Now Playing on The Tonearm:
Servants of Music — The Folk Theater of YAGÓDY
Ukrainian folk ensemble YAGÓDY discuss songs handed down across generations, lyrics using invented phonetic samples, and the theatrical instincts behind their performance at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville. Interview by Jonah Evans.
Hans-Joachim Roedelius — Cluster, Harmonia, and the Endless After
With Cluster and Harmonia now recognized as foundations of experimental music, Hans-Joachim Roedelius considers a career built alongside Conny Plank and Brian Eno and insists, at ninety-one, that the only direction worth moving is further into the unknown. Interview by Bill Kopp.
B-Movies, Bad Men, and The Notwist's Stubborn Optimism
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. Interview by Sam Bradley.
The Life of the Podium — Miho Hazama's 'Frames'
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. Interview by Lawrence Peryer.
Frank Fairfield — Around the World at 78 RPM
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. Interview by Cary Baker.
This Week's Episode of The Tonearm Podcast:
Caroline Davis: The Saxophone Reimagined in the Fallows
Armed with a saxophone, an Organelle, and an aluminum can, Caroline Davis spent a month in Wyoming making her debut solo record—and thinking about freedom in all its forms.
Rotations
A Hawaii edition of The Tonearm's official radio show, you say? Aloha:
Earlier this week, our episode of Rotations was recorded on Hawaii's Big Island, where I was on a special vacation. After a long, grey, and trying winter, it was nourishing and healing to spend a week in the sun with my life partner, visiting some of our favorite and several new places. I assembled a set of music tied to the region, including but going way, way beyond the expected sounds like exotica and mellow guitar. If you missed it, have a listen via the show's Mixcloud archive.
This Tuesday, May 5, at 11 p.m. PT, Rotations is back with four decades of creative music and a quiet Pacific Northwest thread running throughout. The Bad Plus reimagine Nirvana, Washington State native Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith summons majestic Mt. Baker, and James Falzone brings his mystical clarinet. All of this alongside downtown New York no-wave from Material, Curlew, and Laurie Anderson, a rare Palle Mikkelborg suite, and ECM Records elegance from Muthspiel, Colley, and Blade. Tune in on SPACE 101.1 FM or stream at space101fm.org.
The Hit Parade:
"She found a cheap loft in a building on the Bowery owned by Andy Warhol. (She lived there until her death.) It was across the street from CBGB, the dingy rock club that became the epicenter of punk …" ❋ “‘’[Punk] is my way of letting it all out so I don’t choke to death. It’s my voice,' Cilirio, 47, explained while waiting for the gunfire to subside near the favela where he grew up." ❋ "The rest of the world has created an economic and cultural infrastructure so that American jazz musicians can go abroad and make a living touring … At the same time, somewhat ironically, foreign musicians cannot enter the U.S. to have the privilege to work without significant up-front investment …" ❋ "She found that the situation was dire: 'Women are not allowed to touch instruments in so many parts of India,' she says. 'They’re not allowed to sing. They’re kept in the four walls of their homes. There was this important quote that I came across, which said that, ‘When men are oppressed, it’s called a tragedy, but when women are oppressed, it’s called tradition.’'" ❋ "I do things for money, sure, but if I’m going to do it, I look at myself as an artist, trying to make art. You heard me on Fallon playing Frank Ocean with Flea? I was making art, trying to make it exist as high on that plane as I can.” ❋ "Jill’s CV is an eclectic one, taking her synthesizers to punk shows with Henry Rollins and Minutemen alongside composing music for films including Paul Schrader’s 'Hardcore.'" ❋ "Sitting on a pillow on the floor, she rested the instrument, longer than its player is tall, across a bright pink Minnie Mouse blanket on her lap and struck a single resonant note …" ❋ "To Wierzbicki, science fiction music falls into two camps: 'other-worldly, and thus never-heard-before music' and music that is 'quite old-fashioned and earthbound.' This distinction, however, is not simply a matter of describing or performing a particular sound." ❋ "Look at the evolution of streaming. You increasingly see more revenues going to catalogue as opposed to new releases, which then get lower revenues, leading to fewer resources to re-invest, fewer new releases and fewer artists being supported." ❋ "John Cougar Mellencamp’s combative liberalism has long been an unexpected plot twist for casual fans, politicians, and country music stars who’ve misinterpreted his populist lyrics as base expressions of American chest-beating." ❋ "'Well I’m a gonna tell you fascists, you may be surprised, people in this world are getting organized,' Guthrie sings, shouts, whoops and whistles in his distinctive Oklahoma twang. 'You’re bound to lose. You fascists bound to lose.'" ❋ tapedeck
New Music Recommendations: Allison Loggins-Hull – Patchwork (RIYL: Contemporary chamber music, Jessie Montgomery with sharper political edges) ❋ Daniel Sky – Songs For The World (RIYL: Globally aware jazz; Kamasi Washington, Theo Croker, Michał Urbaniak) ❋ Ensemble Infini – Volume ∞ (RIYL: The Ex & Brass Unbound, Charles Mingus; ecstatic bluster with a psychedelic undertow and pockets of abstract repose) ❋ Josephine Foster – Adormidera (RIYL: Spanish canción, Amancio Prada, Victor Jara, chamber intimacy) ❋ Seefeel – Sol.Hz (RIYL: Ambient dub, shoegaze-electronic; My Bloody Valentine filtered through Warp's Artificial Intelligence era) ❋ Yu Su – Foundry (RIYL: Minimal techno and ambient dub, dusky and reverberant with cross-cultural atmospheric depth)
The Deepest Cut:
Omni Sound's When There Is No Sun, released in March 2026, handed fragments of the Sun Ra Arkestra's recorded archive to seven producers across four continents to render sophisticated electronic re-interpretations and remixes. Curated by Ricardo Villalobos, the project drew from two source recordings: Living Sky, an instrumental suite by the Arkestra directed by Marshall Allen, and My Words Are Music, a spoken-word collection of Sun Ra's poems. Underground Resistance, Chez Damier and Ben Vedren, Calibre, A Guy Called Gerald, SHE Spells Doom, Barış K, and Villalobos himself each took from that material in their own direction, while poets Saul Williams, Anthony Joseph, Mahogany L. Browne, Abiodun Oyewole, Tunde Adebimpe, and Tara Middleton contributed as vocalists and collaborators.
The project gathered artists from Detroit, Belfast, Lusaka, Chicago, and Berlin, and its production runs through Turkey. Barış K, who works from Istanbul, contributed two tracks reconfiguring Turkey's psychedelic musical history through contemporary electronic music. Executive producers Ayşe Turan Sorel and Ahmet Ulug worked with Villalobos to bring the project to completion, helping coordinate a cast spanning genres, cities, and continents.
I reached out to executive producer Ayşe Turan Sorel to learn more about the origin and assembly of When There Is No Sun, its connection to Istanbul, and, as always, recommendations for things she loves that more people should know about.
My name is Ayşe Turan Sorel, co-producer of the album When There's No Sun, developed in collaboration with Ricardo Villalobos and Ahmet Ulug. Our initial concept was to create one or two house or techno remixes based on Omni Sound's two previous releases. However, we soon recognized that such a limited approach would be insufficient to honor the legacy of Sun Ra and the vast diversity of electronic music's many important subgenres. A single remix—whether produced by an artist from Detroit, Chicago, or Berlin—could not adequately reflect this breadth. So after persuading our longtime friend Ricardo Villalobos to join the project, we undertook a more expansive direction. Together, we curated a conceptual framework that drew on a wide spectrum of electronic music genres, including Chicago House, Detroit Techno, Drum and Bass, and Jungle. Our aim was to assemble a collection that captures the richness and diversity of electronic music, interpreted through the distinctive artistic lens of the Sun Ra Arkestra.
Our dream has always been to include Underground Resistance in this project. I remember how honored we were when they finally accepted. Ricardo invited Chez Damier, which was an essential addition to honor Chicago House. Ricardo also suggested a wonderful young talent named SHE Spells Doom from Lusaka, Zambia. We are so happy to have SHE Spells Doom here as the young producer of the album. The curation of who to invite to this project grew naturally and without pressure; I'm deeply grateful for this teamwork.
Most of the artists we selected demonstrated an artistic affinity with Sun Ra to various degrees. One of the common criteria in our selection of remixing artists was their ability to represent diverse strands of underground electronic music while remaining faithful to their own distinctive stylistic identities.
Also, this remixing project, which eventually became a global recording project, was special because it also traces back to our deeply rooted friendships and collaborations, somehow pertaining to Istanbul. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Istanbul was a melting pot of subcultures, especially in the Beyoglu Taksim area. Ahmet Ulug and his brother, Mehmet Ulug, played an essential role in developing the jazz scene in Turkey and in bringing Sun Ra and the Arkestra to Istanbul in 1991.
A few years later, just a few blocks away from where Sun Ra and his Arkestra played, Ricardo Villalobos and the Perlon crew, like Zip and Sammy Dee, started playing regularly in Istanbul's mythical club (((godet))), thanks to my mentor Minas Balcioglu aka Minibashekim and the SOAP crew.
At the time, I was just a teenager trying to look cool enough to get into these underground venues to listen to music. But these cultural events marked me and forged my later determination to work in this industry.
So we could say this project is serendipitously tied together by two totally different subcultures flourishing in Istanbul around the '90s, and then finding their way to this project through our forged friendships and collaborations over the years.
Ayşe also gave us a great little list of things for us to explore:
Book: by William Sites called Sun Ra's Chicago: Afrofuturism and the City — This book inspired me a lot in our quest to search for South Side Chicago and Detroit artists for our project. I did my Master’s while working on this album, and my professor advised me to read this book to better understand the Post-Jim Crow degradations that Sun Ra endured in the 1950s in Chicago's Calumet City.
Movie: Saul Williams's Neptune Frost. I believe this important movie got Underground Resistance interested in doing our project in the first place. Highly recommended.
Music: Ricardo Villalobos' meticulous archive of Torsten Pröfrock's music. Especially the Autechre Remix, when he played it in Open Ground, felt like absolute magic in this wonder of a club.
Venue: Open Ground club in Wuppertal. We had the honor of booking Ricardo Villalobos and Chez Damier on the eve of the album release party. Once you hear music in this club, it's very hard to go anywhere else.
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Thank you for reading! We'll see you again next week. 🚀
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