Songs of Our Lives
For this episode of Songs of Our Lives, I invite film composer Zach Robinson on the show. Foxy Digitalis fans may remember Zach from the recent oral history of D/A/D’s “Love Will Make You Stay.” After getting into his recent and upcoming work (Obliterated on Netflix and season six of Cobra Kai), we go into […]
Track-by-Track
Kirk Barley’s Marionette is an album of details and movement. Melodic passages dance in stray moonlight, glowing like beacons in a welcoming darkness. There are fractured ideas recontextualized into glittering aural dreams. Resonance pulls us in for an up close view, but as tempos flicker and change, the picture becomes less clear. It’s part of the allure, […]
Interviews
One of 2023’s most interesting projects, and one that I have returned to regularly, is Sonic Mud’s Above Ground. The ensemble features ceramic instruments made by Julia Elsas, a multi-media artist and educator in New York, and an ensemble featuring Elsas, Kirk Knuffke, Kenny Wolleson, Mark Irwin, Madeleine Ventrice, and Doug Weiselman. Together, the sextet creates rich, earthy soundscapes […]
The Capsule Garden
Back after a week off, just in time for (the last? Probably? Hopefully!?) Bandcamp Friday. There was a lot more music I was hoping to get to this week (well, I listened, but couldn’t put enough of a coherent thought together to include here), but I do want to give a special mention to the […]
Mexico City’s Amor Muere brings together a host of stellar artists – Mabe Fratti, Gibrana Cervantes, Concepción Huerta, and Camille Mandoki – and on their debut, A time to love, a time to die, possibility swirls endlessly before fading from view. Mixing various styles and approaches, the quartet blends divergent soundscapes into compelling narratives. Sometimes on A […]
The Capsule Garden returns after a week off – a week that gave me a lot. My exhibition, The Sound Leaves, opens today at Philbrook Museum after we held the opening performance last Saturday. It’s been a massive undertaking for me, but the end results are somehow exactly as I imagined and better than I could […]
The Spanish, Iranian, and Afghan trio Badieh explores traditional folk music from the Greater Khorasan while fusing contemporary takes and approaches to create new, inviting worlds of sound. Michel Gasco (Spain) and Mohammad Miraghazadeh (Iran) form Badlieh’s core, and throughout their new album, II, they are joined by a host of incredible Afghan musicians. “Asheq Bodom […]
For this episode of Songs of Our Lives, I invite Patrick Shiroishi on the show. It would take a novel to list all the incredible things Patrick is doing these days, but notably he has new album out this week, “I was too young to hear silence” on American Dreams. He’s also a member of […]
It’s an Oral History of D/A/D’s “Love Will Make You Stay!” Zach Robinson, Sharaya Summers, and Charlie Oliveira wrote one my absolute favorite songs of the last decade, and we get deep into the weeds with it. PLUS, Voice Actor’s incredible “Fake Sleep” gets picked as Album of the Week, I remember Norm Chambers a […]
I’ve often wondered, while listening to any number of Carlos Niño’s projects or records, what a typical day of his looks like. I used that as a jumping off point to talk to him about collaboration and working as a producer, particularly his involvement with Thandi Ntuli’s beautiful new record, Rainbow Revisited. He shared stories […]
For this episode of Songs of Our Lives, I invite the inimitable Larry Wish on the show! After talking a bit about his latest album, “Capricorn Sun,” and some of his characters (Composerhead!), we get into the meat of the episode. From breaking music boxes as a child and the sad, wonderfulness of Scott 3 […]
“Sometimes the world is magical,” Bex Burch says, describing the unexpected trip to Utrecht she took in 2021 that was the beginning tendrils of her beautiful debut, There is only love and fear. The twelve songs on this record are full of joy and tenderness with a heavy side of an insatiable exploratory spirit. Cadences move […]
Mexico City’s Pidgins explores percussive landscapes. The duo of Milo Tamez and Aaron With fuses layered rhythms with a host of engaging sound worlds from voice and other instruments, creating a puzzle-like environment to dig into modern, often banal, trance-like states. Refrains of the Day, Volume 1 is enigmatic and beguiling. Tamez weaves a polyrhythmic fabric across […]
