Fifteen Recommendations
Start your journey into our most recent interviews here - with music and videos. Updated almost daily.
Xol Meissner about his Voice and Singing
There are plenty “disembodied” or “ghostly” voices. Xol Meissner's, however, sounds as though it were conversely re-embodied after spending time between this world and another, like a ghost slipping back into a physical shell. Singing saved Xol Meissner. Maybe his music can save you, too.
Patrick Ellis about Directions in Contemporary Composition
“Music is all about creating, sharing ideas, and connecting with each other. If we take that away from the equation, then it is merely a digital product.”
Patrick Fitzgerald aka Stephen Hero Shares his Creative Process
Patrick Fitzgerald has literally written hundreds of songs, many of them gorgeous, many of them filled with poetic observations. What makes him pick one chord over another, follow this theme while dropping that one, what makes lyrics either beautiful or banal? If only he knew.
Björn Meyer Shares his Creative Process
Listening to Meyer play his bass is like looking deep into his eyes – an intimate connection wordlessly bridging the divide between sender and receiver. Locking into tactile patterns, then again feeling its way through dreams of baroque beauty, his new ECM album creates a space of deep resonance.
Sera Kalo about Lyrics
“Poetry can break your heart. But music can break your heart and rearrange your nervous system.”
Maximilian Hering about Drums and Drumming
Yes, there are drum solos on Maximilian Hering's “The Gathering.” But so are soulful flute lines and tender reed harmonies; and for every bar of relentless swing there is a corresponding moment of inward-looking stillness. It isn't virtuosity that drives these jazz pieces – but the rhythm of life.
Waan about Directions in Jazz
Waan's debut was one of my favourite jazz-adjacent LPs of the past years. Their new one looks set to keep me happy for another few. Drawing from the band's live performances, “We Want WAAN” leans towards pulsation, ecstasy, trance – and the simple pleasure of getting lost in the groove.
Morning Stars about Collaboration
When drummer Sebastian Vogel hit the big 5, his friends treated him to a special birthday present: A band. As befits a gift, Morning Stars are about friendship and fun. Songs are loose and filled with gorgeous vocal harmonies – while spinning out into epic arrangements with dervish-like motorics.
Miska Lamberg about the Magic of Sounds
Miska Lamberg's “Evening, window” is a gentle obduction into a different world: Melodies drift by like clouds, harmonies bleed into field recordings, cycles loop until they no longer have a beginning or an end. Images disappear until there's nothing left but an ear drifting in an ocean of sound.
Antonio Sánchez about Drums & Drumming
There is a rhythm to everything: our breath and our speech, our laughter and our cries, to the way we walk and the way we think. And so, drumming, for Antonio Sánchez is more than playing the drums - or maybe playing the drums, just the life it draws from, is ultimately about everything as well.
Angie Perera about Lyrics
Angie Perera's new single is as sweet and celebratory as her previous ones. But the African touch of the beats and the beauty of the lyrics sung in what she describes as imperfect Chichewa reveal this as something different and special – a tribute to her home of Malawi, a declaration of love.
Delaney Bailey about her Voice and Singing
Life is a struggle, life is unpredictable, life can get messy. So why should music pretend otherwise? Delaney Bailey's songs are odes to imperfection, arrows released with love but dipped in the bitter truth. Being this open can be painful – but it's where the healing begins.
Emile Martinez about Directions in Jazz
“Jazz came from people who had very little and created something world-changing. That’s the part that always hits me: the personal and collective sacrifices it took to keep this music alive, to pass it down, and to evolve it.”
Chaton Laveur about Kraut & Krautrock
Belgian duo Chaton Laveur are almost closer to the original Kraut spirit than some of the originators. Their songs weave melancholic dream pop moods around motorik groove patterns and psychedelic sound worlds – adding their own little star to a galaxy of wondrous constellations.
César Merveille about Directions in Electronic Music
Few enjoy being questioned. César Merveille actively seeks it out. “Community teaches you there isn’t just one way to make music,” he stresses, “There are infinite paths.” His new EP is a particularly lovely one – slightest variations in lush, hypnotic loops leading to a place of cosmic bliss.
Erik Hall about Interpretation
Hall's unique and moving interpretations are explorations of score and performer alike. He can be 18 musicians at once for Steve Reich, an intimate keyboard-trio for Simeon ten Holt, a human synthesizer for Laurie Spiegel. It's not a question of rules or faith - it's a question of love.
İlhan Erşahin Shares his Creative Process
Every project has a color for the Swedish-Turkish polyhyphenate. And so it is with the new full-length of his band The Istanbul Sessions - which shines with the red of passion, the blue of an open sky, the green of rolling grooves and the bright yellow of a sun setting over a world without borders.
TheARTI$T about Directions in R&B
After a lengthy absence from the headlines, R&B is finally in the spotlight again. For singer-songwriter TheARTI$T, however, this is not a comeback. As her delectably warm and comforting music proves, a music as timeless as this is always in season.
Arnau Obiols about Directions in Electronic Music
Krautrock was the gateway into electronic music for the Barcelona-based performer-producer. It continues to influence his work which spans a spectrum from psychedelic folk via drifty dub to house-driven spiritual jazz. It's not about being eclectic – it all slots together if you just let go.
Marina Trench about Directions in Electronic Music
The French producer sees art as a tool for a deeper understanding of ourselves, furthering dialogue with others and advancing freedom. The current obsession with technology and “rational” logic is leading us away from what really matters: “Sensibility and how it is interpreted.”
Tesfa Williams about Emotions in Music
“Music has the power to shift people emotionally. When you shift emotion, you can shift perspective.”
Ulrika Spacek Share their Creative Process
For their upcoming fourth album, the band spent a year writing new music, then another one shaping it. Occasionally embracing chaos full-on, the resulting pieces playfully twist the song format, blurring the boundaries between a live band and its electronically re-assembled ghost.
OMA about Directions in Hip Hop
Sampling remains an important aspect of hip hop culture. But who is going to provide the material for future generations to sample once the well has run dry? OMA are stepping up to the challenge with dark, soulful instrumentals that feed from free-flowing improv and real time interaction.
Erica Tucceri about her Path to Jazz and the Melbourne Jazz Scene
The way the Australian flutist describes her hometown makes it seem like the best place for record digging and seeing inventive musicians tap into creative energy stream each night. Still, her own music – dreamy, floating, ethereal - takes listeners to even more beautiful places.
Alex Ventling about Improvisation
“I would go as far to say that the initial idea doesn’t even matter compared to the transformation of it.”
Diogo Piçarra about his Voice and Singing
Piçarra's electronically charged future-rock has global appeal. But it could never be decoupled from his Portuguese roots. His love for music is based on his belief in its fundamental role: “Music is the most rudimentary and ancestral form of culture, a symbol of our prehistoric intelligence.”
Yuhan Su about Directions in Jazz
Yuhan Su's music is mysterious and magical, a smouldering stream of questions. “I’m always stimulated by things slightly out of balance and out of the ordinary,” she explains, “I play around gravity in music.” And yet, her genuinely exciting new path in jazz always has both feet on the ground.
Janina about DJing
“Music and dancing are like yin and yang, or day and night — one can’t exist without the other.“
Ife Ogunjobi Shares his Creative Process
We should be more like children, the Nigerian trumpet player feels: Fearless, carefree, confident in who we are. His new EP of delightfully sweet, deep and uplifting soul jazz expresses his own desire to enter this state and to keep creating without doubt, intellectual analysis and boundaries.
Victoria Pham aka VP about the Magic of Sound(s)
Music is a realm of pure imagination. What, the mesmerisingly utopian work of Victoria Pham seems to ask, if we used that power to rebuild music itself from the inside – extending, through that process, the limitations of what is imaginable in the first place?
Mark Harwood Shares his Creative Process
Chance is a friend for Mark Harwood. And yet, his two simultaneously published new albums are carefully sculpted - following a psychedelic trail of crumbs through a magical forest of kraut and soft noise towards a mesmerising conclusion.
Louis Matute about Directions in Jazz
The Swiss guitarist sees music as a different path for dealing with the topics of our time. The warm sound and elevating grooves of his new album are his personal way of processing anger, building bridges and transforming despair into hope.
Nate08 about Emotions in Music
For Nathan Thomas, the job of a producer is to step out of the music's way. The challenge to give his soulful garage-house anthems the shine they need without compromising their soul: “A bit of refining helps - but I try not to polish the life out of them.”
Camila Nebbia about Improvisation
What is music? Controlled chaos, directed dreaming - or hypermania, as Camila Nebbia's new trio with Gonçalo Almeida and Sylvain Darrifourq describe it: A state of low-level mania, a stream equally capable of exploding into bursts of noisy free jazz and withdrawing into sculpted ambiance.
Wilson Tanner Smith about the Magic of Sound(s)
The word “meditative” is sure to come up in relation to the work of Wilson Tanner Smith. But if anything, pieces like 22-minute drone-zone "Palace of Culture" remind us that meditation is not about stealing us away from reality – but making us more aware of it.
Anton Roolaart about Lyrics
Words can be an obstacle to enlightenment. For Anton Roolaart, however, as for the great Zen masters, the right lyrics bridge the divide between literal meaning and the truth hidden behind it. The doors don't have to be cleansed – just say the word and enter the infinite.
