Soundcheck

With screaming and blistering guitars, power-chord-like vocal harmonies (both clean and processed through an array of guitar pedals), and a rock-solid pummeling of drums, Brooklyn trio Upper Wilds, [Dan Friel (Parts & Labor), Zach Lehroff (Ex Models) and Jeff Ottenbacher], exploits all kinds of sonic textures for a cathartic, electric explosion of melodic and riff-driven noise-fuzz-pop. Expect distortion-filled, high-intensity songs with the “raw hopeful energy of DIY spaces” (Thrill Jockey) about being the first earthlings in deep space, getting struck by lightning, and colonizing Mars when Upper Wilds plays in-studio. - Caryn Havlik Watch the session here:    Mars by Upper Wilds

Brooklyn band Grizzly Bear has been around in some form since 2002, but since assembling their current quartet lineup in 2006 they’ve become one of indie rock’s biggest, most successful, and sometimes most psychedelic bands. They've also collaborated with contemporary classical composer Nico Muhly, Beach House's Victoria Legrand, the Acme String Quartet and the Brooklyn Youth Choir. Grizzly Bear are also public radio fans, and played a set for New York Public Radio in June of 2018 at Brooklyn Bowl. Set list:  Losing All Sense-- Interview -- Yet Again Mourning Sound Ready, Able Two Weeks While You Wait For The Others Cut-Out  

The band Pond hails from Perth, the Western Australian city referred to “as the most remote city on earth.” They blend blissful and mind-bending psychedelic rock, with subversive strains of funk, synth-pop, falsetto, somehow both of the moment, and informed by the past. To illustrate, in a recent video, the band went shopping at Amoeba Music in Los Angeles, and showed off their haul: Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Young Thug, Tokyo Psychedelic music of the 1990’s, Tom Waits, Neil Young, 1980’s dub from Scientist, “uplifting doom and gloom” from Spiritualzed, along with Yoko Ono and Plastic Ono Band, psychedelic soul from D’Angelo, Jean Michel Jarre, William Oneyeabor, Cocteau Twins, a Prince candle, and Wu Tang boxers. With their latest record, The Weather, they have achieved a synth-pop/guitar-psych balance in their West Australian self-reflective songs. Pond joins us in-studio to play some of these songs. - Caryn Havlik Watch the session live here:    

The cinematic Minnesota band Cloud Cult is a creative collective who continually celebrates life and love, and catharsis through music and multimedia performances, usually involving painting from stage, and lately, film. Cloud Cult’s emotive, melodic, orchestral indie rock is perfectly suited to the movies. Singer/instrumentalist Craig Minowa and his crew have scored shorts and documentary films, The Seeker, The Great Alone, and lately, Minowa has been working on a score for a National Geographic documentary on wolves (Pop Matters.) They’re also independent musicians who are greening the music industry with environmentally-sound packaging, a geothermal-powered studio, and touring with net zero greenhouse gases. The studio is located on an organic farm. -Caryn Havlik Watch the session here:       

Swiss pianist and composer Nik Bärtsch creates playful and carefully balanced works containing both space and riffs. There might be as much listening going on as there is playing, which points to a spiritual focus, trust, and discipline that comes from Bärtsch's avid practice of the Japanese martial art Aikido. In his electric group, Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin (after the freelance Japanese warriors who served no master), there is slow-building, ever-shifting, sensual groove reductionism. With newfound freedom and flexibility, Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin, now a quartet, meditates on repeating patterns, or “Moduls” as he dubs his works, in what he describes as “Zen-funk” and “ritual groove.” Those repeating patterns have also earned the label “minimalist”, but the quartet wanders freely between funk, jazz, new music, or Japanese ritual music. Pianist Bärtsch, reedsman Sha, bassist Thomy Jordi, and drummer Kaspar Rast play at all kinds of accents and subtle syncopations, shifting downbeats, interlocking rhythms, and hypnotic motifs which slowly evolve and build to dramatic effect. Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin perform music from their latest, Awase (a term from Aikido which means “moving together, coming together”), in-studio. - Caryn Havlik Watch the session here:    

Arthur Moon is the moniker of composer/singer/multi-instrumentalist Lora-Faye Åshuvud. As Arthur Moon, she is the anchor who has gathered collaborators- including Cale Hawkins (Quincy Jones, Bilal, Wyclef Jean) and Martin D. Fowler (a composer for This American Life) and other folks. They trade demos and build on musical perspectives, which she then arranges and composes by way of experimentation and improvisation. The result is dazzling music that feels beautiful, affecting, and strange. Arthur Moon’s electronic experimental pop takes advantage of all available sonic space, teasing around all kinds of textures and timbres: here a fat-bottomed synth bass, there some minimal sampled percussion, perhaps a sneaky guitar effect to connect them, all dancing around swooping vocal lines, combined with vocoder action – in something of a multi-layered collaborative musical collage. Yet, the grand thing is that this assemblage of electronic pop never feels heavy, or over-crowded, or falls into any traps of formulaic synth pop, rather – it’s what Åshuvud calls “incorrect music” and it as perplexing as it is marvelous. Arthur Moon - Lora-Faye Åshuvud and her collaborators - join us in-studio to play some of these new tunes. - Caryn Havlik    

In the mid-20th century, pianist Oscar Levant (1906 –1972) was a pre-digital version of a social media star – a ubiquitous, witty presence on American TV and radio, and films. He was also a bestselling author, radio game show panelist, and a talk show host. As a concert pianist, his Gershwin performances, especially a 1945 version of the “Rhapsody in Blue”, were the best-selling classical records in America. But, Levant was a troubled figure off-camera and out of the limelight. He’s the subject of a mammoth eight-volume box set called Rhapsody in Blue: The Extraordinary Life of Oscar Levant, which features never-before-heard recordings and an essay by Michael Feinstein, perhaps our leading curator of the American songbook. Michael Feinstein joins John Schaefer to present “hors d’oeuvres” from both his personal archives and the box set, everything from Gershwin, to J.S. Bach, to Levant’s own compositions and trippy songs with subversive dissonances. Feinstein also tells tales from Oscar Levant’s career, full of admiration for his acerbic wit and his many fascination with the way he could be taken seriously as both a classical pianist and a film star. Despite debilitating eccentricities and addictions, and the loss of coordination in his hands, Levant was able to regularly appear as a game show panelist on TV shows, publish as an author and host a talk show. Feinstein concludes by saying that there is likely five or six more hours of these never-before-heard recordings of acerbic comedian and real-life piano prodigy Oscar Levant.  -Caryn Havlik    

Newark-born composer, multi-instrumentalist, collaborator, and 2017 MacArthur Fellow Tyshawn Sorey, is also the Assistant Professor of Composition and Creative Music at Wesleyan University. A recent Instagram post (Sept. 2018) of the day’s listening ranges from Nigerian King Sunny Adé and a record by legendary drummer Tony Allen to Frank Zappa with Joseph Jarman (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Art Ensemble of Chicago), Steve Reich, and Karlheinz Stockhausen in between. One might conclude that he is informed by all kinds of music in his work, which often combines composition and improvisation. His latest record, Pillars (Firehouse 12 Records), is about time, and on it, “Sorey thinks of the large-scale, and deeper, means of how music defines and describes time itself”, (George Grella, Brooklyn Rail). The music that comes from this personal exploration continues to stretch boundaries and defies casual listening.  Sorey heads a newly-formed ensemble that incorporates turntablism, electronics, and spontaneous composition. Tyshawn Sorey and collaborators Graham Haynes (trumpet), Val-Inc (electronics, percussion, and turntables), and Brandon Ross (guitar) join us in-studio. -Caryn Havlik  

Richard Reed Parry is perhaps best known as the really tall, really redheaded guy playing half a dozen instruments in the Grammy-winning band Arcade Fire. But he’s also a founder of the instrumental group Bell Orchestre, and a composer of contemporary classical music. His latest project is called Quiet River of Dust, and it was at least partly inspired by the psychedelic folk/rock scene in Britain in the late 1960's. He and Quiet River of Dust perform some of the musical meditations live in-studio.  Watch the session here: 

Jorma Kaukonen is a founding member of Jefferson Airplane, co-founder of Hot Tuna, a teacher, and a top-notch  guitarist. But though he will always be associated with the rock music of the 1960's, he’s had a much longer and more enduring relationship with American blues and folk music, as anyone who’s heard his duo Hot Tuna or his own solo performances will know. Together with his wife, Vanessa, he owns and operates Fur Peace Ranch Guitar Camp, a center in Ohio for studying guitar and other instruments. His latest project is a memoir called Been So Long: My Life and Music. Jorma Kaukonen joins us in-studio.     

The composer, singer, and tinkerer, Matthew Dear, is a DJ, dance-music producer, experimental pop artist, and bandleader. He keeps four music-making aliases and has released five albums and two dozen EPs, along with multiple commissioned remixes. On this latest record, Bunny, his weird, wild, gothic, body-shaking, bouncy electronica seems sinister, yet soft; a mix of charming villain and heroic basement nerd. Matthew Dear displays his enhanced baritone as he performs some of this new music, in-studio. -Caryn Havlik Watch the session HERE:    

Denver-born songwriter, guitarist, singer, activist, and performer Jill Sobule, is possibly best-known because of her breakthrough hit of “I Kissed a Girl” (pre-dating Katy Perry by more a decade), and “Supermodel,” the anthem from the film Clueless. In her over seven albums, troubadour Jill has "mused on topics such as the death penalty, anorexia, shoplifting, reproduction, the French resistance movement, adolescence and the Christian right." She has also written music for TV and theater, been active in numerous social and political causes, and been a pioneer in the art of crowdfunding. On her new record, Nostalgia Kills, released on her own Pinko Records, the songwriter/composer tackles adult topics, and looks back without sentimentality to “exorcise some junior high school demons.” Jill Sobule and her band join us to perform some of these songs in-studio. - Caryn Havlik Watch the session HERE:    

Vocalist and composer Meredith Monk is a multi-disciplinary artist, whose work involves music, dance, film, theatre, and now: biology meets anthropology. In her most recent large-scale work, Cellular Songs, musical forms evoke biological processes as layering, replication, division, and mutation in a “deeply affecting meditation on the nature of the biological cell as a metaphor for human society” (Financial Times). Through this work, Monk takes the microscopic unit of the cell, then projects and expands it as a proposal for “an alternative possibility of human behavior, where the values are cooperation, interdependence and kindness,” (much like how a cell functions, minus the kindness part.) Using their voices-as-instruments, Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble perform some of these Cellular Songs, along with violin, piano and keyboard, in-studio. -Caryn Havlik Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble perform 'Cellular Songs' at Le Poisson Rouge, Oct. 14-16 Watch the session HERE:    

Chicago-based duo OHMME serves up fuzz and melodies, along with vocal hockets and harmonies, oh - and lots of time and feel changes. Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart, the songwriters and multi-instrumentalists of Ohmme, are both trained classical pianists with ties to the collaborative Chicago improvising scene. They made a decision to stretch their comfort levels and go with the guitar for their noise-making, and have composed a hard-to-categorize batch of songs that lean toward the experimental without losing that rockenroll bite. On their latest record Parts, they’ve enlisted improvising cellist Tomeka Reid, Tortoise’s Doug McCombs, and composer/sax player Ken Vandermark, a jazzer and improviser, while drawing from influences like the vocal adventures of Kate Bush, the sonic playfulness of Dirty Projectors, and Brian Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets. Complemented by the highly inventive percussion of drummer Matt Carroll, Ohmme joins us in-studio to play songs from Parts. -Caryn Havlik Watch the session here: 

The Mercury Prize-nominated quartet Sons of Kemet is a super-group led by London-based Barbados-born saxophonist and composer Shabaka Hutchings, and propelled by tuba player Theon Cross, and two drummers - Tom Skinner and Eddie Hick. (Kemet - the black land, is one of the ancient Egyptian names for Egypt.) The music is a dance party which may or may not touch upon techno, hip hop, grime, psychedelia, Caribbean music, and social commentary using jazz vocabulary. Their latest album, Your Queen Is A Reptile, is a seething thinkpiece of a record, in which Hutchings suggests some black women across history who were worthy of the title of queen – queens who were made, not born. They perform some of these tunes live. -Caryn Havlik Watch the session here: