Music In Review

Lumen Tähden — Kuupuu (Time Lag) First proper full-length release from Finland’s Jonna Karanka, mixing muffled sing-song folk, bubbling electronics and jumbled avant-improv in a lo-fi haze. Beautiful and haunting. Flaming Tunes — Gareth Williams and Mary Currie (Life and Living) A reissue (!) of a small-run cassette from the mid-’80s. Williams was the "non-musician" […]

Love In Infant Monkeys — Lydia Millet (Soft Skull) Millet uses the lives of real historical characters and their interactions with animals to create short stories displaying a rare mix of intelligence, humor and emotional resonance, some heartbreaking, some funny, some just weird. Madonna shoots a pheasant on her English estate and muses on the […]

The human voice is a most spiritual and mysterious force. The first instrument of expression in the history of our species has always been the means of our deepest forms of communication; be it with each other, between a human and the Earth, or through a song which is sung as a message to the […]

Drummer, percussionist, instrumentalist and composer Glenn Kotche has been prolific in his output lately. Earlier this year, he appeared on his primary band’s release, Wilco (The Album), then recently, on the excellent recent 7 Worlds Collide collaborative project (The Sun Came Out), headed by Neil Finn. With his duo project, On Fillmore, Kotche has released […]

November 24 marked the 150th anniversary of the publishing of Charles Darwin’s defining work, The Origin of Species, and for commemoration Richard Dawkins has written his most accessible book to date, The Greatest Show on Earth.  With a 2008 Gallop poll showing that 44 percent of Americans believe God created man in his present form […]

Performer, musician, vocalist and composer Carla Bozulich frequently challenges her audiences, her listeners and musical boundaries/definitions. Bozulich’s art is often unsettling. Her reputation as a provocateur goes back to the mid-’80s with the Los Angeles experimental noise band Ethyl Meatplow, and later with The Geraldine Fibbers, which featured guitarist Nels Cline (with whom Bozulich would […]

The 28-year-old singer/songwriter Devendra Banhart has been the figurehead for the wave of “New Weird Americana,” also simply termed, “Freak Folk.” Now, under the banner of a major label, Banhart, whose persona seems to put the “freak” into folk, finds himself in an interesting crossroads. Banhart had reached an artistic pinnacle with 2004’s Niño Rojo, […]

Michael J. Chase is known as “The Kindness Guy.” As the founder of The Kindness Center, based in Maine, Chase is an inspirational speaker and author of am I being kind, available at TheKindnessCenter.com. The book has a 100 percent life back guarantee: if it doesn’t change your life, you get your old life back, […]

In out of the way places, as well as in big cities, dance struggles to stay alive. As a modern dancer in New York, I watched studios, even prestigious troupes like Alvin Ailey, get priced out of their rent, moving from location to location. The Creamery in Arcata has long been a center for dance […]

Big Star. Ardent/Rhin. The term, “Memphis Curse,” was bantered around quite a bit amongst musician friends when I resided there for three years in the 1990s. It meant that as soon as a Memphis band reached a plateau, as a unit, it inevitably would soon fall apart, disintegrate. The story of Big Star was often […]

Matt Sharp left the band Weezer in 1997. Weezer has not made a great album since that time. A first-year psychology major knows correlation is not causation, but come on: Something happened. Surely when Sharp left, he took with him the je ne sais quoi that only a goofy, egotistical, falsetto-singing bassist can bring, no? […]

Less Def. "Whoa, Mos Def is coming to Nocturnum?" I imagine quite a few Humboldtians were pleasantly surprised by the news while at the same time wondering why they hadn’t been alerted sooner. To their credit, People Productions, who in the last year have managed to lure Snoop Dogg, Nas and Mos Def’s fellow Black […]