The Handmaiden
Here is a ambitious, rarely placid, sonnet with teeth. Is it pleasant? No. Is it affecting? Deeply. The trick is figuring out what your threshold for pain is, and weighing that against your appreciation for art. Not an easy task.
Kate Plays Christine
History is full of thorns, trampled leaves, and blank passages where handwriting should be. It’s a flip book made of broken glass. Major events are polarizing, competitively important, and often times cause for analysis and discussion. But personal events, when developed in a darkroom and shown in front of an unsuspecting audience, can be altogether quieting.
Notable Debut LPs of 2016
No year is left without at least a handful of promising-to-excellent first LPs from artists, but like most everything else in 2016, there just seems to an exciting wealth of great material at our disposal.
Interview w/ Baywitch
Baywitch lives in the eerie, psychedelic, and saltwater reflected ribbons of surf music. The cavalier reveries of sand flecked palms and warm, kaleidoscopic imagery presents an odd sense of distorted harmony: Seattle-based artist Lila Burns gives us music that hums, sails, and rattles.
Interview w/ Vera Papisova
Vera Papisova has encouraged positive discourse in relation to health, self-awareness, and happiness. Over the past few years her uncompromising passion to discuss vital and often times unaddressed subjects in popular media – ranging from body image to sex education – has given readers a much-needed forum for a myriad of essential subjects.
Interview w/ Japanese Breakfast
Psychopomp’s landscape feels of loose rocks, doughy clouds, errant sparklers, and latticed emotions. It’s an album that climbs, dives, and pushes its ethereal boundaries with longing-vocals and marred pastels. Michelle Zauner is the architect behind both Japanese Breakfast and the weightless reveries of Psychopomp.
Interview w/ Turnover
Turnover – Austin Getz, Casey Getz, Eric Soucy and Danny Dempsey – have created a mosaic of illusory, intangible, and yet familiar imagery. With the band’s latest release, Peripheral Vision, the Virginia Beach natives lend themselves to a rip current of dreamlike compositions.
Interview w/ Globelamp
Elizabeth le Fey’s gossamer cat’s cradle of mystery, magic, and music finds itself under the moniker of Globelamp. The artist delivers spectral intonations reminiscent of forgotten shores and night tides.
Sharkmuffin’s Natalie Kirch Names the Best Releases of 2016, So Far
Despite all the losses the music world has suffered since January, this year is off to a strong start for many artists on the DIY scene. Without further ado, here is a chronological list by release date of my favorite EP and LPs from January through July of 2016.
Interview w/ Avery Trufelman
Avery Trufelman, one of the amazing producers of 99pi, curates, organizes, and presents many of the show’s terrific stories (her episodes will change your life, I’m not even kidding).
