For the past year, I have had a series of insightful conversations with Los Angeles-based visual artist and poet Emmanuel Whyte about art practice, travel as study, and about a series of his paintings. Most recently, about a series of paintings in which he covers parts of his body...
Photograph by Abe Mora Lightswitch, the six-track EP from New Zealand-based Persian rapper, CHAII, draws upon her visual art background and comes paired with six highly-stylized music videos that span continents. Including a three-part series shot in Oman -- which involves a rich roster of local residents and aims to portray...
Homebound in quarantine during the early stages of Italy's COVID-19 outbreak, musician Bruno Bavota composed Apartment Loops Vol. 1 -- an EP that reflected not despair and hopelessness, but Bavota's unexpected bout of inspiration after lockdown. He traded in his solo piano compositions for synthesizers and woke up early each...
Alternatingly celebratory and apocalyptic, moon Over miami -- a collaborative album curated by Archival Feedback, a long-time duo consisting of Emile Milgrim and T. Wheeler Castillo -- subverts the old standard of the same name with a series of remixes and re-imaginings. Written in 1935 by songwriters Joe Burke and...
In the cinematic music video for “Wine,” Canadian Chinese singer Carson Cheng — also known as KICCC (pronounced “kick”) — emerges from hot ashes like a phoenix and finds himself face-to-face with a white wolf in the woods. The dramatic result of a creative exchange between KICCC and director Brock...
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...
Music preservation efforts go beyond strictly archival functions. They challenge our understanding of certain genres that have been historically associated with just a few major cities. For individual musicians who have never profited from their work finally, preservation groups can also provide some small restitution — or at least shed...
Catharsis — the expression and venting of powerfully felt emotions thru intense artistic practice — is the fundamental principle of great drama, and the focus of Giek_1's EP, Escape. The titular escape resonates on many levels: the artist's past escapism thru the use of hard drugs, her escape from a...
Photography by Naomi Ishisaka "But those are the most narrow parameters!" balks my well-meaning white friend. We are on our way to On The Boards to see dancer and choreographer Dani Tirrell's latest ensemble piece, Black Bois, and unrelatedly, I have just been articulating my latest dating quandary. As a first-generation Chinese-American...
In the same way that my 13-year-old self once fretted over who might eventually receive my postcard collection when I passed away (morbid, I know), a younger adult me used to wonder what it might look like when this day came, and how I would be certain that it had...