Soundcheck

The Athens, Ga.-based group Drive-By Truckers has been writing about the Southern experience and its history for more than 20 years. Fronted by founding members Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, the band's latest record, American Band, is a collection of twangy rock underscoring blunt songs of anger and protest. The band intended to raise issues; it is their aim to get people thinking about their views on race, in addition to many other pressing topics: income inequality, gun violence, police brutality, Islamophobia, and the plague of suicides and opioid abuse.

Members of the band Drive-By Truckers join us in the studio to play a bit of a stripped-down set. 

Kaki King brings a string quartet with her into the studio to perform some of her elegant arrangements in this chamber plus rock-folk-jazz setting. Watch:

Guitarist, artist, songwriter and composer Kaki King writes in a variety of styles – finger-picked and tapped instrumentals, out-and-out pop songs, and chamber music works -both acoustic and electric. Her latest record, called Live At Berklee, is a recording of her own works orchestrated for the concert stage, and featuring the Porta Girevole Chamber Orchestra. 

Atlanta-based band, Manchester Orchestra, delivers gripping cinematic indie rock, and they recently impressed us in 2016 with their original film score for “Swiss Army Man.” That record saw music made unlike many film scores – without instruments. Singer Andy Hull and guitarist Robert McDowell just used layers upon layers of voices - breathing, humming, and other vocalizations done a cappella.

So, for their latest record, A Black Mile To The Surface, they re-invented again – this time with instruments – and took as their inspiration a vision of winters in South Dakota. This new record is an island of warmth in an epic snowscape, and is heavy on emotional arc, possibly tailor-made for swooning or deep reflective melancholy. Or both. Manchester Orchestra joins us live in the studio to play some of these new songs. 

Here's a playlist from drummer Andy Prince, on some musical inspiration for the album: 

You probably know songwriter, producer and arranger Dan Wilson. He’s the songwriter who wrote massive hits with folks like Adele (“Someone Like You”) and The Dixie Chicks (“Not Ready to Make Nice”), and for his own band, Semisonic (“Closing Time.”) Recently, the in-demand songwriter reclaimed these songs, rearranging them for his voice, his guitar – so that one could imagine performing them in the woods or at a lake (in perhaps Minnesota, where he is from), acoustically. Dan Wilson joins us live to play some of these “re-covered” songs.

Here’s his version of “Someone Like You” (arrangement by Jacob Slichter) as a collaboration with Kronos Quartet:

Producer and author Ian Brennan has worked with world music, folk music, traditional music, and has a feel for the DIY and lo-fi punk aesthetic. He produced Tinariwen’s Grammy-winning album, Tasili, but he has also recorded and amplified many voiceless communities – like the Zomba Prison Project (Malawi), Khmer Rouge Survivors (Cambodia), The Good Ones (Rwanda), and now, most recently, one of the most persecuted groups on the planet- people living with Albinism in East Africa - the Tanzania Albinism Collective.

Ian Brennan joins us in the studio to talk about traveling to the island of Ukerewe, the largest inland island in Africa, and “a place so remote that historically people often traveled there to abandon their children with albinism and now serves as a haven for many with the condition.” There, members of the Standing Voice community held workshops and worked with the local community of those with albinism – the “unheard,” hunted, feared, & murdered for their supposedly magical body parts. Hear the "un-professional" musicians of the Tanzania Albinism Collective, who grew up separated and shamed about their condition, not allowed into places where people gather and sing – like church, and relegated to “other-ness.”

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.