Guitarist Gregory Uhlmann discusses 'Extra Stars,' a five-year collection of pieces inspired by stargazing in the California desert, and the Los Angeles musical community threaded through it.
Read Now Read Now
Claire Devlin and Eli Davidovici of Montréal jazz combo Bellbird discuss how the quartet turned the loudest bird call on earth into compositional raw material for 'The Call,' with political conviction and collective authorship shaping everything that follows.
Read Now Read Now
Tom Excell talks through the making of Nubiyan Twist's fifth record, 'Chasing Shadows,' a collision of Afrobeat, jazz, dub, and hip-hop fueled by a rotating cast of collaborators and a growing unease with the forces pulling music away from the people who make it.
The classically trained string player recorded her new album across 15 wilderness locations in British Columbia, embracing imperfection, improvisation, and the unpredictable feedback of the natural world.
The 2026 edition of the Big Ears Festival commences this Thursday, March 27. Here are our suggestions for the artists you should check out once the music kicks off in downtown Knoxville.
'Música Para Quinteto: Live at Jazz Cava' captures Juanma Trujillo's Barcelona quintet at full burn, following a prolific decade of recordings and a deliberate exit from New York for a life the Venezuelan guitarist believes feeds the music.
Erica Ashleson and Guillaume Siracusa discuss 'Clipping', the indie duo's third album, their move from DIY bedroom sessions to a French countryside studio, and why they'd happily redo a vocal take twenty times.
The experimental harpist discusses the hand-built electric instrument at the center of her practice, the spatial approach to composition she developed through decades of work with choreographers, and the grief behind 'Lament for the Maker,' her first solo record since Mills College closed.
Reissued more than fifty years after its creation, Bayeté's 'Seeking Other Beauty' finds the Bay Area composer tracing the line between his grandmother's church organ and the electric possibilities that pulled him away from the jazz masters.
Named for the Finnish concept of resilience, 'sisu' documents Kodomo's Chris Child working with vocalists for the first time, chasing analog serendipity, and making a deliberate case for the album as a form still worth defending.
A fixture in London's jazz and electronic scenes, Momoko Gill discusses her debut album 'Momoko', her years of collaborative work alongside Matthew Herbert and others, and the music she makes as the only home she's found.
The German production duo discusses their resistance to the music industry's rat race, the shift to collaborative live-band recording with trusted friends, and why protecting the raw joy of music-making matters more than chasing metrics.
The five-time Grammy winner discusses the daily tension between preservation and intervention, his analog-first approach to archival audio, and what his restoration of unreleased Stax songwriter demos revealed about the ethics of serving the archive.
Holly Tavel, Sarah Morrison, and Beatriz Ramirez-Belt discuss 'cloud, castle, lake', their improvisational rehearsal process, and why music that creates a scene beats music that creates a feeling.
In 'Shouting Out Loud,' Audrey Golden brings her background in law, gender studies, and human rights research to the Raincoats' full story, from art school in North London to the cells of the Maze.
Author and visual artist Bette A. discusses her 'Slow Stories' collaboration with Brian Eno, the pared-down storytelling she traces to Dutch culture, and her growing uncertainty about whether her progressive activism still fits the world she finds herself in.
Markus Sieber's 'Chambers' came together across three days at Berlin's Funkhaus with no revisions permitted and no instrument off-limits, built entirely on the conviction that intuition knows more than planning does.
Erik Hall's 'Solo Three' closes his minimalist trilogy with works by Glenn Branca, Charlemagne Palestine, Laurie Spiegel, and Steve Reich, each part performed and layered entirely by Hall alone in his Michigan home studio.
Swedish artist Fågelle spent three years making 'Bränn min jord' in the forests, community halls, and village gatherings of rural Halland, arriving at a record about what distance reveals and what returning demands.
Guitarist Martin Pugh looks back on the making of 'Armageddon,' the lost opening slot with Eric Clapton that could have changed everything, and the 50th-anniversary reissue that brings the band's sole album back to life.
From squat parties to a cottage on a wildflower common, Loula Yorke has built a practice around beauty, ecological dread, and the feminist history that 'Hydrology' quietly carries forward.
On 'Heaven 2,' Lala Lala traces the slow, unsentimental work of releasing control and learning to trust what gets left behind.
The Toronto saxophonist joins guitarist Dan Pitt and drummer Lowell Whitty on 'Words Underlined,' a live session cut in a beloved Toronto bookstore that became, almost accidentally, one of the year's most assured jazz records.
The Serbian-born violinist discusses her 'Music for Broken Violins' series, her ongoing duo BUKA with Aimée Niemann, and the honesty of instruments that fall apart in one's hands.
On their third album, 'Desert So Green,' the six-piece collective reflects on the slow build of musical trust, the discipline of leaving space, and what it means to stop defaulting and start deciding.
Bob Weinstock believed in treating music and album covers equally as serious art, and 'WAIL,' by Chris Entwistle and Mark Havens, reveals how that conviction produced a graphic legacy still being imitated today.
Ratboys frontwoman Julia Steiner discusses how 'Singin' to an Empty Chair' grew from a grief practice into a collection of bright, aching songs that never settle for just one feeling at a time.
Recorded over two days with longtime collaborators Meshell Ndegeocello and Chris Bruce, 'Man of Style' finds Justin Hicks reclaiming the singer-songwriter identity that persisted through decades of noise rock, sound art, and theatrical performance.
The veteran sound artist discusses 'Trinity,' his trio-format album with Lawrence English, and why every input in his practice—a space, a field recording, a late friend's unreleased tape—warrants the same respect as a living collaborator.
Andrea Mazzariello moves between Joni Mitchell's elusive vocal lines in "A Case of You" and protesters singing outside Minneapolis ICE headquarters, where the distance between marching and dancing collapses in a single frame.
Meredith Hobbs Coons and Carolyn Zaldivar Snow of The Tonearm compare notes on 'Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery,' the documentary film that turns feminist music history into something closer to evidence.
The music journalist reflects on his two-decade tenure at the Financial Times, the tension between covering superstars and unknown artists, and his conviction that transcribing interviews by hand remains a moral compulsion in an age of automated everything.
For 'Heavy Combination (1966–2007)', KMRU digitized five decades of his grandfather's music, discovering how Joseph Kamaru's political songs diagnose today's Kenya and how the archive became a grounding for an artist constantly in motion.
Lawrence English reflects on the impossible trios of 'Trinity,' acid nostalgia as a weapon against possible futures, and how the tension between the microphone and the psychological ear shapes his field recording practice.