Various Artists

Things change slowly at Cat’s Cradle, the storied North Carolina rock club that turned 50 last year. It took half that time to meander from a basement in Chapel Hill through several nearby locations to its current home in a… Read More

ML Buch

From its dramatic first synth splash, Mary Louise Buch’s debut album, Skinned, seems as uncanny as an android. Its disorienting first minutes shift between sleek sonic touchstones—sci-fi keyboards, synthesized baroque strings, echoing drum crashes, and a warped, robotic vocal—with mechanical… Read More

Various Artists

On weekday mornings, sometime between 1.a.m and 5 a.m., lawless fantasia used to appear on television like a good recurring dream. Today, the rhapsodies are duller, stricter, and more subdued, but in the ’90s, they came in the form of… Read More

Hiroshi Yoshimura

In 1967, the Canadian composer and philosopher R. Murray Schafer wrote, “The ear is always open.” He didn’t mean metaphorically: Unlike the lidded eye, the ear cannot close itself off to unwanted stimuli, leaving us particularly susceptible to intrusive sounds.… Read More