A hush overtook the room just before claire rousay performed at the small nonprofit arts space Rhizome in Washington, DC last summer. The percussionist sat quietly behind a snare and tom with two microphones placed directly above the drumheads. The… Read More
They might pal around with Huey Lewis now, but the Postal Service were once considered ahead of their time. Their collaboration, in which they sent each other digital files, is routine today but felt futuristic then, even though they relied… Read More
Nils Frahm’s dominant mode is the eyes-closed fantasia: immersive, rapturous, sentimental. That goes for his post-classical solo-piano work, which is indebted to both Keith Jarrett and George Winston, as well as his surging electronic pieces, which translate the grammar of… Read More
If 2020 had turned out differently, the debut album by Il Quadro di Troisi might have been the perfect soundtrack to the arrival of breathless exchange students in Italy’s ornate university cities, its winsome synth-pop spilling out of the headphones… Read More
In the remarkably unsexy year of 2020, you wouldn’t expect an artist to evoke the glowing grime of a club so exactly, but Shygirl manages to do it with her latest EP, ALIAS. Similar to 2018’s Cruel Practice, ALIAS finds… Read More
Cakes da Killa knows there’s nothing more lethal than a deep cut swiftly dealt. The Brooklyn rapper is a master of unrelenting flows and skewering affronts, made all the more ruthless by his razor’s-edge humor. On the new EP Muvaland,… Read More
In Emily A. Sprague’s indie-folk project Florist—sometimes accompanied by her bandmates, sometimes solo—the Catskill, New York native makes music of startling intimacy. Her last album, the self-explanatory Emily Alone, was as unadorned as a Shaker chair, stripped down to mostly… Read More
On June 20, 1969, Mort Garson began his 45th year on Earth hunkered around a television set with family and friends. It was, after all, the day of the Apollo 11 moon landing, but for Garson, the moment held special… Read More
Since introducing his Tobacco alias in 2008 in the shadow of his more cosmically inclined electro-psych act, Black Moth Super Rainbow, Thomas Fec has been engaged in a prolonged game of, as a track from his debut record put it,… Read More
An astronaut, a filmmaker, and a drum’n’bass producer. It sounds like the setup to a joke, but these unlikely bedfellows were among the base ingredients of The Edge of Everything, the first new album in 14 years from Bristolian jungle/drum’n’bass… Read More