Stories About Music

Five interviews with New England noise musicians, Winter-Spring 2013. Visit our website, investigatingregionalscenes.org, for more info.

story about music #7 Ouroboros Season one concludes with a story about Taraka Larson, her band Prince Rama, and her first manifesto, The Now Age. Thank you to Kyna Doles for her help as an editor for this season.

story about music #6 To Dream of Another Continent A story about love, music, Europe, and memories sparked by A Winged Victory for the Sullen concert.

story about music #5 My Friend Tyler I met my friend Tyler in the autumn of 2010 after we moved into the same dorm room. He was already a musician by then, making pop music that mixed in a variety of other genres: indie rock, world beat, classical, jazz, shoegaze, ambient-anything was up for grabs, really. But those things have never been the central focus of the music Tyler makes under the name Cloud. At its core, Cloud is a project about friendship, ego death, and one persons' attempts to hold onto the memories that shape him. Episode 6 begins with a call I made to Tyler in the weeks before his first vinyl release (on a real record label!) only to find out he wasn't as excited as I'd thought he would be. This is a story about my friend Tyler and me.

story about music #4, Part II A Story About the Trouble Books Episode 5 picks up after the concert that night. Keith and Linda let us stay in their basement after a chance thunderstorm popped up and rained in the tent we’d pitched in their backyard. As my friend Ricco slept on the couch, I lay on my back on the floor and wondered if I wasn’t just a little in over my head. I wanted to be like them, but maybe more than that, I wanted to be them––to settle in some forgotten corner of the U.S. and never worry about having to “make it.” But I also didn’t want to be unknown like them. At some point in the night, one of Keith and Linda’s cats wandered past and I wondered, were they happy here? And more importantly: was this what I really needed? Keith and Linda's work can be found at http://barkandhiss.com

story about music #4: A Story About the Trouble Books In the summer of 2013, I was on the edge of moving back to Pennsylvania. In a last ditch effort to be a real journalist, I drove out to Akron to find the couple whose album kept me company on a lonely night in July.

story about music #3 Alex & Lorena In the radio industry, a tape synch is an industry term for when two people are recorded separately while talking on the phone at the same time. Being a low budget production, Stories About Music has had to rely on these for the past few episodes. Being a no budget production, we've also had to rely on musicians who know how to mic themselves. But not this time. When I went looking for Alex Zhang Hungtai, the voice and mind behind the cross-continental project Dirty Beaches, I found out he had just moved to LA, not far from where my friend Lorena was living. Lorena studied sound recording in college, so I sent her to meet Alex with a microphone so I could ask him some questions about his work–only to learn that Lorena was perhaps even more closely connected to the themes behind Alex's work than I knew.

story about music #2 The Tragic Fate of All Hidden Scenes In 1995, Bluetile Lounge released Lowercase, a perfect example of the tiny subgenre known as slowcore. But for a series of coincidences, it would've disappeared forever. I trace the history of Lowercase from when I first encountered it back to a small indie rock scene in Perth, Australia that disappeared just before the internet came along to catalogue everything, forever. This is the story of how Bluetile Lounge was spared. Guests: Dan Erickson (Bluetile Lounge), Alan Sparhawk (Low), and my friend, and the catalyst for all this, Tyler. Pictured: Bluetile Lounge (clockwise from left) Dan Erickson, Alex Stevens, Howard Healy, and Gabriel Cotton

story about music #1 Between Two Elverums Why can't one musician escape an album he released fifteen years ago? now available on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/stories-about-music/id1037075754?mt=2