Tracks of the Week 20.04.24
Where other artists who have embraced the windy strains and shifting timbres of the pipe organ tend to go in for liturgical refrains, celebrations of the mundane or juxtapositions of the two...
Tracks of the Week 16.03.24
When the baritone saxophone specialist and former Downtown stalwart Dave Sewelson and the visceral guitar virtuoso Ava Mendoza first conceived the idea of a duo album, the expectation was that they’d veer...
Ava Mendoza & Dave Sewelson – Of It But Not Is It
When the baritone saxophone specialist and former Downtown stalwart Dave Sewelson and the visceral guitar virtuoso Ava Mendoza first conceived the idea of a duo album, the expectation was that they’d veer...
Tracks of the Week 10.02.24
From ‘Old Shep’ and ‘Old King’ to ‘Cracker Jack’ and Campfire Songs with its crackling ode to an aeriform doggy, the small corpus of music about losing a pet has tended to...
Culturedarm’s Records of the Year for 2023
It’s an old saw by this point to suggest that while the livelihood of the average working musician has never been more perilous, the curious listener has at the same time never...
Tracks of the Week 09.09.23
In 1948 the audio engineer and music publisher Moses Asch founded Folkways Records with a mission to put on wax not only traditional, secular and children’s music but poetry, language instruction, liturgical...
Tracks of the Week 15.07.23
‘The cock crows / But no queen rises’ begins ‘Depression Before Spring’ by the elliptical modernist Wallace Stevens, a silvery wisp of a poem full of bird call and nonsense syllables from...
Tracks of the Week 08.07.23
Between the portrait of the gay rights activist Marsha P. Johnson which adorns the cover of the record and the sliver of ice ecstatically recalled in memory of her friend and mentor...
Tracks of the Week 10.06.23
Born in Oslo and splitting his childhood between there and Bali as he learned circular breathing through the resonances of the flute and didgeridoo, attending a music conservatory in Copenhagen before basing...