Something (rather than nothing)

Carol Butler is a ballpoint illustrator based in Boise Idaho, where she works seasonally as an organic farmer.An avid cyclist, and Norm Macdonald fan. She spends her time being a day dreaming degenerate while getting lost in the throws of a good science fiction novel.Featuring special guest host Sarah Romano-DiehlCarol in Insta!SRTN Website

Producer / composer / multi-instrumentalist Angel Marcloid records music under the moniker Fire-Toolz. Though Marcloid’s output emerges in a litany of distinct aliases and projects — from the jazz fusion / new age of Nonlocal Forecast to the vaporous nostalgia of MindSpring Memories — the Fire-Toolz catalog remains the central focus of the prolific artist’s musical universe and a home for Marcloid’s most ambitious and combinatory work. 'I am upset because I see something that is not there.', the fifth Fire-Toolz album to join the Hausu Mountain catalog since 2017, follows 2021’s sprawling double-album Eternal Home (HAUSMO111) and 2022’s self-released EP I will not use the body’s eyes today. I am upset […] offers listeners a prismatic cross-section of juxtaposed genres and compositional contortions to explore, maintaining Fire-Toolz’s signature density and complexity while tightening the scope of Marcloid’s experimentation into the project’s most focused song cycle to date. Perhaps more than any previous Fire-Toolz album, I am upset […] presents some form of pop music, carried in Marcloid’s passages of clean vocals, in the bright synth and keyboard tones that animate its tracks, in the yearning saxophone lines that pour into view and whisk the narrative onto a new path. The format of a one-person “band” carries a different weight in a landscape of solo artists crafting abstract modernist productions that don’t allude in the slightest to various twentieth-century rock-related traditions. Fire-Toolz exists on both sides of this divide.Fire-ToolzSRTN Podcast

Jadon Allen is the founder of Guilt! or guiltpdx, a streetwear and street art company based out of Portland, Oregon with the main goal of pushing creative boundaries. Guilt! produces a plethora of goods including unique clothing, colorful artworks, photography, and videography sold both online and in local Portland stores. More work can be found @guiltpdx on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.Jadon AllenSRTN Website

Elle Nash is the author of the short story collection Nudes (404 Ink and SF/LD Books) novels Gag Reflex (Clash Books) and Animals Eat Each Other (404 Ink and Dzanc Books), which was featured in the 2018 June Reading Room of O - The Oprah Magazine and hailed by Publishers Weekly as a ‘complex, impressive exploration of obsession and desire.' Her new novel, Deliver Me (Unnamed Press) was released October 2023. Her work appears in Guernica, BOMB, The Nervous Breakdown, Literary Hub, The Fanzine, Volume 1 Brooklyn, New York Tyrant and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine and has edited fiction at both Hobart Pulp and Expat Literary Journal.elle's websitepodcast website

Alternative tragic Americana, invocations for peace & judgment reshaping with bleeding heart stream of consciousness poems.Originally from Connecticut, before becoming a western transplant, Anna May is a singular artist whose songs bear a placelessness that lends to their timeless nature.The deep exploration of heartbreak and trauma has been an ongoing quest throughout Anna's work.Her lyrics have been heavily textured by a lonesome whimsicality that finds itself most at home in the vastness of the American West.Anna's music honors the nomadic spirit with memory, meditation & fresh interpretations of folk music and jazz influence. She honors a hope to enhance connection, humility, healing, and joy among people in the process of parting with typical genre rules.Anna's lyrical sensibility is steeped in wisdom, and layered with evocative musicality and metaphysical embroidery while eschewing the mainstream & parting with platitudes. Anna explores both estrangement and connection while taking cues from artists like Billie Holiday, Shawn Colvin, Neil Young, and Leonard Cohen.As a yogi, pianist, teacher & poet, she masterfully blends all of her influences into her songwriting.Anna has performed at wildflower music & arts festival, treefort music festival, Boston arts festival, water lantern festival, trout lake hall, abbey arts in Seattle, Globe Hall in Denver, Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, Broadway Comedy Club in Manhattan, the Mint in Los Angeles, and many more.Anna May WebsiteSRTN Website

Sarah Romano Diehl is a comic artist based in Seattle, WA. Her work is published in Seattle Magazine, The Stranger, and Scarff Comics Newspaper. Sarah has been publishing her minicomics and collabing with other comix artists and writers for around ten years. She loves being outside and near water.Sarah's websiteSRTN Website

Over to the NYC to get exclusive coverage of the plays Sex Work, Sex Play by Caytha Jentis and Doris Day: My Secret Love by Paul Adams!Caytha Jentis is a former literary agent. She has written, produced and directed a number of award-winning features including Bad Parents starring Janeane Garofalo, Cheri Oteri, Christopher Titus and Kristen Johnston (Cinedigm), And Then Came Love starring Vanessa Williams and Eartha Kitt (Warner Bros), and The One starring Jon Prescott (TLA Releasing). She has an MFA from UCLA in screenwriting and a BS in TV/film from Syracuse University. She is a member of the Producers Guild and NYWIFT.Paul Adams founded Emerging Artists Theatre in 1993 and has been the Artistic Director for the life of the company. During this time, he has helped showcase hundreds of new works (plays, solo-shows, musicals & dance pieces) for off and off-off Broadway. Some of his favorite credits include directing the off-Broadway production of Sisters’ Dance by Sarah Hollister at Baruch Performing Arts Center and producing the solo-show The Sensational Josephine Baker by Cheryl Howard which had two off-Broadway runs at Theatre Row and received a rave review in the NY Times. Paul performed his critically acclaimed solo-show The Cleaning Guy at FringeNYC in 2016 and is currently workshopping his full length play, Doris Day: My Secret Love. He has also served on the NY Innovative Theatre Awards committee since its inception.Emerging Artists TheatreCaytha Jentis SRTN Podcast Website

Nataša Babič is a New York actress, originally from Ljubljana, Slovenia. Natasa studied musical theater at the Performing Arts Studios Vienna. She continued her studies in New York at The Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute. Upon completion, she joined the HB Acting Studios and studied with Austin Pendleton in his advanced scene study class.Nataša performed Off and Off Off Broadway for many years. Her first Off Broadway role was Sandra/Sissy a split personality character in Anne L. Thompson Scretching’s "The Sanctuary" at the American Theater Of Actors. One of her favorite roles was the impressionist painter Mary Cassatt in The Independents. The play opened Off Broadway at the Jerry Orbach Theater in 2019 and extended it's run twice. Nataša’s latest performance Off Broadway was Tammany Hall at the SoHo Playhouse. This immersive theater production was directed by Alexander Wright and Darren Lee Cole. Nataša has also developed her film and TV career. Amongst others she played a lead role in a horror movie Dark Tarot, a supporting role in an indie feature Life is Too Short and a thriller Gunpoint.Nataša joined the Hallmark Movie Channel family in their new production The Dancing Detective, A Deadly Tango. She is playing a lead supporting role of Mary Aston. The movie premiered on Hallmark in June 2023. Nataša is looking forward to what the future might bring and is a determined optimist on this ever changing path of life.Website SRTN Website

A special interview with Sadie Dupuis.Dupuis chats about art, labor, music, meaning, poetry and Speedy Ortiz's 'Rabbit Rabbit" record release out this very same day! Features the tracks "Scabs" and "Ranch v Ranch."“Rabbit rabbit” is a superstitious incantation repeated on the first of each month to bring good fortune—a belief practiced by Sadie Dupuis, the guitarist, singer and songwriter of the Philadelphia rock quartet Speedy Ortiz. As a child with OCD, she followed arbitrary rituals, a coping mechanism commonly triggered by early trauma, and “rabbit rabbit” was one that stuck. When Dupuis began to parse difficult memories for the first time in her songwriting, it felt like kismet to name her band’s resultant fourth record after an expression of luck and repetition: Rabbit Rabbit. Instead of re-treading old routines, the record finds Speedy Ortiz interrogating conventions, grappling with cycles of violence and destructive power dynamics with singular wit and riffs. Rabbit Rabbit finds Speedy Ortiz at its most potent: melodically fierce, sonically mountainous, scorching the earth and beginning anew.SadieSpeedy OrtizSRTN

Very happy to share a ranging conversation with activist Rick Staggenborg. Recorded at a union hall in Albany, Oregon, host Ken Volante and Rick talk about public banking, health care for all, philosophy, God, veterans, service and hope for the betterment of humans.Rick is a retired psychiatrist who specialized in PTSD and worked in community psychiatry before finishing his career at the VA, retiring in 2010.Rick advocates for universal health care as a member of Physicians for a National Health Program and by serving in multiple roles with Health Care for All Oregon and is  chair of the Faith Caucus.Rick is also an Army veteran and is active in the antiwar movement as the President of the Linus Pauling Chapter of Veterans For Peace.Listen in on this special and exploratory episode!SRTN Website