Noah Berlatsky is a freelance writer in Chicago.
The members of the L.A. punk band the Linda Lindas are all under 20 years old but, in many ways, they’re already old hands at the music industry. The quartet formed back in 2018 for a performance at a music festival called Girlschool USA when guitarists Bela Salazar and Lucia de la Garza were 14 and 13, respectively; bassist Eloise…
"I'm sticking with DJing, because that's about love!" Kavain Wayne Space, aka RP Boo, says from his Chicago home on the zoom call. He wears a sleeveless white t-shirt and his smile lights up the bare room. As you'd maybe expect from a DJ, he talks with his hands, gesturing so emphatically it sometimes looks like he's going to reach…
One of the tracks on singer/producer Georgia Anne Muldrow’s new beat tape, VWETO III (Foreseen Entertainment), is called "Afro AF." The title is a good summation of her career. Since her first full-length album 15 years ago, she has released more than 20 albums exploring and blending virtually every shade of Black music into a funky psychedelic kaleidoscope. As a producer,…
Singer Mary Wells was one of Motown's most successful early stars; her massive 1964 hit "My Guy" smashed through segregated genre lines, hitting number 1 not just on the R&B charts, but on the Billboard Hot 100 as well. But despite selling enormous numbers of records, Wells died in poverty at age 49 in 1992. She had no medical insurance,…
Beverly Glenn-Copeland's new album, Transmissions, released on the artist's new Transgressive label, is a collection of recordings from a stunning, expansive and largely unknown five decade career in folk, electronica, jazz, New Age, world music and genres of his own invention. Born in Philadelphia to musical parents, Glenn-Copeland entered McGill as one of the school's first Black music students. He was also…
"Buried under earth/All our living worth/How I long to be/blooming from your tree." Boston singer/songwriter Anjimile sings in an otherworldly tenor vibrato on "Your Tree," the first song of his debut album Giver Taker on Father/Daugher Records. The chorus sings back to him, "Nothing dies, nothing dies," as Anjimile's fluid finger-picked guitar is augmented by drums and flute. You can…
SPAZA's new album, Uprize! (out on Oct. 16), has a fierce, enthusiastic title, complete with exclamation mark. The cover is similarly joyous; it shows two women raising their arms ecstatically in the air, fists clenched. It makes revolution look like fun. The music inside that upbeat package, though, is a stark contrast. Uprize! is an album of meditative, solemn, spiritual…
On the phone, producer and musician A.G. Cook sounds exactly like his pop creations—cheerful, accessible and eager to race off on a tangent to explore the next new shiny idea that comes his way. Smashing Pumpkins, Cher, and Theodor Adorno chime and dance and spiral around each other as he talks about making music that hooks you with a fuzzy bath of odd…
"Hate This Pain," from Tricky's new album Fall To Pieces, may be the most affecting track of his career. Over a repetitive piano loop and Marie-Claire Schlameus' cello, Tricky half whispers lines about his daughter, Mazy Topley-Bird, who died in 2019. "What a f**king game/I hate this f**king pain/Was crying on the coast/Baby girl, she knew me most." Singer Marta Złakowska repeats the…
"What is world music? What is global music? Do you have to show up in ethnic gear with a tabla and a sitar for you to consider me Indian?" drummer Ravish Momin says, with some exasperation. "Or what if I just showed up with an electronic drum pad? If you were a quote unquote, world promoter, you'd be like, 'No…that's…
Watching noise musician Victoria Shen (A.K.A. Evicshen) perform is like watching a mad scientist transform into a joyful noise cyborg. In an amazing 2019 video taken at New York's Ende Tymes Festival of Noise and Liberation, she carefully tweaks a table full of boxes bristling with knobs and wires before wrapping cables around herself, sticking a wire in her teeth,…
"Left a hole in the speaker/stepped in the stu, no shoes, but got more soul than sneakers," Blu declares on "Miles Davis," the lead single from the new album Miles: From An Interlude Called Life with producer Exile. A cool piano loop plays around the dusty beat, with what sure sounds like a sample from a trumpet solo by the man…
"I never want to leave this world/without saying that I love you," S.G. Goodman sings on "Space and Time," a country weeper that serves as the first song on her solo debut Old Time Feeling. "I owe my life to even my enemies/the ones who have loved me/the one who have tried." Her vibrato give the song a keening, unforgettable…
Like most musicians, Belgian ambient synthscape vaporwave artist Sebastian Dessauvage, a.k.a. Zer0 れい, has been struggling since the coronavirus pandemic began. Belgium has been in lockdown for two months and summer festivals have all been canceled. He's lost tour dates in Amsterdam and London. His day job in retail laid him off as well, and while he still gets 70% of his…
"I become black noise. I become that undesirable force on the landscape." That's what singer/spoken-word artist travis told me when describing his work with 40-year-old Chicago gospel/industrial/experimental band ONO. It makes sense when you listen to a track like "Tar Baby" from their new self-released album Red Summer. A tribute to the Haitian revolution, the song feels like it's composed…
