Author: Karma Oak

Bassist and composer Charles Mingus used to be a figure of controversy for ten different reasons, some political, some personal, and—though this all seems silly in the new century—some musical. Mingus could be difficult with audiences, tough on fellow musicians,… Read More

Not much has changed for Kurt Wagner since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Nashville native spent most of his time in the house, anyway — listening to music, tinkering with songs for his long-running band Lambchop, and carrying… Read More

At the start of the century, in the UK at least, Travis were everywhere. Their brand of earnest, plangent indie rock was a soothing balm for the pre/post-millennium morass, which threatened to make airplanes crash from the skies and terminally… Read More

In Minsk, the bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky — founder of the KGB — still stands. On the Island of Tears, the deaths of 771 Belarusian soldiers in Afghanistan are commemorated by a crying angel and grieving women. An obelisk hails… Read More

Compared to the relatively capacious archival revelations of Can, a band with roughly comparable working practices, the posthumous pickings from This Heat have been cautiously selected and exceedingly sparse. In 1993 a three-song CD emerged – including a 33 1/3… Read More

London’s Tunng are the best band you still haven’t listened to, as since their 2003 inception, this collective have continued to build and folk and pop templates to create a sound that is experimental, ever-shifting, and always compelling. No two… Read More