For a lucky period of time, I had the chance to interview and write about some of my favorite musicians and their music for print magazines based in Los Angeles and Chicago.
Below are excerpts and links to the full articles.
DREAM METROPOLIS
Sam Prekop builds his new solo album, Who’s Your New Professor, piece by gorgeous piece.
Living in a city is a restless business: garbage trucks, car alarms, neighbors. The longer you stay, the more you need the din to be interspersed with the soft metal whir and clamor you’ve begun to associate with comfort. It’s 6:30am. What little sleep is just beginning to wear off. Semi-audible, the bus outside is announcing its route, in the alley someone is rustling through cans. Then, a cornet wavers above it all and is soon eclipsed by a voice. I had put Sam Prekop’s new solo album, Who’s Your New Professor, on rotation the night before. What would otherwise be a calamitous waking up, crowded with the throng of a looming workday is now a gauzy morning. Clearly now: an acoustic bass and the same voice punctuating the blue coming in through the window.
Anthem Magazine, Issue 16. Full article
Photo: Jim Newberry
THE ART OF LISTENING
Tortoise, on their new album It's All Around You.
Glacial Chicago. The radiator threatens to dislodge and serves as errant metronome to the album playing. It's All Around You by Tortoise is euphonious out of the el train and plane sounds through the windows. A jazz professor told me the best way to listen to music was to have it in the background while doing something mindless--wash dishes, cleaning house-- everything except listen. Is that the best way? I ask John McEntire, and he disagrees, "...but I don't necessarily think what I do here is a good way to listen to it, either. You know...listening to little bits of it over and over, for hours and hours." We laugh.
Anthem Magazine, Issue 12. Full article
Photo: Jim Newberry
DESTROYING THE DISTANCE
David Byrne scores Young Adam
Well, no composer wants to be totally invisible--but realistically, I knew that too much music that was obviously music might be too intrusive. It's not a film that wanted to be filled with beats and tunes. The emotions are too subtle for that, in many cases
-David Byrne
It has been said of David Byrne that he minds the sublime in the mundane. Mainly in reference to his photographs; all in animate within the frame.
Anthem Magazine, Issue 11. Full article
Photo: Clarke Tolton
DRUM ROLL, PLEASE
The Lonesome Organist
As far as anthems go, One of Me is the flag with which Jeremy Jacobsen aka The Lonesome Organist could charge. Proto-limbed, decorated with toy piano, drums, accordion, electric guitar and well-heeled in his tap shoes, he'll foray through...the...well..a crusade? But against what? The inescapable charm invoked by his name? One Man Band, it says below the title of his latest release Forms & Follies (Thrill Jockey). Three reproductions of him in a tux are pictured like a Siamese triplet singing with brio, and a double flip-book of him dancing and playing drums and accordion accompanies the album.
StopSmiling, Issue 17. Full article
Photo: Jim Newberry
THE SPARKLY THREE
Please welcome: Pit Er Pat.
On first listen, Pt Er Pat's debut album, Emergency (Overcoat), sounds like romantic bicycling music from the 1930s. They have the word carnivalesque pinned to their lapels and the lyrics Fay Davis-Jeffers flutters around the music are, at times, parabolic. In Bog Man, an idealistic youth finds himself in a thicket anxiously dancing with a marshy character. Drummer Butchy Fuego and Bassist Rob Doran add to this haunting and joyous dervish, accompanied by Davis-Jeffers as she plays while birds fly out of her mouth as she sings.
StopSmiling, Issue 19. Full Article
Photo: Anna Knott
© 2024 Judith Rea Magsaysay Stanley