Of all the artists that emerged from the freak folk/New Weird America boom of the early noughties, Colorado-born Josephine Foster is one of the most enduring, and certainly one of the most interesting. Besides the obvious – her startling voice, opera trained but as wild as the hills – constant reinvention and inspired collaboration have […]
In parts of Southern Italy, the separation between music and everyday life has only grown, as traditions have been flattened and “folklorized” into postcard versions of themselves. On their self-titled debut, Palermo collective Lero Lero push against that logic. Drawing from 20th-century Sicilian sound archives, they treat this material not as something to safeguard, but […]
Americans are increasingly finding themselves stuck behind slamming doors separating them from other cultures and ideas. Guitarist Marisa Anderson’s efforts to counter our current sociopolitical paradigm are all about underlining the crucial, often ignored difference between un-American and anti-American. The latter defines a hostile outsider or inside agitator, but the former simply identifies…
“He has an energy to him like he’s floating,” Fratti said about Orcutt when she chucked his self-titled 2017 album, his first solo electric studio jaunt, on her Baker’s Dozen list for the Quietus. She’d stumbled over the record via a blog and immediately set about following the breadcrumb trail, picking through his blues deconstructions, […]
Athens, Georgia, guitarist Shane Parish isn’t one to shy away from a challenge (he transcribed the whole of Bill Orcutt’s Music for Four Guitars and plays as one of the Orcutt quartet), and his output is always something special, as 2024’s Repertoire, another album demanding some serious arrangement work, demonstrated. However, for his latest album, […]
In Slavic folklore, the archetypal villain Koschei The Deathless is so-called because his “death” is a physical thing which he hides – usually inside an egg. In certain tales, the egg is stitched inside an animal’s stomach, and then the animal is sent far away, or locked up in a chest on the mythical island […]
Trust a man whose ideal compositional form is the palindrome to reckon with this axiom: Everything comes back to where you started, then you start over again. 2023’s American Landscapes, the last record by Dutch lutenist/multi-instrumentalist Jozef Van Wissem and American guitarist/filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, ground their sound down to the essentials of pealing feedback and […]
“Willie o’ Winsbury” is a traditional English folk ballad about a king who spares his daughter’s lover because said lover is a pretty man. But when Irish composer, sound designer, and performance artist Aoibhín Redmond, aka NIMF, borrowed a bit of the tune for her album Sirenoscape, she took it in a much darker, more […]
Connor Armbruster excels at reinvention. The multi-instrumentalist based in Troy, New York, has released numerous albums over the past several years that tackle a wealth of styles and themes. Phonehenge (2019) was a folk concept album about technology. Masses (2022) consisted of a solo violin recorded in the sanctuary of an empty church. Can I […]
In January of last year, Dagmar Zuniga uploaded her debut album to YouTube. By the serendipitous workings of the algorithm-perhaps boosted by the cryptic title and album art in filth your mystery is kingdom/far smile peasant in yellow music took off with surprising speed; within months, she’d hit hundreds of thousands of views and was […]
Divided by Dusk is a mysterious, otherworldly album that sounds like a folktale and feels like walking into the forest just as the sun is setting, not knowing what wonders may await. Will one encounter enchanting creatures, gypsy caravans, a traveling circus ~ or the simple magic of fox and bear, moonlight and stream? Inspired by […]
Saputjiji, the new album from Tanya Tagaq, opens with a series of blood-curdling screams. “Fuck war,” she bellows, over and over, delivering each word with the seismic force of an Arctic cryoseism. Tagaq’s paroxysm of fury is brutally cathartic — a vicious rebuke to the widespread moral apathy and cowardice of our current moment, from […]
Ten years ago, La Tène released their first record, then as a trio with Cyril Bondi, d’Incise, and Alexis Degrenier. A decade, four albums, and multiple collaborations later, the group returns with Moreïne/Déclives — an album that feels as much like a celebration as it does an upheaval. True to its identity, La Tène continues […]
How does one go about making music not usually understood as “punk” sound like punk? How best to apply the DIY ethos, the construction by destruction, of punk art to other genres? How can the guide-fires that have been lit by past iconoclasts of the underground illuminate explorations in different styles? Maine-based fingerstyle guitarist Liam […]
Some combinations are so natural that, in retrospect, you have to ask, “What took them so long to get together?” C Joynes of Cambridgeshire, England and Mike Gangloff of Ironto, Va., have labored separately in substantially similar musical fields. Joynes is a guitarist whose work has drawn inspiration from African and American folk traditions, filtered […]
This is an accomplished, confident new album from Denver guitarist D. West, who leans more towards the ‘new age’ instrumental guitar stylings of Wiliam Ackerman’s Windham Hill imprint than John Fahey’s American Primitive-defining Takoma. Rather than the heavily syncopated thumbed technique of Fahey, West’s music often has a playful nature (‘Cult of the Celestial’) and […]