John Fahey

Get Lost In Mountains' New Album Centralia, Because That's the Point

Eight years in, Mountains albums arrive with certain expectations attached. There will be gently melancholy expanses of sound. There will be lapping-wave dissolves and cross fades caulked with spectral drone. There will be reed-rustling whispers and dry-heaving synthesizers. There will be the illusi ... More >>

Live: M. Ward And Yo La Tengo Enjoy The (Relative) Silence At Prospect Park

M. Ward w/Yo La Tengo, Wyatt Cenac Celebrate Brooklyn! at Prospect Park Bandshell Tuesday, August 7 Better than: Having your appendix removed (get well soon, absent Yo La Tengo bassist James McNew). There was a quiet in the air as I approached the Prospect Park Bandshell, home of the Celebrate B ... More >>

Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo Unveils a 30-Years-in-the-Making Solo Debut

Lee is free

Q&A: The Men On Staying Loud, Being Approachable, And Not Dreading SXSW

You'd expect a band with a name as un-Googleable and as blankly resigned as The Men to be a little stand-offish, if not just completely jaded. After all, the Brooklyn-based four-piece have been at it for roughly five years, only one of which found them getting some recognition outside of New York. T ... More >>

On Mirel Wagner and the Alleged Death and Apparent Spread of Freak Folk

Scattered cosmic dust

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly (In A Good Way): Sorting Through Prurient's Late-2011 Burst Of Noise

On Tuesday Dais Records issued God Is Truth and Light Is His Shadow by Prurient, a.k.a. Hospital Productions overlord/NYC noise institution Dom Fernow. Clocking in at almost 16 minutes, God is a reasonably inauspicious outing that's more interested in ambient texture than pulse-quickening implosions ... More >>

Moving Mountains

The Brooklyn duo gets aggressive with sound on Air Museum

Q & A: Chunklet's Henry Owings On The Indie Cred Test, Not Being A Hipster, And Paying Tribute To Jerry Fuchs

Ian Cone​The 100 Biggest Assholes in Rock Issue, The Shit List Issue, The Overrated, The Rock Bible--Chunklet mastermind Henry Owings redefined the 'zine aesthetic with his deliciously wisecracking, ass-chewing tongue, dumping on everyone and their mother while taking a little bit of time to e ... More >>

Q&A: Kurt Vile on His Favorite Bob Seger Song and the Neil Young Solo That Changed His Life

​Kurt Vile is a virtuoso of self-pity. As a songwriter, he paints more shades in this particular spectrum--industrial silver, steel-blue, watery gray--than just about anyone. His newest record, Smoke Ring For My Halo, is a small masterpiece of this small subset of emotion, nailing the center o ... More >>

The 6 Best Things You Can Bid On From WFMU's Benefit Auction

Inside the WFMU archives.​It's fundraising time again for awesome local freeform radio station WFMU, and rather than do another fall marathon, music festival, record fair, or art benefit, the station has organized an online auction, with all proceeds going to support the beloved and increasing ... More >>

Watch Thurston Moore Make Noise Music With Tiny Children

OK, we take it all back--this is cutest, most awesome free improv set ever. Just look at the tiny children tottering around, pressing buttons, turning knobs, and manhandling guitars! Some of them can't even properly stand up yet! The looming spectre of aging yuppie bad-parent hipsterism passed ove ... More >>

RIP Jack Rose

​His Kensingston Blues was the record I listened to most in 2005. That year I remember seeing him play in various small venues in Brooklyn and Philadelphia, the temperature in the room always a little bit too high, the longer more hypnotic stuff like "Calais to Dover" and "Cathedral et Chartre ... More >>

Jazz Consumer Guide: Loosening (or Tightening) Up

Or slicing, or muscling—anything but letting up, really

Jack Rose+Chris Forsyth+Corridors

The Raw Revelations of Fire in My Bones

A DIY gospel comp offers three discs of ferocious testimony even nonbelievers can believe in

The Improved Timing of Jim O'Rourke

The Visitor is not only a cerebral pleasure but, surprisingly, an emotional one as well

Lit Seen: Momus, Joe Pernice, and Nick Cave Trade Guitar Picks for Pens

On the improbable return of the rock-star novel

Interview: Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny on God, Hardware, and His New Luminous Night

"Even Danzig believes in a higher force." Elisa Ambrogio​For the past ten years, Ben Chasny has been recording under the moniker Six Organs of Admittance. His first self-released recordings, put to tape in his birthplace in the California Redwoods, were homespun abstractions that paid equal h ... More >>

Sonic Youth's Rather Regressive Latest

The Eternal doesn't break new ground, for the first time in 20-plus years

Leo Kottke

Tonight! Amadou & Mariam, Busdriver, and the Beginning of the Week-Long Hold Steady Onslaught

Amadou & Mariam are superstars everywhere else on the planet -- in 2006, the blind Malian couple co-wrote the official World Cup anthem. But transplant the pair to Manhattan and they can't even fill up Webster Hall... yet. Let's make it happen. The Hold Steady, however, have already sold out ever ... More >>

JAMES BLACKSHAW

Interview: Nels Cline on Masturbation, Thurston Moore, and Wilco's New Record

"I'm a really big fan of Sonic Youth, and I kind of don't make any bones about it." Jeff Tweedy pulled a rabbit out of his beard when he landed Nels Cline in Wilco following Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Screwing with that album's winning formula by introducing an off-the-wall competing guitarist on its ... More >>

Live: M. Ward and Vivian Girls at the Apollo

M. Ward and Vivian Girls Apollo February 19 I suppose M. Ward has Zooey Deschanel to thank for his first ever gig at the Apollo Theater last night. Volume One, the debut record from She & Him--Ward's much-feted (and highly over-rated) collaboration with Ms. Deschanel--sold 123,000 copies, far mo ... More >>

KINDA BLUE

Kicking the crap outta codification

John Fahey, Curmudgeonly Again in Harpers Magazine

The Old, Weird America Marches Onward

Another great folk-music box targets everyday people who might even still be alive

No Context: An Interview with the Magik Markers

When Free Radicals Become Free Agents

Thurston Moore goes folk, exploits Starbucks, and walks his dog, Merzbow

Summer's Here Kids

Sweltering jams for the imminent doldrums

Songs of Faith and Devotion

Alice Coltrane's legacy boldly mingles the spiritual with the musical

Live: Lungfish Frontman Holds Brooklyn Loft Hostage

Pickers With a Hint of a Grin Take on an Idiosyncratic Ouevre

Looking for Blind Joe Death

Earthly appetites: The brilliant and curious career of steel-string demigod John Fahey

Harmonies and Abysses

Across the sky sheet the impossible birds in a steady illiterate movement homewards

Chemistry Class

Exploring the sounds of science experiments, on slabs suitable for turntables or framing

Faeries From Yon Philly Wood Revive Ye Olde Jousting Folke

God Is My Co-Pilot

Unvarnished and unhinged gospel music, from 1902 to 1960

Man Out of Time

Hippie-Hating Misanthrope Rests in Peace With His Past

Down and Alt

Spelunking and Crooning in 2001

Reissues by the Boxful, Singers by the Cut

Oracle Testimony

Music

The Ghost in the CD

Baby Gets Back

Hungry and Weird

Built To Spill Over

Consumer Guide