Foxy Digitalis
It’s been a banner year for Byron Westbrook. Hands in the Dark released his evocative album, Distortion Hue, to start the year and it set the standard. His most recent album, Mirror View, comes via Ash International and is a surprise departure that pays off. Utilizing field recordings, sound installation works, and other sonic elements, Westbrook offers […]
Emma Palm’s No Translation project first came across my radar thanks to Matthew Sage’s fantastic longform streaming series last summer. Her performance was captivating in its gentleness and vulnerability. After that, I began digging into her work on Bandcamp and immediately purchased her first Music For Postcards release. The visual element to her work is striking in […]
The pandemic has wreaked havoc on so many artists the past 18 months, but when everything began shutting down, Thollem McDonas was at the front of my mind. McDonas is the traveling musician, having crossed the country (and world!) countless times to perform, speak, record, collaborate, and everything else in between. Sidelined since March 2020, […]
Norah Lorway composes music in ways that are totally foreign and completely fascinating to me. She’s equal parts artist, architect, and coder, using different applications and languages to build soundworlds from scratch. She regularly participates in live coding shows and algoraves, two events I was unfamiliar with before digging into her work and her label, Xylem. […]
Lawrence English is a one-person force of nature. Between his label, Room 40, various solo and collaborative projects, his own writing, and so much more it’s a wonder he finds time to breathe. Truthfully, this unerring, forward-pushing nature is something I deeply relate to, and seeing and hearing all that English has accomplished this year […]
The last show I saw before the pandemic was Steve Gunn at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa. He was nearing the end of a long year of touring, and even though we’d never met face-to-face before that evening, our conversation was that of old friends with a shared history. Gunn is a thoughtful songwriter […]
We’ve all dealt with the isolation of the past 18 months in various ways, but Eric Hardiman took a unique approach. Hardiman, through his solo project Rambutan, does a lot of collaborative work whether in bands, live shows, or through various recordings. During the earlier parts of the pandemic, this proved to be nearly impossible, […]
There’s always risks involved when going through one’s personal archives, whether it’s music, writing, art, whatever. We have a tendency to romanticize those early pearls, especially if we haven’t taken a real spin through them in decades. It’s easy, as we get older, to think back to that youthful glow and enthusiasm and think there […]
Moving from Chicago to Asheville recently, Brett Naucke has big dreams for his garden. There’s a lot that can be done with houseplants and growing in containers, but wide-open spaces are the stuff dreams are made of. When I expressed interest in a series of interviews focusing less on artists’ music and more on, specifically, […]