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Talkhouse

Ember Knight is an LA-based musician and comedian. They&#8217;re the creator of the webseries The Ember Knight Show, and a series of shorts for Adult Swim called Ember&#8217;s Etiquette. Their latest record, Water Can Fly, is out now.

Ember Knight

Music

Haley Dahl (Sloppy Jane) and Ember Knight Love Brian Wilson

Sloppy Jane is an eight-to-11 piece music project led by Haley Dahl out of Brooklyn, NY (originating in Los Angeles). An ever-evolving lineup of players, friends, and collaborators. Elements of the live show include: laughter, choir vocals, xylophone, saxophone, kazoo, television, slide whistle, vomiting blue dye, a naked body, a rotting suit, guitar, bass, drums, tambourine, ruby red slippers, violent shifts in genre and speed, a make-believe maestro, and a set that does not stop moving once it has started.

Sloppy Jane

Best of 2021: Haley Dahl Is Super Happy About Gustaf’s Big Year

Claire Rousay is based in San Antonio, Texas. Her music zeroes in on personal emotions and the minutiae of everyday life — voicemails, haptics, environmental recordings, stopwatches, whispers and conversations — exploding their significance.
(Photo Credit: Dani Toral)

Claire Rousay

Claire Rousay and Haley Dahl Got Comfort Spoiled in Quarantine

Listening to Weeping Icon’s debut album is to enter a dim catacomb of psychical catharsis. A critical commentary on the unique pressures and power dynamics experienced by the social media generation, the self-titled LP digs sharply into the destructive, repetitive nature of the neoteric tasks idled through daily by the ambitious urban millennial. Uniquely contemporary and keenly perceptive, the ubiquity on this album is natural territory for drummer Lani Combier-Kapel and guitarist Sara Fantry, native New Yorkers who grew up playing in bands together at the center of the booming Brooklyn arts scene. Determined to vent the energy left stirring in the inert confines of lazy, decades-old band tropes, Weeping Icon is the almanac to the complex contrarian language they developed as innovational collaborators during a decade of major socio-political uprooting. Alongside the classically trained, sludge/doom seasoned bassist Sarah Reinold and the scientifically explorative noise musician (and daughter of a scientist) Sarah Lutkenhaus, they devised a dream project in which they could freely encourage equal collaboration, pursuit of challenge, and a dedication to dismantling the cliches they encountered as disenfranchised females in a male dominated arena.
The results are an expansive whirlwind of compelling sonics. Urgent yet calculated riffs rip through a thunderous pummel of percussion, Combier-Kapel&#8217;s anomalous blend of punk and psychedelic drumming carrying their songs with an atmosphere of organized chaos. Typical song structure is a rubric to draw from and ultimately deconstruct, as we experience through the whipping tempo changes and sudden tactile shifts that unseat us throughout the album. Switching off vocalists, they give us a panoramic view into the plagued world of the millennial female, with lyrics that reveal intense contemplation, telling harsh truths through dark and poignant sarcasm. Confronting a generation undergoing perplexing, exponentiated change, Weeping Icon doses their listeners with such a controlled sense of horror and humor that they test our very comprehension of the world we participate in.
Weeping Icon is a collection of seven songs that archive the band’s metamorphosis into a heavier and more provocative undertaking. In keeping with their live performance, a sequence of dystopian sound interludes complete the album, serving as guided meditations between the candid subversive fury of the main tracks.
(Photo Credit: John Swanson)

Weeping Icon

“Everyone’s Looking For An Excuse to Do Something Cool”: a Conversation with Sloppy Jane and Weeping Icon