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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'The Observer Effect' finds violinist Meredith Bates recasting quantum mechanics, feminist intuition, and acoustic ecology as one long, uninterrupted act of listening.
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'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 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.
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.
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.
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.
The Roxy Music guitarist discusses his memoir 'Revolución to Roxy,' his lifelong immersion in Latin music and culture, the family secrets unearthed along the way, and a career built in close collaboration with everyone from Brian Eno to Enrique Bunbury.
Post-punk abrasion, unconventional violin, and lyrics sharpened by a literature degree converge on Modern Woman's debut 'Johnny's Dreamworld,' an album built around the friction of being told you're simultaneously too feminine and not feminine enough.
Dr. Charles Joseph Smith has been one of Chicago's most recognized faces and least-known composers—a paradox that Sooper Records' reissue 'Collected Works and the War of the Martian Ghosts' is now, belatedly, beginning to resolve.
With 'Walkman,' his first solo album in over twenty years, Speedy J makes the case for focused, uninterrupted listening in an era engineered to prevent it.
Schneider discusses 'American Crow,' the Rolf Schock Prize, her collaboration with David Bowie, and her conviction that the jazz ensemble's practice of listening without a fixed agenda remains democracy's most accurate blueprint.
From Suicide's Martin Rev to Merzbow, Shaun Cohen's 'Power to Consume' series traces the long, crooked line between Lou Reed's 'Metal Machine Music' and the noise artists it inspired.
DJ Amir discusses his acquisition and revival of Strata Records, the defunct Detroit jazz label founded by pianist Kenny Cox, whose six original albums and trove of unreleased recordings have become some of the most sought-after music in jazz.
The drummer behind Sons of Kemet and The Smile brought his acoustic ensemble to Big Ears, where he discussed 'Kaleidoscopic Visions,' the intentional instrumentation that gives it depth, and the community that makes his music possible.
Johnathon Ford discusses his band's latest release, 'High Remembrance,' the one-album-a-year discipline that has defined Unwed Sailor's second act, and why the bass guitar is the closest thing he has to a singing voice.
In conversation about 'Fallows,' an album made alone in a Wyoming cabin, Caroline Davis reflects on the ancestral figures who accompanied her during the residency, the saxophone techniques she invented in solitude, and an advocacy practice devoted to carceral justice and gender equity in jazz.
Drawing on Adorno, Satie, and a German headphone company's unusual take on ear-cup geometry, Kallie Marie argues that the rituals we build around listening are a form of cultural self-determination.
Veterans of Gong's Canterbury-meets-French-freaks psychedelia, Steve Hillage and Miquette Giraudy discuss how forty years of dance music obsession culminates in 'Flower of Life,' System 7's most fully integrated album to date.
Inspired by Werner Herzog's argument that film must evoke the emotion of poetry, Beth Ann Hooper built 'Poetry in Motion Picture' from three poems in her collection 'Haunting the Dead,' pairing each with original symphonic music as the project heads for the festival circuit.
Korean gayageum player DoYeon Kim discusses how her apprenticeship in traditional music led her to improvisation, her instrument-damaging technique, and why she occasionally screams at her audience.
Markus Acher discusses 'News From Planet Zombie', The Notwist's return to live-band recording at a Munich community space, and why thirty-plus years together still haven't settled the tension between political dread and stubborn hope.
While composing 'Frames,' her third album with the Danish Radio Big Band, Miho Hazama lost her mentor Jim McNeely — and his absence, folded into the absorbed idioms of six other former conductors, became part of the music.
Born Frank Martinez and raised as a Mennonite in Guatemala, the self-taught musician scoured junk shops and swap meets around the country and abroad for 78 RPM records, reinventing himself as a pre-war folk and blues character during a brief recording career.