The Tonearm

This week we're putting The Tonearm's needle on composer and pianist Midori Hirano. Born in Kyoto and based in Berlin, Midori is out now with The Juniper Tree , a new score for Nietzchka Keene's 1990 film starring Björk in her first screen role. We talk about writing without the original soundtrack in her ears, turning field recordings of birds and a waterfall into instruments, and how...

This week we're putting The Tonearm's needle on saxophonist, composer, and singer Charlotte Greve. Waterbodies , out now, is her tenth album but the first under her own name. She wrote it while expecting her daughter. We talk about her love of '80s power ballads, what Shahzad Ismaily brought as producer, and the work deadline driven by childbirth. (The musical excerpts heard in the int...

This week we're putting The Tonearm's needle on author David Perlis. David grew up in Marin County and co-hosted Night People on WFMU. His first book, Morning in Marin , is out now. It follows characters including Alan Watts, the Grateful Dead, George Lucas, Philip K. Dick and many others through America's postwar creative boom. We talk about why he traded fiction for the true story, t...

This week we're putting The Tonearm 's needle on trumpeter, composer, and synthesist Mark Isham . He's out now with At the Carousel Club , his first solo album in fifteen years, built around vintage analog synthesizers and a band that includes Nels Cline, Vinnie Colaiuta, and a string quartet. We talk about where the album's title comes from, his history with David Sylvian, and wha...

This week we're putting The Tonearm's needle on famed record producer Bob Ezrin . Bob has worked with artists including Pink Floyd, KISS, Deep Purple, and countless others, though he is best known for his nearly 60-year relationship with Alice Cooper. He's back working with The Jayhawks on their latest, Sanctuary Park , twenty-six years after their first project together. We talk about how the reu...

This week we're putting The Tonearm 's needle on noted reggae author David Katz . His new book, Dub Revolution: Jamaica's Sonic Innovators and the Birth of Remix Culture , traces Jamaican music from its earliest sound systems to the 21st century. We talk about the 1982 San Francisco night that blew David’s mind and opened his ears, the job that paid his way to London, and even the technology and t...

This week we're putting The Tonearm 's needle on Ann Arbor krautrock band Fling ii . I sat down with drummer and synthesist Brad Gowland, and guitarist Richard Murphy, to chat about their third album, 3 , which is out now on We Are Busy Bodies. It’s six tracks cut down from hours of studio jamming. We talk about Richard's path from ambient guitar to doom metal, Brad finding four minutes inside a f...

This week we're putting The Tonearm 's needle on producer and engineer Martin Bisi . Bisi has run BC Studio out of the Gowanus section of Brooklyn since 1981, recording Sonic Youth, Swans, Herbie Hancock's "Rockit," and countless others. We discussed his new album, Dancing On The Power Lines , his ongoing community activism, the changing landscape of New York's music scene, and so much more. It’s...

This week we're putting The Tonearm 's needle on tenor saxophonist Azar Lawrence . Lawrence is a veteran of Elvin Jones and McCoy Tyner's bands and a leader of his own group, The Azar Lawrence Experience, whose new album, Turn the Music Up , arrives September 25th. We talk about his unique relationship with Pharoah Sanders, dodging McCoy Tyner’s broken piano strings, and how the fifty years betwee...

This week we're putting The Tonearm 's needle on Florida sound artist Josh Mason . Mason’s new album, Kicking A Dark Horse , is out now on greyfade as a hardcover book paired with modular synthesizer music, the two built to zipper together rather than stand apart. We talk about the punk rock roots underneath all that circuitry, why only the album's first and last tracks have a fixed place, and wha...

This week we're putting The Tonearm 's needle on drummer, composer, and educator Terri Lyne Carrington . Carrington has just released Trip the Night Fantastic , the second album from her group, Social Science. It’s built for the dance floor but unflinching on the topics of deportation, prison abolition, and climate collapse. We talk about trusting collaborators before they've earned it, playing to...

This week we're putting The Tonearm 's needle on pop-chart analyst Chris Molanphy . For almost a decade, Chris has hosted Hit Parade , Slate 's monthly show on the history behind the Billboard charts. He also writes Slate 's long-running Why Is This Song No. 1? column, and wrote a book on Lil Nas X's Old Town Road for Duke University Press. We talk about how a Netflix episode can send a forty-year...

This week we're putting The Tonearm 's needle on synthesist and producer Danalogue . Danalogue is a founding member of The Comet Is Coming and half of Soccer96, and he’s recently released his debut solo album, Teleportations . The record imagines grief and upheaval as a science-fictional voyage and was sparked by a chance encounter with the artist Moebius that grew into an imagined civilization. W...

This week, we're putting The Tonearm 's needle on five-time Grammy-nominated composer Suzanne Ciani . Suzanne has spent decades innovating electronic music on the Buchla synthesizer, an instrument as intimate to her as any acoustic musician's. Suzanne has multiple projects out this year: CIANI/ORKEST , a live album with the fifty-piece Metropole Orkest, conducted by Simon Dobson; a collaborative l...

This week we’re putting The Tonearm 's needle on trumpeter, composer, and bandleader Steven Bernstein . Amongst his many activities, Steven leads Sexmob and the Millennial Territory Orchestra and serves as Laurie Anderson's musical director. He's out now with an entwined set of albums. ResoNation Trio pares him down to valve trumpet, bass, and drums with Scott Colley and Nasheet Waits. Ultra Reson...

This week, we’re putting The Tonearm 's needle on saxophonist and composer Alden Hellmuth . Alden grew up in Hartford, studying in the Jackie McLean tradition, and now works out of New York City. Her new album is called Tether, and it features a band centered on two bass players, rounded out by drums, piano, and trumpet. Alden wrote music for the ensemble that keeps them all tied together, no matt...

This week, we're putting The Tonearm's needle on trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas . Douglas’s latest album, Transcend, came out in April. It's the second record from GIFTS, his band with Rafiq Bhatia, James Brandon Lewis, Tomeka Reid, and Ian Chang. His last several records were openly political. This one turns toward the sacred, though we explore where that either/or framing falls short. We al...

Today, we’re putting The Tonearm ’s needle on singer and songwriter Ora Cogan . Ora Cogan’s music pulls from folk, country, psychedelia, and gothic rock. She holds all of it without flinching, as heard on the fantastic album Hard Hearted Woman , her latest release on Sacred Bones. Ora has worked as a photojournalist and human rights advocate, and those experiences feed directly into how she thinks...

Today, we're putting The Tonearm 's needle on Billy Polo , in-house audio and mastering engineer, at iconic Jamaican music label VP Records . Billy has spent years restoring and remastering some of the most important recordings in reggae and dancehall history. Works from Peter Tosh, Dennis Brown, King Jammy, Sly and Robbie, and dozens more. Billy works with the original analog tapes, often in roug...

Today, we're putting The Tonearm 's needle on Stephen Emmer, a Dutch composer and musician based in Amsterdam. Stephen came up in the late 70s post-punk underground, and his band Minny Pops was the first international act signed to Factory Records. He is a curious genre-explorer who has worked with Lou Reed, Chaka Khan, Tony Visconti, Trevor Horn, Flood, and many others. His latest album, Asymmetr...

Today, we're putting The Tonearm 's needle on George Grella , one of the sharpest music critics working today. George is the music editor of The Brooklyn Rail and has written for The Wire , the New York Times , and, luckily for us, The Tonearm . George just published Minimalist Music, part of Bloomsbury's 33⅓ Genre series. His central argument is that minimalism isn't defined by sparse materials o...

Today we're putting The Tonearm 's needle on Meredith Bates , a JUNO Award-winning violinist and composer based on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia. Meredith’s recent double album, The Observer Effect , spans roughly 140 minutes of electroacoustic music built from violin, viola, field recordings, and electronics, composed and recorded live in the studio, with very few edits. It's grounded in t...

Today, we're putting The Tonearm 's needle on Toronto drummer and composer Nick Fraser . Nick Fraser is one of the most distinctive voices in Canadian improvised music. He has played with Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, and William Parker, and has led projects that range from raw free jazz to something much harder to name. His latest record, Areas , just dropped on Elastic Recordings. It's a tri...

Today, The Tonearm’s needle lands on composer and avid birdwatcher Maria Schneider . Few composers working today have Maria Schneider's range. She holds seven Grammy Awards, was named an NEA Jazz Master, and this year took home the Rolf Schock Prize in Musical Arts, one of the most prestigious honors in the field. Maria Schneider joins the podcast to talk about American Crow , her recent EP that u...

Today, we're putting The Tonearm 's needle on Caroline Davis , a saxophonist and composer based in New York. Her new album, Fallows , just came out on Ropeadope Records. Caroline made it alone during a residency in Ucross, Wyoming - improvising and recording in a cabin, using prepared saxophone techniques and a unique little instrument called an Organelle to process and build sounds she'd never pu...