Sam Grisman Project presents the music of Garcia/Grisman
A Note From Sam– The music that my father David Grisman and his close friend, Jerry Garcia, made in the early 90s (in the house that I grew up in) is not only some of the most timeless acoustic music ever recorded, it also triggers my oldest and fondest musical memories. What I find most inspiring about this material is the way their camaraderie and their love and joy for the music, simply oozes out of each recording. It is also impressive how deeply they get beneath their favorite songs—whether they are originals, covers or traditional/old time tunes—and how expertly that material was curated.My goal in starting Sam Grisman Project is to build a platform for my friends and me to showcase our genuine passion and appreciation for the legacy of Dawg and Jerry’s music. By playing some of their beloved repertoire and sharing the original music that our own collective has to offer, we will also show the impact that this music has had on our own individual musical voices. Ultimately, there is nothing that makes me happier than playing great songs with my best friends and my hope is to share that happiness with audiences all over!”Website | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube
Bailen
Tired Hearts, the new album from rising indie-pop power trio, BAILEN, delivers a dazzling set of songs that navigates the space between the heart’s expectation and the head’s sober reality. New York based siblings, Daniel, David, and Julia’s second full-length album for Fantasy beats with empathy, vulnerability, and resolve.At times intricate and playful, measured and elaborate, the 12 original songs on Tired Hearts wrestle with an uncertain future where ethics and morality—both communal and personal—seem to be constantly shifting. Locating one’s compass amidst the chaos—a world-wide pandemic, toxic social media culture, economic insecurity and political turbulence—is at the LP’s core.Producer Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Waxahatchee, Snail Mail) who, along with the band, co-produced Tired Hearts, helped to expand BAILEN’s ambition beyond what they initially envisioned. “We’d played the last record live a hundred times before recording it, so we tracked a lot of it live,” Daniel explains. “With Brad, we took a collagist’s approach. It freed us up to explore and be sonically adventurous.”In contrast to the road-tested songs on their accomplished debut LP, 2019’s Thrilled to Be Here produced by John Congleton, many of the songs on Tired Hearts were honed in the studio as opposed to live on tour – “the songs changed so much over the course of recording process,” Julia remarks.Most noticeably, Cook encouraged the trio to experiment with how they sing. “We deliberately used the more vulnerable parts of our voices,” Julia says. “After not being in the studio for years, we were in vulnerable places, and this record reflects the frustration and tenderness of that time.” “We pushed ourselves lyrically, it’s the most exposed, intimate music we’ve written as a result,” David affirms.Indeed, BAILEN’s radiant harmonies, spare, synth-driven tracks, and futuristic, ear-catching arrangements usher in Tired Heart’s exhilarating avant-pop evolution. “Shadows,” affectingly captures “the moment you see someone and realize you can spend the rest of your life with them.” “Nothing Left to Give” echoes of HAIM’s sparkling pop, while “These Bones,” contains a hint of Phoebe Bridgers’ hushed intimacy.Perhaps no two songs embody that fresh ethos (and the band’s incredible range) more than the high-gloss, New Wave dance track “Call It Like It Is,” and the stunning “BRCA (Nothing Takes Me Down),” which takes its name from the hereditary breast cancer gene that Julia and her mother (who is a breast cancer survivor) share. Over the track’s slow building rhythmic pulse, Julia sings of hospital gowns and uncertainty, untying a complex knot of familial anxiety, guilt, and acceptance, while embracing the determination to move forward: I’ll still live like I’m dying/ But I won’t let it take me down, she insists. “It’s about finding ways to not be defined by these circumstances, and to move past them with resilience.”Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube
Wednesday
A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet’s new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album’s ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman’s voice slicing through the din.Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It’s not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void – somehow – you see everything.Rat Saw God was written in the months immediately following Twin Plagues’ completion, and recorded in a week at Asheville’s Drop of Sun studio. While Twin Plagues was a breakthrough release critically for Wednesday, it was also a creative and personal breakthrough for Hartzman. The lauded record charts feeling really fucked up, trauma, dropping acid. It had Hartzman thinking about the listener, about her mom hearing those songs, about how it feels to really spill your guts. And in the end, it felt okay. “I really jumped that hurdle with Twin Plagues where I was not worrying at all really about being vulnerable – I was finally comfortable with it, and I really wanna stay in that zone.”The album opener, “Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” happens in a flash: an explosive and wailing wall-of-sound dissonance that’d sound at home on any ‘90s shoegaze album, then peters out into a chirping chorus of peepers, a nighttime sound. And then into the previously-released eight-and-half-minute sprawling, heavy single, “Bull Believer.” Other tracks, like the creeping “What’s So Funny” or “Turkey Vultures,” interrogate Hartzman’s interiority – intimate portraits of coping, of helplessness. “Chosen to Deserve” is a true-blue love song complete with ripping guitar riffs, skewing classic country. “Bath County” recounts a trip Hartzman and her partner took to Dollywood, and time spent in the actual Bath County, Virginia, where she wrote the song while visiting, sitting on a front porch. And Rat Saw God closer “TV in the Gas Pump” is a proper traveling road song, written from one long ongoing iPhone note Hartzman kept while in the van, its final moments of audio a wink toward Twin Plagues.Website | Bandcamp | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
Warka Music Video Release Party
The Mask of Warka is a representation of a human face carved from marble more than 5000 years ago. The Sumerian artifact is as mysterious as it is beautiful. Androgynous and expressionless but strangely alive, it looks like it could tell us so much about the past it comes from, even about ourselves, but it does not speak.Warka, the musical collective helmed by singer-songwriter Jesse Ainslie packs a similar collection of enigmas. With the help of drummer Brad Porter (Brett Harris, The Auxiliary) and bassist Spencer Lee (MAKE, Protozoa), Ainslie is seeking a new beginning for an old mystery. Warka’s debut single, “I’m In Love Again” pulses with electronic beats and synthesizers, but is audibly informed by American roots music.As the former guitarist for Phosphorescent and Castanets, Ainslie is well versed in the world of Americana, but after releasing a solo album under his own name he began to find the notions that constructed the genre confining, even problematic. “I was thinking about the word Americana and thinking about how, as a genre, it has a race problem. It presupposes white heritage. Part of me wanted to make something that touched those narrative traditions but broke open some of the associated tropes, and requirements,” Ainslie reflects. “I started thinking about Tina Turner and the electronic aspects of her ’80s records. I was listening to Sade and Kendrick Lamar, and the original score to the ’80s Blade Runner.Website | Instagram | TwitterThe Auxiliary“Eerie…” “Hypnotic…” “It feels like the soundtrack to a dream…” Overture, the debut offering from The Auxiliary, elicits a very particular response from listeners. This opening salvo from Carrboro NC based musician Russell Howard is a reference point, a stage setting revealing the culmination of a long, quiet journey from acoustic songwriter pop to electrified art rock. Based in personal yet universal experience and conversations never had, The Auxiliary explores the idea of merging the opposing parts of ourselves into something new. Take the opening and closing songs from The Auxiliary’s debut EP (March 2023 via BadK.id), Overture and Overture (Acoustic). While ostensibly two versions of the same song, they function as a conversation across the chasm of interpersonal experience. Where Overture sounds like a transmission from another plane, Overture (Acoustic) is the ensuing conversation upon arrival. And while the Overture EP is something of an artistic arrival for Russell Howard, with the addition of Jared McEntire on bass, Ross Gruet on guitar, and Brad Porter on drums, Overture has become a departure point, a coordinate that marks the genesis of a new journey.Website | Spotify | YouTube | Instagram | TikTokUno Dose (aka Shane Hartman) specializes in all vinyl sets that span a wide range of vibes pulled from 30+ years of crate digging and informed by a lifelong passion for all types of music. Leaning heavy into classic Jamaican music (ska/rocksteady/reggae), funk and soul, and anything that will get the body moving, he’s garnered a reputation for assembling crowd-favorite sets that feature soul, pop, and rock songs reimagined in a reggae style – familiar sing-along favorites turned inside out! Instagram
Yaeji
Yaeji is NYC-via-Seoul producer, DJ, and vocalist, whose introspective, dancefloor-ready tracks have made her a global icon occupying a space all her own. After breaking out with her 2017 debut EPs that featured singles “Raingurl” and “Drink I’m Sippin On,” the multifaceted artist featured on Charli XCX’s 2019 album Charli, has gone onto produce remixes for Dua Lipa and Robyn, collaborate with the beloved Seoul-based polymath OHHYUK, sell out two headlining worldwide tours, and launch her bespoke lifestyle webstore JI-MART.Born in Flushing, Queens in 1993, she has roots in Seoul, Tokyo, Atlanta, and New York City, all serving as the backdrop for her singular, hybrid-sound that synthesizes influences of Korean indie rock and electronica, late ‘90s and early 2000s hip hop and R&B, and leftfield bass and techno. With her critically-acclaimed 2020 mixtape WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던, she sharpened her vision as a musician who is creatively unbounded by language and geography, leading to partnerships with PAC-MAN and Heaven by Marc Jacobs. Named by Pitchfork as one of the “25 Artists Shaping the Future of Music” in 2022, she’s also graced the cover of Crack, The FADER, MixMag, and Burdock, among others, and has been featured in programming at the V&A Museum, Serpentine Gallery, and MoMA PS1. Her highly anticipated debut album,With A Hammer, arriving April 7, 2023 via XL Recordings, sees Yaeji excavating her inner world with full force, resulting in her most thrilling and personal work yet.Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | TikTok
Destroyer (solo)
Destroyer’s latest album, LABYRINTHITIS, brims with mystic and intoxicating terrain, the threads of Dan Bejar’s notes woven through by a trove of allusions at once eerily familiar and intimately perplexing. The record circuitously draws ever inward, each turn offering giddy surprise, anxious esoterica, and thumping emotionality at equal odds. “Do you remember the mythic beast?” Bejar asks at the outset of “Tintoretto, It’s for You,” the album’s first single, casting torchlight over the labyrinth’s corridors. “Tintoretto, it’s for you/ The ceiling’s on fire and the contract is binding.” Delivered in a Marlene Dietrich smolder, Bejar’s lyrical menace seeps like smoke through the brazen march’s woozy synths and dizzied guitar. “There’s some character here that feels new to me, a low drawl, an evening gown draped over a piano,” Bejar says of the song. Throughout, LABYRINTHITIS insists that everything’s not all right, but that even isolation and dissolution can be a source of joy— stepping into the sunlight at the other end of the maze in your ear, Bejar strolling alongside like a wild-maned, leisure- suited minotaur.More than an arcane puzzle for the listener, LABYRINTHITIS warps and winds through unfamiliar territory for Bejar as well. Written largely in 2020 and recorded the following spring, the album most often finds Bejar and frequent collaborator John Collins seeking the mythic artifacts buried somewhere under the dance floor, from the glitzy spiral of “It Takes a Thief” to the Books-ian collage bliss of the title track. Initial song ideas ventured forth from disco, Art of Noise, and New Order, Bejar and Collins championing the over-the-top madcappery. “John is in his 50s, and I’m almostthere, but we used to go to clubs,” Bejar laughs. “Our version may have been punk clubs, but our touchstones for the album were more true to disco.”Bejar and Collins conducted their questing in the height of isolation, Collins on the remote Galiano Island and Bejar in nearby Vancouver, sending ideas back and forth when restrictions didn’t allow them to meet. “From the vocal manipulation to the layered electronics, making this record pushed us to a new place, and reaching that place felt stressful,” Bejar recalls. “But I trust that that stress is a good feeling.” That cuddly anxiety excels in tracks like “Eat the Wine, Drink the Bread,” Joshua Wells’ percussion and Collins’ drum programming pushing Bejar’s voice forward. “The whole world’s a stage/ That I don’t know/ I am going through,” he sighs, before reaching the frustrated religious imagery of the title.Lyrically, LABYRINTHITIS embraces a widescreen maximalism, blocks of text dotted with subversions and hedges. Building from the koans of Have We Met, Bejar continues to carve his words precisely, toying with expectations and staid symbols, while Collins’ production reconstructs the pieces into a unified whole. “Even though everyone recorded in their own isolated corners, this is the most band record that we’ve done in the last few years,” Bejar says.Website | Instagram | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube
High Vis
Though the band were all alumni of some of the UK hardcore scene’s most celebrated groups, High Vis’s 2019 debut, No Sense No Feeling, was a record that opened its viewfinder beyond the parameters of any genre or scene. Sure, the intensity and passion of hardcore were stoking the fires, but in its intense post-punk inspired textures and moods lay a sonic adventurousness which suggested the members of High Vis were never going to be confined by any notion of what they should or shouldn’t be playing.“Hardcore is the best. When you’re young and you’re feeling pissed off, there’s a framework there where you think, ‘Fuck it, I’ll just do that…’ and it’s brilliant. You dive on each other’s heads and feel a part of something,” says frontman Graham Sayle. “Hardcore presents itself as this forward-thinking thing, but it’s fucking conservative. It can be like: ‘No! You can’t do that! That’s not like ’88 New York hardcore!”The washes of chorus FX and spectral synths lines of 2020 EP Society Exists was further evidence that the group were never going to be easily pigeonholed or restrained, but High Vis’ second album Blended displays a musical and emotional scope that anyone who’d seen The Smear, Dirty Money, DiE or even Sayle and drummer Ed ‘Ski’ Harper’s pre-High Vis outfit Tremors back in the day could never have imagined.From the anthemic sweep of opener Talk For Hours, through the title track’s psychedelic swirl and Fever Dream’s almost baggy groove, it’s an album that shows High Vis’s sound blossoming into something with an unlimited richness. The hazy drift of Shame or the melodic jangle of Trauma Bonds may take them until uncharted waters, but they still have all the power and bite that made No Sense No Feeling so remarkable.“A lot of it is because Martin has come into the band,” says Harper of the role new guitarist Martin MacNamara has played. “Martin’s influences and mine weaved in together have created a whole new palette.”“I loved the band before I even joined them,” adds MacNamara, “so if I had other influences it was always going to slot into what they were already playing.”Knowing that MacNamara was already a dyed in the wool High Vis fan should assure anyone worrying at this point that the band might have thrown the punk baby out with the bathwater. It’s still recognizably them – see the way Rob Moss’ bass grinds and growls against MacNamara’s skyscraping guitar collage on Trauma Bonds or how Sayle snarls about the working class being “as good as dead” over the cement mixer churn of 0151As the title might suggest, Blending is about bringing all these new strands and elements into what the band are about at their core to forge something entirely new.“I really enjoyed getting back into music again when lockdown happened. Because there were no gigs and we had started writing tunes I was listening to things like Flock Of Seagulls and Echo And The Bunnymen and all the old Manchester stuff,” says Moss of the records the band were buzzing off as they made the album. “I started getting really excited because we were playing all this stuff like a punk band but it was this new sound, it was a blend of what we’re all into.”Website | Bandcamp | Instagram | Facebook
Phoneboy
Phoneboy[fohn • boi] noun1 someone consumed with their phone, unable to tear themselves away from a distraction2 Gen-Z’s newest indie-pop trio spinning off shimmering licks over toe-tapping beats so danceable it’ll make you put your phone downFresh out of school and poised on the verge of adulthood, Phoneboy’s sophomore entry accentuates the power-pop elements of their earlier releases while honing in on a drum-tight enthusiasm that’s defined their signature sound. The appropriately named Moving Out collects a wise-beyond-their-years bittersweet Gen-Z sensibility of a generation forced to contend with not just typical adolescent grievance, but a world continually inundated with ephemeral fame, transient praise, hollow accolades, oh yeah and a global pandemic. Yet as dour as the circumstance, Phoneboy astounds with yet another record chock full of undeniable toe-tappers and bittersweet bangers determined to fuel get-togethers from blowouts to dormroom dance parties.In an age of hyper-stimulated doom-scrolling and over-polished social media stars, humble New Jersey three-piece Phoneboy are all about putting down the phone and living in the moment.. Singer/guitarist Wyn Barnum and Ricky Dana met at a technical college without much of an indie scene and pulled in Wyn’s childhood friend, bassist James Fusco. While in undergrad the three college boys bonded over a love of midwest emo and first built their band to soundtrack the semester’s keggers.As students at a small technical school where indie bands aren’t so common, the ‘Boys don’t distinguish between their friends and their fans. “We respect artists who want to make music just for themselves, and it’s not like we don’t, but we trust our friends the most. If they like the song, we know it’s good.” And it’s not just their friends who like it. Phoneboy’s early efforts quickly earned a following on social media. Serving as a de facto street team, classmates shared the band’s breakout, ACID GIRL far and wide. Before they knew it these floppy haired crooners had racked up over a million streams across the web. It’s the kind of word-of-mouth buzz that makes you think the internet wasn’t such a bad idea. “There’s definitely a tension there,” says Wyn, speaking to social media. “There’s all this distraction, all this fake fun everybody’s pretending to have, but at the same time the discovery potential is insane.”More sonically articulate than their pop-punk predecessors, these fresh-faced friends mix in more mature influences like the Arctic Monkeys, the Strokes, Frank Ocean, M83, Carseat Headrest, Megan Thee Stallion, and even Billy Joel– studying pop music with maybe more enthusiasm than their majors, they polish their influences into a new collection of all killer no filler super catchy party bops road tested on vaulted stages like Mercury Lounge and House of Independence.The latest single FERRARI introduces our protagonist with a thousand faces, a youth on the verge of adulthood. Faced with the responsibilities of adulthood they yearn for those carefree highschool days, singing “I just wanna make a couple hundred thousand/ Put all my friends in one big house and/ Party like we’re never gonna see tomorrow/…Honestly I’m hoping that I see tomorrow.”Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | TikTok
Skyblew
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Speed Stick
The Carrboro, NC supergroup Speed Stick is an ever-evolving project among a group of friends—Ash Bowie (Polvo), Charles Chace (The Paul Swest), Laura King (Bat Fangs), and Thomas Simpson (The Love Language)—whose musical achievements reach back as far as the 1990s. But as its live shows attest, the band does not want to rehearse old accomplishments. On stage, Speed Stick wants to shatter epochs. Step into a world of thunder where lighting strikes rewire nervous systems. Ride waves with peaks that precede disquieting calms. Float in spaces where dark and light collide to set blood afire. To participate in a Speed Stick show is to enter a space of bodily and psychological endurance. Off-kilter guitar riffs shadow the raging intensity of drums; blistering drum beats dance to the feedback of guitars.The songs for Volume One were created in unusual fashion over the course of a year. Initially, Speed Stick only consisted of two drummers. They distributed nine studio tracks and a single live track to select musicians. The musicians’ task was simple: draw inspiration from the beats in order to create music that spreads laterally and horizontally like a rhizome. Indeed, Volume One has utterly discarded the yoke of genre by instead tethering intricate, interlocking drums to myriad creative personalities: Mac McCaughan (Superchunk), Kelley Deal (The Breeders, R. Ring), Mike Montgomery (R. Ring), Stuart McLamb (The Love Language). But no one can stop with just the album. Your ears will yearn to see the shapes of sound and your eyes will beg to taste color. For what Volume One heralds is that the supergroup Speed Stick is the super show of shows.Bandcamp | Facebook
