drag city
See: Alasdair Roberts gathers us round for a solo rendition of ‘Orison Of Union’, from next month’s album for Drag City
SERENDIPITY is such a lovely thing to encounter, especially when it leads to a joining of courses and like minds finding each other. Responding to the invitation of Norwegian fiddler Hans Kjorstad, Alasdair Roberts, who’s been beguiling us with his music since those days with Appendix Out back in the late Nineties, made a deep connection with …
Track: Matt Sweeney and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Joan Shelley and Nathan Salsburg – ‘Watch What Happens’: a good old-fashioned swap and cover two-tracker is out now
WITH their long-awaited third joining together in song, Superwolves, the direct descendent of 2005’s Superwolf, out digitally just a couple of months back, you might think Matt Sweeney and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy could rest easy, take a breather; but not a bit of it, they’ve been up to so much. For a start, Drag City are pleased as …
Album review: Mind Maintenance – ‘Mind Maintenance’: Chicago rhythm masters produce a deeply contemplative, mantric set to guard against the world
TAKE one of the finest and most intuitive leftfield-into-indie jazz rhythm sections of past decades, Chicago drummer Chad Taylor and bassist Joshua Abrams, who between them amass waay over a couple hundred performance credits to their name on Discogs: for artists such as the Chicago Underground Trio and all its various spiralling iterations, Brokeback, Sam …
Track: Mind Maintenance – ‘Valence’: further cognitive hygiene for mbira and guimbri calls you to the hearth
WHEN Chicago rhythm section masters Chad Taylor and Joshua Abrams get together to play, you know the results will be intelligent, off-kilter, crisp; intuitive. The pair have worked together in the engine room on so, so many great and cred records down the past coupla decades, including for the Chicago Underground Trio and all its …
See: Birds of Maya – ‘Please Come In’: Philadelphia’s returning fuzz-stoner prodigals return with a down ‘n’ dirty invitation
BIRDS OF MAYA have become one of those legendary lost power trios, so much more than the sum of their parts; superfuzzed, raw, ready to kick out the primal jamz, deliciously low-slung. I mean, really of course, that should read: had become, since they back with us, boy. Followers of the rock music at its …
Soundtrack of Our Lives: Bo Moore of The Peacers brings the groove
SAN FRAN’S Sic Alps, living guitar legends, were one of those bands which, with the amount of the talent in its ranks, could only burn bright and, like an unstable isotope, emit members to spin off into other musical pursuits, eventually to transform itself in a musical half-life. Tim Hellman went into the ranks of …
See: The video for Alasdair Roberts og Völvur’s ‘The Green Chapel’: fine folk in Nordic collaboration heralds a new set for Drag City
HE’S GRACED us with a very Northern European and delicious take on introspective folk since that trio of lovely albums, The Rye Bears A Poison, Daylight Saving and The Night Is Advancing as Appendix Out, beginning back in ’97; and it should come as no surprise that a man whose music arguably sounds best with …
Soundtrack of Our Lives: Bill MacKay and Nathan Bowles freewheel us through great handpicked tracks
BILL MACKAY, the Chicago-based guitarist, improviser of note and all-round scion of six strings, sure loves to enter into a two-way conversation with other artists with reliably beautiful results; witness the brace of albums he’s recorded with the freewheelin’ Ryley Walker, Land Of Plenty and Spiderbeetlebee. And loving that American instrumental guitar tradition in all its iterations, from …
Track: Mind Maintenance – ‘The Ladder’: Chicago legends Joshua Abrams and Chad Taylor bring percussive African contemplation
IF YOU’RE at all a follower of the Chicago music scene that erupted in so many directions back at the turn of the century, then the rhythmic adepts Chad Taylor and Joshua Abrams will probably need no introduction; given how, they were so deeply woven into intelligent, seminal albums by the Chicago Underground Trio and all its various …
Soundtrack of Our Lives: breaking psych-folk troubadour E.R. Jurken takes us a for a trip through the music of his life
THEY loved what they heard so much they set up a label just for him. Yep, that’s the tale of E.R. (Ed to his friends) Jurken’s slow peregrination towards a recording contract once he’d landed in Chicago after one of those periods when life gets dismantled, leaves you tumbling in its riptides; criss-crossing the States, …