Celebrating Community
The Argentinian band Reynols wasn’t widely known even before they disappeared for some 17 years. They just don’t do the kind of music that gets a band known. That might change with the release of the new Gona Rubian Ranesa, arguably the most musical album they’ve put out, but really it won’t. Which is a shame, because Reynols represent everything […]
Negativland has been successfully prophesying doom for 40 years now, their secret all along being using society’s words against itself. Pioneers in sampling and culture jamming, the outfit is perhaps most notorious for a petty, prolonged and hilarious copyright battle with U2, but they’ve had a longer, more varied and for more subversive career than simply lambasting Ireland’s most famously […]
The punk ethos was designed to implode, and implode it did (or should have, anyway). Punk was a fiery rejection of the status quo. Once it became status quo, it was time to go. But like a dinner guest you don’t know is dead, punk refused to leave. The problem came with confusing the idea that talent and technique weren’t […]
Marc Ribot’s punkjam trio Ceramic Dog had been playing low key gigs around town for a long time before really finding their voice on their second album, 2013’s Your Turn. That’s when they started to get mad. The sarcastic AF song was about musicians gleefully accepting social media presence over money for their work “Masters of the Internet” was both […]
Back in July, Magik Markers quietly released a four-song digital EP, the first new music they’ve put out in a half dozen years. It was subdued, a little psychedelic, with a title suggesting they’ve been out of our ugly loop for a while. (Magik Markers has always been good at naming). In October, the band followed Isolation From Exterior Time: […]
Deerhoof’s set at last year’s Time:Spans festival was a surprise in even in the midst of 11 days of unpredictableness. The festival has all the earmarks of experimentalism; it’s organized by the The Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trust, named for a contemporary of John Cage and Morton Feldman, and held primarily at the Dimenna Center for Classical Music. Deerhoof […]
David Lynch is a problem. A big one. David Lynch is a problem because he doesn’t punish his villains. He’s a problem because he doesn’t explain the motivations of his villains or even so much as resolve his stories. David Lynch is a problem because he won’t tell us what to think of him. Storytellers runs the risk of being […]
The Stooges set at the 1970 Goose Lake Festiival has gone down in their rarified corner of rock history as a turning point for the band, maybe even the beginning of the end. According to legend, bassist Dave Alexander—out of his mind on whatever he was out of his mind on—stood on the stage without playing and was promptly fired […]
From the gruesome to the humane, George Romero’s posthumous novel goes places his movies couldn’t The coronoavirus pandemic of 2020 would have been a goldmine for George Romero, a milder mirror of the world he explored over the course of nine magnificent and gruesome movies. People with COVID-19 are far from animated corpses, of course, but the unwillingness of so […]
It’s easy to think of Lonnie Holley as a bluesman. He fits the type: rural, Southern, self-educated, quick with folksy wisdom and deep, dark truth. But Holley is a philosopher poet, more like Son House when he put his guitar down, more like Van Morrison casting ruminations over flowing, nebulous music. Van Morrison had his blues, too, of course. The […]