Music In Review

Saturn Sings — Mary Halvorson Quartet — Firehouse 12 Emerging from the burgeoning contemporary NY jazz scene, guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson has developed a unique and innovative guitar style, expanding her band and her repertoire on an ever-evolving scale. Exciting, unpredictable and brilliant. Rain on the City — Freedy Johnston — Bar/None NY singer/songwriter […]

Shangaan Electro — V/A – Honest Jon’s Life-affirming electronic dance music from South Africa with a 180 bpm synth-marimba blur that unknowingly refracts current trends in international club music (namely, Chicago juke and UK funky house) back into the global dancefloor ether…amazing YouTube videos to boot. Florine — Julianna Barwick — Florid Kickstart-funded a cappella EP […]

The Scottish band Orange Juice was a quartet of young overachievers. Led by quick-witted vocalist, guitarist and songwriter Edwyn Collins, the Glasgow-based band joined a fledging indie label, Postcard Records, under the helm of equally young pop music enthusiast Alan Horne. When it formed in 1979, Orange Juice also featured drummer Steven Daly, bassist David […]

When Icelandic singer/songwriter/instrumentalist Ólöf (pronounced Oluff) Arnalds’ 2007 debut, Vid Og Vid, sold out its initial pressing of 4,000 copies in Iceland, the spare recording of eclectic folk songs nearly reached “gold” status. (In a country of just over 300,000 people, selling 5,000 or more records is considered a “gold record.”) The country’s best-known musical […]

Mary Halvorson’s guitar work can be partly described as someone attempting to walk on a smooth concrete floor slick with cooking oil. Halvorson is a NY-based musician, composer and arranger who explores beyond the length of her fret board as a guitarist and creates compositions with constant angular, unexpected turns, creating a feeling like everything […]

Beginning in the dark, a voice out of the silence, “This strange ecstatic dream… .” Laura Muñoz, director of Take Off Your Skin, a modern dance piece integrating live music and spoken and sung words of poets Walt Whitman, Hafiz, Lalla and Rumi, fearlessly messes around with all these elements. The atmosphere created is alluring. […]

The electric guitar is one of the great (and constructive) creations of innovation, designed and manufactured originally in the U.S. What started out in the 1930s as collaboration between electronic enthusiasts and musicians would eventually see the beginning of mass-produced electric guitars. By the ’60s and early ‘70s, the electric guitar’s presence in music across […]

International singer and composer Natacha Atlas has long fought being pigeonholed. Her first success came with work as lead vocalist with Transglobal Underground, where Atlas’ voice gave a certain kind of “world” credibility to the fusion of heavy dance-beats and international influences. It’s ironic that when she has attempted to move away from that, edging […]

After keyboardist and electronics wizard Brian Eno left Roxy Music in 1973, his output as a solo artist has been enormous. In addition, he has recorded a continuous string of collaborative projects with musicians such as Robert Fripp, David Byrne, John Cale and experimentalist Harold Budd. In that time, he also established an illustrious career […]

Oakland-based drummer, percussionist and composer Scott Amendola belongs to an elite group of contemporary musicians who have paved new avenues for contemporary music and jazz. Amendola’s strength is his constant inventiveness and improvisational skill, or adding subtle touches within the deep pocket of unrelenting groove. The list of musicians he has played and collaborated with […]

It took a little over a decade for the Swedish trio Junip to deliver their first full-length recording, Fields. Singer/songwriter José González, keyboardist Tobias Winterkorn and drummer Elias Araya originally formed Junip in 1989; a self-released EP, Straight Lines, came out in 2000. However, while Araya spent nearly five years in Norway (in art school) […]

The North Carolina-based quartet Superchunk helped carve out a sound informed by power pop, punk and ’70s FM radio that shaped an important aspect of ’90s rock. Along with bands such as Guided By Voices, Bob Mould’s Sugar, Wilco and Redd Kross, Superchunk delivered loud guitars, hook-filled riffs, a pounding rhythm section and pop melodies. […]