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Talkhouse

Stars is a Montreal-based indie-pop band. Their latest album, the greatest hits collection Laguardia, is out December 6.
(Photo Credit: Shervin Lainez)

Stars

Music

A Guide to Stars’ Laguardia

Holding fast to the emotional honesty of Playing House (2017), Common Holly’s sophomore record, When I say to you Black Lightning is a look outward; an exploration of the ways in which we all experience pain, fear, and self-delusion, and how we can learn to confront those feelings with boldness.
The record is more experimental than Brigitte Naggar’s debut. It is rougher, looser, louder and more atonal. It feels edgy, but still kind. WISTYBL ditches fear without losing vulnerability, and trades in sadness for the healing powers of anger, and the strength of observing, recognizing and confronting. Through its 9 labyrinthian yet catchy tracks, shaped sonically by the seriously unique visions of Devon Bate, Hamish Mitchell, and Naggar herself, the album observes the complexities of mental health, the precarity of life, and the challenges of finding strength in the face of grave misunderstanding. 
(Photo Credit: Alex Apostolidis)

Common Holly

A Guide to Common Holly’s When I say to you Black Lightning

Red River Dialect is a British folk-rock band. Their new album, Abundance Welcoming Ghosts, is out now via Paradise of Bachelors.
(Photo Credit: Jimmy Robertson)

Red River Dialect

A Guide to Red River Dialect’s Abundance Welcoming Ghosts

Sui Zhen is an experimental pop and performance artist. Her new album Losing, Linda is out September 27 via Cascine.

Sui Zhen

A Guide to Sui Zhen’s Losing, Linda

Many an aspiring musician has cursed his or her day job. Not indie folk artist Luke Hogan. His career as a carpenter has helped him to build his career as a musician. For Luke, a fortuitous turn of events enabled him to finance his imaginatively textured debut record, Thank You Stranger, by bartering his skills and building the studio it would soon be recorded in.
Thank You, Stranger is a folk album with songs that have blossomed with intriguing arrangements, and bold textural touches such as strings, synthetic atmospherics, and non-traditional percussion. Thematically, the album manages to be paradoxically personal and opaque.
Pondering the release of his debut album, Luke says: “I connect with records on a very personal level. My hope for this record is that it may be there for others in the same way that some of my favorite records were there for me. To me, that would mean ‘success.’”
(Photo Credit: Callie Bowen)

Luke Hogan

Hear First: Luke Hogan’s Thank You, Stranger

<div class="c-message__content c-message__content--feature_sonic_inputs" data-qa="message_content">Jason Hawk Harris hit rock bottom during the writing and recording of his debut full-length Love &amp; the Dark. In the last few years, the Houston-born-and-raised, Los Angeles-based musician endured life-altering hardships — illness, death, familial strife, and addiction — yet from these trials, a luxuriant and confident vision of art country emerged: Love &amp; The Dark.</div>

Jason Hawk Harris

A Guide to Jason Hawk Harris’s Love & The Dark

Ross Farrar is the lead vocalist of Ceremony, a rock &#8216;n roll band from Rohnert Park, California. He currently lives in Syracuse, NY. where he is pursing an MFA in poetry at Syracuse University.

Ross Farrar

Anthony Anzaldo is a guitarist and founding member of punk band <a href="http://www.ceremonyhc.com/">Ceremony</a> and live guitarist for &#8217;80s pop sensation Taylor Dayne. He practices a vegan and straight edge lifestyle and currently resides in LA.

Anthony Anzaldo

A Guide to Ceremony’s In The Spirit World Now

Andy Stack is primarily known in the music world as one half of indie powerhouse Wye Oak, delegating his limbs to drumming, keyboards, and programming, typically at the same time. With Release the Dogs, his solo debut album as Joyero, Stack takes his musical experiences from that project (as well as time on the road and in the studio with Lambchop, Helado Negro, Thor Harris, Madeline Kenney, and EL VY) and pushes his music forward across adventurous landscapes and into a more lyrically personal territory.

Joyero

A Guide to Joyero’s Release the Dogs

The seeds for Bluebird were sown starting in 2015 when Nick Sanborn and I [Chris Rosenau] were both performing at the inaugural Eaux Claires festival. We were performing in different projects, but, encouraged by the promoters and in the collaborative spirit of the festival, we decided to try an improv duo set together. We had been friends and collaborators for years, but had never done anything like that together before. We were booked for Friday July 17, 2015, talked once over the phone about our general approach to the performance, and met at the stage that afternoon. The day was beautiful; very warm. The stage we were playing, The Channel, was literally a geodesic dome at the top of a hill, and the heat that had been building up all day had nowhere to go. It must have been 100F in that dome that afternoon. Nick and I figured we’d play around a 20 – 30 minute set, but, with years of friendship and music behind us, no plan whatsoever regarding what we’d play, the amazing crowd and the hallucinatory heat, when we finally looked up at each other and smiled after the final note ended ~ 50 minutes later, we knew we were onto something.
We continued to collaborate annually at each subsequent Eaux Claires festival, and always talked about getting together and documenting this collaboration. It finally came together in October 2017. Nick and Amelia Meath had just set up a small house/studio in the woods of North Carolina between Chapel Hill and Durham, and Nick wanted to kick the tires of the new studio. This seemed like the perfect opportunity. The plan was to seclude ourselves at their new place, hang out, have some fun, and capture some of those ideas we had developed over the years, as well as some new improvisations. From there we’d work back into them with other instrumentation, and see if we could get a finished record together.
The reality was that the weather in North Carolina that weekend was beautiful and warm, and we ended up doing some test recordings before we even shut the doors or windows on the small studio/house. As we listened back before officially pressing “record,” we realized that recording with everything completely open to the outside world so strongly evoked the sonics and feeling in the main living room recording space, that we decided to embrace it. We added more room mics, played/improvised/wrote all day for two days straight, and documented it all. It rained, birds chirped, dogs barked, we joked around and had the fun we had been talking about for years. And it was all captured as we experienced it.
As we were packing up that Sunday morning I was flying back to Milwaukee, we did some rough mixes of the session to ensure we’d have something to listen and react to over the next months. We listened to those mixes over the next months as we delved into other projects, talking, barking, chirping, and all. When we talked again, Nick had an idea: Keep it. Keep all of it. No working back in, no editing of us goofing around, no mixing out the dogs and the rain. Keep everything that we heard and experienced that weekend and present that as the project. I agreed 100%.
So, here’s Bluebird. The titles are the working titles we used that weekend, the mixes are the mixes we made as we were packing up that weekend, the pictures are the pictures we took that weekend. Our hope is for all of these things come together for you, the listener, as they did for us; to relay what we saw, what we heard, and how we felt that weekend.
It’s definitely not a traditional way to present a record, but it’s definitely the way we’d like to present this record.
(Photo Credit: Graham Tolbert)

Rosenau & Sanborn

A Guide to Rosenau & Sanborn’s Bluebird

Emily Alone is a collection of songs made by Florist songwriter Emily Sprague during a time of great stillness and isolation with the self. An attempt to capture the dark spaces between change and acknowledge their beauty. It is a natural, isolated, and momentary tangent away from the otherwise collaborative project that is Florist, while still maintaining the documentary nature of the band that, like all things, is a mutable entity in this universe. These songs, as they exist now, were born partly out of literal distance from her bandmates on the East Coast, and partly out of urgency to translate an emotional moment.
Emily wrote and recorded all 12 tracks in her Los Angeles home during the last, rainy months of 2018. After moving to California from New York a year prior, Emily found herself in a transformative time of self exploration and independence after leaving the many lives she knew of as home on the East Coast to start on a new journey. Living alone and separate from many of the things she once held most close, a deep dive into the dark void of the mind began. There is a metaphysical quality to the songs as they search for meaning in existence, swaying between the mundane and the spiritual. Emily believes deeply in the magic and connectedness of all things. The album Emily Alone is the creation of a self reflective lens through which we can view that omnipresence of love and life and the energy of all things around us as well as within us.
(Photo Credit: Carley Solether)

Florist

A Guide to Florist’s Emily Alone

The genre-defying Mekons formed in Leeds, England in 1977, born form the emerging British punk scene. They progressed from socialist art students with no musical skills to the prolific, raucous progeny of Hank Williams. This current classic line-up has remained intact since the mid-1980s. Theirs is an improbable history — a surprising and influential embrace of folk and country music; with occasional forays into the art world. Throughout their history, they have worked collaboratively and collectively with everything credited to the band, never to individuals. Their mind-boggling output consistently blurs the lines between high art and low and has included exhibitions in the UK and US, a deranged musical recorded and staged with Kathy Acker, an art performance with Vito Acconci, and several books including the unique art catalog/unfinished novel Mekons United. The Mekons continue to make bold, unpredictable music while staying true to the punk ethos. Their mind-boggling output consistently blurs the lines between high art and low and they remain one of the truly great live bands.
Mekons are subjects of the fantastic 2014 documentary <a href="http://www.mekonsmovie.com/Revenge_of_the_Mekons/HOME.html">Reve</a><a href="http://www.mekonsmovie.com/Revenge_of_the_Mekons/HOME.html">nge</a><a href="http://www.mekonsmovie.com/Revenge_of_the_Mekons/HOME.html"> of</a><a href="http://www.mekonsmovie.com/Revenge_of_the_Mekons/HOME.html"> the</a><a href="http://www.mekonsmovie.com/Revenge_of_the_Mekons/HOME.html"> M</a><a href="http://www.mekonsmovie.com/Revenge_of_the_Mekons/HOME.html">ekons</a>, which you can watch on Netflix, iTunes, and Amazon.
(Photo Credit: Paul Beaty)

Mekons

A Guide to Mekons’ Deserted

<div class="signed-out-artists-bio-text">
Daughter of Swords is Alexandra Sauser-Monnig of Mountain Man.
(Photo Credit: Kendall Bailey Atwater)
</div>

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