#acoustic-renditions

#acoustic-renditions

David Bellion spent over a decade in top-flight football, playing for clubs like Manchester United and Sunderland, before becoming Red Star FC's creative director, focusing on brand development and cultural connections.

Concrete Waves is the first in a new series by Werkdiscs capturing improvised musical conversations between two avant-garde icons, Actress and Suzanne Ciani.

Jesca Hoop has announced a tour in support of her upcoming album Long Wave Home. Dates are with Faun Fables and include NYC's Le Poisson Rouge on June 29.

In frightening times, it makes a huge difference not to feel alone. Creating art with others in community enhances agency and strengthens self. Creativity requires an open heart; love enhances hope and diminishes fear.

Tone Freq Studios captures pristine acoustics and emphasizes analog warmth, creating a tactile space that values collective experiences over the convenience of digital recording methods.

Pitchfork is honored to host one of our favorite bands- Mandy, Indiana-to kick off our inaugural reader Q&A series. Starting right now, you can post your questions for guitarist and producer Scott Fair, and synth player Simon Catling to talk about their outstanding record, Fair's solo project set dressing, or whatever else you want to ask them about the joys and difficulties of music, Manchester, and making art.

R&B in the 21st century has been in a constant state of flux, tugged between safe traditionalism and blurry attempts at progression. For the last decade-plus that "progression" has seen R&B music become more indebted to trap records and the moody atmospherics of alternative bands like Radiohead, Coldplay, or My Bloody Valentine.

People all saw that there is something new is being attempted here that you've just got to see. I think that is its own reward. In an era where New York's storied Met Opera has faced layoffs, pay cuts, postponed productions, and a controversial financial agreement with Saudi Arabia, forward-thinking artistic direction becomes essential for survival.

With Portland sextet Abronia, you sort of have to listen past the spectacle. Forget about the overtly Jodorowsky-Morricone vibes, the tenor sax and the pedal steel guitar, the contralto vocals, the gigantic bass drum, the legend of co-founder Eric Crespo's desert vision. What's really going on here?

Turns out every soul song with a lot of blank space in it just needs to be filled to the brim with Jersey club stomps and squeaks.

We began in the world that was-in the humid atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Vienna, from which Zemlinsky, Schreker, and Schoenberg emerged. In a program note, Blier wrote that the "Fugitives" concept was inspired by Zemlinsky's "Meeraugen," or "Sea Eyes," which tells of a "person staring into the roiling abyss of the ocean." You had the feeling, as the evening went on, that the crushing realities of twentieth-century history-war, revolution, inflation, the Depression, Fascism-made such refined aestheticism untenable and forced composers onto other paths.

On January 17 Jennifer Wright gave a stellar performance of her compositions for her self-crafted instruments. This performance marked the conclusion of a month-long exhibition of her instruments and sound sculptures in the galleria of PLACE in Northwest Portland. This is the performance where she said she "finally had a chance to let all the parts of me out to play."

Tim Zha is looking for the soul in the machine. While some might hear Auto-Tune as masking a singer's humanity, the London-based artist filters his vocals to highlight technology's inseparability with our notions of self. This is ground well-trodden by Afrofuturist techno pioneers, Atlanta trappers, and PC Music hyperpoppers; for Zha, Auto-Tune represents what he calls the "coincidence of human subjectivity and the networked machine system."

Designed by Korean up-and-comer Woojin Yang, Everglow is a handheld mini-keyboard that fits into any bag. The "musical sketchbook" of sorts allows artists to quickly jot down ideas when they're not in front of their instruments or computers. The sleekly-designed device comes with a generative AI-based sound system that allows them to iterate and develop a song on the spot, not just transcribe the initial tune.

Tiny Desk Radio co-hosts Bobby Carter and Anamaria Sayre present performances from the next generation of Americana music: Sierra Ferrell, whose sound is firmly planted in the roots tradition; Wyatt Flores, an Oklahoman "red dirt" country singer; and MJ Lenderman, an indie rocker who doubles as the guitarist for the band Wednesday. Sierra Ferrell: Tiny Desk Concert Wyatt Flores: Tiny Desk Concert MJ Lenderman: Tiny Desk Concert

His first albums under his own name, 1995's Earth & Nightfall and 1996's cult classic Ten Days of Blue, were blissful-sounding ambient techno records that took the melodic sensibilities of the local scene to their cosmic extremes. Every beep and blip was in harmony with a lush string line, the rhythms less like breakbeats or programmed drums than trance-inducing hammered dulcimers.

I've just given a keynote presentation at Lines of Flight: Improvisation, Hope and Refuge, a conference hosted by the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. I'd been invited to talk about my performance research with D&aacutelava, a cross-genre project that is influenced by animist, Slavic cosmology and a land-based folk song tradition that has been in my family for generations.