From Ryan Lott’s earliest work under the Son Lux moniker — several years before touring members Rafiq Bhatia and Ian Chang joined him full time — there’s been something glacial about the music. There’s a sweeping orchestral grandeur about it,… Read More
Sometimes it feels good to have one’s head crunched in the morning. Divide and Dissolve do a great job of releasing the demons—not the ones of dreams we’ve just left but the nightmare that begins in the morning living in… Read More
Armand Hammer, a duo composed of rappers Billy Woods and Elucid, are at the vanguard of left-field rap music. In the last decade, they have steadily amassed fans by releasing unapologetically exploratory albums. It’s music that rewards time and analysis–the… Read More
In 2019, music fans around the world fell in love with Japanese citypop due to an algorithmic boost in a Youtube upload of Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love”. No one knew how the song would appear in their video recommendations –… Read More
Green Day’s Dookie was the best rock album of 1994. Scores of critics admitted that, yes, this 14-track album full of speedy pop-punk tunes about panic attacks, boredom, and masturbation was quite catchy, but no one would’ve held it against… Read More
Douglas is one Amy Douglas White, an American electropop artist raised in Spain who picked up the landscape’s bright vista and infused it into her glittering music. Having performed with artists like M83 and West Indian Girl, Douglas is hardly… Read More
If you only have time to read one contemporary German writer, it ought to be Jenny Erpenbeck. The author of three novels and several short story collections, her last novel Go, Went, Gone was a masterful statement on the immensity… Read More
Like all of Pallbearer’s records, Forgotten Days is resonant with arched, dramatic melodies in the classic heavy metal tradition. Conceptually, it insists on confronting hard truths about time, memory, identity, and death. There are emphases throughout that are new for… Read More
The title of Diana Darke’s 2020 book, Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe, promises the reader that they are about to embark on a provocative, revisionist reading of architectural history. The choice of words is meant to… Read More
The term “The Blue of Distance” comes from Rebecca Solnit’s acclaimed 2005 nonfiction book A Field Guide to Getting Lost. It refers to the phenomenon of faraway mountains appearing blue due to light particles getting lost in the distance. Filmmaker… Read More