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.
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.
Amateur Hour — Takashi Murakami and the Uses of Failure
Bad filmmaking and Superflat theory turn out to be remarkably difficult to tell apart.
The Whole Greater Than Its Parts — Bondo on 'Bondo'
Years of playing in the same converted room have left Bondo convinced the band is a thing separate from the four people in it.
Curió Curió Turns Distance into a Collage of Voices
Luiza Monteiro sings in Portuguese to find her way back to Brazil, slipping between the characters a theatre stage taught her to inhabit.
Manifesting Mixol
Beijing-based artist Mixol discusses manifestation and tarot, the self-doubt that once made her quit songwriting, and the eight-bit narrative game she built to play alongside her debut EP, 'The Fool.'
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!
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.
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.
From the Line to the Frame — Beth Ann Hooper's Moving Poetry
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.
Rupert Pupkin, Content Creator
'The King of Comedy' imagined Rupert Pupkin as a cautionary figure, but over four decades later, his blend of dogged persistence and indifferent craft has become the standard operating procedure of the content era.
The Grit in the Machine — Kodomo's Slow Craft
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.