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Listening to Threads, the latest album from Minneapolis-based indie rock band Now, Now, you might be surprised to learn that the band was hesitant about working with a producer on this record. “We were freaked out about the idea of anyone just coming in and changing things we didn’t want to change, or telling us that we couldn’t do something,” admits lead singer and guitarist Cacie Dalager. “We didn’t know what to expect.” Continue reading
Jazz may be America’s greatest gift to music, but since its late ’50s heyday, the art form has too often become marginalized by the same process familiar to classical music fans: devolving into either endless recycling of the same old standards (to appeal to a rigidly conservative audience that basically wants to hear its record collections played live) or an extreme avant-garde content to play shrieky, “out” sounds for a tiny in-group audience. Neither is a recipe for building new audiences or sustainable artistic growth. Continue reading
Jessica Raymond has gathered several musical influences since she arrived in the PNW: Mount Baker, Mount Rainier, the North Cascades and the Olympic Mountains. “I’ve spent a lot of the past couple years in the mountains,” says Raymond, singer-songwriter and guitarist for The Blackberry Bushes, an alt-folk progressive bluegrass trio based in Seattle. “It influences what I do. They stick with you.” In fact, Raymond attended Evergreen State College in Olympia and deemed her concentration “Music, Mountains and Mythology.” Continue reading
If you’ve never heard Built to Spill, let me first ask you this: Have you been living on the moon for the past 20 years, or in a subterranean cave with no light or sound? ’Cause if you haven’t, then there’s really no other excuse to have missed out on some of the most vital and interesting guitar rock produced in the Northwest since Nirvana. Continue reading
I noticed a Kickstarter campaign the other day; someone is transcribing the flow of popular rappers into traditional music notation and wants help funding a book about it. I hear you can study “turntablism” at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Does this mean rap is dead — or that it’s finally part of the establishment? Neither, if San Francisco-based indie rap icon Andre Nickatina has anything to say about it. Continue reading
When Jeff Austin roams around the state of Oregon, he feels as if he were in a strange movie. But it’s not just the scenery that keeps Austin and the rest of Yonder Mountain String Band coming back to this fine state; it’s the people. “Eugene is very near and dear to our hearts; it’s always been good to us,” says Austin, who plays mandolin and provides silvery vocals for Yonder. “We’re like old cowboys. We don’t forget that stuff.” Continue reading
Obvious jokes about a certain Simple Minds song aside, who could forget about Molly Ringwald? She’s the redheaded queen of teen flicks who headlined features like Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles in the 1980s, but these days she’s settled into a different artistic milieu: music. That’s right, the actress has traded in her angst for a set of jazz standards, and she’s actually quite the chanteuse. Continue reading
Today’s electronic generation is lowering the music production learning curve so rapidly that many producers can’t even legally get into venues where their music is played. Take Disclosure, the UK-born-and-bred house duo consisting of brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence, who are only 21 and 18 respectively. Continue reading
If you want to make Jeffry-Wynne Prince smile, call him Jeffry-Wynne. Not Jeff or Jeffry or Wynne or Prince, although that might make him smile for a different reason. The hyphenated first name (it’s Welsh) of The Kimberly Trip guitarist throws some people for a loop. Continue reading
No, we’re not talking about Ray Charles, the Allman Brothers, OutKast, R.E.M. or other musicians from the Southeastern US, but rather Zedashe, an ensemble from the former Soviet republic, which performs at the UO’s Beall Hall April 19. The group of singers and instrumentalists (using bagpipes, accordion, percussion and more) has spent years finding and reviving music that was suppressed or otherwise gone with the wind during the decades of Soviet domination. Continue reading