Soundcheck

Torres, aka singer and guitarist Mackenzie Scott, unleashes the exuberant energy of a post-plague celebration with her latest album, Thirstier. She writes about passion and desire and “bringing my girlfriend lunch so she can keep painting.” Adding to these romantic sentiments are the overt power pop crunch of muscular and hooky guitars, Moog-enhanced melodies and Torres’ expressive voice, which goes from hug to howl. Torres and her band declare their arena rock intentions live in The Greene Space. - Caryn Havlik

Set List: "Don't Go Puttin Wishes In My Head," "Hug from a Dinosaur," "Thirstier"

Watch "Don't Go Puttin Wishes In My Head":

Watch "Hug From a Dinosaur":

Watch "Thirstier": 

Little May is an Australian trio whose signature sounds include dark and poetic lyrics, urgent guitar strumming and, above all, beautiful 3-part vocal harmonies. Their 2015 album, For The Company, was produced by The National’s Aaron Dessner and may have a bit of New York in its musical DNA. The band has toured with Mumford and Sons, Alabama Shakes, and others, and in 2015, they stopped by our studio for a live set. (Archives.)

Efterklang is a Danish band consisting of the 3 childhood friends Mads Brauer, Casper Clausen & Rasmus Stolberg, although the band often expands when playing live. For over twenty years, they have been collaborating and experimenting to arrive at a sound that evades easy labeling, so we’ll call it art-rock-indie-folk-chamber-pop. They play new songs from their latest, "Windflowers," remotely for the Soundcheck Podcast.

Poet, sax player, electronic music producer, storyteller, and composer JJJJJerome Ellis is a stutterer. On his 2021 album The Clearing, he takes speech disfluency and considers how it affects one’s experience of time. JJJJJerome Ellis offers live performances of works from his new album and shares how to say “I stutter” in Portuguese. 

The guitarist, composer, ethnomusicologist, and instrument builder Paolo Angeli is associated with traditional Sardinian music and has co-organized an international arts festival in Palau since 1996. He has collaborated with Pat Metheny (who uses Angeli's guitar in Orchestrion), Fred Frith, Hamid Drake, Iva Bittova, Zeena Parkins, and Derek Gripper.

Paolo Angeli plays the prepared Sardinian guitar, a hybrid electro-acoustic instrument that looks like a guitar crossed with a cello, and has virtually orchestral capabilities. Angeli’s custom creation has been fitted cross-wise and lengthwise with additional strings: cello strings and drone strings, and has numerous other inventions attached to it, including hammers, pedals, and some propellers at variable speed. Then there’s his array of effects, controlled by both his feet and hands. These custom modifications enable him to become a crazy-awesome one-man band, as he draws on Sardinian folk music, jazz, flamenco, Arabic suggestions, post-folk and contemporary classical music in his compositions. 

Paolo Angeli strums, bows, and hammers the instrument, and adds traditional Sardinian vocalizing, in a stunning performance of music from his latest, JAR’A, for this remote session, filmed on the island’s northern shore. - Caryn Havlik

Watch Paolo Angeli on the Sardinian shore:

Multiple Grammy-winner and longtime UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Angélique Kidjo pulls together multiple generations, collaborating with global pop stars Burna Boy and Yemi Alade among others, in addition to focusing on our connection to the natural world for her latest album, Mother Nature. Through a signature combination of West African music, jazz, and funk, and using her incredible voice as instrument, Kidjo asks us to honor Mother Nature, and hopes that one lesson that people might learn from the pandemic is how to better care for one another.

As she and host John Schaefer chat, Kidjo gives props to her collaborators, many of them from younger generations, and also speaks to being the vocalist in Philip Glass’ Symphony No. 12, (Lodger) based on David Bowie’s album. Even with no audience, Angélique Kidjo’s larger-than-life stage presence captivates as she talks about having the luxury of living out her passion. She performs live with her band, from The Greene Space in advance of a Mother Nature concert event at Carnegie Hall on Friday, Nov. 5. - Caryn Havlik

Watch "Africa -One of a Kind”:

Watch "Take It Or Leave It":

Watch "Mother Nature":

Brooklyn trio Upper Wilds features Dan Friel (ex-Parts & Labor) on guitar, vocals, and effects, bassist Jason Binnick, and drummer Jeff Ottenbacher and is really exceptional at making fuzzy-noisy songs with big pop riffs, usually concealed within explosive sonic textures.  They’ve now released the third in a series of albums about the planets, Venus, and the band is continuing their way further out as they go, planning to release a seven inch when they get to Pluto.

Friel confides that he’s still learning how to be a singer-songwriter after starting with interesting and possibly noisy textures. He prefers using the open tunings of Glenn Branca, tremolo picking, and effects that can ring and chime forever. Friel says that the lyrics just write themselves, themed around the planet named for the god of love, which also happens to be a “backwards-spinning hellscape that melts every camera we send there…”

Hear through the noise to the melodies as Upper Wilds plays very fast love songs from Venus, remotely from their practice space. - Caryn Havlik

Set List: “Love Song #5,” “Love Song #3,” “Love Song #1”

Watch "Love Song #5":

Watch "Love Song #3":

Watch "Love Song #1":

Guitar innovator and part-time sound technician Guy Buttery discusses the spontaneous recording session with two master musicians, Mohd. Amjad Khan (tabla) & Mudassir Khan (sarangi), called One Morning In Gurgaon. He plays Indian classical music-inspired tunes remotely from South Africa on a custom baritone guitar and improvises on Raag Yaman playing the surbahar (bass sitar).

Watch "Kya Baat":

Watch "Surbahar the Mule": 

Austin-based guitarist, songwriter, and vocalist Carl “Buffalo” Nichols wants to remind folks of the value of the blues as a cultural art form. “Listening to this record, I want more Black people to hear themselves in this music that is truly theirs.” The self-described music nerd considers Delta blues, Chicago blues, West African Malian guitar rhythms, and the African ancestry of the clawhammer banjo in his sonic experimentation and ongoing study of chords and riffs.

Nichols, who lived in Milwaukee for most of his life save for his overseas travels, is Fat Possum Records’ first blues signing in nearly 20 years and “is grateful to be part of the label’s legacy of blues music that also includes Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside,” (Austin Monthly). For his remote performances, Buffalo Nichols wields both a hollow body Fender guitar and a resonator-style guitar, as he plays tunes from his self-titled record. - Caryn Havlik 

Set list: “These Things”, “How to Love,” “Lost and Lonesome”

“These Things”: 

“How to Love”:

“Lost and Lonesome”:

Puerto Rican composer/performer/educator Angélica Negrón, who writes tiny and big sounds for chamber ensembles, orchestras, films, plants, robots and drag queens, joins us for the Soundcheck Podcast. Angélica takes us into her sensory world, and explains how her overlapping creative adventures feed into each other – say writing for the Dallas Symphony or for drag queens, or for the dreambow band, Balún. She offers a live performance - triggering sounds via plant art, programmed surface poppers, and hidden computers into a sonic dreamscape.