When we met on a recent video call, Simon Raymonde was in the studio he built in his garden just a few years ago. “It’s my happy place, really,” he says. “It’s a real treat to me to have...
In Armenian, yeraz means “dream.” It’s a fitting title for the first compilation from Los Angeles-based record label and artist management company Critique. Yeraz is a ten-track album, out digitally on February 19 and on vinyl in May, that...
By 2001, I had already fallen in love with an innumerable amount of albums. Some became fleeting moments of obsession. Others evolved into long-term relationships. None would resonate with me quite like the debut full-length from British electronic pop...
It was around the release of Midnight Sister’s 2017 debut album, Saturn Over Sunset, that Juliana Giraffe and Ari Balouzian began working on the follow-up. They wrote and demoed material on their own time before heading into the studio...
Often, Jill Tracy’s music is rooted in a place. For half-a-decade, she has performed at the annual festival Flower Piano in Golden Gate Park’s San Francisco Botanical Garden. Her concerts, known as “sonic séances” would take place amongst the...
“Swim Test” – the latest single from Cassandra Violet Wolken McGrath (the L.A.-based singer-songwriter better known simply as Cassandra Violet) – was inspired by her father, but as the COVID-19 pandemic took a deadly turn in Los Angeles, the...
Have you ever wanted to borrow a synthesizer for a few weeks, just to see if it’s the right one for you? In Los Angeles, FeM Synth Lab offers just that, with a focus on making otherwise prohibitively expensive...
Over the past four years, I have grown to hate Twitter and its seemingly endless feed of bickering and bad news; since the pandemic started, that disdain has grown tenfold. However, on a Wednesday in late May, I watched...
I don’t think I’ve ever listened to as much disco as I have in 2020. That’s saying a lot for someone whose regular listening habits include a decent dose of the dance floor singles of the 1970s and the...
On Wednesday, March 18, Adriana A. Roberts, best known in nightclub circles and amongst mashup fans as Adriana A., launched her weekly “Mashup Listening Party” on Twitch with an iTunes playlist loaded with Fleetwood Mac. “I needed the comfort...
In the ’00s, Los Angeles-based band Lavender Diamond earned fans and critical acclaim for their folk-tinged indie pop. They toured with The Decembrists and played events like ArthurFest in Los Angeles and SirenFest in New York. On December 4,...
In a year without dance clubs or music festivals, New York-based DJ and producer Julia Govor wanted to do something to bring together her colleagues. Indefinite Uncertainty, which dropped November 27, is the result of that mission. A 10-track...
Is there a better opener than “Since I Left You”? The title track of The Avalanches debut album, released in Australia on November 27, 2000, and in the U.K. and U.S. the following year, fades in like a the...
“I always wanted to push Armenian sounds,” says Lara Sarkissian. “I always thought of the future and how I could push Armenian sounds into the future in very experimental and untraditional ways and how that can fit within this...
There’s this well-know story in the history of Pulp about the time they played Glastonbury as a replacement for The Stone Roses. It was June of 1995 and the band was still a few months away from the release...
There’s a tension in “Preach,” the latest single from Los Angeles-based post-punk band Agender, of the world at a turning point. While “Preach” was seemingly made for 2020, the song was actually written late last year. “It was written...
On Lundi Gras, New Orleans duo Quintron and Miss Pussycat held their annual bash marking the day before Fat Tuesday in the French Quarter. This year, the theme was a crawfish boil, with Quintron dressed as a chef and...
On Quaranmood, Boise, Idaho-based singer and musician Angel Abaya, who uses just her first name for her solo work, goes through the range of emotions triggered by this year’s COVID-19 pandemic, and the stay-at-home orders that came as a...
Maral Mahmoudi grew up with Iranian music. The DJ/producer, who uses just her first name professionally, was raised primarily in Virginia, near Washington D.C., but spent fifth and sixth grade, as well as childhood summers, in Iran. “I I...
More than a decade ago, Róisín Murphy had talked to Sheffield-based producer Richard Barratt (aka Crooked Man and DJ Parrot) about taking their collaborative work from her album Overpowered further. “It was intended to be a big project at...
Back in 2015, when New York-based duo Tempers (Jasmine Golestaneh and Eddie Cooper) originally released their debut album, Services, the vinyl was limited to 500 copies and released through the German label Aufnahme + Wiedergabe. For the fan base...
It opens with the woosh of a synth leading to a steady dance floor rhythm, albeit it one that, at 108 beats per minute, is slow enough for pensive swaying. Her voice rises, “It doesn’t hurt me/Do you want...
In her video for “The Pharmacy,” singer CrowJane appears as a demon with blank eyes and a mouth oozing black goo as she writhes in chains, her long, sharp fingernails nearly scratching herself as her shackled hands clench and...
Some of you may remember that first time you heard Peaches. Maybe it was on the dance floor near the start of the new century. Maybe you were taken aback at first by the sound, so bare and raw...