2014 looks to be a big year for Sam Herring, a North Carolina expat currently based in Baltimore. His darkly emotive synth-pop band, Future Islands, is leaving Chicago’s Thrill Jockey label and joining the roster of legendary British indie 4AD to release new album Singles in March. Less expectedly, Herring also makes his acting debut […]
Brian Howe
Posted inMusic
With a new album out on a chic British label, intimate experimental artist Secret Boyfriend cautiously probes a broader audience
“As a kid, I was always kind of freaked out,” says Ryan Martin. The 31-year-old Carrboro resident and musician issues eclectic outsider music on his Hot Releases label and creates his own as Secret Boyfriend. Right now, sitting under an oak tree outside the Looking Glass Cafe, he’s trying to explain its origins and the […]
Posted inNews
Triangle universities play important roles in virtual reality’s visionary past and widely applicable future
DiVE is open to visitors on Thursdays 4:30–5:30 p.m. and by appointment. For more information, visit DiVE’s website. “With appropriate programming, such a display could literally be the Wonderland into which Alice walked.”Ivan E. Sutherland on virtual reality displays in 1965 One sunny day, I’m standing in a vast landscape of tall pines, green meadows […]
Posted inBooks
As the NC Comicon ramps up its ambitions, a challenger appears on the horizon
NC Comicon Durham Convention Center Nov. 8–10, $15–$125 DICESupergraphic Nov. 9, free If you stopped by Durham’s Ultimate Comics in the days leading up to Halloween, you could pick up a coloring sheet that featured a mite-like superhero decapitating a bat-like one. To the uninitiated, it probably just looked like an unusually violent picture for […]
Posted inCulture
I and robot in The Uncanny Valley at UNC
THE UNCANNY VALLEY Swain Hall Closed Oct. 13 It was a misty Friday night on UNC campus, and outside of Swain Hall, the smokers drew on electronic cigarettes that glowed a cool futuristic blue instead of a cheery orange. In the intimate stadium seating of Swain’s black box theater, college students earnestly discussed Spinoza, while […]
Posted inMusic
With Phantasm in Tutu, Heads on Sticks’ David Mueller gets doing-it-wrong right
Heads on Sticks with Body Games and Matt Northrup Kings Barcade Saturday, Oct. 5 9:30 p.m., $6 There’s something wrong with Phantasm in Tutu, the new album from Raleigh band Heads on Sticks. The martial percussion and psychedelic guitar of “Ragnarok” are well formed, but the beat is destabilized by a sound that suggests the […]
Posted inArt
Co-working space Mercury Studio learns to adapt to Durham professionals’ needs
Mercury Studio doesn’t reveal its purpose at a glance. A suite of spacious rooms on Mangum Street, it has the high, white walls of a gallery, and paintings line a narrow corridor leading to a couple of storefront-window studios. But its main space is taken up by airily partitioned desks, a stylish conference room and […]
Posted inMusic
Superchunk Bassist and Merge Co-founder Laura Ballance Bows Out of Touring, Not Out of the Music That Empowered her
Laura Ballance flops down on a couch in the lobby of Merge Records, the Durham-based record label she helped found in Chapel Hill nearly a quarter-century ago. Nearby, an employee combs through postal crates full of I Hate Music, the new album from Superchunk, the other indie rock institution that Ballance co-founded, in 1989. The […]
Posted inMusic
Hammer No More the Fingers guitarist Joe Hall takes his solo turn with Blanko Basnet
Blanko Basnet with Speedy Ortiz and Organos The Pinhook Friday, Aug. 9, 10 p.m. $7 Band names can become exercises in arcana. In October 1983, the BBC broadcasted an episode of the courtroom drama Rumpole of the Bailey called “Rumpole and the Genuine Article.” The gallant barrister, Rumpole, takes on an art forgery case, set […]
Posted inGuides
Shawn and Karen Galvin bring new music to new places
There’s no shortage of chamber music in the Triangle, but you might conclude that hardly any new material had been written in 50 years. The demand for the classical masters is insatiable, and orchestras play what their patrons want to hear. But since 2009, one married couple has been working to give Raleigh’s classical scene […]
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