On 'Transcend,' his second record with the GIFTS quintet, Dave Douglas reflects on Ellington's Sacred Concerts, the slab paintings of Jack Whitten, and the moment Booker Little broke the dam for a generation of trumpeter-composers.
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The French artist and Shelter Press founder discusses her live score for Les yeux sans visage, the trial of Gisèle Pelicot, improvisation as a form of survival, and the politics of touring the US in 2025.
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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!
Rooted in a fundamentalist household on the South Side of Nova Scotia and sharpened by crust punk and free jazz, Chik White arrives at 'face across the door' after years of tightening the distance between art and noise.
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.
With 'ITERAE,' a collaboration with Belgian pianist Jozef Dumoulin, electroacoustic composer Joseph Branciforte turns his live-editing system into an instrument for slowing time.
With a cast of Nashville heavyweights and a philosophy borrowed from improv comedy, Burlington-based guitarist and songwriter Bob Wagner makes his long-overdue case for the front of the stage.
The ambient composer on her cassette release 'Yarrow,' frog taxis, the power of dormant seeds, and the dread of leaving one's recorder out overnight in the rain.
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.
In 'Minimalist Music,' author and critic George Grella reframes minimalism's defining quality not as style or technique but as a specific, audible practice of composing with time — then turns to ask what becomes of that practice when those who invented it are gone.
On 'Bleeding Past the Edges,' Christopher Tignor upends the interactive electronics playbook, composing for a one-body orchestra through precise, reproducible systems aimed at a single purpose — to break the listener's heart.
As a founding member of Kluster and the author of 'Krautrock Eruption,' Seidel reframes 'Zuckerzeit,' 'Sowiesoso,' and the broader krautrock movement through the lens of postwar German social history — and finds the English-language mythology wanting.
Bonner Kramer and Thurston Moore's debut together, 'They Came Like Swallows,' arrives as a somber, guitar-driven response to a world that has not stopped producing reasons for one.
The Brooklyn-based composer and percussionist discusses her field expeditions with myrmecologists in Brazil, the feedback loops she builds between insect recordings and organic substrates, and what it means to make music from sounds too small for human perception.
Kraftwerk's 'Radio-Activity' turns fifty this year, and half a century on, the group's first all-electronic album reads as an unintentional field report from a nuclear age that was already, quietly, beginning to fall apart around it.
'The Observer Effect' finds violinist Meredith Bates recasting quantum mechanics, feminist intuition, and acoustic ecology as one long, uninterrupted act of listening.
Inspired by the geological scale of Japan and the productive accidents of a standard looping pedal, Ethan Helm's 'Dreamscapes' extends a jazz improviser's instincts into the territory of self-reliance.
Evolfo's Rafferty Swink and Matt Gibbs on 'Of Love,' the collective improvisational process behind it, and why a seven-piece Brooklyn band decided Spotify wasn't worth the compromise.
Charlotte Cornfield's album 'Hurts Like Hell' maps a songwriter's life from drink-ticket gigs in Montreal to the steadier ground of family, community, and creative confidence in Toronto.
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.
Poet Reuben Gelley Newman and scholar Matt Marble join Carolyn Zaldivar Snow for a roundtable on Arthur Russell's radical gentleness, his uncategorizable output, and the serendipitous webs his music keeps spinning.
On 'Areas,' his trio's third album, Nick Fraser brings Messiaen-inflected harmony, electroacoustic interludes shaped by John Kameel Farah, and a compositional vocabulary deepened by eleven years of playing with saxophonist Tony Malaby and pianist Kris Davis.
The Roxy Music guitarist discusses his memoir 'Revolución to Roxy,' his lifelong immersion in Latin music and culture, the family secrets unearthed along the way, and a career built in close collaboration with everyone from Brian Eno to Enrique Bunbury.
Post-punk abrasion, unconventional violin, and lyrics sharpened by a literature degree converge on Modern Woman's debut 'Johnny's Dreamworld,' an album built around the friction of being told you're simultaneously too feminine and not feminine enough.
Dr. Charles Joseph Smith has been one of Chicago's most recognized faces and least-known composers—a paradox that Sooper Records' reissue 'Collected Works and the War of the Martian Ghosts' is now, belatedly, beginning to resolve.
With 'Walkman,' his first solo album in over twenty years, Speedy J makes the case for focused, uninterrupted listening in an era engineered to prevent it.
Schneider discusses 'American Crow,' the Rolf Schock Prize, her collaboration with David Bowie, and her conviction that the jazz ensemble's practice of listening without a fixed agenda remains democracy's most accurate blueprint.
From Suicide's Martin Rev to Merzbow, Shaun Cohen's 'Power to Consume' series traces the long, crooked line between Lou Reed's 'Metal Machine Music' and the noise artists it inspired.
DJ Amir discusses his acquisition and revival of Strata Records, the defunct Detroit jazz label founded by pianist Kenny Cox, whose six original albums and trove of unreleased recordings have become some of the most sought-after music in jazz.
The drummer behind Sons of Kemet and The Smile brought his acoustic ensemble to Big Ears, where he discussed 'Kaleidoscopic Visions,' the intentional instrumentation that gives it depth, and the community that makes his music possible.