The drummer behind Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore, and decades of New York noise reflects on his first solo album, ‘Beach Bongo Bloodbath,’ a percussive distillation of a life lived at the underground’s edge.

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.

On his debut LP ‘Rural Deceased Undiscovered,’ the San Diego-based composer takes country music’s familiar palette and divorces it from all human context, in pursuit of the universal hook buried beneath the American one.

Drawing on Nordic folk lineage and the acoustic personality of grand marble rooms, Zosha Warpeha’s ‘I grow accustomed to the dark’ is less an album about darkness than a slow revelation of what lives inside it.

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.

VP Records engineer Billy Polo on restoring reggae’s rarest tapes, archiving Jamaican music history, and the art of mastering for digital.

Dutch composer Stephen Emmer discusses Asymmetrical Dot, Indonesian heritage, hearing loss, and four decades of learning which clichés to reject.

Critic George Grella discusses his book Minimalist Music, arguing that Reich, Glass, and the genre are really about one thing: time.

Canadian violinist Meredith Bates discusses her new album The Observer Effect — improvisation, quantum physics, and feminine intuition.

Toronto drummer Nick Fraser talks about his atmospheric trio album Areas, long-term collaboration with Kris Davis and Tony Malaby, and Canadian creative music.