Moira Smiley refers to herself as a song collector; she's also a singer, multi-instrumentalist (banjo, accordion, piano, and hand & body percussion), and songwriter. Smiley has sung in arenas, cathedrals, kitchens, back porches, sound stages, and on glaciers with the likes of Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Tune-Yards, Tim O’Brien, Eric Whitacre, Los Angeles Master Chorale, New World Symphony and Solas. But she’s spent a good portion of her career collecting, arranging and performing traditional songs from Appalachia, The Balkans, The Republic of Georgia, Wales, and more. Her latest album is called The Rhizome Project, and features a string quartet along with many guests. Moira Smiley and a string quartet [Sara Caswell (violin), Dana Lyn (violin), Josh Henderson (viola), Jody Redhage-Ferber (cello)] perform in-studio.

Set list: 1. Go Dig My Grave 2. Mourning Dove 3. Oh, Watch the Stars

The Rhizome Project by Moira Smiley

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The singer, songwriter, and multi instrumentalist Joan Wasser is "not a cop" and has been recording for the past twenty years under the name Joan As Police Woman – a saucy reference to the 1970s cop show that starred Angie Dickinson. She’s also collaborated with a huge range of musicians, from the worlds of rock, funk, folk, and experimental music. Her new album, called Lemons, Limes and Orchids, has a mostly nocturnal, understated quality while it celebrates joy and love in the face of extremely difficult times. Joan plays some stripped down versions of some of the songs, including the extraordinary title track, in-studio. 

Set list: 1. Full-Time Heist 2. Lemons, Limes and Orchids 3. Remember the Voice

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Yemen Blues is a band led by Israeli singer and songwriter Ravid Kahalani. For more than a decade now, the group has incorporated the sounds of Moroccan trance, Arab and Bedouin folk, and Western funk and rock into a high energy, groove-filled dance party. But behind that sound is a social conscience, and the band’s latest album is pointedly called Only Love Remains. Yemen Blues plays in-studio. 

Set list: 1. Ma'Ahla Asalam. 2. Greatest Man /Prayers 3. Allenby 4. Lfouq Lfouq

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Born in Guatemala but active in Mexico City’s bustling music scene, cellist, electronic music producer, and singer Mabe Fratti has been making music for several years that could lean toward the experimental and the avant-garde on the one hand, and what seems to be a flair for pop melodies on the other.  She writes songs that encompass chamber music, electronic music, soundscapes, and hard rock, -perhaps with jazz overtones- without ever settling into any one of them. Fratti and her collaborators have such talent for risk-taking, for playfulness with sound and its manipulation, and for endless riffs - whether cello (amplified and with pedals) or vocal processors, and artfully using feedback, field recordings, and loops. Her latest album is called Sentir que no Sabes, or Feel like you don’t know. Mabe Fratti and her trio play some of these songs in-studio. - Caryn Havlik

Set list: 1. Quieras o No 2. Kravitz 3. Oidos

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The Midwest band Cloud Cult is more than a band – it’s a creative collective who continually celebrates life and love, and catharsis through music and multimedia performances (CloudCult.com.) They’re also known for their ecofriendly ways of making and touring their music. Recently in 2022, their orchestral-folk-rock sound was expanded as they were playing and recording with the Minnesota Orchestra. Over the years, the band has embraced joy as an act of resilience, and their latest, Alchemy Creek was written, recorded and produced by front man Craig Minowa in the solitude of a tiny cabin on wheels and named for the nearby creek in the middle of the Wisconsin woods. The band plays some of these new songs, in-studio. - Caryn Havlik

Set list: 1. The Universe Woke Up As You 2. One Human Being 3. Different Kind Of Day

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Nashville-based artist Conner Youngblood is a singer, multi-instrumentalist and producer; his new record, called Cascades, Cascading, Cascadingly, is full of richly textured songs – in multiple languages (Spanish, Japanese, and Danish, in addition to his native English.) The music employs a wide array of effects without ever losing that organic, intimate feel; think of "sad Phil Spector meets shoegaze," (Schaefer). Conner plays some of these spacious, dreamy, and quietly curious maximalist bedroom-pop songs, in-studio.

Set list: 1. From an Ocean, to a Lake 2. Solo yo y Tú 3. Blue Gatorade

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Vocalist and composer Meredith Monk is a multi-disciplinary artist, whose work involves music, dance, film, theatre, and now: biology meets anthropology. In her recent large-scale work, Cellular Songs, musical forms evoke biological processes as layering, replication, division, and mutation in a “deeply affecting meditation on the nature of the biological cell as a metaphor for human society” (Financial Times). Through this work, Monk takes the microscopic unit of the cell, then projects and expands it as a proposal for “an alternative possibility of human behavior, where the values are cooperation, interdependence and kindness,” (much like how a cell functions, minus the kindness part.) Using their voices-as-instruments, Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble perform some of these Cellular Songs, along with violin, piano and keyboard, in-studio. [From the Archives, 2018.] -Caryn Havlik

Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble perform "Indra's Net" at the Park Avenue Armory, Sept. 23-Oct. 6

Watch the session via YouTube:

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The New York band Crumb creates playful and brooding swirls of sounds, somewhere at a crossroads of psychedelia, pop, jazz, and rock. Their latest album AMAMA (Grandmother) [self-released via their own label Crumb Records], experiments with textures and synthscapes: glitchy pitch-shifted vocals, cell phone recordings, nautical blips, sax mouthpiece solos, blasted drum samples, and piano strings dampened with Silly Putty. With lyrics whose meaning may emerge later, Crumb’s haunting music winds up being far from gentle or ‘chill’ and explores fraught encounters and transience, while striving to be carefree and searching for connection. Crumb plays a live set, in-studio. - Caryn Havlik

Set list: 1. The Bug 2. Side by Side 3. Genie

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American classical pianist and educator Christopher O’Riley has spent his career gleefully ignoring musical boundaries and playing whatever turned him on. In addition to playing Beethoven, Busoni, Ravel, Scriabin, and Liszt, he’s also arranged music by Nick Drake, Nirvana, Elliot Smith, and Radiohead; he leads masterclasses covering nearly every aspect of piano playing and repertoire from 1600 to 2020. Christopher O’Riley’s latest album is of J.S. Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, done in a distinctly personal, even idiosyncratic style. He presents his years-long study of the Preludes & Fugues by Bach and a recent arrangement of a classic popular song, in-studio.

Set list: 1. Bach: Prelude & Fugue #1 in C major, BWV 846 2. Bach: Prelude & Fugue #4 in C# minor, BWV 849 3."Over the Rainbow"

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Mehrnam Rastegari is a New York-based master of the traditional Persian spike fiddle, the kamancheh.  She is also a composer, writing film scores and ensemble works that draw on both Eastern and Western musical traditions.  She moved here from Iran in 2022 and formed the Mehrnam Rastegari Traditional Persian Band, a group of New York locals which features traditional Iranian instruments kamancheh, qanoun, daf, and vocals.  Rastegari leads that band in music she’s written, along with traditional Persian, Arabic, and Kurdish music. The Mehrnam Rastegari Traditional Persian Band plays in-studio. - Caryn Havlik

Set list: 1. Velveleh 2. Khosha Howraman 3. Show charay

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