fire under the conversation. Can video games be art? [Read More]

Music is not divorced from place. We know that songs and albums are psychically and sensorily linked to specific memories, specific ages: the temperature of a summer in a foreign city, the smell of an old friend or lover. The take away concert carves out a role for this method of [Read More]

If the proof of the synthesis of the dream-life and real time is the meta-dream of the cinematic, then Christopher Nolan’s Inception, a film of grandiose mechanics and mnemonic architectures, introduces cinema itself as a powerful allegory for the possibility of shared [Read More]

Funk was born from the sludge, the grainy mud of the earth. It festered in the primordial soup until the spirit of life sucked itself into its own existence, and grew into form, and that form changed under the cycles of the sun and moon and stars. The funk has since changed in shape and appearance, once nearly forgotten and then revived in the backbone of hip-hop, but now the possibility of a future funk is making itself clear. [Read More]

... more features