Listen! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. There was a time when The Radiators were considered part of a new wave of New Orleans music. The Meters were done. Professor Longhair was done. The Neville Brothers were taking a break. But The Radiators stretched their rock roots and […]
Chris Toenes
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Skeeter Brandon
Listen! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. Calvin Thomas Brandon has gracefully lifted himself above hardship his whole life, and that feeling ends up in his throat when he sings the blues. As one of 16 children on a farm near Roxboro, he looked forward to singing when […]
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Fathers and father and son
Samples of Mike and J.T. Stewart’s music on YouTube! Mike Stewart was a bluesman, mostly playing in the style of the ’30s he adored. He recorded several albums for Joe Bussard, the Maryland record collector who ran the Fonotone label. He collaborated with John Fahey. And, with Bussard and Fahey, he sought out mysterious country […]
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Hisham Mayet travels the world seeking ecstasy in sound
• Watch the trailers for Musical Brotherhoods from the Trans-Saharan Highway and Palace of the Winds on YouTube. Archivist Hisham Mayet jams himself, his audio recorder and his camera into remote places. In what his label, Sublime Frequencies, calls “folk cinema,” Mayet aims to capture the personal essence and rituals of cultures, from the Bori […]
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Jjak Hogan
Donte Oliver and Wayne Brooks switch musical roles like they’re being controlled by a video game’s joystick: In the Kraftwerk-meets-Mantronix electro band Bass Invadurrz, they claim the lineage of cyborgs. Brooks is Smoke Master I.C.E. and Oliver is Dr. Bass So-Low. In hip-hop outfit Jjak Hogan, Oliver is Slim E. Neutron, rocking formal wear and […]
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Killick
Listen! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. Erik Hinds calls the music he improvises alone under the name Killick “Appalachian Trance Metal,” three words so full of internal conflict one could assume he’s being coy. But he’s not: Hinds wants something that doesn’t sound typical, and that’s long […]
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Helmet
Listen! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. Page Hamilton is the only guitarist who can trace his way from working with militant avant garde composer Glenn Branca in tight New York spaces to opening for Guns N’ Roses in arenas. But Helmet, Hamilton’s influential metal band, rose out […]
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Pylon
Listen! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. Before there was the “next Seattle” craze that led the music industry drooling in the direction of Chapel Hill, there was Athens, Ga. And before Athens’ R.E.M. became a household acronym, there was R.E.M.’s favorite band, Pylon. Being from the South, […]
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SNMNMNM
Listen! If you cannot see the music player below, download the free Flash Player. Chapel Hill’s SNMNMNM embarked on the two-month-long “Revenge of the Nerd” tour with nerdcore rapper MC Chris before releasing its fifth album, Crawl Inside Your Head. MC Chris drops rhymes about things like Boba Fett, the uber-cool bad guy from a […]
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Robert Fripp
On the cover of No Pussyfooting, the 1973 improvisational collaboration between British guitarists and inventors Robert Fripp and Brian Eno, the two men are seated in a room with mirrored walls. The camera faces toward a wall at an angle, so that the objects in the room seem multiplied, radiating into space. It’s an apt […]
