When I want to learn about the oeuvre of a jazz, pop, or rock musician, I often turn to the website AllMusic. Founded in 1991, AllMusic is a vast repository of indexed information about popular music that contains about 30 million tracks. There, you can discover, for example, that the French horn break on the Beatles’ song “For No One” was played by Alan Civil, who was also the soloist on the Philharmonia Orchestra’s 1990 recording of Mozart’s four horn concertos.
Out of curiosity, I entered the word “physics” into AllMusic’s search engine. Of the total of 4370 results, just three were for albums with the single-word title Physics. Evidently our favorite subject is a rare choice for an album name. Intrigued, I decided to investigate further.
In the case of one of the albums, the reason behind the choice was clear. In 1996 Kim Mitzo Thompson and Karen Mitzo Hilderbrand, who call themselves Twin Sisters, issued their sixth education album for children, Physics. Among the tracks are “Forces Make Things Begin to Move” and “What Is Sound?”
Since issuing those first albums, Twin Sisters has grown to become, in its own words “an industry-leading publisher of children’s book and music products.” According to AllMusic, the company’s catalog of albums contains nearly 400 titles!
The Schippenbach Trio’s album Physics was released on Germany’s FMP label in 1991.
Born in in Berlin in 1938, Alexander von Schlippenbach is a noted pianist, composer, and long-standing member of the European free jazz scene. For his 1991 album Physics he was joined by German percussionist Paul Lovens and British saxophonist Evan Parker. The trio’s album contains just two compositions, both by Schlippenbach: “The Coefficient of Linear Expansion” and “Das Drehmoment” (German for “the torque”). In his review for AllMusic, Eugene Chadbourne praised the album, awarding it four stars out of five:
Since modern jazz in the early ‘90s had been largely running away frightened from the late Coltrane model and retreating into more conservative, commercial realms, one could say this is the trio that is physically carrying the history of jazz forward. Whatever they are doing, it’s top notch.
I’ve emailed Schlippenbach to find out how he came to chose the name of the album. Until I hear back from him, I can only speculate that he was attracted to the fundamental and abstract nature of physics. To players of free jazz, the laws of physics can resemble the basic compositional structures around which they weave their wide-ranging improvisations.
Street artist Shepard Fairey designed this poster for the loose-knit band of avant garde musicians known as Physics.
The third Physics album was released in 1998 by a musical collective, also called Physics, that was based in San Diego, California. Here’s how AllMusic described the band:
Physics was a San Diego-based collective heavily indebted to German minimalism, from the electronic trances of Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream to the hypnotic repetition of Krautrockers like Can, Neu!, and Kraftwerk. Unlike many of their influences, however, they habitually performed at top volume, crediting avant-garde composer and guitarist Glenn Branca with significant inspiration as well. Founded by guitarist John Goff (who also played drums and bagpipes in Crash Worship) in 1993, Physics began life as a loose-knit group of local musicians who grew out of a previous aggregate dubbed Johnny Superbad & the Bullet Catchers. Physics’ early live gigs found them jamming on the same single, droning chord for the duration of the performance.
The collective dissolved in 2000, but its history and music are preserved on a website, the Experiment. From the website’s press clippings, I was unable to obtain a definitive answer to why the collective chose its name. But it’s clear that founder Goff and his fellow musicians set out to make music that shared one property with physics: its deep and challenging nature.
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Physics Today - The Week in Physics
The Week in Physics" is likely a reference to the regular updates or summaries of new physics research, such as those found in publications like Physics Today from AIP Publishing or on news aggregators like Phys.org.
