Mark Shikuma

In the mid-1980s I witnessed avant-garde saxophonist, instrumentalist and composer John Zorn literally clear a room at St. Mark’s Church in NY’s East Village during an annual New Year’s Day poetry/performance marathon. At the time, it was not surprising to be assaulted by Zorn’s confrontational, post-No Wave style: loads of honks and screeches produced from […]

Jeff Tweedy, bandleader and voice of Wilco, is a man for all seasons. Literally. After the split with Uncle Tupelo — in which the other songwriter, Jay Farrar, formed Son Volt — Tweedy has amassed an interesting catalog that spans from 1995, with the Wilco debut, AM. Wilco’s seventh studio release, Wilco (The Album), falls […]

Brooklyn singer/songwriter David Longstreth is a deconstructionist. He gained a divisive reputation with his project/band Dirty Projectors and its 2007 release, Rise Above, a dismembering of songs from Black Flag’s Damaged. The rearranging of the originals was so extreme that it bordered on kitsch. But, from a laptop art school perspective, it was also very […]

Former Neutral Milk Hotel drummer/percussionist Jeremy Barnes and his partner violinist/violist Heather Trost are true travelers, nomads. The duo, the core members of A Hawk and A Hacksaw, have carved out a circular route from their point of origin, Albuquerque, N.M., to Devon, England, and on to Budapest, Hungary. Yet this doesn’t seem to really […]

The French singer/songwriter Serge Gainsbourg created a myth of a poet, rascal, provocateur, lady’s man and maverick, using French pop music as a platform. He redefined the concepts of beauty, cool and sexy. His influence has seeped into a wide variety of contemporary musical genres, from Air and Stereolab to Jarvis Cocker, Luna and Beck. […]

Chicago-based reissue label Numero Group has released a number of collections of excellent out-of-print and never-released soul singles from the late 1960s to the early ’70s in their Eccentric Soul series. It begs the question why some of these artists, such as Richard Cook (on the Atlanta-based Tragar/Note label) or Renaldo Domino (on Chicago’s Twinight […]

Sonic Youth provides the bridge between 1970s post-punk experimentations (and noise) and the contemporary noise-core and Black Metal movements, while including an eclectic variety of musical genres flowing beneath its span. So it’s no great surprise to discover that Sonic Youth drew on some of those contemporary influences, within the band’s own evolution, for their […]

St. Vincent is an unusual character. Berklee College of Music dropout, Polyphonic Spree alumnus, multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter, Annie Clark adopted her stage name, "St. Vincent," from the New York hospital where poet Dylan Thomas died (hours after being carted out of the White Horse Tavern). In 2007, after touring with Sufjan Stevens’ band, Clark […]

Hailing from Germany, The Monks were an unconventionally timeless band, making their mark with a single record. Originally released in Europe on Polydor in 1965, with only 3,000 records issued, Black Monk Time failed to garner U.S. distribution. And after three-odd years of exhaustive touring, the band dissolved. It would be difficult to imagine then […]