The Argentine singer/songwriter and brilliant producer of experimental off-kilter folk-tronica, Juana Molina, has a former life as a well-known comic actress. She embraces that playful humor and explores ancient folk legends involving bone on her latest record, Halo. The ever-changing electronic textures feel mysterious, and are full of shadows, but with a sense of devious fun, even at the risk of being morbid. Juana Molina joins us to play some of these fantastical (and fantastic!) tunes live in the studio. 

Brooklyn’s own Afropop-funk-dance big band Antibalas, is probably your favorite band’s favorite band. The 12-piece plus ensemble ranges freely through all kinds of funk, Afro-Cuban music, loping rhythms of Ethiogroove, Caribbean dance, punk rock, and extraplanetary cosmic jazz. And that’s in addition to having been credited with introducing Afrobeat (in the tradition of the late Nigerian saxophonist, singer, bandleader and activist Fela Kuti) to a global audience. 

The Brooklyn collective was born in the late 1990’s in a Brooklyn warehouse/cheesecake factory that also incubated the Dap Kings and TV on the Radio. Since that time Antibalas has performed with Afro-Cuban, avant classical, soul, funk, rock, rap, reggae, and pop music stars: Jovanotti, Mark Ronson, Santigold, Beyonce, Angelique Kidjo, My Morning Jacket, Zap Mama, Bruno Mars, The Roots, Medeski, Martin and Wood, David Byrne and St. Vincent. They have also served as the house band and musical directors for the Broadway show Fela!, in addition to being the house band at Carnegie Hall at tribute shows performing the music of Paul Simon (2014), David Byrne and Talking Heads (2015) and Aretha Franklin (2017).

Their new record, Where The Gods Are In Peace, pays respect to the forefathers of Afrobeat, and they join us in the studio for a live performance. 

PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING sample archival recordings to make filmic, yet propulsive self-contained history lessons, with electronics and live drums, guitar and bass flugelhorn. They perform chapters from their latest, "Every Valley," about the coal-mining boom and collapse in southern Wales, live in the studio.

The west coast-based sound-maker and experimenter Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith weaves melodic patterns and pulses, using various analogue synthesizers – like the rare EMS Synthi 100 synthesizer, a vintage Buchla modular synthesizer, earning her a fun title as a composer and producer – “synthesist.” Her palette includes strings, bassoons, clarinets, and horns, natural sounds, and noisy textures, along with her layered vocals with arresting results.

On Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith's latest, The Kid, due out in October, she crafts a playfully strange expression of human awareness via these synthesized sound designs that falls neither in the pop world nor the avant/classical. The album’s over-arching concept maps human existence from birth to death, from awareness of the self to seeking wisdom and achieving peace and how that might coexist in nature. Synthesist, producer and composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith joins us in the studio to perform some of her recent creations.

RIYL: the films of Hayao Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli, Suzanne Ciani, Joshua Light Show, Euclidean geometry, Anna Meredith, and s t a r g a z e.  

The wonderfully twisted, self-possessed, wry, leather jacket-armored dark humored queen of the downtown night, Shilpa Ray, continues to survive working the door at the Lower East Side / New York City bar Pianos. And she’s turned that harsh reality into an album of cutting commentary.

On the forthcoming record Door Girl, Shilpa Ray plays with throwback “girl group” sounds – except she’s got backing guy vocals and crisp production. Her songs are full of acerbic observations on desperate people, some quite personal - "Manhattanoid Creepazoids," "Revelations of a Stamp Monkey," and "Rockaway Blues"; the portraits are far from pretty, and definitely no longer glittering, with a blaze-of-lights-at-closing-time-feel delivered in her singular brassy croon and growl. Shilpa Ray joins us, (sans harmonium), in the studio to play some of these latest songs.

Cigarettes After Sex is a sensual pop-noir band founded in El Paso, TX, but now based in Brooklyn. Frontman Greg Gonzalez’ dark androgynous voice wouldn’t be out of place in a David Lynch creation, or in "The Handmaid's Tale" (one of the songs WAS used in the TV series - "Nothing's Gonna Hurt You Baby") with its moody, dreamy, seductive and – a bit creepy - undertones. The spirit of arthouse cinema haunts these slow-burn romantic and very filmic songs, with transporting melodies and spaciously chiming guitars & keyboards. Cigarettes After Sex plays some of their autumnal dreamy tunes from the most recent first full length self-titled release, live in the studio.  

Hear music from one of the two Sonic Youth guitarists, Lee Ranaldo, along with the fingerstyle folk rocker Steve Gunn, recorded at the 2017 New York Guitar Festival in the Greene Space.

Ranaldo rhapsodizes about how he had been writing recently on acoustic guitar instead of electric, playing these “wooden” guitars, and even using standard tuning for most of the songs on his forthcoming record, Electric Trim (MUTE Records, due out September 15) . Jonathan Lethem helped out with the lyrics on many of the songs, and Lee plays one, “Thrown Over The Wall.”

Plus, hear a contemplative fingerpicked acoustic tune by Steve Gunn, once a sideman for Kurt Vile, and a member of psych-folk supergroup Black Dirt Oak. Listen to a song dedicated to the late fingerstyle guitarist Jack Rose, who is the reason that Gunn began to explore that playing style. 

Columbian band Bomba Estéreo explores their South American roots, mixing up cumbia, vallenato, & champeta with club & dub dance beats on their latest, "Ayo." Bomba Estéreo join us live.

The appealingly danceable music of Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, or OMD, as the trailblazing synth-driven electronic band came to be known, has delighted and charmed listeners for decades. They formed in the late 1970's, greatly inspired by Kraftwerk, and with influences ranging from CAN to Barry White. OMD, is in the midst of a revival, with a brand new record due out September 1, and their founding members join us in the studio for a live performance. 

The turbo-charged New York band Gogol Bordello get wild with the riotous magic of Eastern European-rooted gypsy punk in the studio, anticipating their latest record, "Seekers & Finders."