Portland-based producer and musician Natasha Kmeto's third full-length record, 2020’s you’ve never danced alone, is a lighthouse for those who are lost, lonely and stressed on their journey, offering an alchemical perspective of empowerment that stems from undertaking shadow work in uncertain times. Released on Future Archive Recordings....
In the music video for "All the Unknown" from instrumental Turkish-German and Swiss duo Grandbrothers, the band's long-time collaborator Manfred Borsch captures the track's delightfully melodramatic moods through one man's exploration of external landscapes and internal realms. Below, Grandbrothers and Borsch discuss the epic nature of how the music ties...
frWe've finally made it to the bitter end of 2020, and believe it or not, human beings are still making amazing art in the midst of crisis and a pandemic. After a five-year hiatus, our Album Covers of the Year feature is back with a deep dive of artwork from...
Swathed in the unlikely comfort of warm grey tones, Toronto-based musician Hiroki Tanaka (田中博基) can be seen on the album cover for his debut solo record, Kaigo Kioku Kyoku (介護記憶曲), looking fairly somber in a space accented by Japanese relics and the simple adornments of a lived-in home. Diving deeper,...
Doubling as the dreamy, psychedel-ish music outfit Tan Cologne and the mysterious arts platform Psychic Sink, experimental musician Lauren Green and multi-hyphenate-creator Marissa Macias are incredibly generative collaborators. In 2014 and 2015, Green's desire to learn woodworking and Macias' pursuit of a cookbook project led each of them to Taos,...
Laraaji, whose name honors the divine energy of the sun, is a radiant personality who often plays up solar influences by dressing head-to-toe in a bright orange color, considered by Eastern yogis and color theorists as symbolic of transcendence. Sun Piano, his summer 2020 release on the British label, All...
LA-based musician and visual artist Vinyl Williams -- born Lionel Williams -- explores ontological realities and connecting nexuses of sound, harmony, digital world-building, and higher consciousness. Tapping into Aldous Huxley’s realm of “mystical insight,” Williams puts it succinctly that, “If you have a vision of the music you love, you...
"I had a big manifesto of 'no's' at the beginning, [of things] that I didn't want to do." As a composer, violinist, and multi-instrumentalist, Christopher Tignor has, since the early '00s, led the New York City-based instrumental groups Slow Six and Wires.Under.Tension. Up until recently, however, he'd had little interest in...
Thousands of years ago, the ancient Greeks would pilgrimage to Eleusis, in Attica, to watch a reenactment of the abduction of Persephone by Hades into the Underworld. These rites, known as the Eleusinian Mysteries, offered the ancient Greeks a tactile connection to the Myths of Demeter and Persephone, as well...
Nonkeen's Frederic Gmeiner and Nils Frahm grew up in a suburb of Hamburg, the German port city famous for the Beatles' pre-fame residency, nestled up near the North Sea. As they were meeting one another in primary school, their future bandmate, Sebastian Singwald, was growing up on the other...
You hear it constantly these days: "The rock band is dying; the rock band is dead." Whether this outlook is simply a jaded gripe, a universal truth, or some combination of both, it behooves a band in the modern age to seek ways to define themselves as more than "just...
Jax Deluca and Kyle Marler of Flatsitter discovered one another years ago on an Amtrak train, in what one might call an act of divine timing, or a perfect illustration of the "right place, right time" adage. What emerged from this meeting is a male-female powerhouse duo, who use an...