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Talkhouse

In 2015, Oakland-based group Thao &amp; The Get Down Stay Down was invited to perform in Vietnam by the Hanoi US Embassy, as part of a celebration commemorating the 20th anniversary of normalization of relations between the two countries. It was also bandleader Thao Nguyen’s first visit to her homeland. Accompanied by her mom, who had not been to Vietnam in 43 years since fleeing the war, this trip laid the groundwork for the band’s most recent, critically acclaimed album, <a href="https://dominorecordco.cmail20.com/t/d-l-cttklyk-ykdthklrtk-o/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Temple</a>. Nobody Dies, a 2017 film directed by Todd Krolczyk, documents that trip. “A profound short documentary that lays bare the bittersweet joy of returning to a homeland tarnished by personal and political loss” per KQED, it was initially broadcast on PBS in partnership with the Center For Asian American Media.

Thao Nguyen

Music

Thao Nguyen Embraces Her Cultural Heritage and Her Queer Identity After the Fact and Right On Time

STRFKR’s sound has morphed over the years through variations of hyper catchy, danceable pop, but this is something very different. For a little shy of an hour, Ambient 1 drifts through softly glowing electronic instrumentals that extract the synth core from the group’s well established synth pop sound. The inspirations for Ambient 1 were as amorphous as the album itself. Upon completing work on the lo-fi dreaminess of the band’s recent Future Past Life, STRFKR’s principal songwriter Josh Hodges found himself returning repeatedly to albums by his favorite ambient artists and minimal composers.
(Photo Credit: Coco Foto)

STRFKR

Josh Hodges on the Ambient Records That Influenced STRFKR

A Chronological Remembrance of Eddie Van Halen

Caleb Nichols (he/they) is a writer, musician, and librarian from California, occupying Tilhini, the Place of the Full Moon, the unceded territory of the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini tribe. His poetry has been featured in Hoax, Redivider, 14 Poems, and DEAR Poetry Journal, among other publications and his chapbook “Teems///\Recedes&#8221; which Chen Chen called “a gorgeous abundance” is out from Kelp Books. Caleb’s debut solo album Ramon, a queer rock opera based on the Beatles song “Mean Mr. Mustard,” is out on Kill Rock Stars, and he is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Bangor University in Wales. Caleb also owns and operates the SLO Book Bike, a queer-owned, bike-powered, pop-up bookshop in San Luis Obispo, and works as a librarian at Cal Poly State University.

Caleb Nichols

William, It Was Really Something

K Nkanza Hansen is a musician and visual artist from Maryland. They’re the producer and multi-instrumentalist behind projects Spring Silver and Blonde Duluth. As of May 2020, they have graduated from University of Maryland, Baltimore County with a BFA in Visual Arts.

Spring Silver

Eccojams Vol. 1 Was the Blueprint for Vaporwave

As a filmmaking duo Puloma Basu and Rob Hatch-Miller were listed among <a href="https://variety.com/gallery/10-documakers-to-watch-2019/#!2/puloma-basu-and-rob-hatch-miller">Variety&#8217;s 10 Documentary Filmmakers To Watch In 2019</a>. Puloma has been active in the film &amp; TV industry for over a decade and has worked on many notable TV shows including Flight Of The Conchords and Bored To Death, and on films such as St. Vincent, The Namesake, and Arbitrage. Rob is a filmmaker and Producers Guild of America member based in Los Angeles, CA. Rob directed the documentary features <a href="http://othermusicdocumentary.com/">Other Music</a> (Tribeca Film Festival 2019) and <a href="http://syljohnsonmovie.com/">Syl Johnson: Any Way The Wind Blows</a> (Best Documentary Feature, Sidewalk Film Festival 2016). Other Music, which features interviews with Matt Berninger, Tunde Adebimpe, Animal Collective, Ezra Koenig, JD Samson, and many more, is available now on all major VOD platforms, including Amazon Prime, iTunes, and Google Play.
(Photo Credit: Lauren Randolph)

Puloma Basu and Rob Hatch-Miller

The Other Music Documentary Pays Tribute to a Sacred Gathering Place

Dan Deacon’s newest score, for the HBO dog-grooming documentary Well Groomed, follows the release of his fifth studio album Mystic Familiar and is the latest addition to his collaborative repertoire which includes soundtracks for films Rat Film, Time Trial, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Twixt, as well as works with the NYCBallet, LAPhil, and Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Well Groomed immerses the viewer in the colorful and surreal subculture of competitive creative dog grooming, a world where prizes are awarded transforming dogs into flamboyant living art objects. The lighter tone and largely upbeat subject matter of the documentary offered Deacon an opportunity to compose with more playful tones and organic instrumentation not usually found in his work such as vibraphone, guitar, and piano. From Vangelis-inspired soundscape to Krautrock-influenced anthems, the Well Groomed soundtrack channels the ecstatic energy of Deacon’s legendary live shows more than any of his film work to date.
(Photo Credit: Phil Kilne)

Dan Deacon

The Way Forward: Dan Deacon

Widowspeak is singer-songwriter Molly Hamilton and guitarist Robert Earle Thomas. Their fifth album, Plum, is out August 28, 2020 via Captured Tracks.

Widowspeak

What Does It Even Mean To Be a “Successful” Musician?

On the spacious and somber Still No Mother, Colorado songwriter Logan Farmer processes and explores climate change anxiety using the framework of the American folk song. The album grew from an initial concept of imagining the songs farmhands will sing when their acreage has dried up or burned, and rising sea levels begin engulfing the coasts — not unlike those sung by Woody Guthrie during the devastation of the Dust Bowl. While much art on this subject focuses on external imagery like glacial melt or wildfires, Farmer instead points his writing inward to examine the human mind’s relationship to this impending reality, and the psychological burdens therein.
(Photo Credit: Ben Ward)

Logan Farmer

No Calm Before the Storm

Jimmy Chamberlin is best known as the drummer of Smashing Pumpkins, a position he still holds with the active band today. On the side, Chamberlin has played with many other groups, including the jazzy combo that bears his name: The Jimmy Chamberlin Complex. That band will release a four-song album on September 25 called Honor.

Jimmy Chamberlin

Jimmy Chamberlin on his New Complex Song, Social Media, and the Future of the Pumpkins

LA based musician and composer Asy Saavedra is breaking out on her own, building the kind of tonal galaxies that music nerds can only dream of. While she performs with her sister Chloe Saavedra in their band Chaos Chaos (formerly Smoosh), she has been cutting her teeth on a string of new projects that bring home her unique flavor of ethereal, synth-infused sound.
Raised in Seattle, WA, and Stockholm, Asy was drawn to her family’s piano from the start; her mother would place children’s books on the music rack and Asy would compose music to accompany the pictures. The sisters Saavedra stumbled into Jason McGerr, the drummer for Death Cab for Cutie, at their local music store. He became their music teacher and mentor, helping them craft the initial sound of Smoosh. After signing with local label Pattern25, the tween duo jettisoned onto the music scene with their 2004 debut album, She Like Electric; even in the band’s earliest incarnation, Asy wrote tightly constructed lyrics, layering them over the electric bounce of Chloe’s beat.
In 2006, they were signed to Seattle-based indie label Barsuk Records and released their second LP, 2006’s Free To Stay. During the years that followed, they opened for Pearl Jam, Death Cab for Cutie, Sleater-Kinney, Jimmy Eat World, Cat Power, Nada Surf, and Sufjan Stevens, to name just a few. Their music was covered on NPR’s All Songs Considered, they were interviewed on The Today Show, and were eventually named “Band of the Year” by SPIN in 2005.
Smoosh’s final album came in 2010, with the self-released Withershins, a record that showed maturescence at work. Asy and Chloe experimented with both pace and genre, the tone of the album was notably darker than previous records, echoing the malaise of the record’s initial title The World&#8217;s Not Bad. The sisters seemed poised for their next creative leap, yet a shift seemed necessary. Chaos Chaos was both a name change and shedding of their child-prodigy background. The name was pulled from jargon their scientist dad bandied around the house; it’s the scientific classification for a species of amoeba that can alter its shape. They drew parallels between their band and the organism: “simple but always changing.”
As the sisters continue their metamorphosis, they both have branched out with solo efforts. Asy’s latest project as composer for the indie game Trover Saves The Universe, finds her at the helm of a new frontier, building the sonic reality in which the characters live (and die). Inside the game, players confront a world of chaos, exploding bodies, and salty language geared for the gamer sect. It’s a scenario that materializes elegantly overtop Asy’s score, a collection of dreamy, glitch-infused, electro-pop science fiction. Darker scenes are delineated through Asy’s eerie, mutating vocal range; her piano adds to the feeling of despair, a wrong turn taken. The writing process involved daily dives into the game itself, experimenting with what sounds fit the scene. Her customary mix of organic and digital equipment are showcased in their full range within the score; her recording “control room” included a digital piano, a Juno 60, a korg prologue, a roland xp30, a theremin, and plugins like synplant, permut, TAl-U-NO-60, and bitspeek.

Asy Saavedra

How To Score a Video Game

Haley Blais is a Vancouver based singer-songwriter/musician. She’s been DIY-ing it since 2014, turning out song after song of defiant scream-into-your-pillow bedroom pop anthems. Since the success of her 2018 EP Let Yourself Go, Haley has organically earned a considerable online reputation for her self-deprecating, self-loving balladry sung out in operatic crescendos. 2020 sees the release of highly awaited debut Below the Salt via Tiny Kingdom Music.
(Photo Credit: Lindsay Elliott)

music essay