Tim Bluhm is principal singer/songsmith for Northern California's Mother Hips, a band that's been playing great West Coast-style rock and roll for the past decade. Originally hailing from Chico, the...
Many current recordings employ an unnecessarily cartoon-like style that abandons natural instrument sounds in favor of exaggerated caricatures of these sounds. Recorded both with Nicholas Vernhes in...
An equal balance among all players provides a guiding principle for freely improvised music. Hef presents engineer Colin McClean the challenge of balancing electric and acoustic instruments. The...
Lozenge's music combines a powerful sonic density with carefully composed melodies. To capture this challenging mixture, they turned to Cheer-Accident guitarist Phil Bonnet, who until his untimely...
The Trio, actually a quartet since the addition of Jeff Parker on guitar, continues in their quest for the hippest sounds in new jazz. Straight up bop dominates on this disc with drummer Chad Taylor...
Whereas King Crimson present ground-breaking and challenging compositions, ProjecKt X is it's alter-ego, living in an alternate reality- in the land of exponential improvisation and discovery, where...
Studio owners make CDs. Shellac features Steve Albini, of Electrical Audio (Chicago), and Bob Weston, super engineer. It's raw lyric scenarios/characters are supported by pounding drums, crackling...
It's not that often a CD comes along that I really have to listen to closely and try and figure out where all the sounds are coming from. This is one. Where OK Computer had interesting textures and...
I've been buying all the Byrds' reissues, and just today completed my collection. There's some great music, of course, but in the process of being a completist there's always the glimpse into what...
Fontanelle, a Portland, Oregon, quartet which includes orphaned Jessamine offspring Andy Brown and Rex Ritter, paint a bipolar musical landscape that is both soothing and sardonically ominous in a...
Recently I've had a few conversations with musicians about the difficulties of getting all your ideas finished when working in the studio on a tiny budget. Since indie releases generally can only...
The CD reissue of Linda Perhacs's Parallelograms illustrates that a CD mastered carefully from a vinyl pressing can still sound great. More importantly, it returns to print a beautiful...
