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Talkhouse

Deeper&#8216;s Shiraz Bhatti, Nic Gohl, and Drew McBride take a thoughtful and direct approach with their songwriting, yielding spry melodies and inventive structures. It’s a clever combination of jagged post-punk and refined indie rock. A tightly wound rhythm section teeters on the edge, but is anchored by intricate guitar interplay and saturated with an enigmatic spirit. Their first album, 2018’s Deeper channeled the anxiety of change in everyday life and navigating the unhinged political atmosphere. Run takes a more existential approach, reaching down past the emotion and staring back at the inner.
Backed by an astutely scientific cover of the John Maus rarity “Bennington”, Deeper sheds the searching bottled up in previous material, carving out an ambit distinctly their own. Brisk, pointed and efficient, and no note wasted, Run b/w Bennington, a new 7 Inch out in October 2019, sets the stage for the Chicago trio’s sophomore LP.
(Photo Credit: Brendan Carroll)

Deeper

Love is everyday magic. That’s the impression you get listening to Water, the new album by Chicago trio Dehd. Love rises up into the atmosphere like steam off a summer sidewalk and makes you wild. Love breaks your heart and you consider yourself lucky for it. Like water itself, it surrounds us, it supports us; it’s what we’re made of. It takes the shape of its container.
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That’s something Jason Balla, Emily Kempf, and Eric McGrady discovered quickly after forming Dehd in 2014. Balla and Kempf are both veterans of Chicago’s increasingly fruitful DIY scene (Balla with Ne-Hi and Earring, Kempf with Vail and formerly with Lala Lala). When they joined forces with first-time drummer Eric McGrady, they discovered they shared a strange and inexplicable chemistry. The music they make — hazy and reverb-drenched, a scuzzy and hyped-up take on surf rock that could only come from the Third Coast — came so intuitively, it made all three feel like they were stewards of something bigger than themselves, even while that very thing is unmistakably drawn from their own personalities.
Water finds Dehd’s three members united as they push themselves beyond their natural limits and end up in places they wouldn’t have imagined. Balla’s production incorporates flubbed notes and dropped beats, and it emphasizes he and Kempf’s occasionally strained voices. It’s all animated by the red-lining feel-good spirit of the Velvet Underground’s Loaded and the breezy melodicism of C86-era indie rock, with a dash of the Cramps’ spooky-hop bop courtesy of McGrady’s locomotive drumming.
Which makes Water feel like a different kind of record: It’s at once a mature and grounded look at adult relationships, and a raucous celebration of friendship, and a cracked piece of purely musical bliss. It’s a clear-eyed look at the wild nature of everyday life that’s been spun up in sugary sweet melodies and scratched-crystal sounds.
(Photo Credit: Alexa Viscius)
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Dehd

Music

Dehd and Deeper Talk Chicago’s DIY Family Unit

Tony Price is a New York based producer, musician, and songwriter. Born in Greektown, Toronto, Price has lent his expertise to a wide range of critically acclaimed records on labels like 4AD, Slumberland, DFA, Slumberland, and Burger Records amongst many others. In 2017 he founded his label and creative services unit Maximum Exposure, which quickly became an in-demand entity, providing production and design expertise to the likes of Capitol Records, Pat McGrath Labs, Vogue, SSENSE, 4AD, and Night School Recordings amongst others.

Tony Price

Young Guv Talks Making a Rock & Roll Album in 2019

Tim Bluhm is frontman of acclaimed San Francisco rock outfit The Mother Hips, a solo artist, an accomplished rock climber, and an avid paraglider. In late 2015, Tim was speed-flying near California’s 10,000 ft. Mt. San Jacinto when he lost control and crashed – an accident that he and doctors considered near fatal. He shattered his pelvis and his foot was nearly separated from his leg, connected by an artery. Though doctors said he would never walk again, Tim has made almost a complete recovery. Over the course of a dozen surgeries and heavy rehabilitation, Tim wrote the songs on his appropriately-named new album, Sorta Surviving.

Tim Bluhm

Tim Bluhm Confronts His Fears

Rachel Browne and Andrew Futral formed Field Mouse sometime in 2009 after meeting at SUNY Purchase. After releasing two 7&#8243; singles, they signed to Topshelf Records and released their first full length Hold Still Life (2014) followed by Episodic (2016). Their new album, Meaning, was released August 16, 2019.

Field Mouse

Field Mouse and Control Top Talk Ditching Grad School and the Meaning of Meaning

Collapsing Scenery is the meeting of two fertile and febrile minds, Don De Vore (Ink &amp; Dagger, Lilys, The Icarus Line, Amazing Baby) and Reggie Debris. Together they straddle the gap between music, art, film, and politics, seamlessly moving between each with the same ease at which they traverse the globe, soaking up experiences and immersing themselves in different cultures.
Since they formed in 2013 “under a pall of paranoia and disgust” they haven’t stopped moving. They&#8217;ve recently collaborated with Jamaican dancehall legend Ninjaman, Beastie Boys producer/collaborator Money Mark, and no-wave pioneer James Chance. The band also has remixes out or on the way from Genesis P-Orridge (Psychic TV, Throbbing Gristle), Jennifer Herrema (Royal Trux), Uniform, Youth Code, Brian DeGraw (Gang Gang Dance), Oliver, and more.
Their forthcoming debut album Stress Positions is a glorious collision of futurist electro, glacial goth tones, techno, post-punk and chillwave recorded using analogue electronics: samplers, step sequencers, synths and drum machines.
Collapsing Scenery are artistic explorers pushing into bold new futures, then. Join them.

Collapsing Scenery

Collapsing Scenery and Colum McCann Talk Protest Music, and Protesting in General

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

Jan St. Werner is a critically acclaimed and internationally recognized sound innovator. In a myriad of ways — as a solo artist, a collaborator, through his group Mouse On Mars, as a producer, as a lecturer at MIT, or as a professor of Dynamic Acoustic Research at the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremburg — Werner has challenged traditional approaches to creating and experiencing music.

Jan St. Werner

Jan St. Werner and David Grubbs Talk the Fiepblatter Catalogue

Cross Record is the recording project of Emily Cross, an artist, musician, and death worker currently living in Austin, TX. Her new self-titled album was released August 2 on Ba Da Bing! Records.
(Photo Credit: Jackson Montgomery Schwartz)

Cross Record

In Conversation with Thor Harris and Cross Record

John Colpitts, aka Kid Millions is a drummer, composer, drum teacher and writer based in Queens, NY. He is best known for his work in the experimental rock band Oneida and his percussion group Man Forever. His latest album with Oneida, <a href="https://www.joyfulnoiserecordings.com/products/expensive-air" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Expensive Air</a>, is out now on Joyful Noise.

John Colpitts

Sofar Sounds: Concerts, Community, and Controversy

When asked, who is Kate Tempest? She gives a brief, albeit telling answer. “Kate Tempest is the words,” she responds. You haven’t ever seen, heard, or experienced anyone quite like her. Tempest uncovers the missing link between the Golden Ages of literature and hip-hop. The London-born BRIT Award-nominated spoken word artist, rapper, poet, novelist, and playwright rhymes with a century-turning fury. Since her emergence in 2011, she has redefined what it means to be a wordsmith in the Modern Age. To date, she has published three poetry collections, staged three plays, and released two studio albums — Everybody Down (shortlisted for the 2014 Mercury Prize) and Let Them Eat Chaos (shortlisted for the 2017 Mercury Prize). Along the way, she entranced audiences on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, NPR’s Tiny Desk, and more. Not to mention, she garnered widespread critical acclaim from the New York Times, The New Yorker, Forbes, and more, to name a few. In the midst of this whirlwind journey, she performed a passage of her popular 75-minute narrative poem, &#8220;Brand New Ancients,&#8221; on Charlie Rose. Legendary producer and American Recordings Founder Rick Rubin caught the show, tracked down her phone number, and made a call. This set a series of events in motion that led to her debut album for American Recordings, The Book of Traps and Lessons, was released on June 14, 2019.
(Photo Credit: Julian Broad)

Kate Tempest

Kate Tempest Talks Live Performance as an Antidote to Numbness

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

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;

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