Very long ago, in the mists of the early 1980s, “indie” and “pop” had not yet conjoined to become a compound word. There was the pop that inhabited the charts, and there was everything else.

But the pop that was created and distributed at the independent level was indeed unlike pop as most people know it, both then and now. Transparently low-budget and conspicuously disheveled, it didn’t sound like punk, but it couldn’t have existed without punk’s ripping up of the musical rulebook and demolishing of the barriers to entry. It tended to be melodic but coarse, unaffiliated with recent technology (if the Top 10 was the sound of penthouses, this was the sound of a cement-walled cellar), and its lyrics usually made plain that these were people who were unafraid to flaunt their own intelligence and feelings.

In 1983, the Smiths would become the standard-bearers of U.K. indie-pop, bringing the (admittedly vague) notion of the genre to an audience of previously unimaginable size and scope. But before them there were the little-known but trailblazing likes of Orange Juice, The Monochrome Set, Marine Girls, and, almost simultaneous to the Smiths, The Jazz Butcher.

The Jazz Butcher, from the town of Northampton, in England’s Midlands, was the brainchild of fellow singer-guitarist-songwriters Pat Fish (aka “the Butcher”) and Max Eider. The purpose of the band, in Fish’s telling, was to “free my mind from the increasingly dank post-punk ghetto that it had been inhabiting.” When a friend lent him a compilation album of 1970s soul hits, he had a vision of a new way forward, and in response, wrote a song called “Partytime” that was a three-and-a-half-minute repudiation of post-punk’s sonic and verbal tendencies toward deadly seriousness. This was bright, wry, happy-to-be-alive music. It was, in its own skewed, understated way, pop.

Throughout the following three years, the Jazz Butcher made four albums for Glass Records, an independent label whose business structure—essentially, one man sitting in a room in London—belied the breadth of its achievements, also releasing classic left-of-center albums from the Pastels, Spacemen 3, Nikki Sudden, and many others. Those Butcher recordings have now been collected together on The Wasted Years, a four-CD box set accompanied by a booklet with a fantastically eloquent 5,000-word essay from Fish.

Above all else, The Wasted Years demonstrates that the Jazz Butcher seemingly existed to throw curveballs. The band’s very name served to confuse and mislead: Max Eider’s stunningly elegant six-string work aside (arguably, only Johnny Marr was a better guitarist at the time), there was nothing explicitly jazz about them. From debut long-player In Bath of Bacon onward, every disc is an exploding confetti bag of styles, moods, and textures, from the Velvet Underground-at-a-sock-hop velocity of “Jazz Butcher Theme,” to the aggressively, hilariously atonal “Caroline Wheeler’s Birthday Present,” to the conventional melodiousness and sentimentality of “Big Saturday” (the great, lost should-have-been indie number one). Their songs’ common denominator was Fish’s and Eider’s vocals, often delivered with the poker-faced poise of a genial game show host.

“We used to reply that we thought surprises were supposed to be a good thing,” says Fish. “A buyer is going to be stuck with your LP for at least a year before the next one comes out, so, come on, give them a little bit of something to chew on, no?

“The great liberating album for our generation was London Calling by the Clash,” he offers. “They broke out of the three-chord restrictions of their first album and the faintly dodgy chorus-metal of [second album] Give ’Em Enough Rope, and just played any kind of music they wanted to. At a time when the post-punk mob seemed to be removing more color, texture, and beauty from their music with every passing week, London Calling was a revelation, taking us back to reggae and soul and everything that was possible. From that day on, it was an article of Jazz Butcher faith that ‘punk’ meant playing whatever the hell you wanted.”

Following In Bath of Bacon’s very modest public reception—“It cost less than £500 to record; at the time, I had no idea that I would ever make another one,” says Fish—the following year saw the Jazz Butcher exceed everyone’s expectations, including their own. The band became a solidified unit with the addition of drummer Owen Jones and bassist David J, grateful to have found an artistic outlet that was the polar opposite of his recently deceased previous band, goth pioneers Bauhaus. Their 1984 album, A Scandal in Bohemia—made, like every subsequent release for Glass Records, with producer John A. Rivers, whose principal talent was making diminutive indie bands sound like they were playing in a canyon—was such a drastic progression from its predecessor that it seemed five years ahead of itself. It sold more than 20,000 copies.

“We found ourselves, rather to our surprise, in the middle of the music game in London at a golden moment where some of the principles of punk had actually become normal business practice,” says Fish. “It didn’t stay that way for long, but for a while there was a genuine feeling that the independent sector was ahead of the major labels. The level of ‘success’ we achieved certainly did surprise us. It completely astonished us. After a year or two, we could no longer cope with it. We were entirely unprepared, which manifests in all sorts of silly ways that you can’t possibly anticipate until you’ve been there. I wouldn’t have missed a second of it.”

A Scandal in Bohemia and its follow-up, the mini-album Sex and Travel (Fish’s personal favorite from this period), attracted enough attention that the Jazz Butcher soon signed on the dotted line with labels around the world, including in the U.S. and Canada. While other U.K. bands, who had received more acclaim and sold more records at home, made few inroads internationally, the Jazz Butcher became favorites of college radio audiences abroad. (Bloody Nonsense, a flawless 1986 compilation made exclusively for North America and Australia, has probably served as an introduction for more people than anything else the band did.)

“The West Coast of the American continent has always been the place where we’ve done the best business, all the way from Vancouver down to San Diego. Hell of a commute, mind,” says Fish. “We’ve also had regional success in Chicago, Toronto, New York, Hamburg, Valencia, Paris, London, Tokyo… all over the place, really; always at club/small theatre-level, and always economically viable.”

Having received what Fish in his box set notes as “the inspirational crash course in liberal education that is touring,” the band—now minus David J, who departed amicably to launch the soon-to-be chart-topping Love and Rockets with two of his former Bauhaus colleagues—returned to the studio to make “our greatest album ever.” Yet the resulting work, Distressed Gentlefolk (which followed very closely on the heels of Bloody Nonsense in 1986), is something of a misfire in Fish’s estimation, despite it remaining a fan favorite to this day. In retrospect, Fish says, there were several contributing factors: him and Eider going “in different directions” as songwriters, David J’s departure leaving an unfillable void, and “fatigue and liquor.” Although the album’s release was followed by a successful first tour of the U.S., Eider left soon after for a vastly underrated solo career. (His debut, The Best Kisser in the World, deserves a garlanded reissue of its own.)

This was far from the end of the Jazz Butcher, though. A reconfigured lineup left Glass and signed to the then-emergent Creation Records, where they remained until Fish retired the concept in the middle of the ’90s, their music seemingly too idiosyncratic to find its place in the culturally myopic Britpop years. But the band—variously featuring Eider, Jones, J, and other alumni—has been fitfully active again since the turn of the century. The Wasted Years is by far the greatest of several gestures that keep interest in the Jazz Butcher simmering. Fish views his Glass-era recordings as a memento of a very different time that nevertheless feels at home in the here-and-now.

“We never felt the urge to sound fashionable, which is probably why most of those old records still sound enjoyable today,” he says. “We were young and full of enthusiasm and weird, dogmatic ideas, and more than half the time we had no idea what we were doing. We were learning on the job and sometimes falling down in public. It beat the hell out of working in an office.”

—Michael White 

Even if you don’t recognize Ian Chang’s name, you’ve likely heard him drumming somewhere before. The Brooklyn-based, Hong Kong-born percussionist is best known for recording and touring with outfits like Son Lux and Landlady, but he’s also worked with a wide array of other musicians—Matthew Dear, Moses Sumney, and Dave Douglas, to name a few. After drumming professionally in the U.S. for more than a decade, Chang’s various musical experiences have led to the release of his own album, Spiritual Leader, an adventurous, genre-bending EP that explores the physicality of electronic music, and the relationship between the human and the machine.

Chang’s methodology is what sets him apart from many other contemporary solo drummers and electronic musicians. All the tracks on Spiritual Leader were performed and composed using Sensory Percussion, a mesh (silent) drum kit. One of its key properties is its ability to “host” two separate samples in a single pad (on its opposing ends, for instance); over time, the sounds can mould into each other as the drummer’s repositions hit. This is a key compositional feature of this particular kit and Chang makes good use of it. “ASMR” is a perfect example, its various textural and melodic samples merge to create an atmospheric, almost ambient piece.

Elsewhere on the EP, Chang manages to showcase his impressive percussive skill set, fusing dynamic off-kilter beats with ambient soundscapes and elements of sound design to great effect. On “Romeo” and “Spiritual Leader” especially, mesmeric webs of rhythm, vocal, and synth samples launch into deep sonic peaks.

Over the course of his debut EP, Chang freely moves between genres and Spiritual Leader never settles down. While traces of IDM, free jazz, and ambient are explored, none of those terms really encapsulate what Chang has created. It’s challenging, resonant, and familiar.

—Adam Badi Donoval

Photo by Zach Smith.

“You don’t just stop at one point and say, ‘This is where the tradition ends,'” says Louis Michot of Lost Bayou Ramblers. “Tradition has to keep growing and keep breathing to continue to live.” How else could you explain a Cajun band that has opened up for Arcade Fire, jams regularly with one of The Pogues, and has a producer/bassist moonlighting with LCD Soundsystem?

On their new album, Kalenda, the Cajun warriors from Lafayette, Louisiana mix centuries-old musical traditions with everything from electronically-assisted grooves to dirty, punk-tinged guitar attack and swirling, psychedelic effects. But they also come from a deeply traditional background, bearing an enormous knowledge of and respect for the history of Cajun music.

“Music has been a part of the Michot family for as long as we can count,” says singer/fiddler Michot, who started the band with his brother Andre on accordion and lap steel in 1999. “My great grandpa, who was the first Louis Michot, played with all his brothers-in-law. His mama was a Cajun accordion player.” And Louis and Andre’s father and uncles started trad Cajun band Les Frères Michot, which formed in 1984 and is still active today.

“We eventually started replacing our uncles in Les Frères Michot,” explains Michot. ” I was the standup bass player for Les Frères Michot, and Andre was the acoustic guitar player. When I turned 18 and Andre about 20, we both picked up the lead instruments of accordion and fiddle, and then we started Lost Bayou Ramblers.”

On their first five albums, the Ramblers perfected a sound steeped in Cajun tradition. But by 2012’s Mammoth Waltz, they started pushing things a little further. “Mammoth Waltz was definitely when we took our biggest leap into feeling comfortable enough to experiment on a deeper level,” says Michot. “I think with any traditional music, you really have to master the basics before you can think about adding, so it took us over 10 years to get to that point… but Mammoth Waltz is the first time we took the liberty of experimenting with different sounds.”

This was the point where producer/musician Korey Richey’s influence came to the fore, with touches of programmed beats, dirty, distorted guitars, and heady sound manipulation leavening the rootsy vibe. Guests like actress Scarlett Johansson and The Violent Femmes’ Gordon Gano further added to the stylistic expansion. Around this time, Ramblers fan and filmmaker Benh Zeitlin used the band’s “Valse de Balfa” in his Oscar-nominated, Louisiana-based film Beasts of the Southern Wild, broadening the band’s reach even more.

Kalenda, the Ramblers’ first album since the departure point of Mammoth Waltz, finds the band pushing even harder at the boundaries of Cajun convention. The seeds that were planted on the previous album bear bountiful fruit here. The electronic beats, punky barrages, and psychedelic sound processing subtly deployed last time around become an even bigger part of the overall picture here.

Richey, who engineered LCD Soundsystem’s newest, American Dream, and co-producer Eric Heigle, who worked on the latest Arcade Fire album, Everything Now, helped the band realize their vision of an endlessly adaptable continuum of Cajun music. “I think progression in Cajun music is natural,” says Michot, “it’s something that’s always happened. Especially in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s; there was a lot of progression going on, and then that became the standard, and people stuck with that standard for a long time. Why shouldn’t it keep growing?”

The theme of the album is a perfect example of the kind of cultural mutability Michot and his bandmates pursue. “[The phenomenon of] Kalenda is such an amazing metaphor for the complexity of Louisiana’s history,” says Michot. “It started out as a Congo Square dance in the 1700s and early 1800s. New Orleans on Sundays was the only time and place slaves could actually express themselves and keep their traditions going. There was one dance called the Kalenda, a risqué courting dance, but it ended up being adopted by the French and Spanish, both of which were our ancestors. We’re made up of mostly Spanish and French Creole from New Orleans on the Michot side.”

By the 20th century, Kalenda had gone from a dance to a rhythm to a song. “If you ask someone around Lafayette now, ‘What is Kalenda?’ they’ll say it’s a Cajun rock ‘n’ roll song about a girl who dances too close,” says Michot. “Looking back you realize it wasn’t her name, it was the dance that dancing too close. And somehow it made its way from Congo Square through generations and cultural transmissions from one people to the next, from a risqué dance to a Cajun rock ‘n’ roll song in the ’60s about a girl named Kalenda.”

The version of “Kalenda” that is the title track of the Ramblers’ record achieves a transcendental, appropriately syncretic atmosphere. It blends the African polyrhythms of the dance with eerie ambient textures, and even the tin whistle of erstwhile Pogues member Spider Stacy (he makes his home in Louisiana these days, and sometimes gets the band to accompany him on Pogues material in the performance project Poguetry in Motion, named after the 1986 Pogues EP).

But most of the tracks on Kalenda are original compositions, however deeply rooted in the band’s background. The throbbing pulse and blaring riffs of “Granny Smith” actually frame a story about the Michot brothers’ grandmother. “The words are kind of about her and the wisdom she shared with us, and about her growing up on the bayou and swimming across,” says Michot. “It’s a really huge bayou down there, Bayou Teche, it’s really wide, and she would swim across in the middle of the night. This is a story one of her childhood acquaintances told us after she passed away. She would swim across and he would have a horse for her ready to go, and a gun, and they would go polecat hunting overnight.”

The intensified stomp of “Rice Pump” (also the name of the band’s label) is inspired by a Louisiana tradition that encompasses both music and machinery. “‘Rice pump’ is the term some of the older Cajun musicians use to describe the pulsing bass drum of two-step rhythm,” explains Michot, “because it sounds like these old-school one-cylinder rice pumps, which is actually a water pump that’s used to fill the rice fields. It’s very important to us, because we love that pounding rhythm and the constant drone in Cajun music. It’s a way the land and the working of the land is tied in with the music. And on a more personal level it’s a song I wrote for my wife, I said, ‘You make my heart beat like a rice pump.'”

The most overtly left-field track on the album is “Freetown Crawl / Fightin’ville Brawl,” which moves from an ominous, minimalist setting for spoken verses to downright industrial-sounding electronics more akin to Throbbing Gristle than anything out of Louisiana. “I think that was more of an experimentation,” allows Michot. “It uses the rice pump [beat] as kind of a heartbeat. Freetown is where we started…Andre was living in Freetown. And then Fightin’ville is another town on the other side of downtown Lafayette. It’s kind of this Cajun French spoken word piece about ‘Go and do what you do in Freetown…and then you end up in Fightin’ville.’ It’s kind of a story about living around these areas of Lafayette, and what life would be like.”

Kalenda may feel like the farthest the Lost Bayou Ramblers have come from their roots, but those roots are never abandoned. They remain at the heart of everything the band does, even if they’re framed far differently than usual. “This is traditional Cajun music,” insists Michot, “but we’re also having a lot of fun with the drums and guitar and effects and the sonic creation of music. New Orleans is really reactive to art, so if it’s really good, people will come out. They’re not judging us for what we are or aren’t supposed to be, they’re appreciating us for what we are.”

—Jim Allen

Photo by Duncan Bellamy.

Ever since they formed in 2005, the London-based Portico Quartet have been difficult to define. They were labeled a jazz band following their 2008 Mercury Prize nomination for debut album, Knee Deep in the North Sea. But while their music has elements of jazz, it also pulls in electronica, folk, and ambient, fusing a wide mix of sounds that pay homage to various genres.

After the temporary departure of of hang drum and keyboard player Keir Vine in 2014, the band signed to Ninja Tune, dropped the “Quartet” from their name and reinvented themselves as an electro-pop trio. Their subsequent album, Living Fields, featured guest vocals from Alt-J’s Joe Newman, and replaced their customarily intricate sound with synth melodies and fluid dance beats.

Fast-forward to 2017, and the Quartet have reformed for their fourth album, Art in the Age of Automation. With Vine back in the fold, so too is the dreamy, hypnotic sound of the hang, the percussive instrument so central to Portico Quartet’s identity. We caught up with saxophonist Jack Wylie after a captivating performance at U.K.’s Womad Festival to talk about the album, their return as a quartet, and how automation doesn’t have to mean the end of art.

This is your first album since you reformed as a quartet. How did the time apart affect the band and your music?

As a band, I think sometimes you need some time apart; you need to step back from a project to see it a bit more objectively. We’d been playing together since 2008, and we put our last record out in 2013 [Live/Remix, on Real World Records]. After so long, you kind of lose a sense of what it is you’re doing, but coming back to it, you get a better perspective. You can also take all the stuff that you’ve learned in the meantime and put it into the new record. For example, the last record we did [Living Fields, as trio Portico] was really produced, really electronic. I learned a lot about production, which has been really helpful to go into a bit more depth in sound on this record.

Our previous records as Portico Quartet were more about being in a room playing with each other, and part of this record was like that, too. But a lot of the detail on this one was made on a computer, taking sounds that we played live, using our instruments and running them through chains of effects to change the sound. There’s a lot of shape-shifting of acoustic instruments, and we were really focusing in on little details here. There are a lot of layers and little bits going on compared to our other records: a lot of synthesizers, a lot of drum machines, just that blend of electronic and acoustic sounds which give the album its identity.

How did the name Art in the Age of Automation come about, and what did you want to convey with it?

When we were making the album, we started talking about automation a lot, about how the world was going to become more automated and how artificially intelligent systems and machines will start to change the way the system and the economy works. So we were thinking about our record and how a lot of it is about merging acoustic instruments with electronic techniques, so I suppose the album in a way is trying to find a solution to those two different things- the automation and the human side. It’s not like we had this huge concept for the record; we didn’t make the album to suit a particular idea, but the name seemed to fit quite well. It’s also quite bold and thought provoking, and it sits comfortably with the music.

And the artwork is made to fit this theme?

Yes, Duncan [Bellamy, the band’s drummer] makes the artwork. What he did was scan a video while it was playing on an iPad, so you get all those weird patterns. And in some of the videos that we made, he’s taken loads of different scans. Again, that was about taking an automated process and giving it a bit of life, giving some human artistic value to an otherwise automated process. Which is what the music tries to do as well.

Does this merging of acoustic and electronic, human and automated, make it difficult to perform the music from this album in a live setting?

It’s funny, the actual tunes are not particularly difficult to play, but what is hard is working out how to play them, and getting all the sounds to work in a live setting. We’ve tried to reproduce everything we’ve made in the studio by effecting and manipulating the instruments onstage, so for example, I run my sax though a lot of effects pedals to get the same effect as I would get in the studio with a few plugins. Trying to find an approximation to create that sound live takes a lot of time.

For this record you signed to Gondwana Records, how has that been different?

Matt [Halsall], who runs Gondwana, has been a fan of the band for quite a while, and he said if we wanted to do an album he would support it, and that we could basically do what we wanted on it, which is what you want from a record label. It’s nice to have some advice, but you also want to be left to your own devices too, so it was a really nice fit. I think Gondwana are really beginning to position themselves in a good space, they’ve really cottoned on to something.

There are a lot of people who growing up were listening to techno and electronic music but now just want to go to a concert, and maybe they want to listen to jazz or classical music. But both jazz and classical come with a lot of baggage and not everyone wants to invest their time and delve into all that history, which is fair enough. Bands like GoGo Penguin, BadBadNotGood, even The Comet is Coming all cater to that demographic, in the sense that they take inspiration from the music around them. We probably fit into this whole thing as well, to a certain extent, in the sense that we don’t draw our inspiration from jazz music as much as we draw our inspiration from techno, electronic music, and rock.

You were nominated for the Mercury Prize in 2008, how did that change things for you?

One thing the Mercury Prize does, especially with the jazz nominations, is it gives artists a lot more exposure than they would get otherwise. We’ve never thought of ourselves as jazz band, but I guess because we have a saxophone and bass that’s the way our music is seen, and since we extend into that bracket, some parts of the jazz community were quite critical at the time.

But you know, if people want to call it jazz, I’m not going to fight with it, but I don’t want to call my music jazz, it is just what it is. I think there is quite a strong case for putting boundaries around the term, otherwise it gets so diluted and becomes meaningless. It’s such a rich tradition, and I can understand why people get so protective about it. I don’t think our music is jazz either, so in a way I agree with [the critics].

How would you say that living in London has shaped the musical development of you as musicians and of the band?

It definitely has in some ways. London has so much going on, the fact that there are always exhibitions and concerts, that definitely has an effect. But we’ve never really felt part of the scene, we’ve always been quite outside of it. When we made our first three records, I didn’t really play with any other musicians, none of us did, and we didn’t really know any other musicians. These days, we are a bit more involved with other projects, a bit more connected to other bands and musicians. But in general, it’s getting harder and harder in London. It’s getting more expensive to live, and venues are under a lot of pressure—it is a shame. A lot of people I know have moved to like Manchester and Berlin. But still, London is a great city.

Where is Portico Quartet going from here?

We’ve got an EP coming out, which we will probably release early next year. We might make a new record in spring next year, and there was talk of making an ambient record. We’ll see, every record we’ve done we’ve always left it quite open, as to what direction we’re going to go, and we’ve always kind of changed, and sometimes you need a bit of space and distance from your last record to know what direction it’s going to be.

—Megan Iacobini de Fazio

Pierre Kwenders—born José Louis Modabi—has one of the most excellent press photos you’ll see this year. What looks like a cool and calculated shot of him relaxing on a rug with a lustrous poodle companion was actually a lucky coincidence. “We were at the photo shoot, and another photographer came in with his dog, and I was like, ‘Can I get the dog in the picture?’ And he said, ‘Yes, she loves to be in pictures.’ So she came and sat down next to me and that was it.”

As soon as he saw his muse walk into the room, the Congolese Montreal native who takes his stage name from his grandfather, knew he could make an even bigger splash with a dog like that next to him. “I think it was just meant to be,” he says with a laugh. “I was trying to make some old-school R&B album cover pose like Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson, and this dog walked in, and I thought, ‘What a beautiful dog.’ Luckily the photographer was nice enough to let us use his dog.”

An album like Kwenders’s sophomore effort, MAKANDA at the End of Space, the Beginning of Time, deserves such extravagant imagery. Recorded in Seattle during whatever spare time Kwenders could find with his producer, Tendai Maraire of Shabazz Palaces, MAKANDA is a multilingual, multicultural blast of Afro-futuristic electronic funk, R&B, and pop. We spoke with Kwenders while he was driving around Montreal (speaking hands-free, of course) to discuss the importance of the women in his life, the pitfalls of being labeled “world music,” DJing with his pal Win Butler (of Arcade Fire), and how he is currently living the African dream.

You’ve called yourself ‘the spokesman of modern Africa’ who is ‘living the African dream.’ What do you mean by that?

[Laughs] Wow, that’s a good question. You’re the first person to ever ask me that. ‘The spokesman of modern Africa,’ not to be pretentious, but I believe I am like one of those young, African diaspor[ic people] that is showing a new image we don’t normally see. Within my music I try to showcase that. I use a lot of traditional music from my country in order for people to be more open and discover things from Africa. When I say I’m living the African dream, I mean that as a reference to when people here succeed after struggling, they say they’re ‘living the American dream.’ It’s just for me to tell people that it’s not only an American dream, it can also be an African dream. My dream was to make music after struggling, and today people are recognizing my art, which is great. So, I’m still living that dream.

Is that also why you describe your music as Pan-African?

Yeah, the idea behind this album was to create a sound for everybody. I wanted to make music that speaks to people from here but also people that left their country like I did. I want those people to be able to identify themselves in my music, but also people like yourself, so you can feel more connected to Africa in a way that you never thought possible before. I want people to be able to discover Africa but also Canada, because at the end of the day I’m Congolese, but I’m also Canadian. There is a strong influence from Quebec, from Montreal. The main objective is to create a bridge between those cultures that seem so far away, but bringing them together can make a beautiful thing. That’s why I use the term Pan-African. It’s not just a term for Africans.

I know you don’t want your music to be classified as ‘world music.’ How do you avoid being pigeonholed like that? Can you?

I believe it’s basically impossible to avoid it. We live in a society where people like to put everything in boxes, and it’s impossible to get out of it. You can go to the market and buy my CD, but if you want to find it you have to go to the world music section. Even though I don’t consider what I do world music. I feel that my music has no boundaries. We all use the same notes, and the only thing that changes is the context and culture. In the world music category, you will find a musician from India, some part of Africa, China, South America… it doesn’t make any sense. And if something is in English or French it’s considered pop or rock ‘n’ roll. But you get rock ‘n’ roll sung in Spanish and it’s considered world music. C’mon guys, it doesn’t make any sense!

What section would you want to be placed in?

What I do, I do it for the people. It’s popular music for the people. It’s pop! My music might not be radio-friendly sometimes, but that’s just something we need to change. We hear the same thing all the time on the radio, which is not good. There are many influences in my music—jazz, funk, Congolese rhumba, electronic—but it is pop music. The thing about the world music category is that people won’t go there unless they want to discover new stuff. Something in the world music section won’t win Album of the Year, which I don’t understand, because there are some amazing albums stuck in there. There shouldn’t be any categories.

Your new album is called MAKANDA at The End of Space, the Beginning of Time. What exactly does it mean?

Well, ‘makanda’ means ‘strength’ in Chinoba. The reason why I called it Makanda is because I wanted to pay homage to the three women in my life: my mom, my aunt and my grandma. They each have the same values, but taught me different things in life. My mom always told me to be responsible and work hard, which is what I’ve always done. My grandma raised eight kids by herself after my grandfather died in the 1970s. That’s an example of determination. She raised them well and sent them all to school. And my aunt is the reason why my mom and I moved to Canada when I was 16. She’s probably the reason why I’m making music today. I don’t know if I’d be making music if I hadn’t moved here. She was a woman full of joy, always smiling with a joie de vivre. I decided to take my grandfather’s name for my stage name, and I believe he is living through me, like life is a circle.

How did you end up recording the whole album with Tendai Maraire from Shabazz Palaces?

A few months after my first album came out, I decided to reach out to Tendai and see if he would be willing to work on a few songs for my next album. Back then I didn’t have any idea of what I wanted to do, I was just a Shabazz fan and wanted to have a couple of songs with them on my next record. So we sent the album to Tendai and he wrote back saying we should come to Seattle to work on some stuff and see what happens. Then in May 2015 we travelled to Seattle for the first time and got to know each other a little. I said I was a big fan and wanted to work with him on a couple of songs. He had a few tracks that he thought would suit me, which he played me. I was inspired and we did the first track from the album, ‘Worlds of Solitude.’ The day we recorded that song, there was this magical moment in the studio. I don’t know exactly what happened but we looked at each other and said, ‘We need to do the whole record together,’ [laughs] and that was it.

You and Tendai were both born in Africa. Did that strengthen the bond between you?

Oh yeah, and we kind of have the same background. He is from Zimbabwe and moved to the States and grew up there. A similar thing happened to me, but I moved to Canada, and I grew up here. So we had the same struggle, because we both felt we had to fit in at some point. Though sometimes you decide to be yourself and do what best represents you, which is what we’ve both done. That’s what we tried to do with this record.

—Cam Lindsay

A churning, 34-minute cover of “When the Saints Go Marching In” (from 2006’s Buns and Gutter). A gratuitously goofy rap LP (2012’s Puff Up the Volume). A brain-scrambling remix of the latest My Bloody Valentine album (2013’s Launch Pad #3: MBV). All of the above—since forming in 2005, the duo Talibam!, of multi-instrumentalists Matt Mottel and Kevin Shea—have proven that they can and will do anything and everything.

From that perspective, the lively Endgame of the Anthropocene comes as no surprise. While a dire fantasia—a nightmare future Earth where only Antarctica remains habitable—looms over these eight instrumentals, Talibam!’s impulse is to throw a spiked Slurpee party at the end of the world.

“Human Interference and the Failure to Ratify” throbs and weaves between constantly mutating funk and effects that resemble numbing rounds of bumper cars. “Breach of Ecology on the Seabed (Biodiversity in Shambles)” surges and sloshes, Mottel’s supersaturated, undulating keyboard waves perpetually threatening to capsize both the song’s pulsating hook and Shea’s shambling drums. But “The Telegenic Annexation of Territorial Expanse in the West” is where Endgame stirs the blood, a chintzy, triumphalist hail of synthesized plinks and phaser bursts that shifts from Barkley’s Barnyard Critters splatter to Steve Reich-esque dazzle in two astonishing minutes.

—Raymond Cummings

[All profits from Endgame of the Anthropocene go to long-term, on-the-ground relief for Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria.]

Beaches by Darren Sylvester.

While AC/DC, the Bee Gees, and INXS are probably Australia’s most famous musical exports, the country has long had an outstanding psychedelic rock scene. But even though bands like Tamam Shud, Tully, and Coloured Balls produced some exceptional psych jams back in the ‘70s, they didn’t make it very far beyond the Great Barrier Reef.

Recently, however, there’s been an explosion in modern psych rock across the country-continent. Tame Impala, whose first album channeled late ‘60s Beatles, broke out internationally. They aren’t the only ones. Melbourne has the most vibrant scene, but Brisbane and Perth aren’t far behind, and Sydney and Adelaide are currently ground zero for a number of edgier acts.

While these groups cover a wide variety of sounds—ranging from ‘60s homages to neo-shoegaze to heavy psych—they all have a spirit of adventurousness, unafraid to mix other genres into their songs as the mood strikes them. Here are some of the best new psych-rock acts rising from the land Down Under.

The Asteroid Belt

Like the movement of the rocks in the astronomical body for which they are named, The Asteroid Belt’s improvised instrumental jams feel simultaneously unpredictable and well-choreographed. These Adelaide-based space cadets know how to lock into a solid heavy psych groove similar to Earthless and Hawkwind. After playing together for a decade, they work their effects pedals like seasoned road warriors. Their first LP in five years, Do Whats Right, makes it hard to go wrong. It’s fun to disappear in smoke under their guidance.

Beaches

Beaches have an appropriate name, evoking the California coastline where the first psych purveyors congregated. This Melbourne quintet takes their DIY philosophy seriously—everyone plays an instrument, everyone sings, and the various members design their own album artwork and direct their videos. Their third album, Second of Spring, is their most ambitious yet, a double-LP filled with sunny melodies and motorik beats. It swings between brittle post-punk riffing and delightful pop harmonies, occupying that dreamlike state right before sunrise.

The Black Heart Death Cult

If you’re going to have a death cult, it may as well be a black-hearted one. These Melbourne natives appropriate ‘60s imagery in their lyrics and visual presentation, but their sound is firmly rooted in ‘90s neo-psych. They prefer to lay down a fog bank of fuzz to cover their Britpop hooks, like Oasis experimenting with My Bloody Valentine’s gear. They’ve been slowly working on their full-length for a few years now and, if the Black Rainbow EP is any indication, it should be filled with hazy shoegaze, mumbled vocals, and blissful riffs.

Comacozer

Comacozer’s name almost seems like a portmanteau of “coma” and “bulldozer,” and that perfectly describes their sound. Sydney’s three (sometimes four) biggest Monster Magnet and Earthless fans wield cosmically heavy riffs in the service of putting the listener into a trance. Kalos Eidos Skopeo, the title of their second album, also forms a portmanteau in Greek: kaleidoscope. The ever-shifting textures found within hold the same fascination as the beautiful forms created by the glass lenses of the record’s namesake device. These blues for the red sun come in every color.

Dreamtime

In aboriginal culture, the Dreamtime refers to a foundational myth, one that attributes the creation of the world to their ancestral spirits. The band Dreamtime consists of four hippies from Brisbane, and they pay pretty serious reverence to their own spiritual ancestors on their second full-length, Strange Pleasures. With nods to Pink Floyd, Ash Ra Tempel, and Hawkwind, it would be weirder not to find pleasure in this heady blend. They deliver something for everyone: mellow folk tunes, spacey sojourns, and freak-out jams—often all at the same time. Turn on, tune in, and drop out of this plane of existence.

Hotel Wrecking City Traders

Passage to Agartha references both a legendary city at the Earth’s core and the name of a seriously whacked-out electric joint by Miles Davis. Hotel Wrecking City Traders certainly aren’t jazz, but the Perth rockers share a similar love of sonic exploration. The mix of post-rock tension-and-release with guitars run through broken amplifiers and concrete slab bass makes for a truly bruising take on heavy psychedelia. Their last album, Phantamonium, played with those discordant elements. This one uses the jagged edges to burrow straight towards the center of the planet.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

With connections to over a dozen other bands in their home city of Melbourne, and a rising profile in the United States, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are certainly on their way to claiming their crown. They’ve been incredibly prolific since 2011, releasing 11 full-lengths and an EP in that time span, but they got really ambitious in 2017. The three full-lengths they’ve released so far this year range from more microtonal psych weirdness to an Emerson, Lake & Palmer pastiche to a collaboration with jazz unit The Mild High Club—and they have two more planned! This seven-piece does some better than others (Murder of the Universe, the prog album, is a hoot), but their eclectic spirit makes them truly unique.

Mt. Mountain

Mt. Mountain called their latest opus Dust, and boy, is that title accurate. This may as well be the soundtrack to a Vegemite Western. The 17-minute title track opens with a low drone reminiscent of a didgeridoo. Melancholic Morricone guitar and lonesome flute drift across the landscape. A full-on sandstorm hits, propelled by ominous riffs and swirling effects. Earth is an appropriate (if obvious) comparison. They make lovely oceanside Perth seem like a barren desert perpetually shrouded in crimson dusk.

Sacred Shrines

This Brisbane-based group taps into the mystic energies of both ‘60s flower power and the 1980s days of wine and roses. Their organ has a nasty bite, their guitars leak fuel all over the place, the drums soundtrack a “youth in revolt” movie. With disaffected alternative vocals moaning lines like “listen up, disengage, fade away” over wah-wah pedals and sitar, it’s not hard to figure out what shrines they worship at. Still, on Trail to Find, they mix together the mysterious and the upbeat with unfettered verve.

Smoke

It’s hard to tell if Smoke intend their name as a noun or a verb, but either one feels appropriate. They claim to be influenced by Hawkwind, Black Sabbath, Hendrix, and Ornette Coleman; that’s accurate, but doesn’t tell the full story. What’s really impressive is their ability to combine the heavy sounds of the first two with the freewheeling weightlessness of the latter two. After taking a break for a couple years, the group has recently returned, ready to spread their smog all over Brisbane and its surrounding environs once more.

—Jeff Treppel

The intro to O.C.’s 1994 album Word…Life, one of New York’s most fully realized rap debuts, gave listeners fair warning: “Get your ears ready for creative control / ‘Cause no one’s gonna tell me how to sell out my soul.” That credo has held true for the past two-and-a-half decades where, across several projects, O.C. has been one of rap’s most acrobatic lyricists.

Word…Life was a focused triumph of vivid storytelling and street-tested punchlines, full of somber moments that felt impossibly wise for a 24-year-old still figuring out life. The following year, O.C. and producer Buckwild joined fellow New York luminaries Big L, Diamond D, Fat Joe, Lord Finesse, Showbiz, and A.G. to form the Diggin’ in the Crates collective. From there, O.C. was hand-picked by Clockers director Spike Lee for the second assembly of the Crooklyn Dodgers supergroup. Jewelz, a treasure trove for East Coast purists, arrived in 1997, featuring a dream team roster of producers and guests.

The new millennium saw O.C., who was raised in Bushwick, Brooklyn and Jamaica, Queens, outlast not only many of his ‘90s peers, but a procession of beloved yet doomed labels stranded some of his seminal records. Beginning with 2005’s Smoke and Mirrors, the latter half of his discography is comprised of full-length collaborations with friends both old (Mike Loe, A.G.) and new (Apollo Brown, Ray West). On the eve of his latest release Perestroika, a Cold War-themed romp recorded with Connecticut rapper Apathy, O.C. granted rare access to the O-Zone and told the stories behind his legendary catalogue.

Word…Life

“A lot of that record is demo music from prior to my getting a deal. I did ‘Fudge Pudge’ with Organized Konfusion in ‘91, and didn’t get a deal until two and a half years later. During that time I was doing a lot of demo work, ‘O-Zone’ being one of those records. A lot of the stuff on Word…Life, I transferred from old music to new music once I started working with Buckwild.

“Buck and I clicked right away—it was like we’d known each other forever. We met on the Source Tour with Lord Finesse. I was traveling with Organized Konfusion, and Finesse brought Buck on a few dates. MC Serch was there too, and he figured out that I wasn’t the third member of Organized Konfusion. He signed Nas first, and I was the second artist signed to his production company Serchlite Music.

“We’ve all heard the saying that history repeats itself—certain events, politically, socially. I didn’t know certain elements of Word…Life would be so relevant to this day. I’m surprised, but then again I’m not. Like, ‘Constables,’ of course, that’s been going on forever. ‘Time’s Up’ was just pointing out some of the music being made at the time. Instead of people telling the truth about their experiences and their lives, the easy way out was, ‘I get a lot of women’ or ‘I pull my gun out,’ and that was just so cliche. At the end of the day, I don’t want hip-hop being looked at as some gangster shit. There’s always two sides to a coin.”

Jewelz

“After Word…Life, DJ Premier took me out for my very first overseas run in Japan. I’ll never forget, it was me, Premier’s DJing for me which is still surreal, Lords of the Underground, and Biz Markie was hosting. What’s crazy is when I look back, Lords of the Underground taught me how to perform. Them dudes would crush you on stage, their energy was so ridiculous. Being that I had Premier for that particular tour run, I was OK, but DoItAll and Funke taught me breath control and how to work the stage. Do is the storm, Funke’s the calm, but together, nobody could mess with them. It was like, damn, I got the headline just because Preme was DJing for me, but they were the real headliners, it was obvious.

“On Jewelz, the game chose me. People didn’t want to deal with me on my first album. It wasn’t nothin’ personal, but thinking about it, I had to prove myself. It’s a proving ground, especially in hip-hop. Around that time you had Illmatic, Redman, all these incredible albums, Large and Main Source, this is what I had to compete with in my era. Me and Buck had no choice, we had to do that first album by ourselves. But after that, people were more prone to seeing my direction and it just fell into place.

“In that three years from Word…Life to Jewelz, there was change in my life, period. You’re not the same person when you wake up the next day, in a sense. It was just a different energy, and I had the people around me. That album came together because of Buck, Premier, Mr. Walt, Show, and Finesse. Freddie Foxxx taught me so much in the studio—I was still new.

“For me, each album is a like a chapter in a book. If you listen to Ready to Die and then listen to Life After Death, it’s night and day. Big couldn’t make another Ready to Die because of how much his life had changed. Growth is a process everybody shares, but some people deny it.”

Bon Appetit

“Bon Appetit was me and Buck again, but that was a crew effort. We was all in the same studio, D&D, so people would come into each other’s rooms, poke their heads in, sit down for a little while, and help with the direction of the projects. Premier and Guru were in one room, Jay and the Roc-A-Fella guys in another room, Beatminerz and Smif-N-Wessun in the lounge playing pool, it was that kind of atmosphere.

“That was my Blueprint, Bon Appetit—both albums were being done around the same time. I know Buck even had sessions with Hov and Kanye around that time. I captured something, and it took people a long time to pay attention to that album. That’s why I say it’s my favorite album.”

Starchild

“It wasn’t finished. The guy Marlon I did it with on Brick Records, it was his album. Marlon’s my man, he was just antsy. I was like, ‘Yo, the record’s not finished, B! Let me tweak it!’ It was a work-for-hire, it’s his record. I guess he figured, I paid him, it’s cool.

“Now, fast-forward, the record is in demand. It’s a cold record, it’s dope. There’s some things I would have changed, but I guess we say that about all our records. That cover, though. I’m like, that ain’t even my character, that’s not me! I’m not a b-boy. The big sneakers with the paint…but, shit, people love it.”

Smoke & Mirrors

“Smoke & Mirrors I did with Mike Loe, he’s been around Diggin’ from day one. That was a therapy record. It just happened that I had a relationship with Dom and the whole Hiero, that’s my peoples. They were like, ‘No disrespect, but can we approach you about doing a deal on the label?’ I laughed at it, like, of course I didn’t feel disrespected. They flew out here, we met up in the city, went out to eat, and they were like, ‘We’re trying to pitch you.’ I’m like, ‘Man, it’s cool, we’re family.’

“They taught me something. They’re the first people I saw tour with their own buses, pay for their own day rooms and hotels. They own a giant compound in the Bay where they make their own merch, they got a recording studio, you go upstairs you might see George Clinton or E-40 just chillin’ out. Very smart business-wise, I love and respect these dudes for showing me a different road.

“We went on a promo tour, and we actually just missed Katrina. We were doing the House of Blues in New Orleans, they had two stages, Lyfe Jennings on one side and the whole Hiero on the other side. Remember, they had their own bus. I think Lyfe Jennings left right after the show at 2:30 that morning, and we left close to 4am. We got up to North Carolina and it started raining, two days later we got to New York and the hurricane hit. So that album holds some shit for me.

“I was growing up, I was in my mid-30s. People want to feel like you’re personal with them, and that’s what I did.”

Oasis with A.G.

“I was seeing a lot of comments and shit. People talk about fallin’ off, I don’t know what that is. For me it’s like, you either get better or you don’t. And I really take what I do seriously, this is my life.

“Oasis was just me and A doing what we do, and we’re a lot alike. There were times I wasn’t there when he recorded. I would come in, he or Show would play the record, and if I felt there was a need for me to be on it, I would get on it. If I felt like he bodied it, I was like, ‘I’m not touchin’ that shit, you bodied it, I can’t follow up.’ And vice versa—we both had solo records on there, and A felt the same way. I did ‘Contagious,’ and A was like, ‘I ain’t gettin’ on that record, you bodied that shit.’ When he did ‘God’s Gift’ I was like, ‘You embodied what you envisioned on that joint, why overkill it?’”

Trophies with Apollo Brown

“Working with Apollo, that shit was easy work. I wrote the album before they flew me out, and recorded it in less than eight hours. Me and Apollo made a bet—he picked me up and was like, ‘I’ll take you to get something to eat if you’re hungry, and we can go to the studio from there.’ I was like, ‘Cool, I’ll probably cut like seven or eight records.’ And he was like, ‘Word? OK, wanna put your money up?’

“Fast-forward, we’re in the studio, and I’m on the seventh record in a matter of two hours. I told him if he heard something I wasn’t doing right to stop me and I’d go back and fix it. He stopped me, he’s like, ‘Yo, I apologize.’ I’m like, ‘What you talkin’ about, you shoot some spitballs on me or something?’ He’s like, ‘Yo, what you’re doing, that’s amazing.’ I’m like, ‘Yo, everybody from my era had to work like this because we was paying $200 an hour in reel-to-reel analog studios, there wasn’t no time to waste. I’m not the only one that do this!’ And he’s like, ‘Well, you’re the only one I’ve seen do this, that’s some other shit.’

“I think each album gives you another life, so any experience that gives me another life in the recording business is dope. I’m proud of that. I’ve had to learn to balance quality and quantity in the past few years. I’ve got a lot of music, and that’s what we have to do in this fast-paced game right now. Everything is basically disposable, so you have to make sure it’s quality first, and quantity to keep up with what’s going on.

“But I think some traditions you don’t break. P.E. had the Bomb Squad, EPMD had EPMD. Certain things you just don’t change up the model. For some things, people can have different producers and things of that nature, but I don’t think it gives a cohesiveness to the album, when you’re listening to three different producers’ sounds or 20 MCs just for features on there. It don’t give the album a cohesiveness, and it don’t give it no life, long life. I think everything I’ve done up to this point, it has life. I mean, 20 years, that says a lot, in the music business.”

Ray’s Cafe with Ray West

“Ray is a genius. What I love about Ray is, we sat down and had a conversation, and that’s how the records got done. Out of every conversation we had, we recorded one or two records and would call it a night. We had a conversation about ‘Ray’s Cafe,’ the title joint. It was just like, that’s what we’re gonna talk about, let’s set a mood for it, like we was in a cafe, you owned a cafe. You’re a cafe owner and people are comin’ in, not paying attention to who you are but they’re listening to the music, boppin’ their head as they walk past. Just setting a tone for the music. He picked the samples—I thought he was a little crazy at one time, just listening to what he do, but dude is a genius.

“It was just fluidity, conversations. Ray would smoke me out—I don’t smoke weed, but I’d be sitting there high, zoning, and we would just look at each other and go, ‘Yeeeaaahhh,’ on some Cheech & Chong shit. When we were recording, I’d want to redo or remove stuff, and he’d be like, ‘Yo, leave it.’ I would start to overthink, maybe out of paranoia, being high or something. I’d be like, ‘Yo, I think I gotta add an extra bar here,’ and he’d be like, ‘Nope, leave it, O.’ And I’d leave it, I’d trust him.”

Same Moon Same Sun: 1st Phase

“The truth is in the title. We all live under the same moon and the same sun, I don’t care how much money you got, I don’t care what color you are, what social status. At the end of the day, we’re all going back to the dirt. We all share basically the same things in common, in life, but people feel like they don’t. I get upset, you get upset, I laugh, you laugh. People feel like we’re different, and it’s like, we’re not so different.

“It goes deeper than that, because you deal with religion, you deal with politics, and that’s where everything becomes a blur. People ask me what Same Moon Same Sun means, I’m like, we live under this shit. I didn’t even put my face on the album cover, I’ve got the moon in the front and it’s eclipsing the sun. I’m just writing what the universe is telling me. We’re all part of the elements, man—earth, water, fire and air. Ain’t no deep shit about it.

“I’m working on Phase 2, it might be an EP. It’s gonna be the lighter side of the first one, just to lighten up the blow a little bit. Once people get the whole collection, they’ll understand what I was doing.”

Perestroika with Apathy

“Ap’s another genius, man, he made my job easy. We merged as a unit. I always fucked with him, calling him a white Kanye, crazy, all kinds of shit. He’s a super overthinker. When you listen to an Apathy track, it’s probably a record that’s been mixed over 20 times, because he’s a perfectionist.

“I remember KRS-One saying years ago that if you talk things into fruition, they’ll happen. This Russia shit in 2017, I mean, it’s something we’ve all seen coming. By that I mean, the Perestroika concept relates to people all around the planet. All the things they went through during the Cold War, it didn’t just have to do with Russia. I done been around the world, Ap’s been around the world, I see the same shit in Istanbul, same things that’s going on in Russia that’s going on in America. We all see the same things—everything falls under the same umbrella. Now I’m back on Same Moon Same Sun.

“Ap’s a huge D.I.T.C. fan, a huge hip-hop fan period. I get him mad now, because I’ll give him a compliment, and he’ll be like, ‘Nah, you buggin’.’ He thinks I’m bullshittin’. I’m like, ‘Eat it, we’re on the same level!'”

—Pete Tosiello

Photos by Kennedi Carter.

The Reverend Curtis Gatewood moves with purpose and determination toward the microphone. He’s impeccably dressed—clean cut, dark suit—and he strides through the standing room only crowd at The Pinhook to ask his question. On most nights, this venue books rising indie acts touring through Durham. It’s an accepting, socially progressive space, with gender-neutral bathrooms and a few nights a week given over to wicked dance parties. It currently holds the title of Best Gay or Lesbian Bar in the Triangle, according to the local alt-weekly.

When Gatewood takes the microphone this evening, he’s addressing five of the six candidates for Durham mayor, only one of whom is white. The former North Carolina NAACP leader is asking them what they’ll do to prevent terrorism and the infiltration of the city’s police department by white supremacists.

One candidate answers in verse:

“After emancipation they expanded experiments / Replicated the plantation under new management / They locked us in a cell, the propaganda was scandalous / Overseers, the officers, they branded us terrorists,” Pierce Freelon raps, delivering the final verse of his song “Captain America” a cappella. “The private prison industry, they lobbied the candidates / Gave mandatory sentences for handling cannabis / Captain America, look what we saved Americans / Billions in cheap labor, it’s a slave’s inheritance / This is what it is to be black in America / It feels like any minute I’ll be capped in America.”

Artists See the World the Way It’s Supposed to Be

“Tonight I dropped a verse,” Freelon says about an hour later. “That’s very uncommon.”

We’re sitting in an upscale bar about a block away from the Pinhook, and Freelon is finally eating supper. Durham locals tend to know him as a musician and not a politician, he explains, particularly as the MC in the hip-hop and jazz ensemble The Beast. Freelon, the son of a jazz singer, has fronted the combo since 2007. Now, at 33, he’s running for mayor. As Freelon puts it, his campaign is about displaying his chops as a potential leader, rather this as an emcee. And while The Beast’s latest record, Woke, was released the day Freelon formally entered the race, and the “Captain America” video was promoted in his campaign newsletter, Freelon has been purposefully avoiding rapping at mayoral forums like this one.

But when Gatewood mentioned policing’s roots in slave patrols as part of his question, Freelon felt that his answer had to go beyond policy notes. It was an ancestral question, he says, and it merited a deeper answer. So Freelon merged his two public selves, the artist and the politician.

It’s an unusual combination. As Freelon puts it, creatives and visionaries are often on the margins of power; bringing artistic thinking into public office has the power to change the status quo. But Freelon’s resume extends beyond the time spent fronting a respected hip-hop group. He’s taught black history through hip-hop in his Blackademics curriculum; he’s traveled the world building studios for PBS webseries Beat Making Lab ; he’s founded Afrofuturist hub Blackspace, and lectured at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina Central University. All of these experiences have informed the way he’s run his campaign.

“If there was a city in the state of North Carolina or the South that would be open to electing a 33-year-old hip-hop artist, professor, organizer to the highest office in the city, I think it would be Durham,” Freelon says. “There is a very unique community [here] that is progressive and queer and creative and awesome.”

Photo by Katrina Parker.

Freelon is the youngest candidate in the election, and he’s up against the CEO of a prominent nonprofit and ex-city council member, a retired police officer, a small business owner, a pastor, and the founder and former owner of local alt-weekly INDY, who is currently on city council. And because the current mayor, Bill Bell is retiring, there’s no incumbent in the race.

And while Freelon hasn’t held public office, he’s no newcomer to political action, either. When he was a child, he watched Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt run for U.S. Senate against incumbent Republican Jesse Helms—first in 1990, then again in 1996. Freelon’s politically-active parents, jazz singer Nnenna and architect Phil, were involved in both of Gnatt’s campaigns. Freelon, who was in elementary school during the first race and a teenager during the second, was inspired watching the first black mayor of Charlotte challenge an entrenched, established conservative. Knocking on doors to campaign for Gantt gave him a taste for what running for office entails.

Joshua Vincent, Freelon’s campaign manager, also worked with a young, black politician who ran against an elder statesman of the Republican party. The same year The Beast formed, Vincent was hired to work on Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. He was 25. “If you ever need an example of what it takes to win, I think that campaign is probably one of the better ones to get your experience,” Vincent says. “It was something that had never been done before. I learned a significant amount about work ethic.” In 2012, Vincent was hired by the national NAACP and worked closely with prominent North Carolina civil rights leader the Reverend William Barber. Then, in 2016, he worked for the Color of Change Super PAC.

Vincent and Freelon have a lot in common. Vincent is only a few months older than Freelon; They’re both musicians, and they’ve run in the same circles for years. Vincent, a jazz trombonist, even played on Nnenna Freelon’s 2013 holiday album, Christmas. In the summer of 2014, Vincent helped organize Durham’s National Moment of Silence after teenager Michael Brown was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Vincent ran into Freelon again there. The two became—and remain—close friends. As artistic and political beings, Freelon and Vincent are on the same page.

“As a jazz musician, politics is kind of a natural thing for us,” Vincent says. “We have to always negotiate through our process with other people.” Like Freelon, Vincent feels an artistic imagination can lead to effective leadership and creative solutions. He thinks back to a conversation with a wealthy, successful uncle who told him, “You know, Josh, I’m envious of you.” Vincent couldn’t imagine why, so he asked his uncle to elaborate.

“He said to me, ‘You’re an artist, and artists see the world the way it’s supposed to be,'” Vincent recalls.

Martin and Malcolm Were MCs

On August 14, 2017—three years to the day after the National Moment of Silence for Michael Brown—protesters surrounded the Confederate Soldiers Monument at the old Durham County Courthouse, tied a rope to it and pulled it to the ground. Days after a violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Durham’s response made international news.

This kind of activism is a time-tested North Carolina tradition, Freelon says. “The Greensboro Four, who launched the sit-in movement, those were four students at North Carolina A&T University,” he says. “They were 18, 19 years old, breaking the law.” During the Civil Rights Movement, The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was formed at Shaw University, a historically black college in Raleigh. In 2015, Charlotte’s Bree Newsome climbed the 30-foot flagpole of the South Carolina statehouse in Columbia and took down the Confederate flag. She was arrested, but lawmakers moved to take the flag down permanently soon after.

“Here we are in Durham, in 2017,” Freelon says. “A couple of weeks ago, a North Carolina Central University Student—a queer, black person—tied a rope around a Confederate monument and pulled it to the ground. That, to me, is consistent with the organizing work of other young HBCU students throughout North Carolina.”

Freelon is proud of North Carolina’s civil rights activists and excited about Durham’s potential. There’s no racial majority in the city, he says. (In 2016, Durham was 50.3 percent white and 37.2 percent black, while the U.S. at large was 76.9 percent and 13.3 percent. The Hispanic and Latino population was 13.4 percent and 17.8 percent, respectively.) There’s power in that diversity, but there are also troubling trends in this rapidly growing and increasingly gentrified Southern city.

“In Durham, we have the highest income inequality in the state of North Carolina,” Freelon says. “We have 40 percent poverty in black and Latinx communities. We have 800 evictions a month. We have disparities in the criminal justice system. There is a lot of work to be done.”

People in these situations know what their needs are, Freelon says, but they’re rarely asked because they lack economic and political power. Freelon knows that if someone is dealing with an eviction, they don’t have time to come to a mayoral candidate forum—they’re more concerned about survival. Solutions come from listening, and from addressing the structural issues that have displaced minority and disadvantaged families. They come from going to housing projects like Durham’s McDougald Terrace—”The Mac,” as it’s called—and meeting sidelined citizens where they are. This is what Freelon does.

“It’s one thing to say you have certain values,” Vincent says. “It’s another thing to actually live the values you say you have. This is not campaign rhetoric, this is who [Freelon] is.”

Throughout his career, Vincent has learned that public figures are most effective when they are honest about what they believe. That’s how Obama succeeded, he says, and it’s a quality Reverend Barber shares as well. Vincent also believes that the electorate is more informed than they’re given credit for.

“People are not stupid,”  Vincent says. “I think a lot of times some candidates want to pull the wool over the electorate’s eyes and make them feel like they’re talking to them, when they’re really not.”

Freelon finds that approach repugnant, using a hip-hop metaphor to break down the hypocrisy: “A lot of what you hear from politicians is like a Top 40 rapper’s version of a wack verse,” he says, “which is like ‘Hi, I’m such-and-such. I’m a good, Christian, heterosexual, white man. Vote for me because I believe in values and safe communities and creating jobs.’ We’ve heard that verse before, like a million times. And we all know that it’s not true. There’s more to the story.”

To Freelon, civil rights leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were both, in their own way, MCs. King was a master of metaphor and cadence; to prove it, Freelon launches into a few lines of King’s famously melodic “I Have a Dream” speech. “That’s a dope verse,” Freelon exclaims, when he finishes. “I think that he would have been an excellent politician because of the way he wielded the spoken word.”

Truth to Power

It’s getting late and Freelon is starting to yawn. He’s eaten, he’s relaxed, and we’ve taken a few minutes to talk about something other than politics (it turns out he really knows his Star Trek). As our conversation closes, he’s got tired-but-satisfied look of someone who’s put in a hard day’s work at a task he considers important. The mayoral campaign hasn’t left Freelon much time to make new music, but he’s told his bandmates that he’s going to have a lot to write about after the election.

And what if he wins? Off the top of his head, Freelon can’t think of any other people in public office who are active performing artists, but that doesn’t mean it’s off the table. As he sees it, politics and art often have the same origin. “I wouldn’t bother making music if I wasn’t honest and speaking truth to power,” Freelon says.

As he gets up to leave, he stops to say hello to two friends who have dropped by after a Black Wall Street meeting. They chat for a few minutes, and then Freelon bids them a good night and steps out the door, just another young Durhamite, downtown on a Wednesday night.

—Corbie Hill

Italian post-punk group Havah are no trend-hoppers, though their crisp darkwave sound might come as a surprise if you were a fan of Michele Camorani’s previous bands, La Quiete and Raein—messy, emotive hardcore outfits. In Havah, Camorani channels his deep love of ‘80s forebears like Diaframma (the “Italian Joy Division”), CCCP Fedeli Alla Linea, and so forth. And though the style may be different from the groups he’s best known for, Havah’s intensity and melodic sensibilities are clear throughlines from Camorani’s past endeavors.

Chorused-out guitar hooks and nimble basslines abound on Contravveleno, Havah’s third album, and it’s excellently recorded and sequenced, with the A-side more on the blistering post-punk tip and the B-side tending toward more experimental, spacious, industrial-influenced new wave (“Un’Altra Strada,” in particular, uses its rhythmic and melodic interplay in a particularly appealing way). Havah’s previous efforts were a little bit less polished; here, the clarity and fidelity truly allow each element to shine, and there’s no loss of raw energy.

Contravveleno’s thematic meat couldn’t be more relevant to the present moment, too. While many of us are embroiled in online Discourse(™) over whether Nazis should be punched and what counts as an act of resistance, looking to near history for everyday stories of people standing up against fascism always proves remarkably grounding. Contravveleno spins around true survival stories at the human level passed down from grandparents to their grandchildren as they tell of their experiences in Mussolini’s Italy. Each song is a snapshot: there are no anthems for street protest, no public declarations to be found here. These are tales of unglamorous actions, decisions made under pressure by people without activist pedigrees.

Contravveleno is reverent to both the musical and social histories it explores, but it pushes away our tendencies to mythologize the past through nostalgia. Instead, its descriptive imagery and perfect post-punk pastiche encourages listeners to dig deeper into all of its references and think about the fact that resistance is rarely about sweeping speeches and big media moments and is most often about putting your average body on the line in the moment, when it counts.

—Jes Skolnik

Photos by Chona Kasinger.

“Making this record almost killed me.” That’s Wolves In The Throne Room drummer and co-founder Aaron Weaver talking about the band’s latest album, Thrice Woven. He’s exaggerating, of course, but he soon elaborates: “When we make a record, we’re going all in. It’s being locked in a dark room during the brutal, cold, wet wintertime with the woodstove going, just digging into it. The other stuff in your life just kinda fades away when you’re going that deep. You forget the rest of your life exists.”

That’s pretty much the way Weaver and his younger brother, Nathan—the band’s vocalist, guitarist and other co-founder—have been making Wolves In The Throne Room records since the band’s inception in 2002. The process has resulted in six albums and an EP’s worth of hypnotic black metal that’s been widely referred to as “Cascadian black metal”—a nod to the Cascade mountain range that looms over the band’s home near Olympia, Washington. For Aaron, the connection between the landscape and the music is crucial. “The music just comes up out of the earth for me. Call it an energy source; call it an inspiration—that’s what our music’s about. It’s about this place, this home we love so much. We wouldn’t be able to make this kind of record anywhere else.”

What kind of record is Thrice Woven, then? “Majestic” is a word that comes to mind.  “Magnificent” is another. It’s not difficult to convince yourself that you can hear the emerald forests of the Pacific Northwest presiding over the melodic tremolo guitars of 10-minute epic “Angrboda” or Nathan’s feral howls on 11½ -minute closer “Fires Roar In The Palace Of The Moon.” Elsewhere, special guests Steve Von Till of Neurosis and Swedish singer Anna von Hausswolff lend their unique vocal talents to “The Old Ones Are With Us” and “Born From The Serpent’s Eye,” respectively (Hausswolff also appears on the ambient interlude “Mother Owl, Father Ocean”).

“Anna is incredible,” Aaron enthuses. “She’s really well-known in Europe but hasn’t really made it over to the States yet, so she’s someone to watch. As for Steve, what can you say? It’s nothing but a deep honor and privilege that he spoke on our record in this way. To us, Steve Von Till is a hero and an elder and a mentor and a teacher.”

With its distinct medieval feel, Thrice Woven sounds like an episode of Game Of Thrones—or Vikings—high on corpse paint and funeral pyres. As it turns out, that’s not too far from the way Aaron thinks of it. “The themes of this record are a lot of Norse mythology, a lot of old stories from the Northern Lands—stories about Odin and Loki and Thor and Ragnarök and Fenris Wolf,” he explains. “This record also takes place in a very specific location—on a body of salt water with the ocean on one side and a range of volcanoes on the other side. That’s the world that we saw when we wrote this record. When I hear the music and close my eyes, I’m right there, smelling the salt water and feeling the heat coming off of fire on the beach.”

To properly capture the ambience of their natural surroundings, the Weaver brothers recorded most of Thrice Woven at their home studio, Owl Lodge, with producer Randall Dunn. (Dunn, who’s worked on all of the band’s albums dating back to 2007’s Two Hunters, was responsible for bringing Anna von Hausswolff into the project.) But first, they recorded the drums in a single day at Studio Litho, a Seattle recording facility owned by Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard. “Pearl Jam practice there, so it’s got this cool old-school Seattle grunge thing going on,” Aaron explains. “Nathan and I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, so that energy is something we definitely know from high school.”

Even in the heart of the city, nature prevailed at Litho. “The south wall of the studio is covered in some kind of flowering vine, and on that day it was just covered in thousands in bees,” Aaron explains. “So the building was almost vibrating with the sound of these bees.”

At some point during the recording process, the Weaver brothers asked their longtime session and live guitarist Kody Keyworth to become a full-fledged member of Wolves In The Throne Room. “It’s almost like we didn’t even make a choice,” Aaron says of the decision to invite Keyworth into the fold after more than six years of session and live service. “Energetically, it just felt right—like he was one of us, a brother all of a sudden. Some old boundary that used to be there, where we’re the band and he’s the session guy—that boundary just dissolved. And it feels really good to be in this new place with him.”

To outside observers, it might seem like Thrice Woven is Wolves In The Throne Room’s return to black metal after 2014’s synth-based Celestite. But Aaron doesn’t see it that way. “We knew from the beginning that Celestite was us taking a deep breath, cleansing ourselves and cleaning out some old shit so we could be ready to do another metal record,” he says. “That’s always been the intention.”

Whether playing metal or not, Aaron views Wolves In The Throne Room as his personal path to self-awareness. “For me, life as an artist and a musician is about going deeper and deeper into myself, especially the dark places—the places that feel really tender or like they’re off limits,” he observes. “Over the course of our records, I’ve been able to go further into those places.”

“Wolves In The Throne Room is this space in my life where I do my prayer, where I delve deeply into my dreams,” he concludes. “It’s a really private place, a place that really only this band can get to. It’s always been the same, but my understanding of it changes.”

—J. Bennett

“I feel like a label is like raising a child—you got to feed it,” says Alex Ruder. The founder and sole proprietor of Seattle’s Hush Hush records has kept his label alive and well, using it to release 89 official albums, EPs, and mixes (so far) since its inception in August 2012, which equates to more than one release every three weeks.

Ruder, who also serves as a late-night DJ on famed independent Seattle radio station KEXP, conceived Hush Hush as an offshoot of a DJ night of the same name he was running at the since-shuttered Capitol Hill venue the Living Room. Ruder had become enamored with the “night bus” aesthetic (mainly calm, insular electronic sounds that play to the contemplative atmosphere of nocturnal transit) that was pioneered by Montreal artist CFCF, and gained traction on taste-making sites like the Fader and the online music forum Hipinion around the time.

“I always thought it was exciting because it wasn’t really a genre,” explains Ruder. “It was more like a vibe and a feeling, and could be a whole bunch of different types of music.” One of the early guest DJs at Ruder’s Hush Hush night, Seattle’s Kid Smpl, ended up supplying the label’s first three releases, and helped cement the imprint’s image as a purveyor of sleek, textured headphone music from an often dark and rainy region.

Hush Hush is primarily a digital-release label, but to further distinguish it, Ruder turned to his love of cassette tapes into a notable facet of the label. About a quarter of the Hush Hush catalogue has been made available on cassette, and a half dozen have been pressed to vinyl. While vinyl has enjoyed a resurgence as a viable format for releasing new music, cassettes have remained mostly limited to small underground pockets within scenes. But Ruder says the unique qualities of the format helped open his mind to unconventionally arranged releases, like this year’s two-part album from Lushloss called Asking/Bearing.

Increasingly, releases from the label have come from a broad array of electronic artists from around the globe (like Croatia’s Kimekai, Greece’s Serafim Tsotsonis, and Singaporean duo TZECHAR), and incorporated many moods. “In the early years, I was really focused on putting out music that fit that [night bus] vibe,” remembers Ruder. “The aesthetic has definitely expanded… I think you see that in every label, where you see them start off with the motivation to spotlight a certain sound, or a certain scene, then they start following their ear into different places.”

From the bouncy dream pop of Cock & Swan, to tripped-out screw mixes by DJAO, and the glitchy Norwegian free jazz of Klunks, Ruder has added bright layers to the Hush Hush catalogue to supplement the nighttime wandering at its core. And he promises to remain active: “I just listen to so much music that I hear something awesome, then kind of move on to the next thing, because I want to hear what else is out there. That’s kind of how I run the label. Like here’s something cool to check out, come back in two weeks, there’ll be something else to check out.”

Kid Smpl, Skylight

It’s no mistake Kid Simpl’s long form debut defined the label’s early aesthetic, as the album was a primary reason Ruder decided to form the label. Then 22-year-old Smpl (real name: Joey Butler) had sent a handful of demos to Ruder for consideration for his overnight radio show. The night bus vibe was perfect for the time slot, and after a few months, Ruder had accumulated an album’s worth of Butler’s new recordings. After inviting Butler to guest spin at the Hush Hush DJ night at the Living Room, Ruder posed the question: “I got this album, it’s really good, what about the idea of me starting a label that’s like an extension of this DJ night to put this out?” And just like that, Hush Hush became a platform for Ruder to shine a light on like-minded artists.

A mixture of ambient field recordings, atmospheric synths, and subdued percussion, Skylight celebrated solitary living, which boded well for the famously chilly Seattle population, and received widespread praise from the local press.

j.Faraday, Beat Tape #1

At the time, Houston producer j.Faraday (aka Javier Escareno) was only 21 years old, but was already proficient in the crafting of heady, cloud-rap instrumentals, which were reaching peak popularity when this beat tape went live in March, 2013. “It’s like Clams Casino meets DJ Screw,” says Ruder. “He was just posting tons of tracks on Soundcloud. I just hit him up and we picked 20, had them mastered.” Ruder says the release stands as the label’s most-downloaded release.

Fjord Morrison, Old Tendency EP

Fjord Morrison is a secretive solo alias of Jordan Koplowitz, one of the founding members of Beat Connection. “He didn’t want anybody to know it was him, so that was an interesting one,” remembers Ruder. Live-sounding drums and playful synthesizer melodies carry the three original tracks and an equal number of remixes. It’s an interesting look behind the Beat Connection curtain, and shows that Koplowitz is an inventive beat-maker and songwriter.

Cock & Swan, Secret Angels

“That one was a pivotal one as far as being able to branch out into something that was a little more pop-leaning, a little more traditional, that wasn’t just bedroom producers.” Seattle musicians Johnny Goss and Ola Hungerford indeed crafted 12 hypnotic, dare we say movement-inducing tracks here, made even more accessible by Hungerford’s gently sung vocals. More traditional in its use of percussion and minimally augmented vocals as primary ingredients than previous HH releases, but just as adventurous in its own way, the album’s driving rhythms keep your head nodding while tweaked samples and mono synth/clarinet/electric sitar arrangements take your mind to the clouds.

Big Spider’s Back, Ssoft EP

This 2014 release by Seattle producer Big Spider’s Back got a little love from national outlets like Pitchfork, and for good reason. Marking another move for Hush Hush toward the upbeat, the EP’s plush house vertebrae are fleshed out by carefree keyboard melodies and filtered samples, amounting to five blissful tracks that sound as good in your headphones as they do in a room full of people.

Kimekai, Coral Dreams

Producing as Kimekai, Croatia’s Marko Vuković packs some fantastic IDM into Coral Dreams in the form of trippy beat scene experiments (“Le Loyon”), non-ironic chillwave grooves (“Manetine”), and cinematic slow burners “Chinese Live in Caves.”

Klunks, Elastic Forest

Hailing from Seattle’s sister city of Bergen, Norway, Klunks stands as one of Hush Hush’s most interesting artists. Sequenced blips and, well, klunks, brush up against traditional and acid jazz trappings to create a beautiful distorted reality. Experimental, but certainly not unapproachable, it’s certainly a fun listen.

Lushloss, Asking/Bearing

This album was conceived in two halves. Bearing, the heady, beat-driven second half, was turned in as a standalone document, but was quickly followed up with Asking, a tender group of songs spliced with conversational vocal snippets with the artist’s mother. The result is a warped, highly personal journey that highlights the emotions of an emerging trans woman. “I love doing tapes, and the idea of being able to do a tape for this release totally made sense,” explains Ruder. “Putting them together, but being different sides on a tape.”

—Todd Hamm 

Melvins

Sludge metal is an oozing, bulbous hybrid of doom metal and lo-fi, messy punk. Where doom bands like Skepticism or Esoteric adopt a slow, grandiose, unearthly sound, sludge is more visceral and ugly. The sound of sludge has gone pop a couple times, first when mixed with alternative rock by Nirvana, Soundgarden, and other grunge acts in the early ‘90s, and again when mixed with alternative rock in the current decade by swaggering proggy metal acts like Baroness. For the most part though, purer, fouler sludge has remained a niche interest, with even the largest amphibious monstrosities confined to a relatively small portion of the pop culture swamp.

Sludge often smashes noisily into stoner rock, though the later genre tends to be more straightforward in its pursuit of the head-nodding pleasures of the groove. Sludge, in contrast, generally weds a feral craftiness to its lumbering brutality. Most genre excavations trace sludge ancestry back to Black Sabbath and the slowed-down tracks on Black Flag’s My War. But the Stooges and even the Velvet Underground lurk and loom out there beyond the campfire as well, arty throwbacks carefully calculating the correct angle at which to bludgeon your brains out. Most sludge is slow, but as the list below demonstrates, it’s possible to sludge at any tempo, as long as one is careful not to shake free the filth.

Atavistic Primordial Sludge-lords

Melvins

Sludge arguably began with Black Sabbath’s 1971 “Sweet Leaf,” a love letter to cannabis. “You introduced me / To my mind / And left me wanting / You and your kind,” Ozzy wailed over a thick, detuned, rumbling riff.

Weed and nasty riffage are obviously strong precedents, but sludge proper really begins with Washington state granddaddies the Melvins. “Eye Flys,” the first track on Gluey Porch Treatments, their first full-length from 1987, established the Melvins sound and the filthy blueprint for sludge simultaneously. Dale Crover hits the drums hard enough to fracture the cement foundation underneath, and possibly Earth’s core beneath that. Singer Buzz Osborne shouts belligerent garble, while his guitar and Matt Lutkin’s bass vomit out stringy ropes of feedback. Part doom, part slowed-down structureless noise monstrosity, part hideous vision of creeping fungal infection, the Melvins sounded like no one else—though, as the viscous progress of sludge demonstrates, many were eager to imitate them.

Soilent Green

While America’s Northwest may have been the foul birthplace of sludge, many of the early important bands were from the South. A case in point: Soilent Green, who, along with foul compatriots Eyehategod, helped define the New Orleans sludge sound. “Swallowhole,” from the 2001 album A Deleted Symphony for the Beaten Down, alternates bluesy trudge sections with faster death metal passages that seem to have slithered in from a Deicide album. The slow/fast grunge suggests an alternate universe Nirvana, with that band’s pop heart replaced with pure slime.

Buzzov*en

North Carolina’s Buzzov*en staggered back and forth across the line between belligerent punk swagger and sludge catatonia. On Revelation: Sick Again—an album recorded in 1998, but not released until 2011—the guitars scrape and blare. Singer Kirk Fisher gargles and spits. The result is messy, gross, and clotted rock.

Neurosis

Oakland’s Neurosis started out as a hardcore band in the late 1980s, but slowly began to develop their own style of sludgy post-metal. On 1994’s Enemy of the Sun, founders Dave Edwardson and Jason Roeder began to add experimental weirdness to their punk and metal influences. The song “Enemy of the Sun” opens with quasi-ambient drift and includes industrial-sounding clatter and howling keyboard screech alongside slow lumbering crusty doom.

Metastasizing Sewer Critters

Thrones

Bassist Joe Preston contributed to some of the Melvins’ most famous albums, including 1992’s Lysol, arguably the band’s masterpiece. “Wage War,” recorded in 2010 under Preston’s solo project Thrones, sounds more like classic Melvins than the Melvins themselves do these days. Preston bellows in a very credible Buzz approximation, and his bass fills the bottom end with mud and guts. Even though the track itself bashes along at faster-than-doom speeds, it still manages to sound thick and ponderous, like prehistoric creatures thundering across a muddy plain.

Harvey Milk

Formed in Athens in the early 1990s, Harvey Milk put swagger in their sludge, channeling blooze bad-asses like Zeppelin and ZZ Top as well as more lumbering patriarchs like Sabbath and the Melvins. Though their early albums were influential, 2008’s Life…the Best Game in Town, with Joe Preston on bass, is generally considered their masterpiece. “After All I’ve Done For You, This Is How You Repay Me?” is a typically atypical sludge suite, opening up with a cock rock riff before thundering into plodding bass-heavy feedback nightmare crawl.

Noothgrush

Sludge often has more ponderous whimsy in its heavy than is typical of metal, so Oakland’s Noothgrush, named for a Dr. Seuss nonsense word, don’t seem out of place. “Oil Removed” from their 1999 compilation Erase the Person, showcases the band’s flirtation with grungy pop. The chunky guitars could almost be part of a Soundgarden composition, and Chiyo Nukaga’s drums come close to swinging. For all the songwriting smarts, though, the band stays resolutely on the sludge side of heavy, banging out dance music for moshing wildebeasts.

Bathtub Shitter

Japanese belching noise weirdos Bathtub Shitter are sort of grindcore and sort of uncategorizable… but they spend a good bit of time with the sludge too, as in this bizarre cover of classic thrash band D.R.I.’s “Time Out.” The drums slam and race and even swing, while someone gargles like a demon swallowing grey water and someone else shrieks like a chipmunk being devoured. The thick guitars turn it all into one sludgy mass.

Coffins

Japanese band Coffins started churning out ugly doom-death sludge around 2000. Their 2012 EP Sewage Sludgecore Treatment is, as the title suggests, a tribute to the genre, including covers of seminal bands like Buzzov*en, Eyehategod, Noothgrush, and Iron Monkey. “I Hate You” was originally by depressive Boston-based band Grief. Coffins don’t take many liberties with the blueprint, except perhaps to slow it down, add more feedback, and have vocalist Jun Tokita screech even more throat-tearingly and incomprehensibly than Jeff Hayward did.

Fistula

Boston’s Fistula started cranking out charred and clotted sludge in the early 2000s, and haven’t stopped since. “Lightbulb Smoker” is a glorious example of their fiendish methods, starting with hardcore-esque shrieks piercing instrumental viscousness. The mud only gets thicker on the track’s lengthy, mottled tail, interrupted by half-muffled Corey Bing muttering about drugs.

Young Bastard Mutant Sludge

Helms Alee

Sludge isn’t a natural fit with shoegaze, but Seattle’s Helms Alee has made a career out of smooshing the two together. “Tit to Toe” from Stillicide captures their methods nicely; the band sings lovely counterpoints and layers lovely guitar lines over a thick, twisted, sludgy bottom. It’s a bit like My Bloody Valentine meets the Melvins. Genre purists may sneer, but for those who like some dreaming in their swamprot, this is perfect.

Cavernlord

Wyoming’s Nathaniel “Namtaräum” Leveck released the self-titled Cavernlord album in February. It’s not so much sludge as some sort of unholy hybrid. On “Cloudless Sky” Leveck’s vocals are somewhere between a black metal yell and sludgy bellow, while the guitars evoke black metal buzz rather than the thicker detuned wallop of stoner rock. But there aren’t blastbeats; instead, beneath the choral vocals, the drums thump slowly, so that the album both howls and trudges. There aren’t many bands that connect the punk nastiness of black metal to the punk nastiness of sludge; there’s more than a glimmer of intelligence back there in that bat-infested darkness.

The Great Sadness

Los Angeles duo The Great Sadness make brutally spacious stoner rock on their wonderful 2017 album Weep. The band is always on the verge of sludge metal, but “Suicide” topples over the edge slowly, with a noxious splash. Singer Cathy Cooper’s voice is as piercingly, gloriously painful as her guitar feedback, and drummer Stephen McNeely’s drumming connects sludge primitivism to rockabilly primitivism.

—Noah Berlatsky

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.

Alex Lahey, I Love You Like A Brother

A whiz-bang hot-pink-firecracker of a record, Alex Lahey’s I Love You Like a Brother bursts with glam-pop exuberance from the get-go. Album opener “Every Day’s the Weekend” is a crackling collection of hot-rodding guitars and gang-shouted “Whoa-oh, Whoah-oh, Whoah-oh”s, and the title track pits the marching-band rhythm of “Ballroom Blitz” against a riff that zig-zags like a lightning bug trapped in a mason jar. But what makes Brother so irresistible isn’t just Lahey’s stunning gift for pop melody (though, let’s be clear: that gift is stunning), but her pithy, economical lyrics. Lahey, who is from Melbourne, agonizes over a long-distance lover in the cheekily-titled “Perth Traumatic Stress Disorder,” singing, “Now I’ve got to visit somewhere new/ not forever tainted with thoughts of you/ Didn’t even get an inadvertent holiday.” In the bounding “I Haven’t Been Taking Care of Myself,” she takes the shopworn analogy of comparing a lover to a drug, but uses the whole first verse to cannily explore the implications: “When you’re in my blood/ nothing’s ever boring/ I feel you through my veins/ so eager to please/ you give me chest pains/ and let my heart rate ease.” And on album standout “Backpack,” the titular object becomes a metaphor for emotional distance. “I know life’s too short to settle down/ and you move faster than the world spins ‘round,” she sings, before sadly concluding, “It’s hard for me to put my arms around you when your backpack’s on.” The song itself is a wonder, building to a full-on symphonic conclusion, with Lahey’s voice streaking down the background like stars slipping down from the night sky. Brother is intoxicating from start to finish, an album that proves that acutely-drawn stories of love and loss can sound like Slade and still be marvelously affecting.

—J. Edward Keyes

Eel, Night Parade of 100 Demons

EEL are from Pittsburgh, but their scuzzy sound, as their album art (by punk artist Kazuhiro Imai) makes plain, owes a whole lot to Japanese noisecore (think Gai, Gudon, State Children, and so forth). Under a relentless layer of feedback, there’s solid, classic hardcore: fast riffs, spindly solos, and rampaging drumming. No new ground being broken here, but there doesn’t need to be; guitar heroics, vocals distorted beyond all comprehension, and breakneck rhythm section all meld together seamlessly for a really fun ride that may also inspire you to dig out those ‘80s classics and think about the continuum and traditions of hardcore, and how we constantly reinterpret and reimagine them.

—Jes Skolnik

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, The Kid

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith has a deep relationship with music that began during her childhood. “I realized how much of a difference music made for me when I was younger,” she recently told Bandcamp contributor Sasha Geffen. “I could feel scared, but if I put on music, it would be different. I just loved that you could totally color your environment.” On her impressive new album The Kid, Smith explores the four stages of the human lifespan—birth, self-awareness, old age, and death—using vast synthetic sounds to convey the journey. Smith’s voice is more prominent here, yet it’s pitched to accentuate the melody, not outstrip it. The results are lush, playful, dark and robust—just like life.

—Marcus J. Moore

Kologbo, Africa is the Future

If you look at his CV, there was virtually no way Oghene Kologbo’s Africa is the Future wasn’t going to be great. He’s the son of highlife legend Joe “King” Kologbo, played guitar as a member of Africa 70 with Fela Kuti, and both toured and recorded with King Sunny Ade and Kuti drummer Tony Allen. Still, years of experience doesn’t always translate into success in 2017, but from the first notes of Future, it’s clear Kologbo’s talents haven’t faded. “You No Lie” is a nervous, twitchy update of the classic Afrobeat sound, Kologbo’s guitars pricking like mosquitos over a deep-diving bassline and between somersaulting horns. On “Abandon Property,” his rich, oaky, finely-aged vocals provide rugged counterpoint to Tony Allen’s lightly-skipping rhythm. The title track rides a freewheeling dance groove, lit up by Ben Abarbanel-Wolff’s laser-beam horns. On Future, Kologbo doesn’t just deliver throwback Afrobeat-by-the-numbers, he takes the sound’s essential elements and updates them to create something that feels vital and contemporary. “Don’t Mind Them” is perhaps the finest example: its rhythms are tricky and slippery, stuttering and half-stepping not settling into the groove so much as consistently upending it, the horns playing in unison to highlight the off-kilter cadence. Africa is the Future is a record that knows there’s much to be learned from the past, but it’s only useful if you apply that knowledge to the here and now.

—J. Edward Keyes

Patsy, LA Woman MLP

New Orleans’ Patsy (featuring multiple members of Mystic Inane) are perhaps the current reigning champions of riffy, snotty punk. This is their first full-length, after a couple of EPs, and it’s a pure delight for anyone who likes their rock n’ roll stripped of all pretense and equipped with a constant eye-roll. “Society Ape” and “Nazis Are So Plain” are particularly finger-on-the-pulse in 2017 without being too on-the-nose; the former taunts harassers (“You can’t touch me”), and the latter takes the piss out of the careful aesthetics of white supremacists by essentially calling them basic as hell. “Tommy, Bobby, Johnny” is a wicked take on the interchangeability of musical love-objects, and Candice Metrailer’s vocal delivery here is especially cutting. Patsy do a lot with their essential elements; everything here is perfectly simple but not at all simplistic.

—Jes Skolnik

Sound of Ceres, The Twin

The Twin is a perfect companion to a planetarium show—rising and falling electronic sounds with otherworldly vocals play against a backdrop of the cosmos. Sound of Ceres have the ability to make a rudimentary drum machine sound elegant and to expand upwards to a hazy Cocteau Twins-like sound. Playful psychedelic crescendos crash into each other beneath the soaring beauty of Karen Hover’s voice on opener “Gemini Scenic.” According to the liner notes, the band showed up at the Reykjavik studio of Alex Somers (Sigur Rós, Julianna Barwick) with nearly complete demos, but ended up with something entirely different and wonderful.

—Ally-Jane Grossan

Back Catalogue

Jamie Paige, Autumn Every Day

Synthpop artist Jamie Paige first hit my radar back in January while I was working on a piece for Bandcamp Daily about the Vocaloid phenomenon (briefly: the use of synthesized singing software by young producers in the United States.) She’s remained on it ever since due to her immense talent. At the time of our initial interview Paige had only released one record, Anew, Again, but it contained the track that finally brought me, avowed guitar rock lover, to appreciate the power of Vocaloid software to innovate with music in ways that rock no longer can. That song was the sparkling “Grand Restore,” which featured an irresistible chiptune hook and bright, optimistic vocals provided by Vocaloid Megpoid GUMI. Last month, Paige released her second record, Autumn Every Day, a showcase of both her innate talent for pop hooks and growth as an artist over the past 12 months. Incorporating elements of synth, EDM, bubblegum, and regular old pop bangers, the record is peppered with laughter and jokes, full of quirky lyrics exploring the contours of loneliness and love, and packed with experimental breaks and rhythms that expand upon their influences for something that sounds fresh, but also very Jamie. “Too Much Autotune” is a hilarious rebuke to critics who complain about her love of autotune. There’s a touching song to her girlfriend, Honor, and a breezy, casual take on New Order’s perennial classic “Bizarre Love Triangle.” My favorite is “It’s 2013 Again,” a collaboration with =ODDEEO= (another talented Vocaloid producer) that once more finds Jamie duetting—in harmony, no less—with GUMI. Autumn Every Day feels both deeply personal and open-hearted; a potent reminder of what makes music so special and so crucial to so many.

—Mariana Timony

Is there a way to make a musical virtue of understated ecstasy? That’s the question that Daphni, the dance music-minded alias of Caribou’s Dan Snaith, seems to be asking. While his main outfit has evolved from a post-rock project to a more electronically-inclined enterprise over the years, Snaith’s work as Daphni has set its sights expressly toward the dancefloor, with a particular allegiance to house music and its soulful variants in their most organic forms.

Like Four Tet, a close friend and collaborator who established himself as a dance music master only after loosening up slowly, over the course of several years, Snaith’s earliest certifiable “club music” tracks had an uptightness and uprightness that have faded away. The result has been transformative, largely because the new songs exhibit a true ability to swing—to play around more freely with syncopation and entertain genre expectations that can just as easily be upended.

Joli Mai is related to Daphni’s recent DJ-mix release Fabriclive 93, for which Snaith created a new array of original tracks and edits to twist together into a tightly coiled sequence over an extended 74-minute spell. Joli Mai presents tracks from that mix in longer versions—plus the unreleased “Vulture,” which has been passed around only by way of some of Daphni’s DJ friends. The other 11 tracks were conceived to serve their respective purposes in particular spots of the Fabriclive mix, meaning that changes in speed and tweaks in volume (and so on) were integral to their duties as part of a mosaic whole.

Those functional, purpose-minded aspects of the tracks are left intact to thrilling effect on Joli Mai, so much so that a listener can practically hear Daphni thinking out loud about the subtle shifts and mutations a DJ considers over the course of a set. “Poly” opens with a swell of synth arpeggios and cooing vocal snips that build before “Face to Face” comes on strong with drums and a bassline pared down to its essence. Adjustments in volume and dynamics abound over the course of five-plus minutes that grow funkier for all their little variations.

Other tracks fluctuate in weight, and swing between big drama (“Xing Tian”) and small, slice-of-life sentiment (“Life’s What You Make It”). Each plays its own adopted role in a collection that designates Daphni as a dance music producer at the top of the field.

—Andy Battaglia

Photo by Eleanor Short.

Necro Deathmort’s music defies categorization as fiercely as David Lynch’s nonlinear narratives defy any single “correct” interpretation. Formed by Matthew Rozeik and AJ Cookson in 2007, the London-based duo have been steadily building an immense body of work which has straddled everything from industrial doom to abstract techno bangers—and almost everything in between.

Noticeably brighter and bubblier than the austere sound of 2016’s The Capsule, this year’s Overland makes greater use of acoustic instrumentation, and finds Necro Deathmort exploring a dynamic range of sonic territories, including astral jazz, krautrock grooves, noirish atmospherics, and plenty of spooky-to-soothing drone work.

Whereas The Capsule was a frostily ambient work released via Rocket Recordings (a label best known for psych rock), Overland comes courtesy of Profound Lore, home to extreme metal acts such as Portal and Pissgrave. This notion of finding a space in a place they might not naturally belong extends to Necro Deathmort’s live shows, where they feel just as comfortable playing metal events as they do performing alongside electronic artists—even though the latter happens less frequently. “Possibly we’re a bit negative for that kind of party,” reasons Rozeik. “[But] people into both types of music make up much of our fanbase, so we’re happy playing to anybody who wants to hear us, and we really like being on diverse bills. We’ve played with bands as relatively opposite as Napalm Death and Silver Apples. Hopefully, we’ll never have to choose our corner. Otherwise, it’s going to be mods versus rockers all over again.”

As countless listeners have already observed, Necro Deathmort’s abstract, cinematic style would make the perfect match for some epic space thriller or creepy supernatural horror movie, if only Cookson and Rozeik could get their foot in Hollywood’s door like Clint “Pop Will Eat Itself” Mansell or that dude from The Nine Inch Nails. But since their reputation hasn’t yet secured them the big motion picture or Netflix contract, the duo is in regular demand as remixers, and recently contributed production to the latest album by Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree fame. Wilson has been a devoted fan of Necro Deathmort since the release of their second album, Music Of Bleak Origin, in 2011.

Here, Matthew Rozeik explains the thinking behind Overland, and how playing the wrong notes can often yield the best results.

What was the concept behind Overland?

The Capsule had a theme of isolation, birth/death cycles, and the idea of an individual’s personal perspective in the universe. Overland is much more terrestrial. We wanted to evoke the sense of being in a specific environment, feet in the dirt, looking out rather than up. The lyrics are also focussed more on human nature rather than outer space and we tried not to make it sound too sci-fi or futuristic. The title just stuck when AJ came up with it. I think it fits the sound of the record perfectly.

Overland has a warmer and more playful feel to it than The Capsule. There are some jazzier moments. The track ‘Gu’ grooves along in an upbeat, almost poppy way. Is this a reflection of… something?

It’s probably a reflection of our ever-expanding musical interests more than anything. We always want each record to be different from the previous one. The Capsule was quite bleak and cold-sounding. This time we knew we wanted to do something a bit more lively and melodic. Using ‘real’ instruments was a conscious decision; we hoped it would enrich the album’s palette, and I think it worked. It’s always fun to see how far outside of our comfort zone we can take things. With regards to ‘Gu,’ we actually did a whole record of up-tempo melodic tunes called EP3 in 2015 but it seems to be our least known-about release.

Necro Deathmort recently released a third album of archive material on Extreme Ultimate. What other unreleased delights do you have hidden away?

That was technically the fourth volume, as we did Volume.2.5 in 2015, [but] I’m saving the title Volume.4 for a heavier collection in homage to a band from Birmingham whose name escapes me at this moment. We have tons of unreleased material yet to see the light of day. It’s just a case of finding an appropriate outlet for it all and hoping people don’t get sick of us releasing stuff so frequently. One particular record that I’m hoping we can find a home for is a collection of acid tracks that we made in 2015. It’s a pretty coherent album. I guess that might be EP4.

Certain people have been calling you a ‘synthwave’ act. How do you feel about that categorization?

I don’t think anyone who has heard us and knows what synthwave actually is would say that, so I personally find it a reductive and asinine description. I don’t think of us as a retro-sounding band—or even really a synth band, if I’m honest. It’s possible that there’s good synthwave music out there, and no disrespect to anyone who makes it, but it’s not something we listen to or feel an affinity with. Most of it sounds like the Airwolf theme tune, which I’m sure is intentional.

Have you ever waved at a synth?

I wave at synths all the time, though they rarely wave back.

Synthy soundscapes are pretty ‘hot’ right now thanks to the Stranger Things theme tune, the return of Twin Peaks, and all those Clint Mansell and Cliff Martinez film scores. How could Necro Deathmort best capitalize on this trend?

One of the most frustrating things about this band is that people often tell us that our music sounds like a soundtrack, but that side of things seems like it’s totally closed off to us. It’s a completely separate world from the music scene. I suspect we’ll never get the call as it’s highly unlikely anyone in Tinseltown is familiar with our band. One of our dreams is to score a bleak sci-fi film, but it seems as though Mansell and Martinez have things locked down.

Which horror film had the biggest impact on your psyche when growing up?

The Omen II terrified me when I was 10. The dude getting chopped in half by the elevator cables stuck with me forever. I think sci-fi films had a much bigger impact on me when growing up. I didn’t properly get into horror films until my late teens. The sci-fi films that had the biggest effect on me when I was younger were Alien, Star Wars, Tron and The Terminator. The visuals and sound design in those films are incredible, and they really fired my imagination when I was young. Then I got into the really stark vibey stuff like The Andromeda Strain, Phase IV, Outland, Westworld, THX 1138 and Colossus: The Forbin Project, and that’s when I became obsessed with electronic soundtracks.

Which one track from your whole catalogue best sums up Necro Deathmort?

That’s a tough one. Possibly ‘Odorem Creepus’ from Volume.1, as it was the very first recording we ever made and it kinda kicked things off. I was unsuccessfully trying to work out a Melvins song on a keyboard while AJ manipulated the sound, and I pretty much played every note except the correct ones. It sounded fat, and we were excited by the sonic possibilities of playing heavy doomy music on electronic gear.

—JR Moores

On “If After All,” the opening track of Common Holly’s debut album Playing House, Brigitte Naggar repeats the mantra “Let’s take this one day at a time,” her words echoing gently over a staccato acoustic guitar arrangement. The soft, melodic timbre of her voice is soothing—it’s almost as if she’s trying to convince herself to follow her own advice. Those simple words, delivered in Naggar’s comforting voice, arrive at the center of a piercing, intimate tale about pushing forward, leaving behind the demons that haunt you. “If After All” is a brief, unguarded glimpse of the Montreal singer’s journey toward growth and freedom.

Playing House is full of moments like this, and Naggar’s wordplay, and the forcefulness and ingenuity of her writing, give each of them a sense of urgency. And while “If After All” boasts a manic arrangement, going from beautiful folk guitar to cavernous string section to math rock finish, it’s an outlier. On House, Naggar mostly dabbles in minimal folk (“Nothing”), occasionally shading her songs with hints of the blues (“In My Heart”). On “Devil’s Doubt,” a song about uncomfortably settling into adulthood and the sadness and wisdom that accompanies it, she gilds her sparse country with a cinematic string arrangement, adding both gravity and depth.

That theatricality continues on “Lullaby,” featuring celebrated French Canadian composer Jean-Michel Blais. True to its name, the song is a strange, sad bedtime story, in which Naggar finds herself consciously maintaining her distance from a past love. Her haunting voice, the sparse, tinkling piano, and the soft guitar melody are blanketed in a thin layer of reverb that, much like the subject in the story she’s telling, keeps her at a distance from the listener. This is where Naggar shines, composing sonic experiments that perfectly embody the sentiments her lyrics contain.

Playing House ends with the track “New Bed,” a song that’s about more than just Naggar getting new sheets. Under a veneer of static, she says goodbye to her old surroundings and her old friends, and welcomes—with some trepidation—the strangers that await in the future. And, once again, she vows to take life one day at a time.

—Amaya Garcia                

Photo by David Choe.

At first pass, the third full-length from Seattle doom metal duo Bell Witch seems designed to test its audience’s resolve. Mirror Reaper consists of a lone track of the same name, which clocks in at a gargantuan 84 minutes. Even in a subgenre—in this case, funeral doom, approximately—that mammoth length pushes the limits of the metal songwriting template. Bassist/vocalist Dylan Desmond and drummer/vocalist Jesse Shreibman have crafted the group’s single most challenging listen in years. They’d probably take that as a compliment.

“It was suggested to us that an 84-minute song may shrink the audience that will listen to the song,” Desmond says. “We understand that, but nothing about this song was written for someone who can’t listen to it.”

It’s far more than just the album’s epic runtime, punishing low end, and molasses-slow riffs that make it a brutal listen. Founding Bell Witch drummer and vocalist Adrian Guerra passed away in May 2016, during the writing process for Mirror Reaper. Desmond and Shreibman were devastated, and the metal community’s love of Guerra meant they were forced to reckon with his death largely in public. (“I found it near impossible to mourn with so much attention,” Desmond says.) When they finally went back to work on the record—Shreibman’s first as a co-writer and full member of the band—their grief had understandably penetrated the music.

“His death definitely changed the way we looked at what we were doing at the time,” Shreibman explains. “We wanted to make sure to honor him the best we could, all while making sure we were doing something unique from the previous recordings.”

By any measure, Mirror Reaper succeeds in those aims. It’s the most ambitious Bell Witch album yet, which is saying a lot for a band whose first two records open with 20-minute songs. Desmond’s six-string bass work still sounds like no one else’s in metal. His solos are as dexterous and soulful as any lead guitarist’s, and Shreibman’s work behind the drum kit is a more than adequate replacement for Guerra’s; his style fits the band’s sound like a glove. He credits the time before recording that he spent on the road playing the old Bell Witch material with Desmond.

“Adrian had a very distinctive vocal and drum style that took some time for me to adjust to when it came to playing the songs off of Four Phantoms and Longing,” Shreibman says. “On Mirror Reaper, I tried to keep a similar percussion style to the previous recordings, while adding my own style and signatures to make sure someone could listen to the old and new material back to back without it feeling jarring.”

The decision to present Mirror Reaper as a single piece of music came relatively late in the process, after the band had already booked studio time. Desmond and Shreibman noticed that their new riffs all seemed to intersect and respond to one another. Once the song started to take shape, it was evident that releasing it as one epic-length track was the only option. “To split the piece up would do it a disservice,” Desmond says. “It was obvious to us that it was one piece. We discussed designating movements to make the listening process easier, but decided against that also. We don’t feel that the music is trying to convey anything easy.”

Though the band didn’t break the song into conventional movements as such, it is divided into two 40-plus minute sections—“As Above” and “So Below.” At the album’s midpoint, where these sections collide, Mirror Reaper has its most cathartic moment: Adrian Guerra’s voice appears. Guerra had laid down some vocal tracks during the Four Phantoms sessions that were never used, and when he died, Desmond knew they had to be a part of Mirror Reaper. Guerra’s posthumous contribution marks the emotional center of a record with no shortage of emotion, and for longtime fans of the band, it hits with the force of a battering ram.

“The riff we used his vocals in was originally being omitted from the song because I didn’t like it,” Desmond says. “When we decided we had to use Adrian’s vocals, this riff came back into mind.”

Like every riff on the album, the riff that was exhumed to accompany Guerra’s vocals both echoes and responds to every other part of the song. The internal dialogue between sections that Bell Witch achieves gives Mirror Reaper a profoundly cyclical feeling, one that makes you want to put the track on repeat and let it enfold you for hours on end.

Mirror Reaper is a difficult work, as formally ambitious as it is conceptually heavy. But by its very nature, it becomes more approachable with repeated listens. Bell Witch may not have made an album that’s easy to listen to, but they made one that rewards its listeners. “One might sense multiple endings upon first listen, but in truth they are beginnings,” Shreibman says. And on each successive spin, this makes more and more sense.

—Brad Sanders

For many obsessive fans who grew up in the pre-Internet era, a passion for music was sparked in the dingy basements and dark booths of college radio stations. Despite sound boards that are decades out of date and rapidly-changing tastes, the collegiate airwaves tradition has endured. The best college stations remain dedicated to delivering music that fall outside the purview of Billboard-charting mainstream radio.

If anything, the shifting climate has caused student station managers and music directors to work harder at keeping their stations relevant. And with good reason: at the radio station, they find comrades with whom they can trade mixtapes and stay up late into the night raving about life-changing B-sides. Bandcamp speaks from personal experience: even if our first shows were at 4am on Tuesday nights, they were the best two hours of our entire week.

In our column called Better Know a College Radio Station, we spotlight the programmers, music directors, and general managers who make sure the “On-Air” light never burns out.

The state of California is facing a huge education crisis and arts budgets are being slashed at public universities across the country so we have to wonder, where does that leave college radio?

This installment of Better Know A College Radio Station is especially important because the University of California’s Riverside campus station KUCR needs your help. The school is proposing to level the historic building that houses the station so it can build a new mixed-use complex.

KUCR founding members Bill Farmer & Hans Wynholds, 1966. Photo by Ansel Adams.

College radio is extremely vital to the continued health and survival of the music industry. It’s where brilliant producers often lay hands on their first soundboard, and it’s where future artists and industry leaders can learn from the past. It’s where students learn to communicate, how to manage a budget, how to create a production schedule, how to promote events, how to program, and so much more.

In 2017, it’s easy to get swept up in the new, but college radio is hardly a relic; it’s a reminder of how important independent music is now, and will always be. This month, we chat with the staff at KUCR: Wolfgang Mowrey, Student Manager; Gilbert Quintero, DJ and Administrator; Karolyn Jaranilla, Student Staff; Louis Vandenberg, Director/GM; and Elliot Fong, Associate Director.

What’s your call number, tag, logo, etc? Where does the station live online?

Louis Vandenberg: The call sign is KUCR. The K means it’s west of the Mississippi. The UCR stands for the University of California at Riverside, a campus with now about 21,000 students. It was originally assigned to a banana boat called the Carib Queen. Congressman Tunney helped us acquire it. It’s worked out. There’s another station a few miles away, called KVCR. Although we’re wildly divergent, we’re often confused, with only one letter of difference. They broadcast NPR stuff, with no students on-air. Our content is highly original, featuring students, because they’re pretty darn fresh! Oh, and our frequency is 88.3MHz, we stream on www.kucr.org and we have a free iPhone app in the Apple App Store.

Elliot Fong: Our Instagram (@kucr883fm) is quite active. We do ticket giveaways, promote events, and have fun behind-the-scenes posts. We aim to engage with our audiences with a variety of cultural content.

KUCR DJs (L-R, Kiara Wagoner, David Chavez, Shahriar Momen, Karolyn Jaranilla, and Erin Mahoney) participating in College Radio 2015, with special themed programming and collaborative sets happening throughout the day. Photo by Elliot Fong.

What’s playing on the air Tuesday at 4:30am?

Fong: Jazz, because Jazz Tuesday! We have a ‘Jazz After Midnight’ session every Monday night (aka Tuesday morning) in the early AM on Tuesdays.

KUCR is currently facing the prospect of having the building in which you reside demolished. Can you tell me about how this came about? 

Vandenberg: KUCR’s original building, which was deeded to the station by Chancellor Hinderaker in 1965 was originally constructed during World War II, as part of a large number of houses built remotely from March Air Force Base. These were permanent houses, meant to house the families of people who were working at the Base, many on a temporary basis. A lot of the structures were built by female laborers—this was the era of Rosie the Riveter—because the men were drafted to fight overseas in World War II. The craft work on the houses is especially impressive.

An act of U.S. Congress transferred ownership to the University of California and they became the first student housing at the fledgling Riverside campus. After dorms were constructed on campus, these houses were devoted to students with children and became known as Family Student Housing. So, through generations of UCR student families, KUCR was there, side-by-side with them. Four thousand student KUCR staff members, countless bands, politicians, community leaders, artists, writers, etc, have come and gone. So, into this idyllic situation arrives our new chancellor, who wants to replace low-density housing with high-density housing and is not impressed with how amazingly cool KUCR is, especially on the inside.

Why is it important to preserve the station as it is now?

Gilbert Quintero: Since its inception, the DJs here have made their mark, one by one, by sharing their own musical interests, opinions, and experiences with their listeners—offering perspectives that challenge others to rethink their own views; touching the hearts of thousands who tune in; and developing a staple for the University of California Riverside, which concomitantly sets it apart from many other universities in California. Additionally, all of the DJs and staff members have regularly collaborated with the Riverside community and beyond to develop a bold culture that is both shared and valued among those involved. The current building in which the station resides is the site of these experiences and this culture. Here is where it all began, and to have it taken down would be to destroy the physical embodiment of this rich history. Relocating simply is not an option.

Fong: KUCR is one of the cultural pillars in the Riverside and inland Southern California area. It is the only student-run, commercial-free radio station in the region. KUCR features a variety of DJ-curated music programs, and produces original public affairs programming. KUCR reaches tens of thousands of unique listeners each week. Many people in the region may not know UC Riverside, but they know KUCR because it has [had] a great relationship with the community for over 50 years.

In addition, it is not only a radio station, but also helps students realize their potentials. We encourage students to grow creatively, and to help expose them to new and challenging projects. KUCR student staff have on-hands experience with audio producing and editing, and have opportunities to interact with record labels and PR firms. We also work with NPR, BBC, PBS, and other international media organizations in producing programs featuring professors, researchers, and writers from UCR and the surrounding areas. We are also a crucial factor in emergency situations, with backup generators ready for broadcast when the power goes out. In Southern California, it’s not if, but when a major earthquake will occur.

What can people do to help KUCR stay where it is?

Quintero: People can help KUCR in a few different ways. One is by emailing us with their comments and support at SaveKUCR@gmail.com. Another way is by spreading the word to whoever they know, and getting into contact with the UCR administration in charge of the Campus Redevelopment Plan. It’s important for the administration to be aware firsthand of the growing support for the station.

Describe the culture of your station. What are the more popular genres?

Quintero: Currently, the biggest genres at the station are world, jazz, and indie. Both college students and members of the Riverside community participate at the station. The culture here is amazing. It’s bright, bold, and extremely diverse. All people who participate here have the freedom of expressing their identity in any way they choose, thus making each member of KUCR a staple at the station. Together, the KUCR community creates a culture that is unlike any other, leaving a lasting impression in the minds of all those who experience it.

A portion of the Jazz section of KUCR’s record library, home to rare and out-of-print Jazz records from around the world, 2017. Photo by Andres Herrera.

What are five bands that you’re really excited about right now?

Natasha Agrama

Fong: A vocalist and composer from Los Angeles, who is involved in the new L.A. jazz scene.

Annapura

Fong: Hardcore punk from Mexico City!

Bedouine

Mowrey: Syrian-born, L.A.-based singer-songwriter Bedouine’s debut record is indescribable. Stop what you’re doing and listen to it, all the way through.

Daymé Arocena

Mowrey: Excellent Afro-Cuban jazz produced by L.A.’s own Dexter Story. Cubafonía is one of my favorite records of the year!

Diners

Mowrey: Arizona pop genius who comes through SoCal DIY spots frequently released the excellent album three last year.

Ex Eye

Fong: Amazing metal with jazz elements, featuring Colin Stetson.

Sneaks

Mowrey: D.C.-based minimal post-punk that evokes groups like ESG, Delta 5, and Devo while remaining untethered to their reference points. ‘Hair Slick Back’ is one of my favorite songs of the year.

ZETA

Fong: Heavy, artistic, and atmospheric music from Venezuela.

What will you miss most about working at the radio station after you graduate?

Mowrey: Having been at KUCR for a little over three years, which feels more like 30 in college radio years, I’ve certainly seen many of my closest friends when I started out move on to bigger heights, teaching English in South Korea and going on to various graduate programs. When I leave, I imagine I’ll certainly miss the weekly thrill that begins the moment the previous show ends—the ritual of finding new music, debating on centering the show around the theme, perhaps finding a guest to interview, and delivering with minimal hiccups. But what I’ll undoubtedly miss the most is being around the people and the institution that changed my life

Karolyn Jaranilla: I’m going to miss being in a space where new music is playing consistently and being around people who are so passionate about music in all forms. KUCR has become a second home to me in my short time here, so it will feel like I’m moving out somewhat.

What’s the best thing about working in college radio?

Mowrey: College radio offers an extremely unique experience, allowing people from many different backgrounds to play an exciting role in their campus community and beyond, sharing music with an audience of fellow students, professors, community members, and complete strangers. The kind of freedom and curiosity that is fostered at places like KUCR has for decades encouraged people on both ends of the microphone to seek out that which is not made obvious, to venture off the beaten path, and to consistently keep an open mind.

Quintero: The best thing about working in college radio is the freedom to play whatever I want. I’m not bound to sales, labels, or charts, so I’m able to develop my own unique playlists every week to showcase the music that I’m currently vibing to. This allows me to develop a musical identity that is entirely my own, and I love being able to present that identity to my listeners.

—Ally-Jane Grossan 

Photo by Kate Young.

This summer, Petra Glynt posted a message to her Instagram account, its floral-printed background belying the seriousness of its message. It read, “I want this to be known to the men of the music industry and those men booking and promoting shows. I am tired of being in the opening slot for your bills of all male musical acts. I’m so tired and I feel used.”

Those unsparing words, Glynt says, were long overdue. “I wrote that message publicly because I was fed up and am looking to make some changes,” she says from her home in Montreal. “I found myself feeling frustration at being the token female on music bills of all-male musicians. It is important to have diverse music events, but I was feeling that my role at these shows was a bit too obvious. People weren’t booking me because of my music, but because I am a woman who makes music, and being aware of that comes with a truly dreadful feeling. I am, more often than not, billed as the opener, which means knowing my place as the token female.”

“I am also tasked with starting up the night, which, along with the tokenization, can feel demoralizing,” she continues. “The whole thing was taking a toll on me, on my spirit, on my feelings toward my future as a musician, so I said something to prevent it from happening further, and so that I can begin to carve out a preferred way of performing—because I fucking love performing. Why should anything get in the way of that?”

A few years ago, Glynt was bumping around from one noisy project to another. She’d moved to Toronto from Ottawa, majoring in English at the University of Toronto. She wasn’t the best student; she was often distracted by making art and music, missing classes, and feeling half-hearted about the entire enterprise. Soon into her studies, she realized she needed to attend art school instead. Glynt transferred to OCAD University, billed as “the largest and most comprehensive art, design and media university in Canada” and found herself immersed in creating, collaborating, and connecting to a community that would help her find her artistic voice.

Born Alexandra Mackenzie, Glynt was a suburban kid, raised, as she puts is, “in an island of houses.” It was her early exposure to community theater that first drew her to music. “I liked singing showtunes, enjoying theater because it was very campy and over-the-top,” she says.

Glynt’s childhood voice teacher, who trained her in opera, noticed her potential early on, and was determined to see it through to fruition. “I would see [my teacher] every week and rehearse every day. It was like an athlete training for a race in the classical world,” Glynt says. But while she appreciated her teacher’s faith in her, Napster and LimeWire began filling her teenage life with music that would eventually draw her away from opera. “I was able to explore and find out about all kinds of music. I was drawn by more punk—kind of rebelling. I just realized that music could be so much more than what I knew,” she reflects.

In 2011, the Occupy Movement was making headlines. As Mackenzie watched it play out, something powerful began taking root within her. It was time to lend her voice to something bigger than herself. And so Petra Glynt—a riff on “petroglyphs”—was born. She quit her band in 2012, during her thesis year at OCAD. “I felt I was given a reason from the [Occupy] movement, a reason to start something,” she says. In August of that year, Glynt, the self-taught producer, put out a five-track EP called Of This Land.

Producer Damian Taylor, best known for his work with Björk and Austra, happened to catch one of Glynt’s dynamic performances and reached out—he wanted to work with her. The two began collaborating on music, but were never able to find the right home for the result. Glynt worried that her career was in danger of stalling, and approached Taylor to say she was moving on.

““I’m sorry, I don’t think this is going to work out,”” she told him. ““I need to move forward and put this out any way I can.”” But Taylor wasn’t ready to give up. “It’s not over yet,” he told her, “We can do this.” Taylor had been considering starting a digital label for some time; now, he had a reason to. He launched Vibe Over Method, and Glynt’s This Trip was its debut release.

This Trip takes listeners on a journey through out current, turbulent times. “It took a long time to make the record,” she reflects. “It was a journey, a trip in itself. It’s not in the psychedelic sense of like ‘tripping out,’ it’s about people, the world, our political system, our economic system, and the world with Trump. We’ve been taken on this wild ride. The music is in support of social movements and in support of people power.” In the video for “Fell in a Hole,” which Glynt co-directed with Lesley Marshall, she plays a narcissistic CEO watching the world burn down. “This is the reality in North America,” she says. “Though we are so strong as the 99%, it remains [that there’s] this arrogant elite who are making decisions at the expense of everyone else.”

Glynt is also finding success outside of music. Her fashion-forward and striking, color-saturated aesthetic extends to her social feeds. “I’ve always been one for personal style before fashion. It gives me a sense of identity, of who I am, how I feel, and it’s always changing,“ she explains. “I think it’s a compulsion to consider the composition of everything, down to putting food on a plate. It’s the relationship that different objects, materials, and colors have with each other—they say things, even if it’s just speaking with a visual language. I always seem to be leaning toward a classic rainbow.”

She’s performed at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s notable First Thursdays event, and has also shown her visual art in its world-renowned space. Her design work was recently selected to grace the packaging for Shiseido’s new limited-run of its Eudermine skincare line, which was first created for Japanese women workers exposed to lead poisoning in 1897. As with everything Glynt creates, she aligns her work with action and meaning; the proceeds from Eudermine sales go to planting trees throughout Canada. She’s got another album coming next spring, and she dreams of working with Canadian icon, throat singer and provocateur Tanya Tagaq (“I wanna produce a super heavy track for Tanya Tagaq and sing and freak out too!”).

Ultimately, it’s people power that drives everything Glynt creates, and she’s grateful that she’s part of a cultural sea change toward social equity. Speaking again of her declaration on Instagram, Glynt says she’s lately felt some movement in the music industry. “You see more women taking charge as festival and event promoters [because] in order for this to change there needs to be more women organizing,” she says. “Soon, [gender inequities] will be a thing of the past.”

—Chaka V. Grier