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Talkhouse

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

Music

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)

Haley Blais

From Passive to Passionate

Buzz Osborne is a founding member of “rock” band the Melvins. Over the past 30 years, he’s played on more than 50 recordings on various major and minor labels, and performed over 2000 shows. In 2012 the Melvins became the first band to release three different records in the same year with three different lineups of the band, and did a spring tour of the U.S., a Canadian tour, and a London show with Slayer to 10,000 people, then played shows in all 50 states, plus DC, in a record-setting 51 days. Osborne’s latest album, released under the moniker King Buzzo,  is a collaboration with Trevor Dunn of Mr. Bungle called Gift Of Sacrifice.

Buzz Osborne

Buzz Osborne Gives Us His Collaboration Wish List

After meeting six years ago and bonding over their shared love of music, Cody Bowles (they/them) and Kevin Comeau (he/him) became “instant best friends” and started jamming together in a local barn, switching up instruments, but never straying from a two-piece set-up. Making music that brings together a range of influences from folk and blues to psychedelic to prog rock, and drawing on their own intense personal chemistry, Crown Lands are a startlingly fresh jolt of energy.
The group’s name is indicative of their musical ambitions: “Crown Land” is territorial area belonging to the monarch — or, as Bowles puts it: “Crown Land is stolen land and we are reclaiming it.” Crown Lands are on a mission to represent a sense of empowerment for marginalized communities through their music and the weighty subject matter of their lyrics. “People are going to listen to you, so you may as well say something that matters,” says Comeau.
(Photo Credit: Travis Shin)

Crown Lands

On the Highway of Tears

Julie Weitz is a Los Angeles based artist whose work spans several media including video, film, performance and installation. Her practice is grounded in Jewish folklore, mysticism, humor and ritual. Weitz also works as a writer, educator and activist. Follow her at <a href="https://www.instagram.com/mygolem_is_here/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">MyGolem_is_Here</a> and view her work at <a href="http://www.julieweitz.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">http://www.julieweitz.com/</a>.

Julie Weitz

David Berman: I Don’t Know, Adonai

Gracie and Rachel are a study in duality: light and dark, classical leanings with a pop sensibility, Californians in New York. With forthcoming music releasing on Righteous Babe Records over the next several months (which will include their much-anticipated sophomore record), Gracie and Rachel&rsquo;s new work explores the depths of their emotional states and the walls we build up inside ourselves, asking us to break them all down in order to face our truths. It&rsquo;s music to excavate our inner fears and help us find the empowerment from within.
They will be releasing their album Hello Weakness, You Make Me Strong September 18 via Righteous Babe Records.&nbsp;
(Photo Credit: Tonje Thilesen)

Gracie and Rachel

Write Ugly, Edit Pretty

Tenci began as Jess Shoman’s bedroom-folk project in Chicago in December 2018.
With the help of Spencer Radcliffe and Tina Scarpello it quickly became something more fully-formed. By spring of 2019 they’d recorded their debut My Heart Is An Open Field, which is out now via Keeled Scales.
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The current lineup of Tenci includes Chicago musicians she met playing some of her earliest shows. Curt Oren plays saxophone, flute, and guitar. Isabel Reidy (of Izzy True) plays bass, and Joseph Farago (of Joey Nebulous) plays drums. They’ve added a depth and playfulness to the songs that have made them even bigger and full of life.
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(Photo Credit: Ashleigh Dye)

Tenci

Tenci Will Never Get Sick of Love Is Overtaking Me

REBELMATIC is easily one of the most important modern Black Punk/Hardcore bands playing and recording today.  Their appearance at Afro-Punk in 2017 was lauded by many for being a saving grace of a festival many felt had left it’s Black rock and alt roots.
REBELMATIC fashioned themselves from the rubble of the New York heavy rock scene abandoned by gentrification and the unlikely infiltration of pop music on the NYC underground&#8230; and quickly found themselves a refreshing addition to New York nightlife. They have become an iconic band with fans including HR of Bad Brains and Angelo Moore of Fishbone.
A writer once described REBELMATIC as “James Brown in a mosh pit.”  The band shares Brown&#8217;s soul, rhythm, urgency and social awareness wrapped in a Punk aesthetic.

Rebelmatic

Rebelmatic Makes Hardcore That Is Unapologetically Black

The Toronto-based sophisti-pop artist Elrichman — the project of Paul Erlichman — is set to release his new album, Heaven’s Mayor on April 24, 2020 via Madrid-based label, Bobo Integral. Following his work as part of Goosebump (formally Germaphobes), Erlichman, who also plays in the jangle-pop quartet, Ducks Unlimited, recorded the new album with producer, Alex Gamble (Fucked Up, Alvvays). It’s the first record under the Elrichman moniker since 2014’s Young, Healthy, and Wonderful and finds further contributions from members of Hooded Fang (Jon Pappo), Weaves (Zach Bines) and Twisted Pine (Anh Phung).
Recorded at Toronto&#8217;s recently closed studios, The Hive, Heaven’s Mayor looks to meticulously examine how to be honest with oneself in a world driven by consumption. It’s a theme that somewhat ironically resonates with the story of The Hive and many other ephemeral studios and venues across Toronto’s scene, being closed, removed and then replaced with condominiums or clothing stores. The level of rapport Elrichman demonstrates with himself is something he reflects onto a wider world context too. Whereas previously his writing has invoked the use of character sketches, Heaven’s Mayor, amongst its gorgeous string sections and &#8217;80s indie-pop, unabashedly portrays who he is as an artist. “I guess I&#8217;m at a point where I feel more comfortable putting myself in my songs,” he says. “It&#8217;s also kind of about feeling ridiculous being a male guitar-playing singer-songwriter in this age when lord knows there&#8217;s been enough of us.”
(Photo Credit: Chelsee Ivan)

Elrichman

Music By the Humbled, For the Humbled

Joy Downer is an LA-based musician whose latest album, Paper Moon, is out now.

music essay