It’s mid-afternoon and I’m washing dishes when my partner Joh and her son Shep arrive at the house. I’m surprised to see Joh is already wearing earrings. “Of course, it’s date night!” she says. We’re going out to dinner and to see Peter Evans. It feels good knowing Joh’s sense of anticipation matches mine. Plus, Shep knows he will have a fun night with my son Sean, about ten years older, babysitting. Good moods abound.
It’s been a busy year for Born Ruffians. The group is reading their new album Beauty’s Pride, which is set to be released on June 6. From there, the group is set to tour extensively in the U.S. and Canada in the second half of the year. I chatted with frontman Luke Lalonde about the genesis of this new album and what a certain memoir by Vladimir Nabokov has to do with it all.
Immersion, the duo of Malka Spigel and Colin Newman, have been making acclaimed music for a while, both as a duo and through their work in Minimal Compact and Wire, respectively. Their latest album, Nanocluster Vol. 3, is (as its title suggests) the third installment in a series of collaborations. This one teams them with New York’s stunning “ambient country” band SUSS; the result is an atmospheric, textured collection of music. I spoke with Spigel and Newman to learn more about this new album and their overall approach to the project.
For most of the 1990s, Tsunami combined deft lyrics and charged music to create some of that decade’s most enduring work. Now, the group’s discography has been collected by Numero Group as the collection Loud Is As, and the band is heading back on the road with longtime friends Ida. I spoke with Tsunami co-founder Kristin Thomson about the group’s return, the process of assembling the new collection, and the questions of art and ethics that they navigated then and now.
I was standing in the driveway, just home from work, watching the snow fall. I was still numb from the news about my dad. The flakes were big and gentle, floating on the breeze and slowly yielding to gravity. The tension I’d been carrying in my neck and shoulders began to melt. It was the first time since 1943 snow fell without my dad somewhere on the planet.
This December brings with it the release of two different works titled Lisa 2, v.1.0. The first is a novel by Nicholas Rombes about a playwright working on a new project, the a possibly haunted computer she begins working on, and the surreal occupation of the playwright’s husband. The other is an album by Mike Shiflet designed to act as a soundtrack and companion piece to the book in question. Shiflet and Rombes conversed about their respective works, their collaboration, and — as the saying goes — What It All Means.
I mute the sound on the ballgame and start listening to Accept When by Caroline Davis and Wendy Eisenberg. With my turntable in the repair shop, I have to settle for listening to the album on my laptop. I sink into the couch and the music flows. A light rain starts to fall outside the window and drops are visible at the game, though not enough to pause the action.
Composer Erland Cooper did something unexpected with the recordings that would become his new album Carve the Runes Then Be Content With Silence: he buried them. For several years, in fact, until they were discovered by someone who’d followed the clues Cooper had left to the master tapes’ location. The result is a gorgous, melancholic array of music, interspersed with poetry and given a more textured quality from their time underground. I spoke with Cooper about this unusual process and the role of collaboration in his work.