A dispatch from the 50th-anniversary celebration of Mort Garson’s ‘Mother Earth’s Plantasia’ at Seed Song Farm in Kingston, New York, with a conversation before soundcheck about improvising to the landscape, whether plants listen, and the dawn drive to Philadelphia for Making Time.
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Her tenth album as a leader and the first under her own name, ‘Waterbodies’ was tracked while she was pregnant, with Shahzad Ismaily pulling together its many parts.
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The musician, sound designer, and game maker talks through ‘This Could Be a Start,’ an AI character’s search for a soul, and writing about gender through invented characters.
Brett Bullion on recording ‘carver’ from loops cut out of his own Max/MSP jams, grieving in widening circles, and touring with Autechre.
The author of ‘Morning in Marin’ discusses the postwar movement he calls the Marinaissance, the letters in Gary Snyder’s archive, the MKUltra safe house and Gumby studio that didn’t make the cut, and the case for riskier American art.
The New Eves’ cellist straps on an electric guitar for ‘Wild Love,’ a debut solo album of bruises, breath, and a closing salute to her foremothers.
Christian Best and Jen Kirby of Crying Laughing talk through the making of ‘Talking,’ from Moondog’s melodic percussion to the Baltimore scene that delivered the rest of the band.
A longtime devotee goes back through more than four decades of Hassell’s music and talks with co-producer Jeff Rona about the ‘City’ sessions, the self-sampling, and the posthumous ‘Music Is Invisible.’
Thacker's verses handed to synthetic voices and processed past recognition, 'Songs for Sad Poets, Vol. III' buries its words inside Amini's electronics.
On ‘At the Carousel Club,’ Mark Isham turns a wall of vintage synthesizers, Nels Cline, and a string quartet loose, all while keeping the editor in his head at bay.
On ‘Fuzzy Logic,’ Olaf Rupp pushes a small amplifier past its limit and captures the wreckage at what he calls “the volume of a kitchen radio.”
On megiapa’s ‘Intentions,’ voice notes from her grandmother, her mother, and her closest friends drift through the synth haze, a family album cut to beats.
The Istanbul-born film and television composer discusses 'For Luca' — his earlier songs recast in his friends' voices, the dog it mourns, the freedom of being one crew member among many, and the melancholy he prefers to share.
Harpist Lara Somogyi talks through 'a [time] patterned,' from delay pedals and disrupted loops to Steve Reich and 'A Pattern Language,' the architecture handbook that gave the album many of its titles.
Good and evil sit in the same character, the same song, and — Moss suspects — the same person, a Catholic inheritance she hears throughout 'The Knife, The Needle.'
The Residents' spokesman Homer Flynn traces the path from a commissioned 20-minute set to the first full staging of the group's Arctic concept album, now expanded with songs drawn from century-old folk tales.
The producer of 'The Wall,' 'Destroyer,' and 'Welcome to My Nightmare' discusses his return to the Jayhawks on 'Sanctuary Park,' how he builds a record out of three or four live takes, what a label and a band each want from a producer, and why he thinks the album still exists.
"I get close. I always want to see the pupils in their eyes," Winn wrote of her method — and 'Grievous Angels, Trout Masks, and American Beauties' is the first gathering of what that closeness yielded, from a coffee shop outside Eureka to the Grateful Dead's ranch.
The guitarist and bouzouki player discusses 'Brooklyn Stories 1–5', his five-CD set of duos and small groups for Infrequent Seams, the years of wordless playing alongside Bern Nix that shaped his ear, and what harmolodics can mean on a nylon-string classical guitar.
The Royal Trux cofounder discusses 'Bad Bunch,' the first Black Bananas album in twelve years, along with her new email newsletter, heirloom tomatoes, what's so special about a bloody T-shirt, and her thirty-five-year clothing archive bound for a Tokyo installation.
The Brooklyn musician, composer, and performer discusses 'been thinking bout confession,' her third album, which she wrote on a century-old baby grand after hitting walls with the guitar, and touches on Sondheim, the pomp of Catholicism, and whether a sound made on a computer counts.
Five years in the writing and forty in the gathering, 'Dub Revolution' rebuilds dub's beginnings out of the engineers who were there, the political map they worked inside, and the studios that doubled as shelter.
Sova means owl, a bird of wisdom in some myths and an omen of evil in others, and on 'Alight!' the pianist wants her instrumental music just as open to interpretation.
Twenty-five years of booking bands ended in a burnout Voith is still annoyed about, and 'Recommended If You Like: A Novel' is what he did next — free, self-published, and delivered city to city out of an SUV.
Recorded with Randall Dunn, 'Manifestations in the Shadow of an Uncertain Land' turns several years of political fatigue into what Lowe calls a "multiphonic landscape of horror," and the conversation runs from Jodorowsky to low-pass gates by way of his nine years in Om.
Her mother remembers love, her father says there was none, and 'The Brothel: A Musical Memoir' lets both accounts stand before handing the story to the next generation.
The German drummer, a member of Web Web and Subtone, discusses 'Drum Seeds,' an album of drums, vintage synthesizers, and spring reverb made alone after his label asked him for drums and nothing else.
The two founders of the Ann Arbor band talk through the making of '3,' from a weekend of continuous takes with players scattered across Michigan, New York, and New Orleans, to the months Gowland then spends alone deciding which minutes survive.
Richter wants "a little garden where things can grow" without being overdetermined, and 'Mymerian' — organ, accordion, contrabass, and cello, recorded live in one cold room — is that garden at its most exposed.
Producer, art director, and label owner, Don Schlitten photographed jazz from a 1957 Monk set at the Five Spot through the Newport festivals of the sixties, and 'Love and Understanding' brings out the photographs that stayed inside jazz circles for decades.
Nobody rehearsed, nobody planned, and nobody can say with any confidence where half the sounds on 'Windy & Carl Meet Optigan Conservatory' came from.
Jeff McIlwain's tenth Lusine album, 'Melting Days,' makes the case that rhythm and atmosphere were never opposites to begin with.
Forty-five years into BC Studio, Bisi talks through hardcore and hip hop as underclass music, the trouble with the post-genre label, the taboo of anger, and the collaborators who shaped 'Dancing On The Power Lines.'
After 30 years of handing her records to producers, Veirs recorded 'Temple Songs' entirely alone, guided by wabi-sabi, the DIY ethos she took from Ani DiFranco, and a determination not to fall down perfectionism's rabbit hole.