Jeff Cardinal is busy. He’s recently completed fall semester classes at the University of Georgia, which means it’s time to focus on his label, PLUS100. For a little over a year, PLUS100 has been releasing a series of acclaimed vaporwave (and genre-adjacent) albums, and while Cardinal is able to run the label and create music as Vaperror during the school year, the summer break gives him more time to focus exclusively on music.

After a brief period creating work inspired by early Aphex Twin, Cardinal began making music under the Vaperror name, releasing those albums on a variety of labels. “After those were released, I started thinking of starting my own label,” he says. “But I knew that if I was going to start a label, my first release had to be something special. At the time, t e l e p a t h and I were collaborating on an album. That seemed like a good place to start.” The resulting record, the ambient, dreamlike 超越愛 by テレヴァペ (Televape), was PLUS100’s first release in October 2015.

The music released by PLUS100 may not be what typically comes to mind when you think of the Athens music scene which birthed bands like Pylon, R.E.M., and The B-52s. Vaperror’s sound is rooted in hip-hop, juke, footwork, and other forms of electronic dance music—worlds away from the guitar-centric rock for which Athens is mostly known. And while vaporwave is primarily a product of Internet culture, and as such exists outside the established system of geographic “scenes,” living in a college town with a rich rock history has given Cardinal, his label, and Vaperror unique advantages.

“I’ve had several opportunities here in Athens,” he says. “I’ve been able to play shows on local radio, and perform live as Vaperror. Athens has been very welcoming.” So welcoming, in fact, that Vaperror’s bright, upbeat 2016 release Acid Arcadia (on PLUS100, of course) was named one of Flagpole’s favorite local releases.

Although many of PLUS100’s early releases fit the traditional definition of “vaporwave,” Cardinal is interested in expanding the label’s sound. To that end, he’s enlisted Rhode Island experimental/noise/drone artist Adjusted Speech, whose forthcoming PLUS100 release is what Cardinal describes as, “a double album, half of which will be ambient tracks, and half really dirty noise stuff. It’s very interesting, and it’s not like anything I’ve put out so far.”

An upcoming release from Japan’s plunderphonics-inspired さよひめぼ (SAYOHIMEBOU) continues that deconstructive aesthetic. Given the producer’s previous work, it’s seems a safe bet that his PLUS100 release will build on his propensity for disassembling stereotypical elements of electro, disco, and funk to create dense, over-the-top sound collages that reward more with each repeated listen.

Which is not to say that PLUS100 has abandoned the peaceful ambient sound of its early releases. One of Cardinal’s favorite releases from PLUS100 is Splash Realistique from Golden Living Room, an artist whose collaboration with t e l e p a t h will soon be released by the label. PLUS100 is also planning an early July re-release of Splash Realistique on cassette, to commemorate the record’s first anniversary.

While most PLUS100 releases are issued on cassette—a favorite medium for vaporwave and associated genres due to its low cost to manufacture and distribute, as well as for the format’s retro aesthetic—Cardinal has also begun to release material on vinyl. To date, three of the label’s offerings have been pressed to wax: two full-lengths from Televape and Love Potion (Vaperror’s collaboration with COCAINEJESUS), as well as a t e l e p a t h 7-inch. Although there are more logistical difficulties involved with pressing vinyl, as compared to the relative ease of putting out music on tape, it’s a format that PLUS100 intends to continue. Cardinal says, “I believe vinyl is a ‘final frontier’ for indie record labels nowadays. They are difficult and expensive to produce, so it sets your label apart from others. The artwork is large, the sound fidelity is excellent, and in 2017 color vinyl is in, making the record itself another piece of artwork for people (and myself!) to collect, admire, and spin.” (The Golden Living Room/t e l e p a t h collaboration will be the label’s next vinyl release.)

Cardinal is interested in expanding the range of physical releases PLUS100 offers in general. He’s already released a limited-run VHS edition of Televape’s 永, which sold out in its first and second pressing. Although the process would likely be a technical nightmare, Cardinal’s also interested in exploring the possibility of future releases on floppy disc. “Aesthetics,” he says “add another dimension to the music. I want the design of the physical release to reflect, as much as possible what the album is about.” This attraction to obsolete and non-standard formats stems from Cardinal’s belief that physical releases are not always simply a way to listen to music—they’re art objects that have worth as artifacts, and serve a function beyond mere content delivery.

A quick look at PLUS100’s Bandcamp page shows that the label’s fans share this belief: Most of the label’s early releases are sold out. An initial pressing of PLUS100’s cassette releases is anywhere from 100 to 600 copies, depending on Cardinal’s estimate of the demand. This amount of stock usually lasts several weeks. In order to thwart the often ridiculously overpriced secondary “collector” market for vaporwave, Cardinal strives to keep all of the label’s releases in print, as long as there’s a demand for them. This demand is monitored by keeping an eye on secondary markets, the Facebook “Vaporwave Cassette Club” group, and comments that Cardinal receives from the label’s fans. Cassette runs (generally between 100 and 250 copies) usually sell out within a few weeks of release, but the larger minimum orders that vinyl pressing plants require means that releases arrive in greater quantities, and are available longer. Balancing out the deep back catalogue is a raft of new material, including a new albums from Useless & 仮想夢プラザ, a follow-up to their album Balance, and Kai Beckman, whose 2015 album Falling Apart / バラバラ, will also receive a deluxe cassette reissue.

After the summer, Cardinal admits that work on the label may slow down so that he can finish his Computer Science degree, but he has no plans to end to his activities as Vaperror or PLUS100 any time soon. He’s always on the search for new music to release by artists he admires, and he’s always working on making music of his own, whether alone or with collaborators. “I don’t really see an end to it,” he admits. “It’s a good thing, and I’m not going to stop.”

—Robert Newsome 

The first indication of what Yazz Ahmed’s new album, La Saboteuse, might sound like actually appeared on her 2011 debut, Finding My Way Home. On that album, the trumpeter made skillful use of Arabic scales, and ventured cautiously into cosmic jazz.

On La Saboteuse, Ahmed expands on all of those early impulses, and the result is less an album than it is a statement of purpose. The influence of Arabic music remains prominent: a single melodic mode, or maqam, runs throughout the length of the recording. It also turns up on a series of interludes that pair the melodic sighs of Ahmed’s horn with the icy precision of Lewis Wright’s vibraphone.

Ahmed was born in Bahrain, and moved to London with her family when she was nine years old and La Saboteuse is a reflection of both places. The Bahraini influence emerges through those Arabic scales and the group’s improvisational methods; it also turns up in percussionist Corrina Silvester’s generous use of Middle Eastern rhythm instruments like bendir, darbuka, krakeb, and riq. Silvester’s drumming creates rich lines of rhythmic communication throughout the recording; on “Jamil Jamal,” the instruments’ chatter provides a backdrop for bass clarinetist Shabaka Hutchings and vibraphonist Wright to weave together thick threads of melody.

Ahmed’s work as a collaborator with artists like Lee “Scratch” Perry, Max Romeo, and Swing Out Sister also transcends borders, and her experience contributing to Radiohead’s King of Limbs informs La Saboteuse. The inclusion of a rendition of that group’s “Bloom” is the most overt example, but Ahmed employs a host of electronic effects throughout La Saboteuse. A Kaoss Pad transforms “The Space Between The Fish and The Moon” into an otherworldly ballad with wobbly melodicism, while a track “Al Emadi” reaps the benefits of smart in-studio editing by running melodic lines back and forth in opposite directions, one dubbed over the other, each pulling the attention in multiple directions. And then there’s the alluring “Belielle,” where the use of electronics makes it seem as if the melody is burning at the edges, its embers swept up in the sonic breeze of Naadia Sheriff’s Fender Rhodes piano. The net effect is mesmerizing.

We spoke with Ahmed about the evolution of her sound, how recording sessions involved road trips, the struggle with identity, and how those things informed her new album.

I’d love to hear a little bit about how La Saboteuse came together.

I wanted to follow up Finding My Way Home, and I wanted to make something that reflects my journey. I feel I’m still exploring my Middle Eastern roots, and fusing that with my British roots.  At first, the sessions were little improvisations with vibraphonist Lewis Wright. That led to some recording sessions with my quartet, and then with a larger ensemble, which has become my main band now. So, yeah, it’s been a very long journey, and along the way, I had to put the recording on hold quite a few times—mainly because I’ve had some quite big commissions. But during that time, I luckily met some amazing people who’ve been very influential in the way I create music. So the album has really developed and undergone a journey of its own, too.

Those delays, did they affect the sound of the album in any way?

My playing was developing and it began to sound very different from how I played in those first sessions. Taking time to write some commissions didn’t have a huge influence on how the music on the album developed, but they did inspire me and helped me imagine more about what I can do after the album. They helped improve my writing. They led me to change the music and the soundscapes, and they reflected the way I think about music now. I had to do a lot of re-recordings and overdubs—some of the tunes, I changed the melodies a little bit, or I’d re-record some of the trumpet, or some of the bass clarinet parts. I also did a lot of collages—it kept evolving and changing.

There’s nothing ordinary about the title La Saboteuse. Is there a story behind it?

The theme of the album is the relationship between my optimistic conscious self and the seductive voice of my self-destructive inclinations—my inner-saboteuse. That’s the negative voice that I have in my head. It’s an exploration of those two conflicting emotions, themes. But it’s also a document of the musicians I love working with, and the evolution of the band I play with now in live situations.

La Saboteuse has very distinct influences, but it’s cohesive—it’s often difficult to tell where one piece ends and the next begins. What was the key to getting everything to snap into place?

Very clever recording techniques, I suppose [laughs]. I just wanted the album to sound like it was a wash of sound, even though it was recorded in a lot of different locations. Take ‘Bloom’—that song sounds like we’re all together. It sounds like a live performance. But the thing is, everyone was recorded in different places at different times. Martin recorded his drums at home and sent me the file. I recorded Shabaka in this little room underneath the symphony hall in Birmingham. And I recorded Naadia at her house. We had to record some extra stuff for Lewis, so we went to his house in Brixton and recorded him in his bedroom. And Corrina, she did a lot of overdubs on different percussion instruments in our garage. She brought her little dog, and it sat through the whole recording session. The album is a mix of songs, together and apart, but it all sounds unified, because we’re all on the same wavelength.

On the subject of being on the same wavelength: Sophie Bass put together some amazing cover art for the rollout of La Saboteuse. How did that come about?

Naim Records introduced me to Sophie, and I loved her art. She went away with the recording, and came back with these spellbinding pieces of work. And when I saw them, I was taken aback. It was quite overwhelming. Nobody’s ever done anything so special in reaction to my music, and it took me a little while to register just how special this was. I mean, I kind of went nuts.  It’s just so beautiful.  And she’s fantastic, and I’m so happy that Naim decided to go with Sophie. She’s brilliant.

That experience with Sophie’s art, which I suppose was something of an interpretive action upon your music, did it cause you to take a moment to evaluate your own self-image or how you view your individual sound evolving over time?

I’ve struggled with my identity for a long time since moving to England, and I’ve been searching for how I can express myself.  Ever since studying Arabic music—particularly Bahrani music—and learning to read, write and speak in Arabic, I’ve developed my own unique voice through music. And something really wonderful, which has changed my whole way of listening to music, is I have a quarter-tone flugelhorn. I can use it as a Western tuning system, just as a normal flugelhorn, but it has an extra valve, so I can sharpen or flatten a note by quarter tones. Those are the notes that you hear in Arabic singing and playing—the blue notes, the real emotional music. And as time has gone by, I’ve discovered new musicians, Arabic musicians, and these new things let me delve deeper into the essence of it all. The London jazz scene, and music scene, is very diverse in England. There are a lot of musicians who celebrate diversity and collaborate to explore different genres and create something new, and bring the music to a wider audience. And now I feel like I’m a part of that.

—Dave Sumner

Beneath the hedonistic reverie of Descartes a Kant’s Victims of Love Propaganda is the story of a fictional couple, told over the course of 10 deliciously volatile tracks. The songs follow a relationship through its manic highs and crushing lows, from desire, to rabid infatuation and, ultimately, to obsession-induced self-destruction. Throughout Victims, the Guadalajaran iconoclasts illuminate the stark contrasts of toxic love.

Their darkly eccentric opus resists pop culture’s romantic clichés. “We find out that [love] is not the way it’s presented to be [in media],” says Memo Ibarra, who plays bass and synths—and provides the album’s diabolical screams. According to Ibarra, some of the songs are pulled from personal history. “What may seem as a traumatic or terrible experience turned out into what we think is a great album,” he says.

Victims was engineered by Steve Albini, known for his work with alternative rock fixtures like the Pixies, Nirvana, and the Breeders. Throughout the album, Descartes a Kant turn their broken hearts into a sort of exorcism, setting woozy lullaby vocals against digital hardcore beats and frenzied punk riffs. Their live show takes cues from dark cabaret pioneers like Dresden Dolls, as well as the camp of Rocky Horror Picture Show, and all of the group’s members wear ’50s gas masks on stage. Toxic love, indeed.

We caught up with Ibarra via Skype; in our conversation, he touches on media deceptions, dystopian love, and his fantasy of playing during an apocalypse.

On Victims of Love Propaganda, you explore utopian and dystopian scenarios with the theme of love and heartbreak. How did you settle on that approach?

The concept came from people that we know in relationships who are close to us, and personal things that have happened to us, as well as the way that love is presented in movies, magazines, and in media in general. We ended up finding out that [love in reality] is not the way it’s presented to be most of the time.

The title Victims of Love Propaganda tells the story of a relationship going from point A to point B—point A is the crush part, and point B being the ending of it. We have a single out called ‘Motion Picture Dream Boy,’ which chronicles the beginning of a relationship where everything is perfect. And throughout the album, you go through the different phases of this long-term relationship, and it ends with a break-up song [‘The Science of Break-up’]. We picked a couple, a girl and a boy, actors who are going be representing these characters throughout.

Each song offers a different take on romance and disenchantment. What’s your personal relationship with these characters? How did their passions affect the songwriting process?

Several of us Descartes a Kant members were going through something similar, and during that particular time, we were writing the album. Sandra [Michel], who is the band’s main composer, was vomiting a lot of personal experiences into the lyrics. That’s a lot of what’s in there, as well as some other stuff based on others’ relationships. I don’t wanna say it was ‘perfect’ timing, because it’s obviously not fun [to break up], but I think we translated it into something good. What may have seemed like a traumatic or terrible experience turned out into what we think is a great album.

Your musical arrangements are refreshingly unpredictable, unconventional even—they turn and twist at every corner. I’d love to hear a little bit about your creative process.

Descartes a Kant has always been a band that pushes boundaries of musical style. It’s not that we go out of our way to be unconventional. But that’s what we like; it’s the kind of music that we enjoy. We listen to lots of different musical styles, from very quiet lullabies to the most hardcore punk and digital hardcore. This album has a lot of influences like that. I understand that this is our first album to be released in the U.S., so for those who don’t know this band, you might encounter a lot of bipolar stuff in our music.

Our first album [Paper Dolls] has a lot of style-shifting short songs, similar to what Mr. Bungle did in their time. Then, on our second album [II Visore Lunatique], we took another route, with ambitious arrangements and orchestral stuff. We stopped doing the style-shifting songs, and started to do a narrative in the album. We had a hip-hop song and a Broadway musical. In this new album, we have a little bit of both—we took a little from the first album, in terms of the punk rock and hard songs elements, but we also have a lot of more sophisticated arrangements from the second album. We also included elements that aren’t in any of the previous two albums. We went with more synthesizer sounds, and it’s also the first record that we recorded to analog tape.

The sounds in the album evoke imagery that’s straight out of a horror film. Are there specific cultural references that you drew on for this album?

We’ve always been huge fans of artists that put on a show—meaning, bands, or singers that don’t limit themselves to only singing or playing their instruments, but doing a show for the visual part. That led us to become fans of punk cabaret bands like Dresden Dolls. Sandra is a huge fan of the Forbidden Broadway musical, and Danny Elfman’s Oingo Boingo. More recently, Sandra has been influenced by directors like Nicolas Winding Refn—people who are visual, but also musical. I think we’re all big fans of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. It has a lot to do with the punk rock part of it. Not every band can do—or likes to do—the whole wardrobe thing—theater, and performance. When I was growing up, I decided I wanted to have this [approach] because I saw videos of the Dead Kennedys. Just the way Jello Biafra expressed himself physically—wow, he didn’t use props or anything. We have tremendous respect for anyone who tries to communicate and express things during the live show, taking it to another level apart from the recording. That’s what we try to do.

You’ve dressed up as everything from burglars to characters from Alice in Wonderland on stage. Talk to me about your wardrobe and costume choices.

That Alice in Wonderland get-up was like 10 years ago. In the Paper Dolls era, for each show we did, we’d [depict] different characterizations—it was sort of a multiple-personality concept. We were also devils—we had a lot of costumes, and each show was different. On the second album, the concept was very different. It was a tribute to psychiatric malfunctions, a collection of stories on people in mental institutions. So the outfits had a lot to do with that sort of stuff. Now, we’re starting to put out our new live show, and it’s a whole new thing, a bit more theatrical. For the first time, we’re doing proper design and cinematography. It’s gonna be related to the toxic love couple.

How did you guys link up with Steve Albini? What was it like working with him?

I still can’t believe it. I’m a really huge admirer of his work, being that I’m also a recording engineer. And obviously, Sandra is a big fan of the Pixies, The Breeders, and Nirvana albums; these are bands that really marked us when we were growing up… Also, [we dig] some of his more recent engineering work, like with Don Caballero and post-rock bands like MONO. The opportunity came to us as a very fun and strange way. A guy named Taylor saw us play in Chicago at Ruido Fest two years ago, and he really liked the band. He insisted on getting us a good producer so we could get a shot at releasing our album with a U.S. label. He spoke to our manager, Brian, and sorted out the whole thing. They were very helpful in getting us to the studio, because it’s difficult for a band like us to go to the States and record in a studio like that. It was strange because we thought [Albini] was, like, a dictator, from what we’ve heard on interviews. But when we met him, we saw that he’s not like that at all. He’s a very nice guy who made us feel comfortable the whole time. It was a very enjoyable experience and we’re all grateful for the opportunity.

If you could travel through time, whether past or future, where and when would you want to perform with your band and why?

The future. I think it would be fun to play during the end of the world, the apocalypse, where everyone is dying. I think we would be the perfect soundtrack for that. But it may take a long time for that to come.

—Isabela Raygoza

Across a couple of records and EPs released since 2014, Austin, Texas punk outfit Institute have excelled in articulating anguish, particularly when it comes to Moses Brown’s retching vocal delivery. Atop brittle, needling guitars and rigid grooves, Brown seems to mine the pain of repressive adolescence in strikingly literal terms. When Brown isn’t near sobbing, he’s actually sobbing; it sounds channeled from within the process of confronting trauma, rather than from some later moment of relative resolution, especially on the 2015 full-length Catharsis.

Subordination, Institute’s first record since, is a slight yet significant departure. A thicker and firmer recording, it’s more akin to Institute’s punchy live presence (and less to the old leftist English punk band Crisis). Far from the great jostling simplicity of early material like “Giddy Boys,” the songs on Subordination expand to accommodate instrumental detours. And Brown, though still a wailer, mixes his spittle with a bit more venom. The lyrics refer to “oil wealth” in a “Southern state” rife with racist “good ol’ boys,” plus heteronormative indoctrination via television and how “sexually insecure police cause violence.” (There are certainly shades of The Dicks’ classic “Hate the Police.”) He’s zooming out, dismayed by how patriarchy and racism conspire to impoverish and destroy nonconforming bodies. Phew.

You won’t make out many of the words (there’s a lyrics sheet), but the band’s politics are refreshingly earnest. Brown uses vocabulary—words like “bourgeois,” which he memorably burps in two songs—that other contemporary punk lyricists might find pretty tired or hackneyed. It works because, rather than taking a stance of righteous distance, Brown’s queasy delivery and personal tie-ins emphasize the suffocating omnipresence of intersecting oppressions—much like The Dicks’ Gary Floyd. Critical observation leaves him indignant as well as depressed, no further from a society that prescribes him an unwanted sort of masculinity—just more aware of the coercion.

—Sam Lefebrve

Karen and the Sorrows by Carol Litwin.

“This is the song about pickup trucks and liking girls that country music has been waiting for,” Karen Pittelman announced on stage this past January. Pittelman was performing with her band, Karen & the Sorrows, as part of the Queer Country Quarterly, a regular concert series that features a variety of queer-identifying country and roots musicians that she’s both organized and hosted at the Branded Saloon in Brooklyn since 2011.

Pittelman was introducing “Take Me For a Ride,” a song on her band’s forthcoming album that she wrote as her own take on “bro country,” the brand of oft-derided, commercial country that has taken hold of mainstream country music over the past five years.

“Right now, the critique of ‘bro country’ is that it’s the same old ‘girl in the pickup truck, with the painted-on jeans,’” Pittelman says during a recent interview in Brooklyn. “I agree with that critique. It’s boring to have the same song over and over again. But we can also ask more of a genre, rather than just throwing it away.”

In a musical style where heterosexuality is assumed, and where flirtation, sex, and romance is often filtered through a male perspective (to wit: there is currently just a single female solo artist among the 10 most popular country songs in America), Pittelman’s song offers a rare moment of splendid subversion: “Don’t care what those folks say / ’Cause I don’t even have one doubt / Wanna kiss that pretty mouth / And then keep on kissin’ south / You’re still the girl I dream about.”

Pittelman wrote those lyrics after stumbling upon a standup routine online from the Southern comedian Ali Clayton that bemoaned the lack of country songs about “eating a pussy in a pickup truck.”

“If country music can’t tell a story about a girl picking up a girl in a pickup truck, then it’s missing out on so many possibilities,” says Pittelman.

On her band’s second album, The Narrow Place, Pittelman is determined to depict that reality. Described by Pittelman as, “a weird mix of Jewish country songs and queer bro country songs,” The Narrow Place uses pedal steel-driven, rootsy songs that recall Harvest-era Neil Young to explore a variety of unorthodox subjects. The album’s title is a translation of mitzrayim, the Hebrew word for Egypt, and a decent portion of the new record is comprised of Talmudic tearjerkers about Passover. “Price of the Ticket” uses the story of Pittelman’s grandfather to explore ideas of, “immigration and whiteness and Jews becoming white,” while “I Was Just Your Fool” transplants King Lear’s fool into a honky-tonk setting. The album is being released on purple vinyl, a nod to pioneering early ’70s queer country band Lavender Country.

That the stories told on Karen & the Sorrows’ new album feel so radical is a reminder of just how limited the scope of vision and subject matter can be in modern, commercial country music. “An entire genre,” says Pittelman, “is missing out on sharing the perspective of this enormous part of its audience.”

The Queer Country Quarterly

Karen Pittelman founded the Queer Country Quarterly as a response to that lack of queer voices in country and roots music. Unlike mainstream country which, to its detractors, can feel homogeneous in sound, style, and substance, the Queer Country Quarterly’s definition of country music is loose and adaptable. It incorporates everything from straightforward folk to garage cowpunk to traditional bluegrass and rockabilly. On the night Pittelman debuted “Take Me For a Ride,” the QCQ’s three-act bill skewed toward punk and rockabilly—or, as Pittelman put it before the show, “Hard rockin’, guitar slingin’ tough femmes.”

More than 60 acts have played the Queer Country Quarterly, including several of the most exciting young voices in roots music, like Virginia bluegrass traditionalist Sam Gleaves, Tennessee gothic folk-blues singer Amythyst Kiah, and North Carolina indie folk trio Mount Moriah.

The origins of the Queer Country Quarterly date back to April 2011 when Pittelman decided she wanted to organize a show for her birthday. Both Pittelman and Elana Redfield, Pittelman’s partner and the founding guitarist of Karen & the Sorrows, were part of a small subset of musicians who had been playing for a few years in Brooklyn’s burgeoning alt-country/roots scene, but they never quite felt at home. Part of the disconnect, Pittelman says, was feeling out of place in the aggressively traditional, straight-laced world of Americana and alt-country.

“I think it’s hard to feel the urgency for something if you don’t need it yourself,” Pittelman says.”One of the best things about punk’s legacy is the idea that, ‘If you need something, go fucking make it.’”

Pittelman’s premise for her birthday show was simple: recruit some friends’ bands to play a queer-themed country night. She’d call it the Gay Ole Opry. When 350 people showed up on a weeknight to two-step and listen to old-time country music, Pittelman was taken aback.

“People came up to me after the show crying, saying things like, ‘I grew up in the Midwest,’ or ‘I grew up in the South, and I never felt like I could be in places like this with my partner, dancing to this music,’” she says. “I remember thinking that I had to do something with this. I had no choice.”

Soon after, Pittelman reached out to Gerard Kouwenhoven, whose band Dolly Trolly shared rehearsal space with Karen & the Sorrows, and who Pittelman had collaborated with over the years. When Pittelman found out that Kouwenhoven was opening a new bar called Branded Saloon, she asked if she could turn her one-off Gay Ole Opry party into a regular show. “Instantly, I set aside one Saturday a month for her, and the Queer Country movement was born,” says Kouwenhoven.

In the six years that followed, Pittelman eventually became a central figure in New York’s queer country music community, organizing regular shows for the Queer Country Monthly, which eventually became the Queer Country Quarterly. Occasionally, she puts together larger events, like Another Country, a festival taking place over 4th of July weekend that brings together “queer, trans, and/or POC musicians” to communally question the definition of country music.

Pittelman has also become one of the most important focal points for the scene nationwide, expanding the community’s network by bringing artists from around the country to play assorted Gay Ole Opry gatherings and the regular Queer Country Quarterly shows in Brooklyn.

“It’s surprising how many emails and calls I get from people who want to play the Queer Country Quarterly,” says Kouwenhoven (who, in addition to owning the Saloon, also mans the soundboard at the QCQ and sings harmony for Karen & the Sorrows). “The fact is that there are a ton of gay people who create and enjoy country and folk music.”

“There’s always been queer people making country music,” says Pittelman. “We just started labeling it as such. Building this network has been really exciting because you see how many people all around the country are having the same thoughts.”

“Karen’s done such great work, as far as making a locus of community around country-related styles of music and queer folks,” says Julie Adamo, who fronts the roots-punk outfit Julie Cira. “I’m so appreciative to be a part of it.”

Julie Cira’s music blends the melodicism of Lucinda Williams with the punk energy of Lydia Loveless, but in Western Massachusetts where the band is based, they don’t quite fit either into the traditional folk scene or the DIY punk scene. Their sound is more at home in the former, but their ethos and sense of community is much more closely aligned with the latter.

When they performed at the Queer Country Quarterly this past February, Adamo expressed gratitude for the QCQ community during her band’s ferocious set. “This is a dream come true,” she said. Then, she played a new song called “Drown Out the Voices That Tell You You’re Nothing,” which seemed to encapsulate the precious space that the QCQ provides: “When you feel you’re the only one,” she sang, “know you’re one of many.”

Appalachian folk singer Sam Gleaves offers similar praise. “Karen’s done a really special thing organizing this series,” says Gleaves, who first met Pittelman when he was opening for Karen & the Sorrows during their southeastern 2016 tour.

“There aren’t very many places where I can celebrate my identity as an Appalachian musician and as a queer man, and this is a space to do both of those things. It’s not so much about me as it is about the community and the feeling of knowing that there are other people who are on the road using country music to sing about their identity and our place in the world.”

In his own music, Gleaves excavates untold Appalachian stories and forges new ties across class and gender lines. On Sam Gleaves & Tyler Hughes, his new album with his musical partner, Gleaves recontextualizes traditional music during moments like “When We Love,” an Appalachian-tinged ballad that turns Donald Trump’s campaign slogan into a prayer for love and compassion.

“When people hear these old sounds, they think of their community, and when they hear the contemporary, political lyrics, they think, ‘What will we do?’” says Gleaves. “I love that.”

On the title track to his 2015 breakthrough Ain’t We Brothers, Gleaves tells the story of a gay coal miner seeking solidarity with his fellow workers. Pittelman can still recall the first time she heard Gleaves perform the song.

“I felt so connected to all the people for whom that’s their song, who never got to have a song before. That’s the whole point of this, to make it possible for people to tell the truth about their lives because we all need songs. That’s part of how we survive this shitty world. When Sam sung ‘Ain’t We Brothers,’ I felt the presence of everybody who, for all these years, have been waiting for that song, and of people in my own life who died for the lack of that song,” she says, before arriving at perhaps the best possible explanation for the precious importance of the Queer Country Quarterly: “It’s a serious thing when you don’t get to see your own life reflected back to you by the art that is meaningful to you.”

—Jonathan Bernstein 

Since their somewhat casual inception in 2012, Mutoid Man has transformed from an outlet for Stephen Brodsky (Cave In) and Ben Koller (Converge, All Pigs Must Die) to explore the lighter side of metal to a deadly serious supergroup. Their 2015 release, Bleeder, netted endless praise, inspiring the band to push themselves even further on their next release. Accordingly, War Moans, leaps forward musically and lyrically, challenging the conventions of metal, culture, sexuality, and politics. We spoke with Brodsky and bassist Nicholas Cageao about perversion, relationships, and war.  

You said this was your most ‘perverted record.’ Can you expound on that? What makes it perverted?

Stephen Brodsky: Well, I think there’s sort of the personal side and the political side. It’s sexually perverted, probably more so than anything we have done so far. We had the title War Moans kicking around for a while, and with the way things are heading politically, everyone just seems hot for war. There’s this unsettling idea of things just being too peaceful. Thrash bands were singing about warheads in the ’80s, and things just haven’t changed. There’s this element of, ‘Well, we have to accept that there’s this faction of humanity that is obsessed with the game Risk, but in real life.’

Nicholas Cageao: The thing that I think is super relevant about the title: hormones are something that happen to your body, you know? Testosterone and estrogen—your body reacts to these things. Currently, the world is kind of a piece of shit full of reactions. You’ve got politicians saying, ‘Let’s bomb this place’ and ‘Let’s send a warship here.’

Brodsky: Yeah, I think there’s the two sides of it. There’s a lyric in the song ‘Bone Chain’ that goes, ‘Like lovers in chains / bored with our lives today / we’re getting restless / oh what a goddamned shame / but what can you say.’ I think the idea of sexuality is heightened by the fact that you can watch porn anywhere, anytime you want now. And, there is this ‘war on your body,’ that too much heightened sexuality can bring upon a person and their various relationships, and how they function in society.

How does that affect your personal relationships? Is it that you no longer need another person, and a whole emotional connection?

Cageao: Yeah, it’s like, people just don’t have time for that stuff anymore.

You guys were writing this album before the whole ‘alternative facts’ arguments started to take shape. That’s kind of another way to look at perversion.

Brodsky: That really started when the artwork for the album was coming together. Ben [Koller] thought it would be really cool to follow the idea and flesh it out to where it’s this soldiers kissing on the frontlines.

Cageao: I think Santos Illustration did a really good job making the characters really androgynous. People are conditioned to think that only men fight the wars, and we have these androgynous characters. That makes people think just a bit.

Brodsky: Yeah. It could easily just be Trump and Putin, making out on the battlefield.

I wanted to ask you about the ‘Kiss of Death’ and whether the ultimate love really is dying for someone. 

Brodsky: Well, I’d say that the character in that song is definitely coming onto this other person with the degree of intensity that would probably necessitate, in their mind, death of some kind. That’s the level of intensity, confidence, and cockiness—their swagger, really. It’s cavalier like, ‘I’d fucking die for you. I don’t care. I’ll just jump off that cliff naked and that would be the last thing you see of me.’ Someone who writes really great, dark lyrics that go to those extremes would be someone like Peter Steele, and I was trying to channel some of that darker personality and vibe on that song.

There is definitely a goth vibe that appears on the album at times.

Brodsky: I think a lot of bands in our world are either afraid to, or don’t know how to, express some level of sexuality in their lyrics or their attitude, vocally. It’s just something you don’t see a lot of—at least in our world.

You guys are a decidedly ‘fun’ band in a scene that often intentionally rejects fun. Is that conscious, or is that just expressions of your personalities? 

Cageao: Playing music is super fun, and making it anything other than that is wrong. I never started playing music as a kid thinking I was going to be a rich rock star. I picked up the bass because it was fun, and I just loved guys like Les Claypool and other people who could play stupidly good riffs. Working a job where I see four bands a night, seven days a week, you definitely see people go up there and just go through the motions. I question why they’re doing it. If that isn’t the best night of your life, at that given moment, then why are you doing this?

Brodsky: Mutoid Man is still a relatively new band, so we’re still in our honeymoon phase. But with me coming from Cave In and Ben coming from Converge—those are two bands that have a much more overall serious tone and vibe. I think, for us, Mutoid Man is kind of a break from that, something that is a little more light-hearted. Also, it’s not really our ‘career.’ We all do other stuff besides this band, and that has an effect on how much fun you can have. It takes the pressure off. We’re very serious about playing as best as we can. We really demo’d these songs and tore them apart. We worked hard at making them the best they can be, lyrically and musically. We don’t shortchange people who come to shows or buy our records. But we have found a nice balance about our overall attitude between doing it and having some fun.

—Zachary Goldsmith

Photo by Cina M Nguyen.

On Dawkins’ simply-titled debut EP, Ep1, the Washington, D.C. area group offers a handful of widescreen, pop-flecked productions that don’t slot easily into any single category. But while the five songs that make up the group’s first official outing may vary in exact structure, it is clear that each composition is part of the same whole.

Across the record’s five sonic collages, rippling electronics peek from behind finely-sculpted drum programming. Beds of pedal-processed guitar gradually turn and evolve beneath kaleidoscopic, reverb-drenched vocals. The result is something the group hesitantly refers to as “splatter-pop.” While that name gives a good sense of the colorful, vaporous songs the trio creates, Dawkins is doing a lot more than merely throwing paint at a wall.

Though they grew up together in the D.C. area (Bethesda, Maryland to be exact), the band crafted much of their debut effort while they were attending colleges in different cities. Songwriter/instrumentalist Jack Jobst lived in Denver, guitarist Carson Lystad attended school in Nashville, and songwriter/producer Will Guerry was studying abroad, in London. They traded Logic files back and forth, and fleshed out general concepts for the EP in preparation for the few weeks they’d be able to spend together in D.C., playing a handful of shows and refining the tracks that would eventually form Ep1.

We talked with the group, who were preparing to return to D.C. from their respective universities, about pan-Atlantic collaboration, and how they see themselves fitting into their hometown scene.

Do each of you have specific roles in the group, or does it vary depending on the song?

Carson Lystad: We definitely have roles. All of the songs come together in different ways, but Will and Jack have been the primary songwriters for a long time. Will also does most of the production; he is sort of our primary guy at the computer with the headphones on.

Will Guerry: And Carson is mainly our guitarist. He does a bunch of pedal stuff, while Jack will move around between guitar and keys. I feel like I’m rarely playing an actual instrument, I’m usually the one tinkering with a bunch of electronics and singing.

Jack Jobst: And when we play live, we play with a drummer and bass player as well.

How did you decide to start this project? You guys all grew up together and had played in bands before?

Guerry: Oh, yeah. Early on, we played in a variety of cover bands together, and later in high school, Jack and I started writing these little singer-songwriter things—there was a ukelele involved [Laughs]. Then, slowly, we expanded the group into something that had more of a rock sound.

Lystad: And all of that has been part of the process to get to where we are now, and between each little stop, we’ve learned a lot. The same is true for the EP—we got a lot of good information from working on this project that we’ll try to carry over into the next one.

Considering you all live in different cities, how does the collaboration actually work? Are you trading files and ideas over email?

Lystad: It’s mostly a trading thing for sure, but some of the core nucleus of the songs on this EP actually came from us jamming together; some of these songs even trace back a couple of years to hour-long jams that we reinterpreted and reworked. From there, it’s just been a long process of one of us working on something, then sending over the files and everyone giving their comments. Then, it gets worked on for a couple more weeks, and sent back and forth again.

Guerry: We definitely talk about the songs a lot, too. We’ll upload a project and then talk about the idea behind it, or the direction it should go in before recording the other parts.

Jobst: Again, going back to how we’ve developed from project to project: On this EP, there was more of an emphasis on setting out core concepts during the songwriting process. So we’d have conversations about whether we were hitting those [conceptual] marks, and what more we could focus on. But a lot of that is in preparation for the small amount of time when we’re home together on breaks, so that we can hit the ground running when we finally get to be together in the same room.

And how often does that happen, where all three of your are physically in the same room to work on music?

Jobst: Three or four times a year. Summer and winter breaks have been big for us.

Lystad: We really pack them in, too. The last few breaks have hardly been ‘breaks,’ because we’ve gotten home and have just been working, though it’s obviously a lot of fun.

Though you don’t live there full time, how do you think you fit into the D.C. music scene?

Lystad: To be honest, we’re still very much navigating our way around it, but at the very least, we’ve found there is a very friendly and supportive scene in D.C., which is something I think has always been there. I live in Nashville right now, which is so competitive and cutthroat by comparison.

Jobst: It’s also a city that doesn’t have just one artist that represents it. There isn’t necessarily that ‘champion’ of D.C. right now. So what you get is something that is pretty tight-knit, but scattered in terms of there being a lot of people trying different things just for the sake of creating music.

Lystad: Yeah, D.C. had the punk and the go-go thing back in the day, but now there are a lot of different sounds going on. There are a lot of people doing more DJ and electronic/bass music stuff, and we’ve been able to somewhat slide in with them and make some friends that way—even though we have a bit more intensity and rock sensibility than some of the people we’ve played with. It’s fun for us to be the ones whipping out guitars at shows.

Jobst: And with D.C.’s rent being super high right now, there are creative spaces that exist, but maintaining them for long just isn’t realistic; so there are houses and warehouses that throw shows, but you never know for how long they might stick around. People do jump on it and try to make the most of it while they can.

And how does the OTHERFEELS artist collective, which you are a part of, fit into this?

Lystad: OTHERFEELS is not, like, an official agreement or anything; it’s a collective effort to really just make stuff happen, and James Scott (who runs the collective) works so hard and is just dedicated and talented. He’s going to be famous someday.

Jobst: A lot of what James is trying to do is to unify D.C. in some way, using this collective to bridge the gap between a few different scenes. He spends a lot of time going to local shows and seeing what is happening, and who is undiscovered, and then makes connections from that. It’s been really awesome to be a part of that, and it’s given us the opportunity to meet and experience a lot of interesting and largely unknown acts around D.C.

How long would you say you spent writing and working on this EP?

Guerry: Really, we had been working on a bunch of different songs for a long time, so a big part of the process for this EP was just figuring out what our sound was. For a while, we were still working on an old project that we had started in high school. Then we decided that we should start a new project, with a slightly different group of people, [which became Dawkins]. After a while, we had all these songs that weren’t necessarily all of the same core—there was a lot of exploring the types of songs that we could make between us, or what felt natural at the time. Towards the end of the process of making the EP, we started narrowing it down and finding a cohesive sound. Once we found that, we wrote a few new songs that fit within that framework.

Lystad: There was also a lot of time between the making of many of these songs, too, which left a lot of time for different ideas and approaches to emerge. There would sometimes come a point where we had been sitting on a mix of a song for a year or so, and then we’d start to rethink it, or see how the new approaches we’d been working with could re-energize that material.

Guerry: When you have that much time to work on something, I think you can almost forget what you liked about a song. There were a bunch of songs that we just lost interest in or forgot about. We outgrew the songs in the process of making them.

Jobst: Yeah, there are a lot of demos and songs that we made together that aren’t on the record, but they are songs that led us to the sound we have now.

Was there a certain objective you had in mind for the EP, either aesthetically or conceptually?

Guerry: There was no real conceptual agenda. We weren’t trying to represent a particular sound or scene, it was more about us finding ways to cohesively incorporate certain influences. In the future, I think we want to be much more organized going into working on a record, in terms of putting stricter limits on the sounds we use and the kind of songwriting style.

What are some of the influences that you felt were important to incorporate?

Lystad: There are some maybe less overt influences, like hip-hop—which we have all been really into and all try to work a little bit of that in certain places. But then there are some of the more obvious shared influences, like Radiohead—especially from a songwriting front, and in terms of their melodies. But it really comes from all over.

Guerry: We’ve been told not to say Radiohead is an influence, but we fucking love Radiohead [Laughs].

Lystad: All three of us like so much different music, and part of being in this project while living in different cities and having to take up things individually, is that it lets each of us have our own influences and grow into being our own musicians. When we come together for this project, that combination yields a certain sound, but if you took all of us individually, we’d all have our own distinct approach and our own favorite styles. Together, those things just start colliding in different ways.

—Glenn Jackson

Photo by Divine Enfant.

It’s not easy to summarize the vast musical history of 69-year-old groundbreaker Martin Rev, but his new album Demolition 9 does a pretty good job. Across 34 tracks—most of them less than two minutes long—Rev skates through jazz, classical, doo-wop, R&B, punk, industrial, and the many uncategorizable styles he coined as founding member of pioneering post-punk duo Suicide.

Demolition 9 feels like a concept album—perhaps a score to a musical about Rev’s life—but, for him, there was no concept beyond making new music. “I was just following my ear, which is what I do in everything I work on,” he says, speaking over the phone from his home in New York City. “It’s all about playing around. I’m like a kid playing with toys, assembling his own little arrangement out of stuff that doesn’t make any sense to anyone else but him.”

That playfulness is clear on Demolition 9. Rev will jump from a swelling symphonic piece to a swinging pop ditty, then cut to a jarring blast of noise or a pounding storm of electronics. There are serious moods throughout the record, but there’s also lots of fun to be had. Take “Tuba,” a bouncy piece that could soundtrack a Bugs Bunny cartoon. “The sounds of certain instruments—horns, tubas, bassoon—always have an angelic or innocent humor for me,” admits Rev.

The many modes of Demolition 9 reflect Rev’s lifelong devotion to music. Born in New York in 1947, Rev first fell in love with the doo-wop and R&B songs he heard kids his age playing and singing in the streets. In his teen years he turned to jazz, watching legends like Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane in Manhattan nightclubs, and taking piano lessons from bebop innovator Lennie Tristano.

A jazz career could’ve been in Rev’s future, but his path veered when he met artist and singer Alan Vega in the summer of 1969. The two bonded over mutual loves of classic pop and the confrontational performances of Iggy Pop. They soon formed Suicide, with Rev banging at a hybrid of keyboards and drums and Vega playing the dangerous frontman. A huge influence on the post-punk scenes in ’70s New York, the duo stuck it out for four decades, outlasting their peers and ending only when Vega died last year at age 78.

Demolition 9 is Rev’s first album since Vega passed. He wasn’t specifically thinking about his musical comrade when he made it, “but he’s always a listener somewhere in my mind,” he explains. “There are certain people in your life that you’re really playing for. They’re the ones you want to please. Alan and I didn’t always agree on everything, but I always wanted to hear what he had to say.”

To learn more about how Rev’s past informed Demolition 9, we asked him to give us a guided tour of his musical history.

On R&B and Doo-Wop

I grew up on this music. It was coming right out of the homes of people I knew, and kids would sing it in the streets. Songs would sometimes go right from the streets into the studio and then onto the radio. It was the pure emotions and inventiveness of kids my age.

That music was New York. Everybody was listening to R&B and doo-wop on their little transistor radios. Anytime you went out to a school dance, that was the music, that was the soundtrack of your life. Being romantic, falling in love as teenagers do, the music enhanced that and that enhanced the music. It was a reflection of that whole teen way of coming of age amorously.

R&B holds up today because it was truthful, not always in the words but in the performer’s intensity, commitment, and direction. The rhythm is poignant and terse and tight. It’s a structure that has been time-tested. You make a building so well, with everything screwed in so perfectly, it’s going to hold up a long time.

On Classical and Jazz

When I heard something that I really liked, I wanted to know how to do it. As a teenager, classical music was the most remote kind, but I knew there was something there that I didn’t want to just walk away from. If Stravinsky came on the radio, I’d make sure to listen to it. Some I didn’t have the concentration to listen all the way through, so I’d fall asleep. But I knew that it was a challenge and it was great in its own way.

Jazz struck me immediately. As a teenager, it was an incredibly fascinating thing, hearing Monk, Miles, and Coltrane. They held music on such a high level. You didn’t mess with that in terms of your dedication and the level you tried to achieve. As an instrumentalist, it demanded such study to master. You couldn’t just dabble, you had to really work at it. I dug that, because I always felt that the worst thing in the world was to run out of things that I didn’t know.

At that point the classical musicians that I knew of were not improvising so much. They were basically working on mastering what was already written. Whereas the jazz guys were inventing forms all the time, so they were really on top of the whole thing. And issues in America—civil rights, equality for all—jazz was reflecting that because the musicians were living it. So when they played, that was in their horns, the intensity, the truth. That came out in their music.

On Suicide

A lot of why Suicide stayed together so long was because we were never really embraced; we never had a really major success. We were always on an uphill battle. When we met, we were both already developed and committed to being artists. There was not going to be anything else in life for us; we didn’t want anything else in life. That was our great obsession and desire. Alan and I were the only ones still out there after everyone went home, so to speak. We were up the latest, and we were the most inspired in terms of what we wanted to do.

We sculpted Suicide out of each of our own musical tastes and value systems—what might work better for his vocals, what might work better for my instruments. You just keep sculpting it out from one big block of sounds. The music stayed fresh enough for us that it was never something that we thought was finished. It was always changing as we were. So was all the stuff happening around us, especially the whole focus on performing with a certain aspect of theater. That was really in the air, from Iggy and before him the Rolling Stones, and we seemed to take to it naturally.

On New York City

The city has changed a lot, but there are still aspects of what it always was, in terms of its geometry. The ratio of people versus space versus height versus nature—that kind of dynamic has a rhythmic aspect to it. It creates a certain energy, a certain intelligence because people are so close together. When you’re surrounded by a lot of activity and a lot of people, there’s a lot of information around. So you become more aware and sophisticated about other people, and tolerant of other people. But because of the cost of living, it doesn’t really allow new artists—dreamers, you might say—to come to NYC and hole up for a while, and that’s what always made it a fertile ground for new arts.

I can’t separate New York from my life. I don’t know where it applies on a daily basis. Suicide was definitely influenced by the subways and the streets and the concrete. It’s the way that you shape things and the intensity of your focus that is effected. So it’s all there, and I don’t think it’ll ever not be, because I was born in New York and it has always been an incredibly exciting place for me, and so influential.

On Career

I wanted to do something with all this stuff that knocked me out, all the rock and jazz and classical. So I had a real adventure ahead of me, to master that, to find my individuality in all of it. I knew early, at age 10 or 11, that was the route I was on, and it influenced every decision I made afterwards.

It’s like an obsession or a compulsion, like when you see a girl or a guy that’s the one for you. You want nothing to get in the way of that. Music never really breaks your heart the way love can, but the circumstances of your life can become very tough. Some cats don’t take risk into account. Many years after I started, I realized I hadn’t ever factored in risk. A lot of people around me, they gave up early if they had an aspiration like I did—they said, ‘I gotta make a living.’ They were more realistic in a sense.

Then you have a few people like me who say, ‘I don’t care about that.’ They end up making the work that means something, but they also end up in difficult places. Because when you’re steering your ship, everybody else is going where they need to survive, and you’re going off to the side. You see an island in your mind, and at some point you’re way out in the sea towards this island, but all the other ships are far in the distance. Suddenly it hits you that you’re in this giant ocean with nothing around you. But that’s part of the whole journey.

—Marc Masters

Launched in 2009 as the solo project of singer-songwriter Dustin Payseur, Beach Fossils has since expanded to become a full-on rock quartet. On previous albums Clash The Truth, released in 2013, and their self-titled 2010 debut, the band have fleshed out Payseur’s delicate, melodic compositions, amassing a solid catalogue of songs that toe the improbable line between dreamy and anthemic.

On their latest full-length, Somersault, Beach Fossils add even more nuance to their brand of melancholy guitar pop. While the music is bright and playful, the lyrics find Payseur struggling through loneliness, underscoring the impermanence of personal relationships.

The heady, mid-tempo, piano-pop groover “Saint Ivy” combines a bouncy rhythm with dynamic classical strings, as Payseur’s lyrics touch on both cynicism and hopefulness. With its weaving bassline and the chorus’s gently-circling guitar, “Sugar” could be an outtake from a lost 4AD record. Underneath the gauzy instrumentation, Payseur’s vocal refrain—“On the outside, change your mind, feeling nothing”—hints at detachment and alienation.

The album closes with the softly-jangling “That’s All for Now,” which opens with sorrowful lyrics: “It’s new regret / Isn’t it funny how we forget?” Payseur sings. Eventually, the song’s mid-tempo groove gives way to tender, wilting slide guitar, as Payseur advises: “Keep moving on, keep moving on.” It’s a fitting end to an album that reconciles the immediacy of heartbreak with the transitory nature of life and love.

—John Morrison

Welcome to Seven Essential Releases, our weekly roundup of the best music on Bandcamp. Each week, we’ll recommend six new albums, plus pick an older LP from the stacks that you may have missed.

Chastity Belt, I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone

On their spectacular third record, I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone, Chastity Belt dial down the LOLs for a long, uncompromising dive into modern age anomie, loneliness, depression, and the ennui that comes from overdoing things, in the name of trying to find meaning in a world that’s increasingly difficult to decipher. “I just fall on my face when I’m trying to have fun,” sings Julia Shapiro coolly, one of many times on the record she admits to overindulging in the name of feeling okay–just okay. Elsewhere on the record, she looks to relationships (“I can convince myself of anything, so what the hell?”), employment (“I wanna do something cool and I wanna get paid”), or even self-deception (“What good does truth bring?”) to restore her to equilibrium. Yet by the end, at the wasted end of “5am” reality comes on strong: “Communication’s pretty hard.” Chastity Belt’s sound feels remarkably unmoored in time, all bummed out jangle-pop, cracked vocals and yearning melodies just a few steps below “rock band”; it’s hard to think of another band that sounds quite like this. I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone is not an easy listen, but it’s an essential one.

—Mariana Timony

Gold Dime, Nerves

Andrya Ambro, of Talk Normal, has been working on her Gold Dime project (now a trio) for a few years, and this, their first full-length LP, is a gutsy, dense, fascinating work. It all builds from pulsing rhythms and Ambro’s powerhouse voice, guitar squall overlaid and squiggling melodies interwoven; the influences of ‘70s avant-garde NYC that were louder in Talk Normal are toned down here but still clear. The lyrical theme here is, in a way, authenticity. Ambro asks, in many ways, from  “Quota,” with its ominous industrial throb, to “4 AM,” a jagged, reedy thing, to “Easy,” which is not at all, just to be seen and taken for who she is, in all her complex glory, by everyone in her life, from critics to intimate partners. She asks by doing, by being, by making this music that’s easy to get hooked into but difficult to parse, requiring listener patience that’s well-rewarded. We often forget how powerful an assertion that can be on its own. Glad we have Ambro around to remind us.

—Jes Skolnik

Grotto, At Last

As Lagos, Nigeria became known for Afrobeat music in the 1970s, Grotto took a different path, fusing rock and funk with psychedelic results. Influenced by Jimi Hendrix and Carlos Santana, the young group played with Fela Kuti and released their debut album in 1977. Now fully remastered, At Last finds Grotto at the height of their powers, pushing their sound to unforeseen places. It’s a kaleidoscopic trip you have to take over and over.

—Marcus J. Moore

Hante, Between Hope and Danger

This is the first so-called “dark” or “cold” wave album that’s actually given me the chills. Even though it has all of the genre’s trappings of moody synths and snap-crackle drum machine beats, it still feels darker, more sinister, and more lonely than the rest. Hélène de Thoury’s morose and distinctly feminine voice wanders around the synthetic instruments as if lost in an abandoned cold storage warehouse.

—Ally-Jane Grossan

Marika Hackman, I’m Not Your Man

The lyrics on Marika Hackman’s second record, I’m Not Your Man, are sharp and cutting from the get-go. On “Boyfriend,” the brilliant album-opener, Hackman leverages a man’s sexist assumptions to seduce his girlfriend. “I held his girl in my hands, I know he doesn’t mind,” Hackman sneers, “She likes it ’cuz they’re softer than a man’s (I like to moisturize).” Hackman’s pithy wordplay is paired throughout the record with razor-sharp instrumentation. “Gina’s World” is built on a framework of bare, tense guitars, Hackman’s voice haunting and whispery over top of them. “My Lover Cindy” pairs a candy-coated, ’80s twee guitar line with lyrics that are pure poison: “Gonna get my fill/ Gonna keep my eyes on the prize/ and I’ll suck you dry, I will.” I’m Not Your Man is a collection of 15 brilliant, searing rock songs, equal parts sly humor and withering wit.

—J. Edward Keyes

Wren Kitz, Dancing on Soda Lake

Dancing on Soda Lake may sound, in its first few minutes, like a folk record, but the deeper in you get, the more you realize how inadequate that shorthand is. The base of Kitz’s songs is soft, melancholy guitar, but sometimes it’s submerged so deeply on Soda Lake that it’s imperceptible. Album opener “Haunted Hole” is the most straightforward song by a mile, and it’s got a chorus that takes a strange, hairpin turn and a strange, stuttering time signature. From there, things only get more adventurous. The stunning, nine-and-a-half-minute “Ocean Rah” stretches ominous, unearthly drones for minutes at a time; Kitz’s guitar, baleful and skeletal, is shoved far in the background. As the song goes on, it gets even eerier: birds chirp in the distance, there are brief snatches of garbled voices, and deep, rumbling bass notes roll in like threatening clouds. “Hold Him” is as chilling as a funeral ballad; “Cheese Whiz Salad” may have a playfully surreal title, but the song itself is built on what sounds like a field recording of tape machines melting down. Kitz’s voice throughout remains calm and focused—a man singing lullabies at the center of a storm. Dancing on Soda Lake is deeply stirring and quietly defiant, a record that seeps into your skin and refuses to disappear.

—J. Edward Keyes

Back Catalogue

Columbia Nights, In All Things

The members of Columbia Nights describe themselves as a “soultronic” group, which makes complete sense listening to their debut album, In All Things. The record is dusty vinyl and nocturnal soul, bringing D’Angelo and Jose James to mind. Featuring Aaron “AB” Abernathy and Diggs Duke, In All Things is easily one of the smoothest soul records ever released from the D.C. area, though to this point, it’s been severely slept on as a viable LP. Music like this lasts forever. Of course that’s a great thing.

—Marcus J. Moore

Label head Tom Lea, photo by Vicky Grout.

Viewed from one perspective, the history of British dance music is a tale of genres. Jungle, grime, U.K. garage, dubstep—each one born and bred in the nation’s capital. Yet it’s notable how the key London labels of the last decade or so—the likes of Hyperdub and Night Slugs—have operated in the space between clear genre boundaries, giving equal attention to grime, techno, dub, and countless others. To that list, add Local Action.

Founded in 2010 by Tom Lea, Local Action emerged at a transitional point in U.K. dance music, just as dubstep was morphing from an underground London sound into a global mainstream soundtrack. At the time, Lea was working as the editor of FACT, the influential online music publication located in the basement of Phonica Records in London’s Soho. “One day I was sitting with my colleague Kiran [Sande] who now runs the label Blackest Ever Black and Simon Rigg, manager of Phonica approached us, like, ‘Why don’t you run a label for us?’” says Lea. But Sande had his own distinct vision for a label brewing, so Lea decided to go at it alone. With financial backing from Phonica, Local Action debuted with a volley of 12-inch records, from the likes of T. Williams and Throwing Snow, that sketched out a bumping, rhythmic dance floor sound with traces of distinctly British house, U.K. funky, and grime in its DNA.

“At first, I didn’t have any ambition beyond putting out banging club tunes,” explains Lea. But as the label grew, he started to have doubts about the label’s direction. T. Williams, Local Action’s flagship act and author of five of the label’s first nine releases, jumped ship to PMR Records, home of Jessie Ware and Disclosure. Some bigger names had expressed interest in releasing music on Local Action, “but it became apparent that, as a small label, we wouldn’t be getting their best material.” Lea, meanwhile, had become smitten with the atmospheric “cloud rap” of Clams Casino—hardly a natural fit for Local Action’s early roster. “Then all of a sudden Type and Tri Angle put out Clams records. I had this revelation: ‘They’ve done it, why shouldn’t I?’ It felt like we kind of needed to regroup.”

Lea’s first step was to sever ties with Phonica, and he began to rethink the label’s remit. “I started thinking, ‘Maybe what’s important isn’t to have an identity, but to have all these artist that have their own individual sounds.’ Most of my favorite artists have followed their own path, be it Clams Casino or Tom Waits.” New artists quickly came aboard—among them: DJ Q, pioneer of the rowdy Northern English dance floor genre “bassline house”; Brooklyn footwork outsider LiL JaBBA; and Paul Lynch aka Slackk, formerly the blogger behind Grimetapes, an MP3 archive of classic grime sets.

Local Action found its new spiritual home at Boxed, a London club night organized by Slackk and fellow DJ/producers Logos, Oil Gang, and Mr. Mitch. Boxed is a grime rave, but one with a difference—it’s entirely instrumental, with a forward-thinking productions policy, and no MCs. For a while, Lea was sort of an “unofficial fifth member” of Boxed, and it was at these club nights that many Local Action tracks got their first airing. “It suddenly gave a physical context to a lot of the records we were putting out,” Lea says. Another key testing ground was New Atlantis, a series of live broadcasts and Sunday sessions on which Lea and label artists like Yamaneko and Deadboy mixed Local Action productions with tranquil New Age music by the likes of Iasos and J.D. Emmanuel.

Lea confesses he’s often felt like he was “blagging it” with Local Action—the little label that somehow snared out-of-its-league artists like Deadboy or DJ Q. But it’s a mark of just how far Local Action has come that he could land an artist of the stature of Dawn Richard—founder member of R&B girl group Danity Kane, and vocalist of Diddy’s supergroup Diddy – Dirty Money.

Lea first communicated with Dawn Richard for a FACT feature, then started sending her instrumentals, and their friendship gradually transitioned into a working relationship. First came a one-off single release, “Not Above That,” then later last year, an album, REDEMPTION. “I knew it was such an opportunity. I didn’t want to fuck it up,” says Lea. REDEMPTION was a critical and commercial success, and scored positive reviews from publications like Rolling Stone and Vogue. Not bad, for a label that’s still a one-man operation. “It legitimizes what you’re doing,” muses Lea. “Your parents know you’re an idiot creative who doesn’t make any money. But then you can say, ‘Look, I’ve done this and sold tens of thousands of copies.’ It’s nice just to show you haven’t wasted your fucking time.”

Six essential Local Action releases

Slackk, Palm Tree Fire

Slackk, the recording alias of blogger-turned-producer Paul Lynch, debuted on Local Action with the 2012 EP Raw Missions. But it’s his 2014 album for the label, Palm Tree Fire, which crossbreeds grime with translucent, quasi-Asian melodies that became his key statement. “I’d known Paul for years,” says Lea. “He used to run the blog Grimetapes—he was the guy people would ask if they were looking for a specific grime set. It took a while for him to get his production together, but he put in the effort—took piano lessons, everything. By the time Boxed was going, he was flying.”

DJ Q, Ineffable

Bassline house emerged from the clubs of northern England around 2002, a rude and rowdy descendent of 4×4 garage. Bassline pioneer DJ Q dropped a few singles on Local Action before presenting his effervescent debut LP in 2014. “From a London perspective, you might imagine he was stuck in this bassline house ghetto,” says Lea. “But he sells a load of records in the regions, plays all these club raves and absolutely smashes it. It was the first time we’d approached an artist who was bigger than the label, so to have Q come on board was incredible.”

LiL JaBBA, Scales

A wild card of the Local Action roster, the Australian-born, Brooklyn-based JaBBA debuted on the label with this floaty, psychedelic collision of jazz, juke, and footwork. “He’s a genius, a really unique character,” says Lea. “He’s just someone who lives his art. Since I’ve known him, he’s lived in an attic studio where he paints these huge oil canvases, makes music, sleeps. He lives his art in a ridiculously intense way. He’s so driven. I think he’s destined to be a quite under-the-radar cult artist.”

Yamaneko, Project Nautilus [Keygen Loops]

Pixel Wave Embrace, Joe Moynihan’s debut on Local Action, was a blissful fusion of grime and meditation music, but its follow-up covers much darker, more anxious territory. “Joe went from being in a really good place to a really bad one. He wrote it while he was in a relationship that was breaking down, but he couldn’t afford to move out, and he was speaking to his mum most nights to get through it. Then, the day we announced the album, his mum died, very suddenly. It’s very bleak, not the sort of record I ever expected to put out. But Joe is one of my best friends, and it’s a real privilege that he would trust me with his music.”

D∆WN, REDEMPTION

The third part of D∆WN’s trilogy, following 2013’s Goldenheart and 2015’s Blackheart, is a reflective, expansive future R&B record, produced beautifully by Machinedrum. “I started speaking to her over email, as she had her email address on her Twitter, and I started sending her instrumentals. She’s got really interesting taste, she’s into experimental stuff. Then, over Christmas, she DMed me, like ‘Hey, I’m bored of self-releasing—I’d like to work for a label.’ We had 10 days to get her single ‘Not Above That’ together, because she’d already put the date on Twitter. I pulled in every favour to get it done. But D∆WN is a fucking artist. She doesn’t stop, doesn’t sleep—and that brings the best out of you.”

Deadboy, Earth Body

South London-born producer Allen Wooton won early acclaim for his emotional, synth-smeared early 12-inches for the labels Numbers and Well Rounded. But Earth Body shows off another side of his oeuvre, exploring a melancholy, Drake-like pop with Wooton’s own multi-tracked vocals placed front and center. “I’ve been obsessed with this album since hearing the first demos,” says Lea. “I’ve wanted to work with him pretty much since I started this label, so to be trusted to do his debut album is something I’m very proud of. Musically it’s very unlike anything he’s ever done before, but it taps into a side of Al that, having got to know him in recent years, I’ve known was there for a while and I’m really happy he felt free and confident enough to bring to the forefront.”

—Louis Pattison

From emporiums with vast caverns of dusty, disorganized stacks, to the slick, wooden-box shops, where carefully-curated bins of vinyl are perfectly positioned next to screen prints, the world has no shortage of diverse and amazing record shops. There are the miles of stacks at Amoeba (the California-based independently-run music chain), crates to dig through at flea markets the world over—even Myanmar, the former pariah state just now treading towards democracy, opened its first record store in the capital of Yangon. And there’s my favorite, The Thing in Brooklyn, where it sometimes feels as if the head of A&R for Def Jam has dumped 30 years worth of promo 12″s into a cramped junk shop.

With the recent flood of reissues and brand-new vinyl on sale at airports and Urban Outfitters, record stores can feel quaint—what was once a thrilling hunt for rare finds is now a few clicks away on Discogs. This isn’t a treatise on the vinyl revival, that’s been written before. This is a celebration of some of the finest purveyors on this planet, as selected by labels on Bandcamp, and paired with a recent release from each.

—Ally-Jane Grossan 

Amoeba, Los Angeles, CA

Amoeba in Hollywood is one of these stores I can spend hours (and way too many dollars, of course) in. They meticulously cover about every existing genre of music in both first- and secondhand. My favorite corner is the comprehensive film score section with the adjacent weirdo/obscure/library section. The latter is the kind of place that makes me feel like I know nothing about music. There’s so much to discover.

—Michael Mayer, A&R/Owner, Kompakt Records

Armageddon Shop, Cambridge, MA

Armageddon Shop in Cambridge rules! It’s a little basement/dungeon shop that carries a great selection of indie/punk/metal/weirdo records. They have tons of small press and self-released records that you really can’t find elsewhere. Armageddon replaced Twisted Village sometime in the early 2000s, so the store now has different owners than I remember. But on the shelves, it feels unchanged. In high school, it was the only place you could find the stuff from Load Record outta Providence and things of that nature. I can tell the shop is still scratching that same itch, covering more than just New England bands.

—Cyrus Lubin, U.S. Director of Distribution and Production, Domino Records; Owner, Famous Class Records

Been Around Records & CDs, Little Rock, AR

Been Around Records & CDs was formative to my record obsession—it’s a tucked-away storefront in Little Rock, Arkansas that’s been there for years and years. John, Been Around’s owner, didn’t care much for the punk rock that I’d bring to the counter as a junior high fanatic, but was quick to point me in all different directions of ‘strange’ when my listening veered towards Devo and The Residents. It was easy to spend an entire day going through the floor-to-ceiling shelves in search of unusual sounds. I haven’t been in years, but owe a small but invaluable part of my collection to Been Around.

—Matt Werth, RVNG Intl.

Bull City Records, Durham, NC

For its size, the NC Triangle of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill/Carrboro has an abundance of independent record stores, and they all carve out their own li’l niche. It rules! That makes it kind of tough to pick a favorite, but I probably find myself at Bull City Records more than the others. This is partly because of its proximity to my house, but mostly because Chaz is not your standard-issue record store clerk; he’s more like a small-town pharmacist. Swing through his cozy store, give him something to start with, and chances are he’ll recommend your new favorite record.

—Mike Caulo, Publicist, Merge Records

Co-Op 87 Records & Tapes, Brooklyn, NY

My secret litmus test is: If dude-behind-the-counter says, ‘Let me know if I can help you find anything!’—I’m already annoyed. I wonder how many other female-identified folks find themselves feeling a bit defensive in the indie record shop environment, too. Anyway, Mike, Ben, and Nate are the kindest most unpretentious homies around. Their New Arrivals bins are constantly full of good stuff, and since everything is so reasonably priced, it moves fast and is replenished quickly. Very hot Dance/Electronic section, if you’re into that, but you can go deep on any genre really. Mike is currently helping me complete my girl group/Phil Spector 45 collection. Simply the best!

—Rachel Barnhart, Project Manager, Mexican Summer; Co-founder, Soap Library

End of All Music, Oxford, MS

There’s something about your hometown record store that separates it from others. Maybe because you’ve flipped through the racks so often it feels like an extension of your home collection, or perhaps it embodies the look and character of the town you call home. David Swider, owner/main dude at End of All Music appreciates the ins and outs of a good record store, and you get the feeling that, when you’re in the store, you’re experiencing the best of the best. Funk, soul, rock, hip-hop, jazz, gospel, folk, local, regional, international; you’ll need a quick few fantastic hours to take it all in. Recently, David produced a record involving Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Adam Torres, William Tyler, and Patterson Hood—each contributed new, original music, to benefit the Southern Poverty Law Center. It’s a beautiful record, sounds amazing, and makes your heart feel all nice and stuff. What more is there?

—Peter Wiley, Director of Distributed Labels, Fat Possum

Everyday Music, Seattle, WA

Everyday Music is definitely my most-visited store. There are smaller shops that only carry the dankest of the dank, and megastores that you can get lost in that seem to have everything. But I like Everyday because every time I go in, I find good, reasonably-priced records, in good condition. I can also walk there from my apartment, which is very tight.

—Matt Kolhede, Digital Sales and Media Coordinator, Hardly Art; Co-Owner, Help Yourself Records 

Exiled Records, Portland, OR

Friends regularly roll their eyes at me when I say that the record stores are my favorite thing about music in Portland, but we’re home to some pretty fantastic places including Mississippi, Little Axe, Music Millennium, Musique Plastique, Jackpot, Everyday Music, Crossroads, etc. that any city would be lucky to have. All of these stores rule, but my personal favorite is Exiled Records. Their selection realllllllly works with my ‘weirdos-only’ policy. They have label sections for killer underground labels like Siltbreeze and Sublime Frequencies, a fantastic selection of back issues of cool mags like Popwatch and The Wire, and rare old 7-inches by artists like Royal Trux, Boredoms, Sun City Girls, etc. I regularly find used records that I’ve spent years looking for here, including Maureen Tucker’s Playin’ Possum and a CD copy of Unrest’s Cath Carroll EP (check out the insane 30+ minute version of “Hydroplane”). Scott and Lindsey will always have a special place in my heart for helping me track down Scharpling & Wurster’s Rock, Rot & Rule on vinyl after I unsuccessfully visited 10 different stores in search of a copy on Record Store Day in 2014. They also have a great in-house record label that has put out records by fantastic artists including the Great Unwashed, Lavender Flu, and more! Highest possible recommendation.

—Benjamin Parrish, Kill Rock Stars (I’ve been here 12+ years and never had a job title. It’s weird, but I love it.)

Face Records, Tokyo, Japan

This is definitely my favorite shop. They simply have the best prices in Japan and the best selection of rare grooves without resulting in you going stir crazy, ’cause there are too many records. They know their music inside out, all types and styles. The service is excellent and you can play any record. They have many rare records with decent price tags.

—Joe Davis, Owner, Far Out Recordings

Long In The Tooth, Philadelphia, PA

Long In The Tooth is the perfect example of an unpretentious, authentic indie record store, and the reason why local shops can still thrive and exist. The owner, Nick, is extremely passionate and knowledgeable about so many genres of music and his curation of new and used LPs, rarities, books, cassettes, and even CDs is impeccable. This is a place where you won’t be judged on the T-shirt you’re wearing or what you bring to the counter, which is probably why it’s easy to spend a couple of hours digging through the crates.

—Bob Lugowe, Director of Marketing, Relapse Records

Mono Records, Glendale, CA

The new location is off the beaten path and makes no attempt at frills, but that’s been part of Mono’s appeal since its original Echo Park location. Quality records priced to keep moving means customers come find this place (even if there’s no sign on the door). Their layout is sleek and uncluttered, which makes finding things you didn’t think you needed particularly easy.

—Nate Nelson, Co-owner, Innovative Leisure

NAT Records, Tokyo, Japan

They have a really wide selection from a lot of genres ranging from punk, metal, psych, folk, and experimental music. The reviews are great and the description of each record has so much helpful information.

—Go, Guruburu Brain

PDQ Records, Tucson, AZ

PDQ Records in Tucson, Arizona is by far my favorite record store. This is the spot to spend a stoned afternoon digging in before heading home to chop, mix, and listen to finds. The store is dedicated to vinyl first, and has one of those monstrous main room collections you only find in a few spots, and also has side rooms with ridiculous 45 collections. This isn’t an overly-curated, trendy main street boutique with only new wax; this is a central, well-cared-for warehouse of music near the quick-loan joints and Karamelo King taco stand with an unparalleled collection of wax.

—Michael Tolle, Founder, Mello Music Group

Sweat Records, Miami, FL

Three to five sentences on why it’s my favorite store: For one, their stock is so well curated. I manage to find some long lost gems in their used 7″ bins every time I go. It’s women-owned and operated (big ups Lauren Reskin and Emile Milgrim), and they sling delicious coffee to boot. Miami is my hometown so I’m lucky I get to visit Sweat a few times a year.

—Jessi Frick, Owner, Father/Daughter Records

Wooden Tooth, Tucson, AZ

Wooden Tooth is the fruit on a prickly pear cactus. Amazing, knowledgeable staff with the best selection of everything. They’ve reached far and wide to bring the pinnacle, most ultimate, bedazzled collection of bangers to the Old Pueblo. They’ve also put out great local albums on vinyl and cassette on their own label bearing the shop’s name. Great art, great people, great selection, great vibes, great smells, great feels.

—Kieran Danielson, Sales Rep (La Croix Boy), Fat Possum

Waltz Store, Tokyo, Japan

When I first came across this cassette store in Japan, I fell in love with it instantly. It makes me so happy there are people who are willing to go full analog in this digital era. I was so happy to have tapes there together with many label mates from all over the world. I hope I will visit this cassette heaven again. Beautiful space with beautiful tapes.

—Filip Zemčík, Owner/Founder/Manager, Z Tapes

Photo by Hugo Holger Schneider.

Sasha Perera, aka Perera Elsewhere, always has one ear tilted toward the future. As the vocalist in the Berlin trio Jahcoozi, Perera and her bandmates made forward-thinking bass music before the polyglot dance music boom of the last decade began. She describes the music on her latest solo album, All Of This, as “doom folk,” teeming with dark pop, trip-hop, and R&B. Among other things, she sings about hopeful escapism (“Tomorrow South”), and the increasingly confounding idea that identity and corporate language—self-branding, as it were—are becoming one in the same (“All Of This”). Perera’s palette is global, but not just as a producer and artist—she’s an accomplished DJ and instructor as well.

When Perera spoke to us, she was in Abidjan for some DJ gigs following a trip to Burkina Faso. We talked about finding empowerment through technology, the best up-and-comers making club music, and the uncanny way a melancholy cover of 50 Cent’s “Candy Shop” ended up on her new album.

What were you doing in Burkina Faso?

I was DJing and giving production workshops with Ableton. I was sharing with MCs ways that they can make their own beats and do their own productions, and showing different musicians how to produce themselves. This is through the Goethe-Institut, the German cultural organization which has budget to exchange culture with other countries. I’ve used Ableton for a long time. The first record with my old band Jahcoozi was made on Ableton.

What do you like about teaching other people about music and production?

I feel like I’m in the same position as them. I used to be an MC and I used to write to other people’s music. I had equipment, but I used to get all, ‘Ugh, it takes so long to make stuff,’ and it’s just not true. I think if you’re a vocalist or an instrumentalist, being able to develop your own ideas without other people, and not being dependent on a studio which you have to pay money for [is important]. I feel empowered through technology and I wanna share that with other people.

There was a recent controversy with a DJ school in New York, where students were paying nearly $5,000 for Ableton lessons and the classes never happened. I feel bad for them, but kind of ‘ugh’ about the whole thing.

‘Ugh’ is right. Get on the Internet, hang out with your friends, mess around, watch tutorials. Nobody would have paid for me to fucking study anything like that. I’m happy that other people can do that—if you can do that, good for you. Just use it. Don’t go to Berghain, fucking spoiled bitches. I don’t wanna sound like some war dad who’s like, ‘When I was a kid, we had to work for our money.’ I don’t want to sound like that, but everybody’s gotta find their own journey. There are people who go to those schools and they also make amazing things. It’s also OK.

You’ve stressed the importance of being able to do things on your own. How does it feel to be going into your second solo album?

It’s similar to my second album with Jahcoozi. There was no pressure on my first album with Jahcoozi or my first solo album as Perera Elsewhere, because nobody knew about it. And then you start to get press and you have this weird form of expectation. You start to feel like, ‘Oh shit, maybe it was a fluke.’ At the beginning, I felt like I was making more tracks. In the middle I was like, ‘Fuck man, why didn’t I just get random 20-year-olds to do my beats? I could make an album in a week.’ But obviously that was not my mission. I play trumpet on this album, I didn’t on the first one but only because I didn’t want to. Trumpet is actually the instrument I’ve played longest in my life, weirdly enough.

There is a very distinct progression from the first album to the second. This album is darker and more pop-infused than the first. The darkness feels a little bit more investigative than the first album, but there are discrete pop songs. Are there specific feelings you’re looking to evoke with the music, or that you feel like you need to express for yourself? How do you know when something you’re sketching is something you want to put in the world?

If I decide I’m going to write a song, then I tend to start with some kind of melodic progression. I get on keys, organ, synthesizer, guitar or bass, anything that gives me a small chord change, enough melody to write on it. I also have to put in a few weird sounds that transport me somewhere and make me want to write something. I’m not the kind of person that can just write and record my vocals on anything. I really feel funny to write stuff which doesn’t move me to another place. There is much more experimentation on this album, a lot more elements. I always called the first album a sketchbook, it’s like deconstructed pop. With this one, I’ve used those deconstructed elements, but added more things to it. I would say it’s completely reconstructed as pop, but it’s a sketchbook where I started to color in certain parts.

The weird elements or sounds you were talking about before, how do you find them?

I’ll get some leaves from outside and shake them in a microphone. I’ll get some kind of string instrument I bought in Bangladesh and start playing it badly on a microphone, and then I’ll take that and manipulate it in Ableton—I’ll pitch it, I’ll stretch it, I’ll repeat it, I’ll loop it, I’ll reverse it. Sometimes I use a weird shaker I’ve made with rice, or whatever, and I’ll put a filter on it so it’s moving. Once the melody feels transported somewhere, then I want to write on it. A chord progression is a chord progression. It can make you feel something. But, for me, sound aesthetics are so important. I DJ club music, right? The sound aesthetic is so important. I really hate cheap, shiny, over-compressed sounds.

When you’re DJing, what do you play?

I actually play bass music, because I come from it. As a kid, I listened to a lot of jungle, drum & bass, U.K. bass music, garage. I think you can hear in my music as Perera Elsewhere that space and time is something that is very important to me. I put a lot of effects on things, and I kind of create this world by using stuff like reverb and different effects to create different dimensions within the sound. Because I come from club music, if I’m playing at 2am, I love that kind of music, I’m super happy to play it. There’s so much amazing club music that is still coming out. I know a lot of DJs produce the same music that they DJ, but for me, it would be extremely boring to have to do that. I would feel bored in my creative process to have to think about people dancing. Maybe I’d be richer if I did it, but life’s too short.

Who are the producers you’re into right now?

In terms of club music, I listen to a lot of London and Bristol kind of sounds. There’s a guy from China called Howie Lee, he’s [making] really weird bass music, kind of like Aphex Twin. It’s fucking good. There’s this chick from London called SHYGIRL and someone called Video Salon who I like. I play a lot of grime, as well. In 2004, I was the first person in Berlin who booked people like Skepta, D Double E. I used to do a party called ‘Grime Time’ and I brought D Double, Lethal Bizzle, Wiley—but he had to cancel. Bruza came, Skepta, Jme, all of these people. I still fucking love grime, but I don’t play a whole grime set—I mix it with footwork, juke, whatever!

You have a knack for mixing genres, but there is one track on the album that stands out, ‘Karam,’ which is a pretty dark cover of 50 Cent’s ‘Candy Shop.’ How did that come to be?

Oh my God, that song I recorded in Istanbul. I had to live there for a bit, and it was fucking depressing. It was just when the world started falling apart and exactly the time of the refugee crisis, when [Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan started turning into a much bigger lunatic than he had been before that. Turkey was at the absolute center of the refugee crisis. It was a weird time to be there.

I also had to work on something I didn’t want to work in. I was asked to play a really weird character in a period drama: an Ethiopian mute slave in 1510 during the Ottoman Empire. I’m not an actor, I haven’t even got a TV. They heard of me through someone, said I looked the part, and asked me to audition. They offered me money! I’m a poor musician, so I did it and I had a bit of an identity crisis at the same time because who wants to work at McDonald’s? Not me.

So, while I was working at McDonald’s—I call it McDonald’s, because it was like a Disney-style TV series called Magnificent Century—I recorded tracks backstage. I’d take my gear with me and ignore everyone. I was making tunes as a form of protest. Nobody ever asked me what I was doing, that’s how uncommunicative it was. There was a language barrier, but I spoke Turkish by the end, enough Turkish to be told where to stand, when they’re going to shoot, things like this.

There are some very cool people in Istanbul, just not working on a TV staff, I’ll tell you that. There’s some pretty cool TV in America, there’s some funny things like True Detective. If somebody asked me to be a slave in that, I’d be like, ‘cool,’ instead of being in a cheesy pile of shit.

Anyway, I recorded this song—it’s a very sad version of ‘Candy Shop’ to me. The only woman who spoke English on this whole set was a translator for another actress, and she used to sing this song all the time in the most depressing way because we were always on set. She kept on doing this and I was like, ‘OK, this is my theme song.’ I went backstage and recorded it on a MacBook mic. I played the bass line on the keyboard of the computer, then I went home and made the rest.

—Claire Lobenfeld

All photos by Chona Kasinger

Every band begins with a mission. Some yearn for fame, others for fortune; many are just looking for a way to pay the bills, and a few want to make art for art’s sake. The Seattle band Chastity Belt also grew from a shared purpose; the quartet came together when they were sophomores at Whitman College, in neighboring Walla Walla. The catalyst? An intense desire, fueled largely by pure boredom, to troll Beta Theta Pi, one of four fraternities on campus.

It was 2010, bandleader Julia Shapiro tells me over the phone, and the brothers’ annual “Battle of the Bands”—a bacchanal dominated by Axe, weed, and body odor—was fast approaching. As such, the ladies—Shapiro (guitar, vocals), Lydia Lund (guitar), Annie Truscott (bass), and Gretchen Grimm (drums)—figured it’d be pretty damn funny to invite all their friends, storm the dudebros’ fortress, and hopefully, come out on top.

A short while later, Chastity Belt hit the stage for their first-ever performance, dressed as punks, faces smeared with garish makeup (“I was wearing so much red eyeliner it looked like my eyes were bleeding,” Shapiro recalls). They performed a single song: “Surrender,” a five-minute ode to angst, youth, “stealing your mom’s cigarettes, and wearing dark eyeliner.” To the band’s surprise, the mass of friends gathered to watch the set significantly outnumbered the Betas. Not that Chastity Belt needed to sway anyone; according to Shapiro, some of the group’s friends stole the voting slips intended for partygoers and stuffed the ballot boxes, rigging the competition in the band’s favor. “We didn’t really win anything,” Shapiro says, her deadpan voice dripping with mock disappointment.

Chastity Belt had, in fact, won several things: a serious confidence boost, validation from their peers, and the realization that, beneath all their jangly tomfoolery as underclassmen, there was a rock band waiting to emerge. “When we moved to Seattle,” Shapiro says, “we were like ‘Oh, we can really do this’—and once we felt that, it was kind of like ‘Well, let’s make music that we actually want to make, that’s not just this funny, humorous thing.”

The foursome weren’t ready to grow up just yet, of course, so when it came time to record and promote 2013’s No Regerts [sic] and its 2015 follow-up Time to Go Home, they kept things light-hearted, preaching self-love and sex-positive feminism with smirks on their faces on songs like  “Nip Slip,” “Giant (Vagina),” and “Cool Slut.”

Between their nonstop buoyant hooks and their penchant for posing in press images like an awkward family, it didn’t take long for the Belters to garner a reputation as Hardly Art’s goofball darlings, spreading smiles and giggles wherever they went. But eventually, the chortles started to seem like a crutch—especially in the wake of sought-after opening spots for tours with Courtney Barnett and Death Cab For Cutie. “It kind of felt like we were hiding behind humor, in a way,” Truscott says. “It takes a lot more to write genuine songs. It’s just harder.”

With their third album I Used To Spend So Much Time Alone, Chastity Belt are taking off the jester’s mask and buckling down, subjecting their jangle-pop to a heretofore unseen level of discipline. Where the first two albums derived their momentum from fleeting, flippant bursts of energy, I Used To Spend So Much Time Alone sees the band taking a protracted approach to dynamics, venturing through the reverb-laden fog with tentative, well-measured strides. Its songs deal with depression and heartbreak. On “5am,” Shapiro mulls over the existential consequences of a long night out, seething over the realization that in all those hours of empty, inebriated conversations she and her friends have said absolutely nothing. “It’s 5am, and I’m full of hate,” she grumbles, before getting to the root cause in the slinky chorus (“Immediate urge to get everything all straight / Need to express it but it’s not the time or place”).

This is a real-life observation for Shapiro, whose beer buzzes typically manifest as a crushing dose of ennui. “I’m trying to have meaningful conversations with people, or make something happen so that it feels worthwhile that I’m out of my house,” Shapiro sighs. “Sometimes, it’ll end with me going to bed around 5am”—she drops the deadpan for an exaggerated, anguished whisper, poking fun at her own melodrama—”just because I know there’s more, there’s got to be more.”

Nowhere is Chastity Belt’s chemistry more tangible, or their emotional honesty so profound, as on the late-album slow-burner “Something Else,” an ode to the seasonal depression that’s a hallmark of life in the Pacific Northwest. Along with the album’s lead single “Different Now,” the song represents a deviation from the band’s fragmented approach to composition (which typically casts Shapiro’s parts as cornerstones, over which the other members add theirs). Instead, its slack, melancholy arrangement came together organically during a jam session. “It ended up being a train of thought that I was having which I feel like a lot of people, especially in Seattle, can relate to during the winter,” she says, reflecting on the band’s shared headspace. “You’re kind of stuck in a downward spiral of negative thoughts until you leave the house and go for a walk to clear your head, but it’s hard to get out there when the weather’s so shitty.”

They may be more world-weary than they were two years ago, but Shapiro and company haven’t gone full Debbie Downer yet, nor do they intend to. At the end of the day, they just want to be honest. Asked if the band’s sobered sound was a conscious effort, she shrugs, “It’s got more to do with the natural progression of our music, and what kind of music we want to be making at this point. Songs like ‘Giant (Vagina)’ and ‘Pussy Weed Beer’ were written in college, when we weren’t really thinking this band was going anywhere. At the time of writing them, we didn’t have any intention of recording them, or continuing to play music.”

—Zoe Camp

Instead of orbiting a single musical style, the Heliocentrics’ expansive jams spiral out into countless galaxies of sound. The U.K. ensemble has spent years squeezing fragments of hip-hop, jazz, psych, and krautrock into their hypnotic, thrumming compositions since debuting on DJ Shadow’s 2006 album The Outsider. The group’s fourth album, A World of Masks, boasts a similar blend of sounds, but the addition of Slovakian vocalist Barbora Patkova brings a fresh element, putting their minor-key grooves into thrilling new context.

Although Patkova, like her new bandmates, has a tendency to construct music out of improvised jams, her melodies here are airtight and highly finessed. On opening track “Made of the Sun,” she delivers a scorching, operatic performance that stands in sharp contrast to the slow-burning arrangement. On “Oh Brother,” she snakes effortlessly through an avalanche of percussion and, on the title track, she seems to disappear into a hazy horn arrangement.

Which is not to say that the Heliocentrics themselves don’t bring the heat; A World of Masks remains a largely instrumental affair, full of complex rhythmic ideas and taut horn lines. Drummer and bandleader Malcolm Catto continues to deliver deft work, particularly on the nimble “The Silverback” and the aptly-titled “Human Zoo.” Jake Ferguson’s agile bass parts add a subtle warmth throughout the album, and Oliver Parfitt’s sprinkles of keyboards provide a balance to the group’s thundering low end, like on the lurching “Dawn Chorus.” While the album doesn’t necessarily revolve around Patkova, the Heliocentrics’ constellation benefits from her captivating presence—and, as a result, burns all the brighter.

—Max Savage Levenson

Vocalist and composer Natalie Chami, who has recorded as TALsounds since 2009, is well-versed in the upside of leaving things to chance. She has spent years quietly issuing a string of cassette releases, mostly on the Chicago label Hausu Mountain. Her M.O. remained mostly the same through all of them: a masterful mix of dreamworld synth gloop and fragile singing. Her songs aren’t the result of meticulous composition, they’re culled from fully-improvised recording sessions. And while her latest LP, Love Sick, released on eminent NYC label Ba Da Bing! Records, doesn’t do much to alter that basic blueprint, it does refine the end results. The songs on Love Sick are Chami’s sharpest and slimmest to date, her wandering jams trimmed to poppier ends.

Though she’s currently based in Chicago, Chami was born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada; she first moved to the States at the age of 10, relocating to Falls Church, Virginia, just outside of D.C. “They had music in public schools there—I was so stoked about that,” she says. Later, she joined the school’s band as a clarinet player, but was soon recruited by a friend to sing in the choir. She eventually taught music theory at summer camp, where her students ranged from three to nine years old. “I always knew I wanted to be a teacher,” she explains, “but that was when I was like, ‘OK, I need to be a music teacher.” When she graduated high school, she enrolled at Northwestern University as a vocal major, a move that prompted a relocation to Chicago. Today, Chami teaches choir at a high school in the city, and the influence of choral music on her own recordings is clear; on any given TALsounds song, she is joined by a small choir of Natalies, all created via loop pedal, an idea that first came to her when she was having trouble recruiting musicians to collaborate with.

“Even though there were all these amazing musicians at Northwestern, everybody was stuck in practice rooms,” she explains. “That’s when I bought a loop pedal. I thought, ‘I’ll just play by myself.’” Eventually, a friend introduced her to bass guitarist Brian Griffith, and the two started playing shows together as the cosmic electronics outfit l’éternèbre. Listening back to those early recordings, it’s easy to detect early traces of TALsounds—particularly in the group’s affinity for creating lush, spontaneously-improvised soundscapes. When Griffith moved to L.A., Chami decided to concentrate on her solo work, creating the TALsounds name to house it.

It was at a TALsounds show that Doug Kaplan and Maxwell Allison asked Chami to join a new free-music project called Good Willsmith. The trio have recorded some half dozen tapes and two LPs of stellar, drumless, three-way cosmic improv. “When I first started playing with Good Willsmith, I didn’t really know anything about ambient or experimental music, or the people in that scene,” says Chami. “The band helped me understand it.” (Kaplan and Allison also co-run the Hausu Mountain label, which is increasingly becoming a keystone of the Chicago underground scene.)

And while improvisation has been at the core of Chami’s music since the very beginning, that free-form approach becomes even more striking after hearing the perfectly-formed melodies that wind their way through Love Sick. “Maybe it’s silly that I don’t try to make them better,” says Chami, “but I think it’s natural and magical to leave it as it is.” That make-it-up-as-you-go process gave early TALsounds albums both a linear, organic flow and dreamy lethargy, with Chami layering stacked synths and voices to create bobbing ponds of melody.

Even Chami’s words are improvised. Any lyrical themes that turn up on the record are a result of lucky coincidence. “It’s kind of like acting, a little bit,” she says. “I might reach back to some shitty memories, I guess—or even to some nice memories. The ‘Artist’ will say they don’t like being happy because they’re not inspired, or some dumb shit like that. I’m like, ‘No, actually, I want to have a really happy life.”

For Love Sick, Chami is trying, for the first time, to replicate some of the album’s songs in the live setting. She’s transcribed half a dozen of the album’s improvisations, but the results haven’t been entirely satisfactory. “It doesn’t feel as good,” she says. “It feels like I’m performing classical music at school again. I’m more concerned with doing it ‘right’ than doing it with emotion.” That relationship between improvisation and “emotional directness” comes up multiple times during the course of our conversation, and it’s the one element that has become easier to detect with each new TALSounds release. On Love Sick, Chami’s innate knack for deep emotional impact has reached its apex. On the Julee Cruise-y ballad “Mys Side My Sign,” she delivers tender odes to romance and commitment with soft, purposeful sighs that would have been out of place alongside the often drifting and dissonant songs on her early work.

Love Sick is also the first TALsounds record to feature Chami’s photo in the artwork—a stark contrast to the abstract imagery of her earlier albums. “Fuck it, if it’s gonna help with sales,” she jokes, “then I sold out!” The cover is fitting: in many ways, Love Sick is the first album where Chami is front-and-center, instead of hiding behind billowing synths. By contrast, the artwork for 2015’s All The Way featured an androgynous avatar, doubled over, head obscured by cloud. “It was such a good representation of how I felt about the music,” says Chami, “kind of defeated.” Love Sick’s cover, though—a shot of a calm and confident Chami looking into a mirror, taken in a restaurant bathroom in Paris—shows a newer side of TALsounds, someone who’s increasingly comfortable both with her music, and the way she makes it. For Chami, her free-form approach is a way to tunnel directly into her heart. “That’s all improvising is,” she says. “And the more you do it, the more you feel comfortable exploring.”

—Tristan Bath

Finding inspiration in the woods and hills around her home in Asheville, North Carolina, 12-string guitarist Sarah Louise imbues her music with a free-flowing, organic quality. Her melodies snake through tributaries and counter-tributaries before building to swirling clusters of tone.

She’s not entirely alone out there. The “solo acoustic guitar” format has been enjoying a renaissance of late, with players like Daniel Bachman and Glenn Jones releasing quietly successful albums full of robust, fingerpicked compositions. Fingerstyle troubadours like Ryley Walker and Steve Gunn have taken the form overground, writing songs that pay homage to the patron saints of the genre: Bert Jansch, purveyor of the florid, left hand-focussed British style of folk baroque, and John Fahey, pioneer of the thoroughly rhythmic, right hand-focussed American Primitive genre. And, indeed, most modern practitioners of the genre tend to oscillate, to varying degrees, between those two figureheads. But Sarah Louise, who creates her own tunings and crams a dozen rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic ideas into any one composition, opts instead to transcend them. As Louise notes, “John Fahey’s writings about the need to master your guitar the way you need to master a woman really put me off. So I never wanted to try to sound like him.”

That sense of musical adventurism and autodidacticism has been with Louise since her childhood. “The first CDs I picked out for myself as a kid were Mbuti Pygmies of the Ituri Rainforest and The Firebird by Stravinsky,” she explains. She picked up the guitar early, too: “I first started to play guitar when I was 13, after someone I barely knew gave me one—a random good fortune!” She devoured pre-war blues records, a move that arguably laid the foundation for her solo work. “I didn’t know anyone else who was really into old blues in high school, but I met a few older kindred spirits shortly thereafter who introduced me to ballads and fiddle tunes,” she says. The arcane world of trad folk and blues, however, would remain in the background of her musical world until relatively recently—a more formative influence was waiting right outside her door. “My number one inspiration is my life living close to nature,” she says. “My love of music and my love of nature are linked because they often result in similar feelings. My relationships with both inform the other. I can’t explain these feelings and don’t want to, other than through what I can make.”

The wordless format of solo guitar was the perfect medium for Sarah Louise’s ruminations on nature. On her first release, the 2015 cassette Field Guide, which came out on the ever-brilliant Scissor Tail Records, she weaves through both dense clouds of dissonance and ringing, raga-esque modalities with ease, her cascading, fingerpicked notes dripping down slowly, like water off leaves; an aura of reverential calm contributes to the work’s devotional feel. But it was on last year’s release in VDSQ Records’s Acoustic series that Louise’s compositions really took flight. On Field Guide, Louise’s prominent use of Eastern scales placed her firmly in the lineage of that other great 12-string pantheist, Robbie Basho. On VDSQ Acoustic Series Volume 12 she ventures even further out, employing more harmonic tension, more varied picking styles, and increased compositional complexity. “Bright Light” opens the album with a plangent feeling, full of worrisome discords and sweeping runs. “Evidence of a Bear,” meanwhile, moves through densely-tangled clusters of fingerpicked tones and ploughs through multiple pathways of potential before arriving at its rapturous coda.

Far from the tranced-out noodlings of other cosmically-minded acoustic guitarists, like Peter Walker and early Ben Chasny, Louise’s music is painstakingly considered. “Composing in my own tunings felt really important from the get-go,” she says, “as has making up my own picking patterns.” She is self-taught, and it’s perhaps that unschooled approach that gives her compositions such inventiveness. “There are infinite picking pattern possibilities, especially when you begin to combine simple patterns into more elaborate ones and explore their individual and collective variations,” she says. “The number of picking patterns you can get with six strings or two courses of six strings in the case of a 12-string is literally inexhaustible.” On VDSQ Acoustic Series Volume 12, you can hear the guitarist working through these potentialities, making for compositions that flow unpredictably, according to their own interior logic. “I am very into the ‘glue’ between different parts of a composition,” Louise says. “Some really interesting things can happen in those small spaces.”

Interiority and the inner world’s relationship to outward nature are the driving forces behind Sarah Louise’s solo work, impulses no doubt accentuated by her years spent living away from the busy modern world. “I returned to Appalachia five-and-a-half years ago to live, and was really isolated for the first few years of that—no Internet or cell phone, just really nice neighbors!” That’s not to say she doesn’t thrive off collaboration, too. For example, she’s played with Manas, the free rock collaboration between improvisatory guitarist Tashi Dorji and drummer Thom Nguyen, on multiple occasions. Perhaps the most fruitful collaboration in Sarah Louise’s musical life, however, is House and Land, her duo with sometime Black Twig Pickers and Pelt multi-instrumentalist Sally Anne Morgan, whom Louise calls “a true musical soulmate.” Deeply informed by the folk music of Appalachia, it’s a million miles from Louise’s solo output. For starters, all the material is based on traditional folk song, and is grounded in the earthy, anchoring pulse of the drone. Secondly, Louise sings in the duo, along with Morgan. “I have sung some of the songs on this album for over a decade, so a lot of the material actually precedes my first attempts to write music on guitar,” Louise says.

This familiarity shows. From the duo’s live videos or their version of “False True Lover,” the first song to be released from their upcoming self-titled album on Thrill Jockey, their settings are steeped in both a respect for the material’s traditional nature as well as a desire to bring out the songs’ latent potential for experimentation.

“We are interested in shedding light on these ancient connections between drone in Appalachian music, modern composition and other nature-based drone styles from around the world,” Louise explains. “People in Appalachia lived a life close to the land for centuries—knowing what types of wood to use for what, keeping food cool in spring boxes, and making livings from what they could harvest from the forest. There’s a universality to drone music that reflects a closeness to nature, and our record connects some of these dots.” Just as experimentalists like the self-styled “hillbilly” Henry Flynt drew from the consonances between American folk music and drone-based minimalism to reach new forms of expression, House and Land aim to blend their grounding in modern composition with their love for traditional lore. As Louise contends, “It doesn’t make sense to me to draw a hard line about what is folk music and what is avant-garde because so many ‘folk’ musicians are incredibly inventive and plenty of ‘avant-garde’ artists are just doing the same stuff over and over again—but it’s considered avant because the mainstream has never accepted it.”

Whether it’s the earthy, drone-based Americana of House and Land or the rich, stargazing litanies of her solo work, Sarah Louise is exploding our ideas of what folk and acoustic music can be and do. Collaboratively or singularly, her musical output emphasises the near-spiritual aspect of devotion to one’s craft, as she asserts, “So much of Western culture has become about consumerism. Corporations have done their best to delegitimize traditional crafts of all kinds to sell their products, but an ache remains to locate oneself within a continuum of culture. Reclaiming these traditions in ethical ways is vital.”

—Danny Riley 

Even though I was a pre-teen with little experience in heartache, Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black dominated my middle school years. As a young, brown Asian girl, I was told vulnerability was a weakness, but that notion was shattered once I heard the U.K. singer. Her voice allowed me to release years of bottled-up worries and fears and lost love.

Aaradhna’s song “I’m Not The Same,” from her 2012 album Treble & Reverb, strikes a similar chord. “Hey Mr. Heartbreaker / Do me a favor / Stop making me cry / ‘Cause I feel I ain’t strong no more.” Aaradhna, a musician of Samoan and Indian descent, often sang about her experiences with depression. To see someone with similar skin sing about mental health—which is too often ignored or unspoken of in brown communities—was affirming.

Both of Aaradhna’s parents were singers, which meant that she was surrounded by music when she was a young girl. She listened to music from Bollywood movies as well as her mother’s Samoan gospel songs. Her 2006 debut album, I Love You, was certified gold in her home of New Zealand, and now, 11 years later, her take on soul music is ubiquitous throughout the country.

On I Love You, Aaradhna’s voice was world-building, reaching higher notes to create heavenly peaks and slipping to lower notes to carve out safe caverns. It wasn’t just her easy control over her full vocals; there was a welcoming openness to the way she sang that invited repeated listens. She followed her debut with a 2008 cover/tribute album, Sweet Soul Music, on which she paid homage to soul greats like Al Green and Aretha Franklin.

Treble & Reverb won Album of the Year at the 2013 New Zealand Music Awards, where Aaradhna also took home the award for Best Female Solo Artist. She won again in 2016, in the urban/hip-hop category, for Brown Girl, but refused to accept her award, saying, “I feel like if you’re putting a singer next to a hip-hop artist, it’s not fair. I’m a singer, I’m not a rapper. I’m not a hip-hop artist. It feels like I’ve been placed in a category for brown people. That’s what it feels like. We need a Soul/R&B category.” She ended up giving her award to hip-hop group SWIDT.

“It wasn’t about me, it was more about the soul artists in our country who get placed in the ‘urban award’ category,” she says. “It was more for them to hopefully create a soul category, which they haven’t had for 51 years. I was aware of [the absence] in 2013, but wasn’t ready to speak my voice that time. I was happy I finally kept my shoulders held high this time around.”

We caught Aaradhna on the phone as she was finishing up a day in the studio to talk about Treble & Reverb five years later, and the lessons she’s learned since then.

How did you find the sound for Treble & Reverb?

Before I put out my first album, which was I Love You, I was always into the old-school sound, and I was trying to get some of my producers to try and make my music sound like that. But we could never really get it there. With Treble & Reverb, when I heard Amy Winehouse’s album, that really made me wanna try and get that sound. Plus, I had some time away, so I was listening to a lot of old-school music; Sam Cooke is my number one favorite. So just listening to a lot of doo-wop groups and stuff like that. But it’s all thanks to Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black album. It just inspired me to go there.

What was it about Back to Black that inspired you? Was it just sonically, or was it the writing style as well?

It was everything; it was the style. I just loved the honesty. It comes from a real place, and I just wanted to follow that. That whole sound, that whole era—I was inspired by it.

What are some lessons you learned from Treble & Reverb?

To continue writing honestly. And to try to work on my own production, to get into producing—teaching myself to play instruments. Just to keep being honest with my lyrics and music.

After Treble & Reverb got the recognition that it did, was it hard to follow up?

I always just stay writing new music, just for therapy. I’m always ready to do new stuff, to put out new music, so by the time that [Treble & Reverb] was made, I had music waiting.

Have fans shared any stories with you from the Treble & Reverb days?

I know that a lot of people really related to ‘I’m Not the Same,’ because they went through the same kind of experience—through depression. It makes me kind of happy when people can connect with the song, and for it to help them a little bit. That was one of the main comments I kept getting.

I was watching one interview you did where the interviewer said that ‘I’m Not the Same’ sounded like a relationship song, and you clarified that it was about depression. Does it worry or bother you when people misinterpret your songs, particularly for Treble & Reverb? Do you feel, for the most part, people do understand what you’re singing about?

I always like to let the listener interpret what they are feeling from the music. It is upon them if they take in the way I sing it. If it’s a little different than what I am saying, I am fine with that. Most of the time, people can relate to it the way I do, because I am trying to write it in my most truthful manner.

Was it hard for you to open up about your depression, especially in your music?

Yes, but it is something people shouldn’t be afraid to speak up about, because it is a serious issue in today’s world. My opinion would be to seek help, talk to family, friends. I used my music to express how I felt.

Music is vulnerable. Was it hard for you to reach that level?

I think I was just going through some stuff. It wasn’t hard for me, since I was really in that zone. Each song was about something I was really thinking about and feeling. It was easy for me to write about it. I don’t know, it’s just easier for me to put it in a song and sing about it. That’s therapy for me.

What’s the songwriting process like for you?

Usually, I start off alone when I write. I’ll have a line that pops up, and then I’ll just write. Most of the songs on Treble & Reverb, half the album I wrote at home at my mum and dad’s. The other half, I was in Romania.

Did you expect it for it to be so difficult to go into the music industry?

I already knew it was going to be hard, and once I got into it, I was like, ‘Damn, it’s even harder,’ because I didn’t think about how people would be negative and share their negative thoughts with me. [Laughs] And I didn’t know that I would really take it to heart at the time, which was my mistake. But you know, you live and you learn.

What drew you to soul music? Was it a record/singer/song that made you want to sing soul, or was it mostly family influences?

I have always admired Sam Cooke and also my parents when I was growing up. They are the major influences in my music today. I also loved Amy Winehouse, and how she was true to her music and her sound reflecting on soul from the ’60s which also helped.

What drives you to make music?

It’s just my sanity. I’ve gotta make music just to stay sane. Also at the same time, man, I gotta make music because, I don’t know, it feels good to me. And I do it for the people that are waiting for my music to come, the people that connect with the music and that it helps—that drives me as well. But most importantly, I do it for my sanity. I do it for myself. Because it’s therapy. And to be able to put it out there and for others to hear it is a plus.

Have you developed a self-care routine?

I just spend a lot of time with my loved ones. That helps. And not looking at comments. And knowing that I got to do this for myself first, and not being controlled by someone else’s judgment. I’m doing this because I like to sing and express myself, and it helps just to remember that. Little reminders help.

Was it a conscious decision to go in a somewhat different direction with your sound on Brown Girl?

It was something that just happened. I didn’t really think about it consciously. Like, with Treble & Reverb, I wanted an old-school sound. With Brown Girl, I didn’t really think about it. I just went with what I felt.

Did you find that it was easier to make Brown Girl vs. Treble & Reverb?

I think it was harder [with Brown Girl], because I wrote the songs, but I had to share a bit more on the production. I really let the producers take control of the sound of the production—which was hard, because I’m particular. With Treble & Reverb, I had the sound already in my head when I gave it to the producer at the time. With Brown Girl, it was totally different. But I was happy. It was just harder to let the reigns go a little bit.

Do you think you’re in a completely differently place now for Brown Girl than you were for Treble & Reverb? How have you grown musically between these albums—not just in the studio, but on stage?

Each album does speak for itself, and I always try to write what I am going through at certain stages in life. I would say both albums have massive growth in different aspects and I love both projects to death because they speak truly and freely. That also makes it easier to perform live knowing the fans can relate.

What do you know now that you wish you could tell yourself five years ago?

To write more, perform more, and keep creating in a positive and happy state.

—Teta Alim

Photo by Andy Moor.

For more than two decades, the Chicago reedist, bandleader, and composer Ken Vandermark has served as something of a DIY icon, a fiercely independent musician pursuing improvisation with the same rigor and ferocity with which he conducts his own business. Chicago, of course, has a rich tradition of creative musicians taking charge of their affairs. In 1965, a group of iconoclastic, forward-looking musicians, including Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, and Roscoe Mitchell joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), taking charge of concert production and programming in order to have full, uncompromised control of their art. Vandermark, a Boston native who moved to Chicago in 1989, adapted many of those concepts for his own work in the early ‘90s, inspired as much by the punk ethos as the AACM’s model. The self-sufficient system he forged has not only fueled his own successes, but was crucial in reinvigorating avant-garde music in Chicago and abroad.

While free jazz and free improvisation have remained his bedrock concerns, his skill as a composer—both for small ensembles and large groups—has steadily grown in sophistication and effectiveness. Over the years, he’s gotten adept at harnessing a wide range of musical interests within his various projects—funk, noise, 20th Century classical music, reggae, African music, and more. For years, Vandermark would track down venues to present his own music, as well as other similarly inclined musicians, establishing residencies to develop new groups in front of youthful audiences.

He later launched an influential weekly jazz and improvised music series with the writer John Corbett at the legendary Chicago rock club Empty Bottle, which ambitiously presented the leading figures of the discipline from all around the world. “During that period, what I learned from seeing the shows and meeting the musicians was priceless, and in many cases led to future collaborations,” says Vandermark. Indeed, some of his earliest encounters with the likes of steady musical partners like Joe McPhee, Mats Gustafsson, and Peter Brötzmann were initiated through performances there. “Musicians from other cities and countries would reciprocate and help with gigs where they were based. I saw that organizing concerts was essential to building the music, for everyone, including me.”

From the beginning, though, Vandermark’s intense drive came from within, first leading the Vandermark Quartet—a granite-hard free jazz band exhibiting a punk-ish energy—and various other Chicago-based combos including Caffeine, DKV Trio, and The Vandermark 5. But for much of his career, Vandermark has worked feverishly with European musicians in an ever-shifting constellation of projects, often spending upwards of six months annually touring around overseas. He still works in Europe more than his homeland, but things have been transforming.

“The situation in Europe has definitely changed—politically, economically, culturally,” he says. “One of the great ironies is that when I first started going to Europe on a regular basis in the mid 1990s, I would get endless and deserved criticism about United States politics from people in countries like the Netherlands, France, Poland, Italy, Austria, Sweden, and Spain. Since then, I’ve watched much of Western Europe choose to follow the very policies used by the United States, which they had rightfully criticized. I believe very deeply in the importance of the arts, but when compared with the refugee crisis in Europe, the racism and sexism in the United States—and everywhere—the idea of music can sometimes feel ineffectual or insignificant.”

In recent years, however, Vandermark has been developing partnerships with a growing number of U.S.-based musicians, including Tim Barnes, Kris Davis, Jason Moran, Sylvie Courvoisier, Eric Revis, Chad Taylor, and C. Spencer Yeh. In fact, a broad spectrum of collaborators from both side of the Atlantic came together to participate in a residency at John Zorn’s influential New York performing space The Stone in early January 2016 for a week of concerts captured on the box set Momentum 1: Stone, on Audiographic, a label Vandermark launched in May 2014. For an artist that has taken matters into his own hands for so long, it’s a little surprising that it took him so long to form his own imprint.

In May 2011, Vandermark and colleagues Gustafsson, Brötzmann, and Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love started the website Catalytic-Sound, a one-stop shop for their voluminous recorded output issued on a plethora of small independent labels from around the globe. Last year it switched its focus, turning to a retail outlet for artist-run labels—with the addition of imprints operated by other figures in Vandermark’s network such as guitarist Joe Morris, guitarists Terrie Hessels and Andy Moor (both of The Ex), and trumpeter Nate Wooley, among others.

For most of his career, Vandermark’s music has been released on a variety of small labels that offered complete artistic control. “They always worked as hard as possible, but they often had issues with their methods of production and/or distribution, which was frustrating,” he says. “Albums coming out past tour deadlines, disorganized publicity, questionable art and design, slow delivery of the albums to distributors, record stores, and mail order to fans.”

Still, the most important shift for Vandermark was a 2010 tour to Brazil—his first—with Mark Sanders and Luc Ex. “I had never performed in South America before,” he says, “and as far as I knew most, if not all, of the record labels I was working with did not have good distribution in Brazil. There were about 200 people at the concert and all of them were aware of my music, and this was because of YouTube, and the possibility to rip music from online resources. The Internet has had a dramatic and often negative impact on record sales, even for independent artists, but it has also created the potential to reach more listeners than ever before in history.”

With Catalytic-Sound already in place as a mail order platform—including a Bandcamp site for digital sales—starting a label, with total control of all aspects of production, made sense. In fact, success on the digital side led Vandermark to start an imprint called Systems vs. Artifacts in July 2016, which makes available, in his words, “experimental, live, and one-off projects; a parallel set of releases to the physical copies put out on the primary label. It has become very easy and affordable to get excellent live recordings made in the last half-decade. This means that I’ve been accumulating a large number of high-quality music files that document aspects of my creative process, which run concurrent to the working groups. If the performances are superior, SvA has given me an affordable way to release these recordings along with a way to let customers burn discs with printable cover art created for the albums.”

The latest Audiographic album comes from a versatile new quartet called Shelter, with Wooley, one of the reedist’s most active collaborators in recent years. “I met Nate through Tim Daisy, who suggested him when I was looking for a trumpet player to record on a soundtrack project that took place in July 2011. The film project was a catastrophe, but working with all the musicians involved was fantastic,” he says. “One of the great things that came out of the situation was meeting Nate. Soon after, we started talking about putting a double trio together, but every time we set plans in motion something went wrong, either with the scheduling or with the other musicians involved.  Finally we just decided to go forward as a duo.”

“Since the beginning, the collaboration with Nate has been one of my most important creative partnerships,” he continues. “The discipline with which [Wooley] works on his—and other’s—music, the rigor with which he thinks, and his goodwill, has been nothing but inspiring. Nate’s range of musical ability is astonishing, from the most abstract, extended techniques possible to complete melodicism and rhythmic acuity.”

And the duo collaboration is not their only project; Shelter folded in Jasper Stadhouders, who’d joined to form a new group called Made to Break, in April 2014. “I loved Jasper’s playing and knew that he was primarily a guitarist,” Vandermark says, “so I asked him if he’d be interested in putting a group together that would include him on both electric bass and guitar. He was excited by the idea and suggested Steve Heather as the drummer, I suggested Nate, and Shelter started working together in September 2015. The music is, of course, quite different than that of the duo, with everyone composing different material for the band.“ The group’s eponymous debut features compositions from all four members, covering a broad swath of influences, from taut funk to corkscrewing Ethiopian vibes.

As usual, Vandermark has lots on his plate. After a lull in programming other concert series because he was away so much, he’s been one of three folks organizing a terrific weekly at the invaluable Chicago underground institution Experimental Sound Studio. “There is a lot of great music programming happening in Chicago,” he observes, “and I wanted to create a series that would offer something else, in addition to the performances. I had an idea based more on the artists’ club of the New York School from the 1950s, where there would be discussions and lectures from different kinds of creative people in addition to the music.” The series, which he programs with drummer Tim Daisy and guitarist Andrew Clinkman, presents important improvisers followed by a lively discussion about their work, allowing listeners a unique opportunity to see what makes some of today’s most daring musicians click.

While his Stateside activity has picked up steam—a new album with the Eric Revis Quartet (featuring pianist Davis and drummer Taylor ) is due this summer on Clean Feed Records, another DKV Trio record is due in the fall, and he recently formed a terrific new Chicago band with a cast of younger players called Marker—he continues to stay busy with European projects, too. There’s a new album due from his quartet Lean Left (featuring Hessels, Moor, and Nilssen-Love) as well as a forthcoming Made to Break record in the fall. More recently, he dropped the debut album from DEK Trio, a bracing improvisational group with Austrians Elisabeth Harnik (piano) and Didi Kern (drums). Vandermark’s indefatigable drive, in other words, shows—thankfully—no sign of waning.

—Peter Margasak

In 1997, Nina Miranda’s voice became familiar to U.K. trip-hop fans thanks to the overnight success of her band Smoke City’s single, “Underwater Love.” (Michel Gondry even used it in a Levi’s ad he directed.) It’s not difficult to understand why the song was a success. Miranda and her band engineered a fusion between bossa nova and trip-hop that benefitted from her cultural fluidity—she’s of British and Brazilian descent. Navigating between those two worlds, she drew from both her knowledge of música popular brasileira, aka MPB, as well as the sounds of ‘90s Britain (think: Basement Jaxx, Massive Attack). Miranda sang—half in Portuguese, half in English—in the soft, melodic lilt typical of the bossa nova singers of the ’60s, using the beauty and gentleness of one language and the brevity and directness of the other to paint a picture of living and loving in two cultures.

On her first solo album, Freedom of Movement, Miranda builds on that blueprint, creating music that straddles the line between nostalgia for her homeland, and the need to embrace the world that surrounds her. Perhaps that’s why Freedom of Movement feels like a musical tug-of-war. On tracks like “Capoeira 2020,” “Julia,” and “Silken Horse,” Miranda playfully explores samba percussion, mixing it with nu-disco, funk, and bossa nova. But she’s also not afraid to experiment: “The Cage” combines buzzsaw guitars with ‘70s funk basslines, distorted vocals, and soulful choruses, while its lyrics plead for freedom in a country that’s growing increasingly restrictive.

Miranda’s voice shines on the dramatic slow burner “Amazonia Amor,” where she trades verses with both a male vocalist and the sounds of the rainforest. The net effect recalls Carla Bruni’s performance of “Dolce Francia”—both songs are beautiful homages to the respective singers’ homelands. Freedom of Movement is Miranda’s way of reintroducing herself to the world as both a singer and performer, an album that revels in experimentation, but doesn’t shy away from embracing tradition. It’s Miranda building bridges between cultures, defining both her sound, and her place in the world.

—Amaya Garcia