The Royal Trux cofounder discusses 'Bad Bunch,' the first Black Bananas album in twelve years, along with her new email newsletter, heirloom tomatoes, what's so special about a bloody T-shirt, and her thirty-five-year clothing archive bound for a Tokyo installation.
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Five years in the writing and forty in the gathering, 'Dub Revolution' rebuilds dub's beginnings out of the engineers who were there, the political map they worked inside, and the studios that doubled as shelter.
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Twenty-five years of booking bands ended in a burnout Voith is still annoyed about, and 'Recommended If You Like: A Novel' is what he did next — free, self-published, and delivered city to city out of an SUV.
Her mother remembers love, her father says there was none, and 'The Brothel: A Musical Memoir' lets both accounts stand before handing the story to the next generation.
The German drummer, a member of Web Web and Subtone, discusses 'Drum Seeds,' an album of drums, vintage synthesizers, and spring reverb made alone after his label asked him for drums and nothing else.
The two founders of the Ann Arbor band talk through the making of '3,' from a weekend of continuous takes with players scattered across Michigan, New York, and New Orleans, to the months Gowland then spends alone deciding which minutes survive.
Richter wants "a little garden where things can grow" without being overdetermined, and 'Mymerian' — organ, accordion, contrabass, and cello, recorded live in one cold room — is that garden at its most exposed.
Producer, art director, and label owner, Don Schlitten photographed jazz from a 1957 Monk set at the Five Spot through the Newport festivals of the sixties, and 'Love and Understanding' brings out the photographs that stayed inside jazz circles for decades.
Forty-five years into BC Studio, Bisi talks through hardcore and hip hop as underclass music, the trouble with the post-genre label, the taboo of anger, and the collaborators who shaped 'Dancing On The Power Lines.'
After 30 years of handing her records to producers, Veirs recorded 'Temple Songs' entirely alone, guided by wabi-sabi, the DIY ethos she took from Ani DiFranco, and a determination not to fall down perfectionism's rabbit hole.
A second anthology, ‘Zip It Up! Too,’ finds the magazine’s co-founder still keeping faith with the bands that sold ten copies rather than ten million.
For Honda, an artistic format is a language rather than an identity — a conviction she shares with Ono, and one that made curating a tribute feel less like a departure than a translation.
Recorded fast and almost entirely improvised, 'Music for Babies' sets Julia Shapiro's melodic instincts against Samur Khouja's appetite for dissonance, and the conversation takes in sad clowns, nose flutes, hearing music as a child, and why they never went to meet Maria Nissan.
Half a century after the Prestige trilogy, the tenor saxophonist marks 'Turn the Music Up' with an account of Horace Tapscott's Los Angeles, McCoy Tyner's touch, Pharoah Sanders's generosity, and a practice routine he hasn't altered since he was a teenager.
Steve Shelley, Gustavo Riviera, and Paulo Kishimoto discuss 'Catacroma,' the overlooked Brazilian rock and roller Erasmo Carlos, and the weekly radio playlist that keeps three musicians in two hemispheres listening to the same records.
The Danish songwriter sang his first album quietly into a microphone at home, and on 'Herzsprung' he had to fill a room.
Kurt Wagner discusses Lambchop's 17th album, 'Punching the Clown,' in a conversation running from untrained singers and lined-out gospel to the difference between spiritualism and religion.
The Odyssey Cult is less a band than a secret society of people whose obsession with art has gotten out of hand, and 'Vol. 3' is its communiqué.
The Florida sound artist walks through his greyfade debut 'Kicking A Dark Horse,' the punk shows that taught him to build things himself, and the modular practice that, 15 years in, no longer surprises him.
Bad filmmaking and Superflat theory turn out to be remarkably difficult to tell apart.
The Guanajuato-born photographer and sound artist on the Buchla 200's own memory, the imagined celestial space she built for her signals to travel through, and a composition that took an afternoon to patch and several months to finish.
Recorded in five days and sung in Gàidhlig and English, 'The Glorious Abysmal' draws on the waulking songs of the Hebrides, Georg Cantor's set theory, and the year Livingstone spent learning production alongside people leaving prison.
The Philadelphia sound artist talks about the windowless clean room where he prepares chemotherapy for patients he never meets, the Trappist retreats that showed him what silence is for, and his growing conviction that irony is a poor use of anyone's energy.
The NEA Jazz Master and four-time Grammy winner talks through a dance album about deportation and prison abolition, the Buddhist line she lives by, and the years she has gone without proper time to practice drums.
On her debut full-length, 'Talking in a Different Way,' the Oakland violinist trades the perfectionism of the conservatory for voice memos, out-of-tune pianos, and a tolerance for the unplanned.
Working with Umiliani's daughters and the analog machines their father left behind, Fabrizio Martina describes 'La luce dell'alba' as "less a tribute than a conversation across time."
Back in London after years of scoring films and documentaries in Los Angeles, David Norland discusses 'La Source,' the free hand he was given on the wordless black-and-white 'Carousel,' the monastery basement he intends to record in next, and the composer's right to a full night's sleep.
Years of playing in the same converted room have left Bondo convinced the band is a thing separate from the four people in it.
The host of Slate's 'Hit Parade' joins The Tonearm Podcast to discuss the two pools of data that keep the Billboard Hot 100 honest, the bundling schemes that turned the album chart into a promotional shell game, and the cultural rules that decide who country radio will play.
Settled in the Berlin district of Lichtenrade after more than a decade of constant movement, hackedepicciotto discuss the making of 'Lichtung' — the German lyrics, the piano de Picciotto avoided, Hacke's return to teenage experiments, and "Draussen," a storm song with a home at its center.
The Berlin-based French producer discusses 'Bow and Arrow,' a record assembled from improvised cello and randomized sample slices, and the working life behind it, in which every day at the computer is a straw pulled blind and most of them come up short.
Raised in the Shenandoah Valley and jazz-trained at Berklee, Wellington discusses old-time repertoire, the constant calibration between dancing and playing, and the making of the solo album 'Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still.'
On his fourth album for Hausu Mountain, and his first on vinyl, the restless synthesist talks improvisation, the burden of the solo record, and the surprises that arrived in the mail.
Best known for his work in The Comet Is Coming and Soccer96, Danalogue steps out on his own with 'Teleportations,' a record built on vintage synthesizers that turns grief and upheaval into a voyage through deep space.