“Have you ever seen ‘Hot Ones’?” he asks me. “The YouTube show?” I’m talking to Kofi Owusu-Ansah, the Ghanian-Australian musician who goes by the stage name...
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Vivian Hua 華婷婷fr We’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...
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...
Zach FrimmelLA-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...
Zeb LarsonMusic 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...
Judy NelsonBeyond Beyond Is Beyond is a record label that has become adept at curating artists for a very specific roster. These artists tend to not have the typical “Brooklyn” sound; what critics usually associate with Brooklyn tends be a trendy...
Strangers, Marissa Nadler’s second record for Brooklyn-based Scared Bones and seventh overall, mixes elements both familiar and unfamiliar to create an uneven, but often rewarding listen. As with the best of her prior work, the songs that hit...
Eight years into its existence, Northside Festival is determinedly future-minded. Dividing itself into thirds, the NYC festival has two- and three-day stretches dedicated to “innovation” and “content”. The other third —...
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...
With each passing year, Northside Festival ups the ante, taking over more northern Brooklyn venues and gaining more and more international recognition. Now in its 8th year, the festival added their Innovation track a few years back, which seems like...
In reviews for Kikagaku Moyo’s House in the Tall Grass, some have implied that the Japanese psych folk up-and-comers are simply rehashing old ground. Consider a sentence from Danny Riley of The Quietus, who writes, “The problem comes...
Though such a struggle may have only existed in some people’s minds, if there was one between digital and analog music recording and creation, there’s no question that digital came out on top without ever even having to dig a trench...