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Talkhouse

Kevin Devine is an independent singer-songwriter from Brooklyn, New York. He plays alone, with his Goddamn Band, and as a member of Bad Books. The first run of his Devinyl Splits, released between February 2015 and March 2016, consisted of six split 7” singles, each featuring Devine and a different partner.  The series, released by Bad Timing Records and Devinyl Records, returns in 2018 for another run.

Kevin Devine

Music

Three Great Things: Kevin Devine

Eric D. Johnson records and performs as the Fruit Bats. His latest album under the name is Gold Past Life. In 2020, he started the supergroup Bonny Light Horseman with Anais Mitchell and Josh Kaufman, and their self-titled debut was nominated for two Grammy Awards.
(Photo Credit: Annie Beedy)

Fruit Bats

Three Great Things: Fruit Bats

Black Mountain’s Stephen McBean turned 16 after Woodstock but before Varg started burning down Norwegian churches. And yet, until just two short years ago, McBean had lived his entire adolescence and adult life without a proper driver’s license, that first and most coveted ticket to personal independence. When he did finally take the wheel in 2017, he essentially became a Sixteen Year Old for the first time, blowing out the doors of the DMV like a pyrotechnics display at a W.A.S.P. gig. Black Mountain’s new album, Destroyer, named after the discontinued single-run 1985 Dodge Destroyer muscle car, is imbued with all that wild-ass freedom and newfound agency (and anxiety and fear) that comes with one&#8217;s first time behind the wheel.
Shacked up in his rehearsal space, McBean found an old chair in an alley, spray painted Producer on the back and pressed record. Friends from the endless rock &amp; roll highway were invited over and 22 songs were brought to life. And while some were laid back into shallow graves to dig up once again at a later date, the remaining skeletons were left above ground — given organs, skin, eyes, and the opportunity to grow their hair real long and greasy. Some of these zombie hesher jams were sent on a journey to Canada where longtime band member Jeremy Schmidt, slipping on the Official Collaborator satin jacket, had at them with his legendary synth arsenal. As he added long flowing robes, sunglasses, driving gloves and medallions, the undead songs began to transform into the new breathing creatures that make up Destroyer. Schmidt’s work with these songs was the needed transformative glue for this new era of Black Mountain.
Coming off his newfound automotive freedom, McBean also saw some personnel shuffling within Black Mountain. Both Joshua Wells and Amber Webber have retired their Black Mountain Army uniforms while Arjan Miranda paid his outstanding membership dues and rejoined. New members include Rachel Fannan (Sleepy Sun) and Adam Bulgasem (Dommengang &amp; Soft Kill) plus other familiar names like Kliph Scurlock (Flaming Lips), Kid Millions (Oneida), and John Congleton (St Vincent, Swans) take a turn in the shotgun seat. Collectively, there’s a renewed vitality to Black Mountain on Destroyer — a seasoned, veteran of heady hard rock that’s found new, young muscles to flex and roads to explore.
(Photo Credit: Magdalena Wosinska)

Black Mountain

Three Great Things: Black Mountain

Dan “The Automator” Nakamura is one of the most celebrated and successful music producers of our time. The Automator sound is unique, an eclectic yet deliberate storm of burr and jangle, spattering off slow-grinding plates of rhythmic bedrock and slashed through with expected flashes of light and heat. It’s the sound of new creation; the sound of the end of the world. It has sent acts like Gorillaz, Cornership and Kasbian to the top of the charts, and it has turned visionaries like Kool Keith and Del tha Funkee Homosapien into underground legends.

Dan The Automator

Three Great Things: Dan The Automator

Claudia Gonson is the manager for The Magnetic Fields and all of Stephin Merritt&#8216;s projects. Gonson met Merritt in high school in the &#8217;80s, and the pair have been working together ever since. Along with her management work, Claudia records and performs with The Magnetic Fields as their pianist and occasional singer, and sings with another Merritt project, Future Bible Heroes. Previously, Claudia played drums with TMF, also with the bands Tender Trap and Honeybunch. Claudia has collaborated with Shirley Simms, Tanya Donnelly, and authors Rick Moody and Neil Gaiman. Currently, Claudia is studying to be a therapist, while raising her daughter, and continues to manage and work with Stephin Merritt.

Claudia Gonson

Gig Economy: Claudia Gonson

Shamir is Shamir and remains Shamir through and through, no matter what the universe puts him through. You may know the singularly named artist (think—Madonna or Cher) from his 2015 debut hit record Rachet, beloved by NPR listeners and club kids alike. After quickly rising to underground fame with his Northtown EP in 2014, the DIY pop star made a sonic splash with Rachet’s lead single “On The Regular,” a poppy banger that had extensive commercial usage. But how to follow all that up? Shamir, who came from the dusty dunes of Las Vegas, to Brooklyn’s Silent Barn, to the Philly indie scene (and all over the world in between), wanted to go back to what had inspired him from the beginning. Outsider music, country &amp; punk. Raw and vulnerable tunes, stripped down to their emotional core. 2017’s Revelations explored a new avenue of guitar driven hooky indie rock and was widely critically praised in the US and overseas.
Shamir’s most recent releases, the brilliant Room 7” on Father/Daughter, and his self-released limited edition album, Resolution, are pinnacles in the catalog of the increasingly fascinating artist’s career. Room and its b-side Caballero celebrate Shamir’s love of country music, while Resolution is a deeply introspective look into the fabric of society and the artists’ own mind.  With these two releases he has refined his craft exponentially and done so in less than six months from the release of Revelations.

Shamir Bailey

Ratchet TV: Shrill

ENDERNESS, A.A. Bondy’s first album in eight years, was finished the day before a wildfire burned his house down. He recorded and played everything himself. Fat Possum will release on May 10.

A.A. Bondy

Three Great Things: A.A. Bondy

The ever-evolving spectacle that is Diane Coffee — the gender and genre-bending alter ego of Shaun Fleming — returns with Internet Arms, a swan dive into a lush, digital glam wonderland.
Fleming’s path to stardom can be traced all the way back to his childhood days as a Disney voice actor, but for the past six years he’s explored the depths of his identity and channeled it outward in the form of the enigmatic and exuberant Diane Coffee.
In 2018, after performing as King Herod in the Lyric Opera’s critically-acclaimed run of Jesus Christ Superstar, Fleming emerged from the recording studio with Internet Arms. Born from the fear and uncertainty of a future in which humankind is both dependent on and poisoned by technology, the album finds Diane Coffee trapped in a digital world, enslaved by AI. As a whole, Internet Arms marks a significant new phase for Fleming, a testimony to the idea that Diane Coffee will endure as a fluid form of expression that continues to defy expectations of sound and genre.
(Photo Credit: Alexa Viscius)

Diane Coffee

Three Great Things: Diane Coffee

Eoin French is the Irish artist better known as Talos. While Talos will always be deeply connected to his native Ireland, his stunning sophomore album, Far Out Dust, draws on a far wider perspective, melding tracks written and recorded in New York, Los Angeles, London, Dublin, Cork, and Reykjavik. The influence of the unknown runs deep here, invigorating French’s haunting blend of organic and electronic music with a gorgeous sense of discovery and wonder. But where Talos’ acclaimed debut, Wild Alee, was a solitary affair about isolation and escape, Far Out Dust finds French actually embarking on his long-imagined journeys, drawing strength and comfort from lived experience and deep human connection. The result is both his most ambitious songwriting and most sophisticated studio work, a collection that absolutely radiates creative confidence even as it wrestles with the pain of doubt and regret.
(Photo Credit: Niall O&#8217;Brien)

Talos

Gig Economy: Talos

Ratchet TV: Losers

I Am Casting is a project helmed by Cole Guerra. After touring in support of last album, Scarves &amp; Knives, Cole disappeared from the music landscape, only recently re-emerging with new music. I Am Casting was adopted as the artist name for the project, highlighting the focus on characters (including &#8220;bad actors&#8221;), hinting at the music&#8217;s cinematic and theatrical elements, and more flexibly setting an expectation that the musical approach might change from scene to scene, album to album.
​I Am Casting&#8217;s debut album is called Carnival Barkers. Sitting atop textured arrangements are lyrics shaped to a considerable degree by the political landscape of the time — songs about manipulation, about predators and clowns, about appeals to fear and anger and tribe.
(Photo Credit: Alex Boerner)

I Am Casting

Gig Economy: I Am Casting

Morgan Enos is a musician, essayist and music journalist specializing in classic rock. He records and performs as <a href="https://finalhouse.bandcamp.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://finalhouse.bandcamp.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1567703426703000&amp;usg=AFQjCNE969PQS5H6jwcQaH3Zb_8LZ4WVew">Other Houses</a> and has bylines in Billboard, HuffPost, the Recording Academy, Vinyl Me, Please, TIDAL and more. He is also the co-founder and editor of <a href="https://northoftheinternet.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://northoftheinternet.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1567703426703000&amp;usg=AFQjCNGi0xmSRKyGPRseoPZ41v4L7WkbQw">North of the Internet</a>, a series of conversations with creative people. He can be found at <a href="https://www.morganenos.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.morganenos.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1567703426703000&amp;usg=AFQjCNG79-8vfghEO9sl4msNRI9Ts-3rdQ">his website</a>.
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