I first met Sara Auster ten years ago when my friends in NYC rock band Peculiar Gentlemen decided to expand their sound and bring on three female back-up singers. Sara brought such a playful and positive energy to the stage in addition to providing ethereal vocals. These days, Sara channels her passion for music in her role as a certified Sound Therapy…
Eunbi Kim is a classical pianist with a flare for chasing down some pretty unexpected projects and, in the process, flipping the typical path of a concert performer right on its head. When I first met Eunbi, she had just returned from premiering Murakami Music in Houston, TX to rave reviews (like this one in the Houston Chronicle). Her multidisciplinary project explores the…
Last week at Soundfly Sessions, I took in the final set from (le) poisson rouge‘s sound booth, watching lighting designer Sharif Mekawy at work. What resulted was an impressive and dynamic light show that wove Delicate Steve’s incredible guitar riffs with visual artistry. Sharif is a freelance audio engineer and lighting designer by trade, yet his…
Mike Evin just released a new single. Most people don’t know Mike Evin. He’s a quiet, strange, talented Canadian who basically loves music and people and works just hard enough to keep those two things close to him, without making too big a fuss… I know Mike Evin, though. In fact, he was the first person…
Gabriel Berezin is a guitarist, singer and the frontman of Brooklyn-based Monuments. I sat down with him at Manhattan Inn recently to pick his brain on his musical process over many rounds of Bulleit Old Fashioneds. His band’s sophomore album Brigadune, released last year, was an exploration in duality (as he explained in a great interview with Greenpointers),…
Chesney Snow is a poet, a songwriter, a beatboxer, an actor, but most of all, he’s an artist through and through. Talking to him can feel a little like receiving a sermon from a beatboxing prophet of some sort, as he waxes lyrical about life as an artist today and the power of art to…
This past weekend, I was lucky enough to catch legendary jazz bassist William Parker and his “Tone Motion Theatre” hit Brooklyn’s Roulette for a free jazz celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called Yes I Dream of Freedom. It was basically a masterclass in how to execute a creative and thought-provoking concept piece, as Parker used music, dance,…
If you’re anything like us, you’ve watched Rob Cantor’s absurdly operatic tale of Shia Labeouf’s cannibalism and ultimate defeat 100 times by now. Clearly, there’s so much that makes this video just next level — from the aerial ribbon dancers to the actor himself appearing at the end like a half crazed serial killer pondering…
Last Summer throughout the UK, it was quite possible that if you wandered into an outdoor arts festival, you had a good chance of seeing a flock of pigeons flying overheard, producing a beautiful soundscape of tones. Introducing Nathaniel Mann, a London-based composer, sonic artist, instrument designer, ethnomusicological thinker and the man who strapped whistles…
Whenever I check in with my friend Gillian Jackson, she’s into something new. Currently, it’s teaching rock to children, scoring films, and playing scream metal (I don’t know if that’s how she’d classify it, but it definitely has screaming in it). Before that, it was neo-classical music, museum tours, and working with snakes and other woodland…
