Kreative Kontrol

Anthony Anzaldo and Ross Farrar from CEREMONY are here to discuss Tell Me About Your Dream , moving around California, befriending each other in elementary school, hair restoration and people who suggest ideas to you about your hair, the Bay Area hip-hop, hardcore, and punk communities, how addressing politics in music might evolve as you do, logic, feelings, power, and entitlement in modern life,...

Don Pyle returns to discuss his lovely new memoir, Rough Description: Love Letters and Ghost Stories from a Life in Music , summers in Toronto, why he wrote this deeply personal book of reflections, recollections, and remembrances, what we learn about departed friends like Reid Diamond, Dallas Good, and Steve Albini, thriving in spite of a difficult childhood and a mother in emotional duress, kins...

Andrew Bernstein and Max Eilbacher from Horse Lords are here to discuss their new album Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! , excellent Indian food in Winnipeg, why all of Horse Lords now live in Germany, being tagged as “Krautrock” and residential coincidences, the socio-economic conditions that might spur artists to migrate around the world, whether or not the rise of Angine de Poitrine means in...

Robyn Hitchcock is here to discuss his new memoir, Stranded in the Future , and his new album, The Confuser , surreal song and prose writing, being haunted by lifelong muses, a fear of being boring, pondering parenting and figuring yourself out, how attending an all-boys school impacts the empathy you have for people of other genders, why aliens gravitate towards other aliens like Bob Dylan and Sy...

Dale Morningstar from the Dinner is Ruined is here to discuss the band’s first new album in 21 years, Like A Tree,Heroic , the first time I saw Dinner is Ruined in 1996 opening an intimate Toronto show for Beck, leaving Toronto for Hamilton, encountering inspiring trees and people, the story behind the making of Gord Downie’s Coke Machine Glow , startling Dave Clark/Don Kerr connections, writing s...

Greg Obis from Stuck is here to discuss their new album Optimizer , following Bob Weston in operating Chicago Mastering Service , his background in audio engineering and an internship he had at Electrical Audio , how Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life helped him re-assess punk rock, explaining what mixing and mastering is via a cooking analogy, where Stuck comes from, recording Optimize...

Roy Binnion and Brian Sokel from !franklin are here to discuss Go Kid Go [Remastered & Expanded] , the Lower Swedish Cabin in Philadelphia, the band’s Canadian connections, the Random Children/!franklin link, Roy’s early entrepreneurship and association with Fred Armisen’s band Trenchmouth, !franklin before Roy joined, why !franklin songs rarely had set lyrics when performed live, the band’s u...

Simone Schmidt from Fiver returns to discuss Fiver Trois presents Cleaning House , seeing a psychic who encouraged them to re-organize their living space and rid themself of belongings, how stuff can memorialize people who are gone, hoarding and archiving, losing and then re-gaining artistic metaphor, how life being a joke morphed into “That’s a Joke,” the gamification of everything we do, importa...

Sook-Yin Lee returns to discuss her new album 72RHR , her home studio and a story about breaking her leg, the constant presence and enduring wisdom of her late partner and collaborator Adam Litovitz, an interest in the human resting heart rate and life and death, a dangerous MuchMusic assignment, a gift from Jennifer Castle, making dirt and bone music, when helpful things are also harmful, if thin...

Jeremy Pahl from G̱a̱mksimoon is here to discuss their debut album Gyiin Naxnox (Feeding the Supernatural), the Hartley Bay region of British Columbia where he and his community reside, his personal linguistic journey and keen interest in cultural and language perpetuation, entering death metal and folk music realms but finding both to be problematic or stifling in some way, getting into metal as...

Jacob Bannon from Converge is here to discuss the band’s 2026 albums released to date, Love Is Not Enough and Hum of Hurt , the penchant for DIY workers to multi-task and take on various kinds of projects every day, the increasing demand for artists to execute all manner of album release-related and promotional tasks, his thoughts on the impact of artificial intelligence on visual art and design a...

Due to a technical error, there are currently two podcast feeds for this show circulating and one of them will soon be archived. As such, some subscribers may notice that Kreative Kontrol either disappears or stops refreshing in your podcast feed in the next while. If so, sorry about that but please subscribe or follow the show again! Thanks! To hear ad and interruption-free episodes of Kreative K...

Claire Devlin and Eli Davidovici from Bellbird are here for a springtime talk about their new album The Call , the McGill University music program, why so many musicians from British Columbia wind up in Montreal, their respective early interests in top 40 pop radio, mainstream and classic rock, and eventually jazz and free music, how improvisation can feel like freedom but also be quite frightenin...

Aidan McConnell, Ben Rositsan, Josh Sparks, and Steven Noronha from Potions are here to discuss the potions95 EP and their new album, Beebo, Make a Wish , being Toronto musicians, the Edmonton/Calgary rivalry, the good, the bad, and the fortuitous aspects of studying music at the University of Toronto, the Liverpool, England rock combo the Beatles and a band Potions is associated with called Ben M...

Nicholas Krgovich and Joseph Shabason are here to discuss the wonderful new Shabason & Krgovich record, Four Days in June , scary but also somehow fortuitous car trouble, their working and social history, how Dan Bejar and John Collins from Destroyer connected them, everyone loving Nick’s record On Sunset , writing observational lyrics about other people’s lives and how it’s harder to make fri...

Hamilton Leithauser returns to discuss growing up in D.C. and being influenced by bands on Dischord Records, working as recording engineer Don Zientara’s assistant at his Inner Ear studio while Fugazi was recording Red Medicine , recalling how Roy Orbison helped him find his singing voice, getting into home recording, having restraint and foresight as a one-man studio band, pondering the tenth ann...

Greg Anderson and Stephen O’Malley from SUNN O))) are here to discuss their new self-titled album , American artists moving to Porto in Portugal, why they relate to author Robert Macfarlane’s vivid liner notes and his essay about being overwhelmed by a standing wave, reflecting upon our experiences at a memorial gathering for Steve Albini and what we learned about him, how this album’s producer Br...

Jon Spencer returns to discuss his new album Songs of Personal Loss and Protest , making the trek to play shows in Canadian cities like Edmonton, the uncertain status of Jon Spencer and the HITmakers, how his new trio featuring Kendall Wind and Macky Bowman came to be and whether or not this band will have a name, the comprehensive Jon Spencer fan site, Pop Catastrophe , what it’s like playing in...

Evan Cartwright, Tim Darcy, and Ben Stidworthy from Cola are here to discuss their new album Cost of Living Adjustment , the first Ought interview ever, why Ought ended when it did, group dynamic stressors and Buddhism, the way Cola work together, cool beats and whether or not Ben could be a music producer, delving particularly deeply into the songs “Hedgesitting” and “Much of a Muchness,” the ban...

Gina Gershon is here to discuss her new memoir, AlphaPussy: How I Survived the Valley and Learned to Love My Boobs , creating the perfect breakfast cereal, how this new book came to fruition, similarities shared between cats and men, why some younger artists see a toughness in her they feel they can’t harness themselves, writing a reflective book about being an independent, somewhat unparented chi...

Mike Stroud and Nick Thorburn from the Creem are here to discuss their new album A Taste of Cherry , why Los Angeles may in fact be hell, standard items available at most Connecticut shopping complexes, their social and working history, Mike’s gifts as a producer of instrumentals and how that inspired Nick to write clever lyrics and vocal melodies very quickly, expressing joy and humour in your ar...

Craig Dunsmuir and Sandro Perri return to discuss Glissandro 70 and their new album G70 2: Bones Of Dundasa , getting emotionally attached to your neighbours who are cows, a table reading of this album’s promotional one-sheet, embracing your own creations after periods of self-doubt and reflection, Andy Magoffin’s playful humour and underrated songwriting genius in the Two-Minute Miracles, the key...

Zoh Amba is here to discuss their astonishing new album Eyes Full , making their podcast debut and a recent hang with folk bitch trio, how they got into guitar, songwriting, and rock music, recurring lyrics about God, eyes, searching, and observational behaviour, why “Southern Soil” is such a key song for them in their Tennessee trajectory, the story behind their collaboration with Jim White and G...

Steve Holmes and Steve Lamos from American Football are here to discuss American Football (LP4) , the joys of marking final papers by the college students you teach, the story behind the alluring, unsettling drum part in “Man Overboard” and an appreciation for James Bond soundtrack songs, why Lamos left and returned to American Football in recent years, the factual aspects of LP4’s lyrical themes...

Marisa Anderson returns to discuss her compelling new album, The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music Vol. 1 , the joys of touring, responding to a Patreon subscriber’s inquiry about her new band Ruminants, exploring the Bob Dylan Center and immersing herself in the private record collection of the late, famed cultural collector/curator, Harry Smith, how she landed on recording her own three-album s...