Category: Album

They say America has no mythology of its own – only a history too young to grow into legend. But drive through the prairies of Dakota at sunset, hear the creak of a freight car somewhere along the tracks of the Pacific Northwest, or pull over on the shoulder of a highway and watch the…

“If I can feel your pain, your doubts, your happiness, your elation through themusic, it means I can feel you. And this can lead to reflection on my own life”, – says Danish musician and songcraft researcher Martin Høybye. Having written his first song at fourteen, and at seventeen setting off to the US to…

“Creativity is a way to find yourself before others finally define you.” In this thought, in my view, there is both romance and anxiety at the same time: the path to one’s own authenticity is rarely straightforward. More often, it passes through shame, loneliness, exhaustion, the desire to conform – through those states that are…

The word “inevitability” is built treacherously. In form it is a negation-“ne” plus “izbezhat’”, that is, “that which cannot be avoided.” When I hear “inevitability,” I automatically imagine an oncoming catastrophe, a diagnosis, a finale from which there is no salvation. The word seems to deprive one of the right to speak in advance: if…

Freidrich$ was one of the few artists I discovered for myself over the past two years. I like his unconventional approach to creativity – a stubborn unwillingness to stay in one genre longer than needed to squeeze everything interesting out of it and move on. That’s why his new album “I Came Across” wasn’t a…

Let’s admit it to each other: we all put off a lot of things, and listing them all is a pointless exercise – the list risks being endless. This applies not only to everyday life but also to quite specific fields. In music, for instance, a songwriter, having written a song, sometimes sets it aside…

I put on “Virtual Island” by Christopher R. Kramer’s project Son Tensei, expecting nothing more than unobtrusive background noise for half an hour, but got hopelessly stuck on “Music I Need.” I got stuck on “Music I Need” longer than I planned: there is a line there sung as if a person is making excuses…

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken,” Oscar Wilde ironized, hardly suspecting how prophetic this thought would turn out to be for the digital age. Stories have become a showcase of social realism, perfection has become the new routine, and flawlessness the main cause of chronic fatigue. We spend tons of energy trying to appear…

When I wrote about the first Outsideness album, “…From What?”, I was mostly occupied with the question of how this alliance came to be: Freidrich$ with his inside-out R&B and Azalias with her languid voice. Back then, it was important for me to understand the mechanics-to explain to myself and to the reader why the…

Some breaks quietly stretch into years, even decades. The guitar goes up onto the shelf, the notebook of poems closes mid-line, and life goes on – without music as its soundtrack. That’s what happened to Brendan Ranney, an indie musician from Southern California whose voice was heard on stages in Fort Wayne and Claremont in…