Trusting the Band Chaos with Hen Ogledd
Hen Ogledd's four members trace how a shared songwriting chaos, competing disciplines, and the inclusion of vocals in Welsh and Scots on their latest album, 'Discombobulated.'
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Inside Alden Hellmuth's Tethered Galaxy
Saxophonist and composer Alden Hellmuth discusses growing up in Hartford's Jackie McLean tradition, her mentorship under Herbie Hancock, and the double-bass lineup behind her new album, 'Tether.'
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Nocturnal Animals — Inside Bill Nace and David Watson's 'On Bats'
Bill Nace and David Watson discuss improvising 'On Bats' on taishōgoto and Highland bagpipes, their shared fascination with Lou Reed's 'Metal Machine Music,' and why neither of them enjoys naming a finished piece.
Silly by Design — Chinese American Bear's Accidental Path to Indie Pop
The Seattle-based duo of Anne Tong and Bryce Barsten speak about their new album 'Dim Sum & Then Some,' the band that began as a Mandarin lesson, their DIY aesthetic, and the unexpected resonance their music carries for Chinese American audiences.
Robert Margouleff — From TONTO to 'Freedom of Choice'
The synthesizer pioneer behind TONTO, Stevie Wonder's classic run, and DEVO's 'Freedom of Choice' reflects on a life spent as the man behind the curtain in his new memoir, 'Shaping Sounds.'
Félicia Atkinson — A Voice in the Shadows
The French artist and Shelter Press founder discusses her live score for Les yeux sans visage, the trial of Gisèle Pelicot, improvisation as a form of survival, and the politics of touring the US in 2025.
The Mending — Tahlia Amanson on the Reinvention of Myra Lee
The Brooklyn trio's 'Capture the Flag' features six songs recorded live in two days—and it's the closest Tahlia Amanson has come to telling her parents the truth.
Civil Service, Protest Songs, and the Private World of Ora Cogan
On the heels of her Sacred Bones debut 'Hard Hearted Woman,' Ora Cogan reflects on the Fairy Creek blockades, somatic practice, the whitewashing of folk music, and what it means to write a trans rights song that doesn't scream.
Guilty Viewing — 'Remote Control,' 'Funny Games,' and the Moral Architecture of the Algorithm
Long before YouTube built its pipeline and Spotify buried its royalties, two films were already asking whether you were a victim of the machine or complicit in it. Warning: contains spoilers!
Golden Mandible — The Feral Minimalism of Chik White
Rooted in a fundamentalist household on the South Side of Nova Scotia and sharpened by crust punk and free jazz, Chik White arrives at 'face across the door' after years of tightening the distance between art and noise.
An Honest Voice — Eliana Glass on Spontaneity, Technique, and Nina Simone
Around the release of 'E at Home,' Eliana Glass reflects on the limits of technique, setting aside her jazz training, and Nina Simone's case for making someone else's song completely your own.
Brings the Dawn In — Mark Barrott On 'The Exit Diaries'
Recorded in an off-grid Spanish farmhouse during a brutal La Niña winter, 'The Exit Diaries' is the sound of a musician who scrapped an entire album's worth of dark orchestral music, listened obsessively to Alice Coltrane, and arrived somewhere he hadn't expected.
From Dub to Dust — Billy Polo's Life Inside the VP Records Vault
Inside the VP Records vault, restoration engineer Billy Polo is in a race against the physical lifespan of tape — and the even shorter lifespan of the people who know what to do with it.
Joseph Branciforte and the Memory in the Machine
With 'ITERAE,' a collaboration with Belgian pianist Jozef Dumoulin, electroacoustic composer Joseph Branciforte turns his live-editing system into an instrument for slowing time.
From the Sideman Seat to the Front Porch — Bob Wagner's 'I've Been Down'
With a cast of Nashville heavyweights and a philosophy borrowed from improv comedy, Burlington-based guitarist and songwriter Bob Wagner makes his long-overdue case for the front of the stage.
Patricia Wolf — The Sound of All Creatures Great and Small
The ambient composer on her cassette release 'Yarrow,' frog taxis, the power of dormant seeds, and the dread of leaving one's recorder out overnight in the rain.
An Audience with Bob Bert, Saint of Scrap Metal
The drummer behind Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore, and decades of New York noise reflects on his first solo album, 'Beach Bongo Bloodbath,' a percussive distillation of a life lived at the underground's edge.
Beauty Out of Misery — Stephen Emmer's 'Asymmetrical Dot'
On 'Asymmetrical Dot,' Stephen Emmer turns grief and new birth into a multigenerational meditation, drawing on the Indonesian folk traditions his mother carried from Ambon to Amsterdam and the hushed compositional vocabulary that hearing loss made necessary.
The Alien Americana of Phil Geraldi's 'Rural Deceased Undiscovered'
On his debut LP 'Rural Deceased Undiscovered,' the San Diego-based composer takes country music's familiar palette and divorces it from all human context, in pursuit of the universal hook buried beneath the American one.
Folk Memory, Living Sound — Zosha Warpeha's Resonant Rooms
Drawing on Nordic folk lineage and the acoustic personality of grand marble rooms, Zosha Warpeha's 'I grow accustomed to the dark' is less an album about darkness than a slow revelation of what lives inside it.
Tape Hiss and Tenderness — zzzahara's 'Distant Lands'
zzzahara's fourth album trades the romantic preoccupations of earlier releases for something harder-won — a tender, analog meditation on grief, mixed identity, and the strange clarity of sobriety.
Never Leave Time Unfulfilled — George Grella on 'Minimalist Music'
In 'Minimalist Music,' author and critic George Grella reframes minimalism's defining quality not as style or technique but as a specific, audible practice of composing with time — then turns to ask what becomes of that practice when those who invented it are gone.
An Orchestra in One Body — Christopher Tignor's 'Bleeding Past the Edges'
On 'Bleeding Past the Edges,' Christopher Tignor upends the interactive electronics playbook, composing for a one-body orchestra through precise, reproducible systems aimed at a single purpose — to break the listener's heart.
Wolfgang Seidel, Eyewitness to the Kosmische
As a founding member of Kluster and the author of 'Krautrock Eruption,' Seidel reframes 'Zuckerzeit,' 'Sowiesoso,' and the broader krautrock movement through the lens of postwar German social history — and finds the English-language mythology wanting.
The Only Valid Form of Protest — Bonner Kramer and Thurston Moore
Bonner Kramer and Thurston Moore's debut together, 'They Came Like Swallows,' arrives as a somber, guitar-driven response to a world that has not stopped producing reasons for one.
Deep Listening, Deep Soil — Lisa Ann Schonberg's Myrmecological Music
The Brooklyn-based composer and percussionist discusses her field expeditions with myrmecologists in Brazil, the feedback loops she builds between insect recordings and organic substrates, and what it means to make music from sounds too small for human perception.
Bleeps, Boops, and Nuclear Dread — Kraftwerk's 'Radio-Activity'
Kraftwerk's 'Radio-Activity' turns fifty this year, and half a century on, the group's first all-electronic album reads as an unintentional field report from a nuclear age that was already, quietly, beginning to fall apart around it.
Molecules Lining Up — Meredith Bates's 'The Observer Effect'
'The Observer Effect' finds violinist Meredith Bates recasting quantum mechanics, feminist intuition, and acoustic ecology as one long, uninterrupted act of listening.
Ethan Helm's Geography of Loops
Inspired by the geological scale of Japan and the productive accidents of a standard looping pedal, Ethan Helm's 'Dreamscapes' extends a jazz improviser's instincts into the territory of self-reliance.
Evolfo Draws a Line in the Sand
Evolfo's Rafferty Swink and Matt Gibbs on 'Of Love,' the collective improvisational process behind it, and why a seven-piece Brooklyn band decided Spotify wasn't worth the compromise.
Charlotte Cornfield's Hard-Won Reckoning
Charlotte Cornfield's album 'Hurts Like Hell' maps a songwriter's life from drink-ticket gigs in Montreal to the steadier ground of family, community, and creative confidence in Toronto.
Skin, Bone, and Electronics — Beibei Wang and Hannah Peel on 'The Endless Dance'
Wang's grounding in Beijing opera, Peel's synthesizer instincts, and their shared Taoist faith in following the flow converge in a series of improvised sessions tracing the full arc of the Chinese solar calendar.
The Radically Earnest Legacy of Arthur Russell
Poet Reuben Gelley Newman and scholar Matt Marble join Carolyn Zaldivar Snow for a roundtable on Arthur Russell's radical gentleness, his uncategorizable output, and the serendipitous webs his music keeps spinning.
Starting at Square Twenty-Seven — Nick Fraser's 'Areas'
On 'Areas,' his trio's third album, Nick Fraser brings Messiaen-inflected harmony, electroacoustic interludes shaped by John Kameel Farah, and a compositional vocabulary deepened by eleven years of playing with saxophonist Tony Malaby and pianist Kris Davis.