“When we recorded, I wasn’t thinking about other people. I didn’t have anybody to really look to, because it wasn’t a genre back then,” recalls Trinere, reflecting on her recording sessions in South Florida penning what would become some of the most well known songs of the freestyle musical style. “I came from the jazz world. He [referring to “Pretty Tony” Butler who she would partner with in music and romantically] was doing his own style. I wasn’t gonna allow him to give me just any type of simple track. I wanted a bridge, I wanted a chorus. I wanted to sing! And that’s where we gelled.” Trinere Farrington, known simply b ...
"I think I have a desert soul. I was inspired by that my whole life - a lonely highway and a neon sign and a derelict shopping mall. Sort of those castaway places." So explains Loviet, referring to the imagery for her new record, 777, which has several photos taken in the United States' southwestern desert area, despite the musician hailing from Canada's Nova Scotia province. "I kinda relate to the desert. Even in my hometown there's a desolate vibe. I kinda relate to the middle of nowhere." While she now resides in Toronto, she talks about her lyrics stemming from imaginative sources - "I wish I ...
"Nevada City is just such a beautiful sweet town and a very idyllic place," says Alela Diane reflecting on the town at the confluence of the foothills and mountains in the Sierra Nevada where she grew up. The musician and multi-instrumentalist, who has lived in Portland, Oregon since 2006, creates a woodsy ethereal folk sound that fluently joins inspirations of her landscapes and geographies both personal and physical, and it's clear to pick up on how the forested winding roads and surreal daydreamy Yuba River of those Sierra mountains can be heard throughout her earlier recordings. While the quaint town lies mostly off the map, sitting alo ...
"I went to junior high with Tony from the Adolescents. Before punk rock even happened, we were listening to Rolling Stones records, and then the Ramones record came out, and we're like, 'What's this?!!'" Greg Kuehn has made a life crafting the sounds that you've probably heard without giving much thought to where it came from. CNN, Ford, Amazon, Verizon, Vans and music from the Barack Obama campaign represent just a handful of entities that Kuehn has worked with. With his company, Peligro Music, Greg Kuehn has partnered with, and created music and sound design for international brands and companies but you wouldn't know this from speaking wi ...
The poor treatment and commodification of recording artists and creators by the mainstream record industry is well known. "The record industry went through an era of just hand over fist cash. But they made a few mistakes along the way," says Steve Knopper, author of the book Appetite For Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age, discussing the traditional system of an up-and-coming artist with no financial leverage basically having no choice but to sign a recording contract with terms heavily favoring the record companies. Though as a writer who penned articles under a freelance basis before taking a ...
"It can be super overwhelming! I've been doing it all myself for six years," laughs Limbo, a producer who has a knack for creating dreamy bedroom pop anthems that can take a kaleidoscope of emotions and lyrics written with humorous double-meanings, and distill them into a collection of sounds with the end result being deceivingly simplistic and catchy songs. The singer, having taken the name from an age in her life when physical and emotional limits struck her as being in a fluid state of limbo, as well as a childhood skill she had growing up around two musical brothers, has taken the DIY ethic and model seemingly to an extreme. "I've been ...
Everyone who has a passion or job in a creative field understands the amount of work it takes to begin seeing recognition in your art. It often takes years, if not decades of effort, of networking, and of struggling in order to gain an audience for your work. Arrested Development, a rap group from Georgia fronted by lead DJ Speech and turntablist Headliner, were fortunate enough to experience the lightning-strike odds of their debut record, 1992’s “3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life Of…” (the title is a reference to the length of time the group was grinding it out before being signed to a record deal) immediately hitting the mainstream ...
An interview with Pleasant Gehman: writer, vocalist, promoter, and actress from the first wave of Los Angeles punk. This interview took place in Winter of 2011. One night a friend laughingly joked with me that no matter how hard you try to fight or deny it, habits tend to eventually come back full circle, sometimes startling you when you unexpectedly catch a glimpse of your past re-emerging in the present. Before the internet, the history of punk's early days -barring the hazy memories of those who were at the shows and the parties- was available either through mainstream media that, by nature and almost witho ...
The year is 1998… The internet, which is beginning to become commonplace in American households, is beginning to change the landscape of music. Up until this point, music was listened to primarily on full length albums or singles played on the radio and exchanged through trading cassettes with friends. Compilation CD’s and traveling festival-style shows like Warped Tour and Lollapalooza were just emerging as the dominant method of music fans having the chance to check out bands and performers from different genres. In short, depending on where you lived it was a lot harder to hear music outside of the popular styles and a hell of a lot ...
“…It’s not just about being on stage. This industry is so male-dominated. We need more women in the music industry, behind the scenes: producers, mixers!” Cristal Ramirez handles the lead vocals and plays guitar for The Aces, a 4 piece power pop band made up of four friends who grew up in the outskirts of Provo, Utah. The band, rounded out by Ramirez’s sister Alisa, and two best friends – one of whom has also been in the band since the beginning - played their first show at Cristal’s 11th birthday party. They’re currently in the studio working on their second album, the follow up to 2018’s When My Heart Felt Volcanic. Th ...
For all of its reputation for being a paradise of palm trees lining beachfront real estate, beautiful people driving down sun-soaked iconic streets and glamorous displays of wealth parading through global pop culture screens and pages, Keith Morris has spent his life furiously writing about the manic depravity, the cankerous potholes underlying the façade, the stains that lie in the shadowy alleyways between pastel offices buildings and designer grocery stores. “There’s construction going on right outside my window. Can you hear it? At least we’re not having this conversation on a Wednesday when the leaf blowers are out,” he says to me ...
Growing up a basketball fan in Southern California in the late 80's, not only was I always aware of Paula Abdul as a powerhouse pop singer who put out Forever Your Girl, a well-loved record that I still play often to this day, but I also knew of her background as a Lakers Girl cheerleader. On her most recent tour, I got to speak to her about her background in cheer, dance and singing, and was absolutely blown away by her story of how she made the Lakers squad to begin with, and how everything unfolded from there. The conversation still feels surreal to me, but here it is: my interview with Paula Abdul... “I was yo ...
Above anything else, what has always stuck out to me the most about Pearl Charles' music is her honeycrisp voice. That it hovers atop a vintage Americana sound that touches on a pop clarity, but can border on the psychedelic or nearly eerie is the recipe for repeated plays as the dusk turns to night. Such was the case as I drove across rural Florida, that strange belt of the not-quite-South, where the music of her Sleepless Dreamer album and the tropical and Spanish moss-kissed two-lane highways combined to create a feeling of the surreal. It was with these echoes of her storytelling crooning through car speakers on backroads that lit up aft ...
Throwing her hands up in the shape of a heart, CloZee stands in front of a cheering, sweaty, sold out crowd at The Bluebird on Reno’s 4th Street. The show was just one of the French producer’s sold out appearances on her first headlining tour across the US, and her music, an electronic amalgamation of melodic glitch-hop and organic ambiance, had the room dancing in the glow of laser light visuals for the entire set. CloZee, nee Chloe Herry, is touring to promote her album, Evasion, which dropped on October 5th. A veteran of performing at festivals around the world, she explains that this travel makes up a large pa ...
“I think we are that animal,” says Matt Muirhead, trumpet player and producer for the New York three-piece band Too Many Zooz. Muirhead is talking about the group’s use of imagery on record covers and t shirts – even the band name itself – depicting wild and unconventional animals. “Myself and Leo [Pelligrino, the group’s baritone sax player] both went to the Manhattan School of Music. A lot of what we did was just frowned upon; the music we liked and played, and who we were as people. At a certain point, once we were playing in the subway, it kinda gave us the confidence to say, ‘Fuck that’. I t ...
an interview with Godfrey Reggio - director of the film, Koyaanisqatsi spring 2011 --- [ introduction ] On a visit to Las Vegas, Nevada, one evening I was lead into the desert. After the sun went down, we left the parked car beside the highway and set off in the direction of the river, the direction of the darkened night sky. Through washes that wound into deeper and narrower canyons, until we emerged onto the open banks of the river. We helped each other over rocks, up inclines, across sloped smoothed banks that had the moonlight glow in its orange sandy surface, and up the path of a stre ...
Susan Vaslev - theme park soundscape composer winter 2015/2016 --- [ introduction ] "Idiot Hill" was the name given to a small forested plot of land in a rural area bordering Oregon's capital city of Salem in the mid 1960's when Roger Tofte, an Oregon Department of Highways worker with no experience in running an amusement park, would spend his free time pouring and shaping bags of cement following an idea to construct just that - an amusement park that could become a haven for his and other local children living in the quiet area. Built in his hours after work and on weekends, while taking on ...
Neil Robinson - punk vocalist, squatter and food grower autumn 2011 --- [ introduction ] I've heard it said that one of the hardest distances to bridge is that of the distrust between two strangers. As the afternoon sun began to settle, we had finally weeded the last of the kale beds, pulled some of the last of the season's beets, and cleared what we could of the overgrown tomato plants inside the sweltering greenhouse. We had awoken at some ungodly early hour to get here to help out for a day. The tinny music of a simple crank radio wafted through the air, provided it was positioned just right an ...