Soundcheck

For Dallas-born folk singer-songwriter Anjimile, who grew up in a conservative Christian family with immigrant parents from Malawi, life wasn’t always easy to figure out. His journey as a young adult, trans man, while simultaneously battling addiction, resulted in the brutally honest 2020 album, Giver Taker,  which the artist deemed to be full of prayers . A few years later came The King,  his mos...

Elizabeth Ziman, who performs as Elizabeth and the Catapult, is a singer-songwriter from Brooklyn. Over the past twenty years, she and a slowly rotating cast of musical friends have released six LPs, full of songs that offer a neat, often unexpected blend of the witty and the vulnerable. Her latest release is called Responsible Friend , "about slowing down in a world that keeps accelerating. It’s...

On this episode of Soundcheck, revisit a special live performance and interview from our archives, recorded in 2019. Multi-instrumentalist, composer, host of the podcast Aria Code , and MacArthur Fellow Rhiannon Giddens collaborated with Italian pianist and percussionist, Francesco Turrisi on there is no Other :  twelve songs that explore the connections between European, Arabic, African-American,...

The London-based art rock band, Mary in the Junkyard, is getting ready to release their debut album after four years of trying to make sense of strange things in life through music. “I think that life is very surreal,” says the vocalist of the group, Clari Freeman-Taylor, as she explains why she enjoys “writing about things that may be a little bit unsettling”. Nothing about the order of life is r...

Bassoonist Joy Guidry is a versatile improviser, performance artist, and composer of experimental ambient electronic music, who has founded her own record label, Jaid Records. While she is classically-trained, she has also listened deeply to some of the spiritual jazz of Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, Shabaka, and Nala Sinephro, and collaborates widely, most recently at the Park Avenue Armory in...

Imagine the tropical grooves of Colombia and Mexico in an avant-garde setting. That’s the ethos of Ruido Tovar; the new collaborative project between Eblis Alvarez of Meridian Brothers and Camilo Lara of the Mexican Institute of Sound.  Before releasing their debut self-titled record together, both Alvarez and Lara were known to experiment with electronics, fusing modern sounds with music styles t...

British singer and songwriter Paris Paloma, a very sharp and thoughtful young artist who considers grief, politics, creativity, love, art, Greek mythology, and power structures in her music and in interviews, has opened for Florence & the Machine, played Glastonbury, and lent her voice to the Tolkien universe. She has built a community – her fairies –over the past few years, from her first EP, 202...

The New Orleans band Tank and the Bangas have built their considerable reputation on a high-energy, exuberant blend of R&B, funk, hip hop, spoken word, gospel, and pop. Listeners may recall how the band first introduced themselves to the public radio community in 2017 by winning the NPR Tiny Desk contest, and have since been awarded a GRAMMY. Their new album is called The Last Balloon , and it com...

Nottingham post-punk duo Sleaford Mods have built their career on going against the grain, challenging the British class system, capitalism, and pop culture. They’d tear it all down if they could. Vocalist Jason Williamson and producer Andrew Fearn are known for their relentless streams of expletive-laden takedowns of social and political hypocrisy, but they’re also catchy in their own minimalist,...

Emma Hospelhorn is known as a flutist when she goes by her full name, especially as a member of Chicago’s Ensemble Dal Niente; the acclaimed collective that brings experimental chamber music to the masses. But when she steps into the universe of her solo project, Em Spel, she writes and sings surreal, beguiling songs that fall somewhere in between dream pop, art rock, and folk music.  The multi-in...

The Klezmatics have never been just a klezmer band. From their beginnings 40 years ago, they’ve fused klezmer music, rooted in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, with the sounds of jazz, psychedelia, Latin music, punk energy, gospel fervor, global rhythms, and even ambient music. They’re also a band whose music rises to meet the moment, from their debut album Shvaygn = Toyt , silence equals...

Ryan Bingham may be known as the character, Walker, on the hit neo-Western television series Yellowstone by many; but he’s also built a fandom around his rich Americana discography, spanning seven studio albums in 19 years. Earning an Oscar and a Grammy for “The Weary Kind”, the theme song for the film Crazy Heart co-written with T Bone Burnett, jumpstarted Bingham’s music career back in 2010. Sin...

Hiss Golden Messenger is the band led by singer/songwriter and guitarist M.C. Taylor, whose Americana folk and roots music has featured a rotating cast of characters, many but not all of them from North Carolina’s rich and varied musical scene. The band’s latest album is called I’m People, a simple enough title for a record that opens up onto some expansive ideas on what it means to be human and a...

Mexican singer-songwriter Julieta Venegas is considered a living legend among her peers. But when it’s just her and her favorite musical instruments, like the piano, the accordion, or the Venezuelan cuatro guitar, her artistry is just as raw, honest, and vulnerable as it was in her early days in music.  On her new record, Norteña, Venegas acknowledges the fact that none of us are as innocent as we...

Gamelan Yowana Sari is a Balinese art ensemble in residence at the Aaron Copland School of Music at CUNY Queens College made up of students, alumni, faculty, and community patrons – all guided by GYS founder Michael Lipsey and co-directors Fred Trumpy and Ruka Shironishi. This contemporary group of percussionist ringers (ahem) are “fostering the creation of new works for gamelan”, and are “deeply...

New York-based Sofia Rei is a Grammy-nominated vocalist, songwriter and producer from Buenos Aires, Argentina who was classically trained as a singer and fell in love with Brazilian music. Her new album, Antónima expands the concept of chamber music, looks to South American and Caribbean dance music (cumbia, c andombe) , and combines elements of Oya’s healing thunder and improvisation – all while...

Morgan Nagler writes new songs every day, whether she’s in a room with the likes of Phoebe Bridgers and HAIM, or by herself playing an acoustic guitar in her bedroom. When she’s collaborating with other artists, there’s a lot of thought put into what each song is supposed to be about. But in private, Nagler refers to her tried and true “puke method”, eager to see what emerges, unfiltered.  Then pe...

Alisa Weilerstein is more than just a virtuoso cellist; she is also a winner of the MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called “genius” award. There is a real genius in the way Alisa Weilerstein connects music in her solo concerts, combining core classical pieces and commissioning new works to expand the solo cello repertoire. Take, for example, her latest project called Fragments , which is a multimedia...

Brooklyn-based folk-rock band The Lone Bellow have stuck through thick and thin for the past 15 years. Their creative output has been fairly consistent, only disrupted recently by a burglary on the road. Strangely, the thieves who broke into their tour van stole the hard drives containing the vocal takes for their latest record and left the precious instruments behind. Still, the financial burden...

Texas-born folk singer-songwriter Jana Horn lives in Brooklyn, NY now. Perhaps it was this lifestyle change that established the introspective and fragmented nature of her eponymous third album. The calm in her voice, guided by instruments that sound as though they follow their own communal continuous clock, softens the blow of her existential lyrics: “ Seeing eternity as a quality of time / Done...

The band Art Brut has been making excitable, eccentric indie rock since their debut LP Bang Bang Rock N Roll was released in the UK back in 2005. The music is catchy, hook-laden, guitar-based indie rock.  The lyrics are delivered in a kind of speech-song by Eddie Argos; they could be about falling in love or hitting the dance floor, but they’re just as likely to tell us a story of a double-crossin...

Mike Doughty is many things; a solo artist, founding bandmember of Soul Coughing and Ghost of Vroom , and a published writer – who not only wrote two memoirs but also an oratorio based on the biblical Book of Revelation that was staged at WNYC’s Greene Space.  Simply put, Doughty has built a long-lasting career since his days of working as a doorman at the New York club, The Knitting Factory. On h...

The Syrian-American rapper, poet, and peace activist Omar Offendum blends the sounds of hip hop and classical Arab music and literature into his stage works.  He has spent much of the past few years on a New York-themed work called The Little Syria Show , named after a historical neighborhood in Lower Manhattan. In a celebration of Arab-American cultural heritage, Omar Offendum shares insights on...

American folk singer-songwriter Annahstasia’s music career blossomed since the day she got kicked out of her teenage choir. Her voice didn’t blend homogenously with others, as it always meant to stand out. Today, with her soulful contralto register, she often gets compared to the greats like Nina Simone, Tracy Chapman, and Sade. But the way she utilizes her voice and songwriting melds a distinct b...

Rapper, singer, and songwriter Dessa is a longtime member of Minneapolis’s influential Doomtree collective, has toured and recorded with orchestras, and been artist-in-residence at The Greene Space, our ground floor performance venue here in New York. But Dessa is also a writer, a poet, and a keen observer of the times. Her explicit commentary on the state of American politics, along with digressi...