Mark Isham’s Harnessed Noise
On ‘At the Carousel Club,’ Mark Isham turns a wall of vintage synthesizers, Nels Cline, and a string quartet loose, all while keeping the editor in his head at bay.
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Grief, Glitch, and the Harp of Lara Somogyi
Harpist Lara Somogyi talks through 'a [time] patterned,' from delay pedals and disrupted loops to Steve Reich and 'A Pattern Language,' the architecture handbook that gave the album many of its titles.
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Bob Ezrin Would Rather Be the Dumbest Guy in the Room
The producer of 'The Wall,' 'Destroyer,' and 'Welcome to My Nightmare' discusses his return to the Jayhawks on 'Sanctuary Park,' how he builds a record out of three or four live takes, what a label and a band each want from a producer, and why he thinks the album still exists.
Ginny Winn's Visual Trip to the Music
"I get close. I always want to see the pupils in their eyes," Winn wrote of her method — and 'Grievous Angels, Trout Masks, and American Beauties' is the first gathering of what that closeness yielded, from a coffee shop outside Eureka to the Grateful Dead's ranch.
The Long Silence Behind Ayman Fanous’s Guitar
The guitarist and bouzouki player discusses 'Brooklyn Stories 1–5', his five-CD set of duos and small groups for Infrequent Seams, the years of wordless playing alongside Bern Nix that shaped his ear, and what harmolodics can mean on a nylon-string classical guitar.
Black Bananas’ Jennifer Herrema Keeps the Seams Showing
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.
Frances Chang Takes a Moral Inventory
The Brooklyn musician, composer, and performer discusses 'been thinking bout confession,' her third album, which she wrote on a century-old baby grand after hitting walls with the guitar, and touches on Sondheim, the pomp of Catholicism, and whether a sound made on a computer counts.
David Katz Cuts a New Version of Dub's History
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.
The Owl and the Upright — Sova Lets the Creaks In
Sova means owl, a bird of wisdom in some myths and an omen of evil in others, and on 'Alight!' the pianist wants her instrumental music just as open to interpretation.
Adam Voith Closes the Book on Christian Rock
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.
Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe's Inner-Ear Illusions
Recorded with Randall Dunn, 'Manifestations in the Shadow of an Uncertain Land' turns several years of political fatigue into what Lowe calls a "multiphonic landscape of horror," and the conversation runs from Jodorowsky to low-pass gates by way of his nine years in Om.
Mother, Father, Daughter, Mother — MuMu's Family Album
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.
Peter Gall's Long Way Around the Drum Kit
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.
Fling ii's Kosmische, Out of a Michigan Basement
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.
Ben Richter, Gardening at the Edge of the Score
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.
Photographing from the Inside — Don Schlitten's Quarter Century in Jazz
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.
A Patient Art Form — Windy & Carl and Optigan Conservatory
Nobody rehearsed, nobody planned, and nobody can say with any confidence where half the sounds on 'Windy & Carl Meet Optigan Conservatory' came from.
Borderline Ambient — Two Decades of Lusine
Jeff McIlwain's tenth Lusine album, 'Melting Days,' makes the case that rhythm and atmosphere were never opposites to begin with.
Martin Bisi, Recording Engineer Without a Uniform
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.'
Laura Veirs Alone in the Temple of Bloom
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.
The Underdog Beat — Ira Robbins on Trouser Press
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.
Yuka Honda's Impossible Dreams — On Celebrating Yoko Ono
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.
Speculative Babies — The Inner Children of Guest Bartender Deborah Toyota
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.
Azar Lawrence Is the Lineage
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.
The Sound of Friendship — Riviera Gaz Across Two Continents
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.
GB Sings Above the Fuzz
The Danish songwriter sang his first album quietly into a microphone at home, and on 'Herzsprung' he had to fill a room.
Lambchop's Choir Answers Back
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.
From the Dimension Next Door — Ethan Miller and The Odyssey Cult
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.
Josh Mason, Better Punk Through Circuitry
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.
Amateur Hour — Takashi Murakami and the Uses of Failure
Bad filmmaking and Superflat theory turn out to be remarkably difficult to tell apart.
The Tape Remembers — Concepción Huerta's Very Small Gestures
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.
A Word for Melody, Mood, and Land — Wild Gods on 'The Glorious Abysmal'
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.
All Shall Be Well — Jason Calhoun's 'revelations of divine love'
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 Whole of Me — Terri Lyne Carrington Beyond the Drum Kit
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.