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Talkhouse

Ghost Orchard, aka Sam Hall, is a Grand Rapids, MI-based artist. His album Bunny is out August 23 via Orchid Tapes.

Ghost Orchard

Foxes in Fiction is the project of the Toronto native/New York-based artist Warren Hildebrand. He is also the founder of Orchid Tapes.&nbsp;

Foxes In Fiction

Music

GChatting with Ghost Orchard and Foxes In Fiction

Evocative music can be some of the best. And musician Shannon Carey, who performs under the moniker Luray, has a particular knack for doing just that. Her songs feel welcoming, yet elusive, like a long-forgotten photograph you find at the bottom of a box, a memory that gets hazier with each passing year.
&#8220;My songs tell me what’s going on with me, like my unconscious trying to get my attention,&#8221; explains Carey, who had plenty to unravel in her life leading up to the recording of her sophomore full length, Dig. &#8220;My marriage broke up while I was writing this album and the songs started to speak to me about my relationship and what I was hoping for and holding onto. What I wasn’t letting myself acknowledge. I moved to Richmond and set to finishing the songs for the record. I wrote more songs about how it felt to lose, and how it felt to be starting over.&#8221;
Although Carey has called Richmond, Virginia home for a number of years, her music has an inescapable imprint of her Wisconsin upbringing. And it&#8217;s back in Eau Claire, Wisconsin that she set about recording the album, enlisting her brother Sean Carey to produce. &#8220;The band drove out to Wisconsin and met up with Sean and engineer Brian Joseph, who had just completed building his own studio, which he called The Hive. It&#8217;s in the woods and feels very &#8216;Northern Wisconsin&#8217; — feels like a little haven from the world.&#8221; The Hive became the perfect locale to capture such a personal collection of songs. &#8220;It’s hard to explain how intimate the recording process was, but it felt very insular and almost delicate. After the end of that relationship that had been so central, I felt a little fragile and obviously in transition. Sometimes you can hear something tentative in my vocals. I had been getting my new life together for the past year, but it still felt strange.&#8221;
The eleven songs that came to form Dig provide a stolen glance at a snapshot of Shannon Carey&#8217;s life, yet invite listeners into the story to explore for themselves. It also marks the closing of one chapter and the beginning of the next.
(Photo Credit: Jake Cunningham)

Luray

Spend Some Quality Time with Luray and S. Carey

Shehzaad Jiwani is a musician, producer, writer and director from Toronto. He fronts the band Greys and performs solo under the name Golden Drag. As a producer, Shehzaad has worked with bands like The Dirty Nil, Casper Skulls, and Patio. His writing has appeared in Brooklyn Vegan, Hazlitt, Metro Toronto and others. He is currently filming his first documentary.

Shehzaad Jiwani

“We’re Ready To Be In the Future Now”: a Talk with Devin McKnight and Shehzaad Jiwani

Claude Fontaine is an American girl with a French name who never felt like she fit in anywhere she happened to call home, and one particular year she was awash in a grey London fog that matched the fog and grey in her own too-recently broken heart. While living right off Portobello Road, she stumbled into the record store down the street. And in a flash of luck — or fate — that particular record store turned out to be Honest Jon’s, a long-lived spot for records collected from the furthest edges of the world. She’d never heard those old Studio One and Trojan and Treasure Isle reggae and rocksteady and dub records before — the same records that got the Clash covering “Police And Thieves,” and the Slits sharing a bill with Steel Pulse. And she’d never heard bossa nova and tropicalia and Brazil’s incandescent música popular brasileira, either. But instantly, she understood — it was exactly and perfectly everything she didn’t know she needed.
And because she loved those records so much, she decided to make a record of her own — an album singing her own love songs (with Jane Birkin-style ye-ye elan) that was itself a love song to classic reggae and Brazilian music, and an album honoring that feeling of finding a home away from home. Ferociously inspired, she demo-ed a set of songs about heartbreak and loneliness, and drafted a wish list of musicians she’d hope would help out. At the top were guitarist Tony Chin, whose playing with Althea and Donna, King Tubby, Dennis Brown and so many more very arguably defined a gigantic part of the classic reggae sound, and Airto Moreira, the Brazilian drummer whose work both solo and in collaboration — with Miles Davis, Astrud Gilberto, Chick Corea, Annette Peacock — make him an actual living legend.
But after diligent detective work — long chains of emails and voicemails, tracing between LA industry veterans and globetrotting photographers and the label that would put out her finished record, though she didn’t know that yet — she found them. Then she sent them her demos. Then they said yes.
She finished her album in two potent sessions with Chin, Moreira and a murderer’s row of their connections — bassist Ronnie McQueen of Steel Pulse and Ziggy Marley drummer Rock Deadrick, Now Again Records guitarist Fabiano Do Nascimento, Sergio Mendes percussionist Gibi Dos Santos and Flora Purim bassist Andre De Santanna. Side A is the reggae, five songs about love gone wrong that sound like they came out of Jamaica in the early 70s; side B wasn’t specifically designed to be the bossa or Brazilian side, but that’s how it worked out. All together, it’s a valentine to this special music that called out to her from the other side of the planet.

Claude Fontaine

Reggae Royalty: a Conversation with Tony Chin and Ronnie McQueen

Most people know Aaron Lee Tasjan as one of the wittiest, most offbeat, brilliant, weedsmokin’ &amp; LSD microdosin’ Americana troubadours writing and singing songs today. But steel yourselves, folk fans, because he’s about to follow his restless muse straight out from under the weight of everyone’s expectations into the kind of glammy, jingle-jangle 
power-pop- and- psych-tinged sounds he hasn’t dabbled in since his younger days playing lead guitar for a late-period incarnation of The New York Dolls.
Really, the roots of Tasjan’s new record, Karma for Cheap, stretch even deeper, drinking up the sounds of a Southern California childhood spent listening to The Beatles while riding around with his mom at the wheel of their navy blue Volvo station wagon — back to the very first pre-teen year he picked up a six-string and started figuring out all the pretty little chords in those Lennon-McCartney tunes. Back to the pure, blissful unfiltered innocence of falling in love with music for the first time.
Karma for Cheap is Tasjan’s third LP and second for his label New West Records, based in his current hometown of Nashville. The record was co-produced by ALT and his friends Jeff Trott (Stevie Nicks, Liz Phair, Meiko, Joshua Radin) and Gregory Lattimer (Albert Hammond Jr.) and features Aaron Lee’s road band — guitarist Brian Wright, 
bassist Tommy Scifres and drummer Seth Earnest — with whom he’s been touring heavily for the last two years.
While the stylistic shift from Tasjan’s palpably stoned ‘70s-country-channeling 2015 debut, In the Blazes, to his more sophisticated, introspective and lushly produced 2016 follow-up, Silver Tears, was relatively incremental, Karma’s rocked-up Brit-pop-influenced Beatles-Bowie-Badfinger vibes underscore a significant departure. The album boldly reimagines these vintage sounds, pushing the boundary of what can be considered Americana. With Karma, Tasjan establishes himself as an artist who not only evolves over time, but isn’t afraid to risk reinventing himself completely from one record to the next.
(Photo Credit: Curtis Wayne Millard)

Aaron Lee Tasjan

“What Haven’t I Said?” A Conversation with Aaron Lee Tasjan and Drivin N Cryin’s Kevn Kinney

Ren Aldridge is the frontwoman of the feminist hardcore punk band Petrol Girls.
(Photo Credit: Martyna Wisniewska)

Ren Aldridge

Sounds, Scenes, and Sexism

Joshua Z Weinstein is the director of Menashe, Drivers Wanted, and Flying On One Engine. He is the cinematographer of Bikini Moon, Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me, and Code of the West.

Joshua Z Weinstein

Film

“There’s Always Something Personal, Always Something a Little Different”: Jerry Schatzberg in Conversation with Joshua Z Weinstein

Richard Reed Parry is a core member of Arcade Fire, in which he plays a variety of instruments. As a solo artist, he recently released Quiet River of Dust Vol. 2, the second half of a pair of albums released via Secret City Records.
(Photo Credit: Zachary Hertzman)

Richard Reed Parry

On Leonard Cohen’s Supernova of a Life

Bellows is the bedroom recording project of songwriter and producer Oliver Kalb.

Bellows

Introducing: Bellows’ “Rosebush”

Harmony Tividad is a song writer from Los Angeles, CA. She plays in the band Girlpool and finds her spare time spent deconstructing God through the lens of a person who loves stuffed animals and crystals, but from a &#8220;practical&#8221; standpoint. When not writing in third person, she finds herself usually talking in first person about the myth and the lie. Much of her life has been spent deifying her acquaintances.
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Harmony Tividad

In the Groupchat with Harmony Tividad and Duster

Anna Biller&rsquo;s 35mm cult feature Viva and her 16mm art-film shorts have screened at major film festivals and art spaces around the world, and her work has been discussed in academic cinema journals. She is known for her use of classic and outdated film genres to talk about female roles within culture, coding feminist ideas within cinematic aesthetics and visual pleasure. She creates all of her own costumes and set designs, making many or the props and paintings as well as composing and scoring for her films. She has a BA in art from UCLA, and an MFA in art and film from CalArts. She continues to work on film because of her interest in emulating the look and feel of classic cinema, and her latest film, The Love Witch, was made using only traditional film processes.

Anna Biller

Visual Pleasure for Whom? Nina Menkes and Anna Biller Talk Queen of Diamonds and Female Representation on Screen

John Darnielle is a novelist and the primary member of the Mountain Goats. The band&#8217;s latest album, In League With Dragons, is out April 26 via Merge Records.
(Photo Credit: Lalitree Darnielle)

interview