News

2023 marks the twenty-seventh year of Suarasama; it is also the first year for this reissue of their 2013 masterpiece, Timeline.

Irwansyah Harahap and Rithaony Hutajulu, Ethnomusicology lecturers at University of Sumatera Utara, founded Suarasama in 1995 after they’d both graduated from University of Washington in Seattle. Their music, as played and sung on both Timeline and Fajar Di Atas Awan (first issued in 1998, reissued by Drag City in 2008) is hypnotic and joyful, progressing ancient North Sumatran music... (read more)

Fresh off a trek through the wild west coast of the USA, and with passports and synthesizers in hand, Bitchin Bajas (Cooper Crain, Rob Frye, and Dan Quinlivan) are set to continue their ever-expanding Bajascillators tour overseas, with select dates in Europe this coming April. If you've been out of the loop, the Bajas live show has been particularly (third-)eye opening since the release of Bajascillators, their sonic expansion strengthening into something so formidably life-affirming it's gotta be experienced to be believed.

Cory Hanson’s third solo LP, Western Cum is a high-stepping, hard-dancing, first love/heartbreak, tonight’s-the-night, future nostalgia kind of good time. It follows unpredictably upon 2021’s luminescent Pale Horse Rider, upping the heat to molten levels, six strings at a time.

Insatiably in search of greener pastures, Cory draws with vampiric glee from the madness coursing through the world outside; a spiraling shitshow that’s reawakened a compulsion in him – an old ambition, even! - to crush brutality and elegance together into a fresh... (read more)

Some bands just play a few gigs here and there, while others embrace their civic duty to bring the music to the masses, night after night! No Age, with their insatiable desire to elevate folks beyond the clouds of despair and disillusionment with a conceptual allegiance to the idea of People Helping People, land squarely in the latter category. With a U.S. run already under their belts, Dean and Randy now set their sights to the U.K. and Europe to further spread the gospel of... (read more)

Every Alasdair Roberts album displays a unique dimension, existing somewhere between the two complimentary poles of "pop" and "folk" while oscillating from superlative original songs to masterful interpretation of traditional songs from Scotland and beyond. The forthcoming Grief In The Kitchen and Mirth In The Hall, his fifth full-length collection of traditional songs, finds Alasdair returning to his roots, where this thing of music and song hasn’t come the eons it’s traveled to simply entertain - it also cuts deep to the bone.

"The... (read more)

With the impending arrival of Drag On Girard on March 24th, the brilliance of Mike Polizze’s music, beyond the obvious — his singing/screaming guitar leads, classic song construction and vivid hope + dream feels —is the shifting, dynamic personality of each Purling Hiss album. This time out, the colliding circles of time seem to have inspired both the songs and the band, as the sentiment-drenched mood explodes in a wild tangle of guitars set to overwhelm the room.

With "Baby", the second single from ... (read more)

More in tune now with the rhythm of the sun and moon, Xylouris White (Dirty Jim White and George Xylouris) speak to each other across great distances with the intuition and fellowship that can only be found over years in each other’s company. With fewer distractions, appreciative of the freedom to play with new sounds and spaces, they carve The Forest In Me from unbelievably thin air.

Once you set the needle down on the record and hear for yourself, the... (read more)

It seems awhile ago, but it wasn’t – not in days and months...or whatever time is. But in terms of phases – we’ve been in and out of all kinds of bags since last summer, right? There’s "us" before we heard the rest that 2022 had to offer, and then there’s us today. And coming on seven months later, fresh as it still is, “Hello, Hi” is disappearing in the rearview, like everything else that’s going down the road.

But July 2022, it... (read more)

Critically-acclaimed, criminally-overachieving Glasgow-based singer and guitarist Alasdair Roberts is known as a superlative original songwriter as well as an interpreter of traditional songs from Scotland and beyond. For the past twenty years, his recordings have alternated between these two complimentary poles, with ‘pop’ records such as The Amber Gatherers and A Wonder Working Stone nestling in his expansive back catalogue alongside “folk” albums such as No Earthly Man and What News (with Amble Skuse and David McGuinness). Alasdair's records possess a further dimension in their collation... (read more)

YTI⅃AƎЯ is what you make it! And thus far, we've made it in CD and cassette forms, while offering it as a D/L, stream and what have ye online. With the 2xLP vinyl version set for release at the end of February, Bill Callahan's taking the show on the once road again, for three weeks of shows around the American East, Southeast and Midwest in late February and early March.

Pitting dreams of songs against performances of those songs in live reality, Bill... (read more)