Jess Kallen steps out today with "A Garden Bed of Thistle Weeds," the 26-year-old guitar wiz's first single from a debut album expected in Spring of 2023. Kallen – who has been spotted as a sideperson on tours with Alex Lahey, Rosie Tucker, even the occasional show with Olivia Rodrigo – offers up thoughtfully arranged folkish-rock that navigates grief, rage, and love with raucous urgency and whimsical charm, for fans of Phoebe Bridgers, Indigo De Souza and Haley Henderickx.
“A Garden Bed of Thistle Weeds” peers through the window of engrossed introspection. Hazy, ambient guitars set the scene, in what feels like an homage to Kallen's foggy San Francisco roots. As Kallen (they/them) comes to “grip on the shovel” of their own fury, “Watch me dig, watch my cold blood boil while I figure it out,” they insist. The song squirms in the turmoil conflict brings: asserting power with clever defiance (“Some food for thought now, I should never be/ A reaper sowing your way to grief”), before returning to the aching confession, “I don’t want to leave”. The chorus rises in a slow and washy crescendo, as guitar and voice blend in unison.
This partnership between guitars and vocals feels like a realization for an instrumentalist stepping center stage. Kallen gravitated towards the guitar hungrily at age five. “My dad was always strumming a guitar around the house,” they recall. “He’s a metalhead, a total San Francisco misfit. I wanted to be exactly like him.” In 2014, Kallen moved to Los Angeles to attend music school for guitar, and they continue to call L.A. home between tours.
"A Garden Bed of Thistle Weeds" is out today, Nov. 29, on New Professor.
In celebration of his fourth GRAMMY nomination for his song “Oh Betty” in the “Best American Roots Performance” category, soulful singer, songwriter, musician, and activist Fantastic Negrito (neé Xavier Dphrepaulezz) has released a brand new reimagined acoustic version today. Part love story, part history lesson and with acclaim spanning Pitchfork to NPR, the multimedia project tells the defiant tale of his seventh generation white Scottish indentured servant grandmother Betty Gallimore who was living in a common law marriage with his seventh generation African-American enslaved grandfather, Grandfather Courage, in the face of the racist, separatist, laws of 1750s colonial Virginia. Fantastic Negrito shares, “The incredible story of my seventh generation grandparents was so profound. I reimagined it through the lenses of my touring band. Please check it out unplugged unapologetic reimagined.”
A larger than life character, Fantastic Negrito’s own story is stranger than fiction. He first released an album in 1996, but a near fatal car crash in 1999 effectively ended the first chapter of his career. It resulted in him spending three weeks in a coma and initially losing almost all movement in his right hand, drastically limiting his ability to play guitar. Effectively reborn under his new artist identity of Fantastic Negrito, his career got underway when his phenomenal, charismatic performance won NPR Music’s prestigious Tiny Desk Concert Contest.
All three of his previous studio albums have won the GRAMMY Award for Best Contemporary Blues album: The Last Days of Oakland, Please Don’t Be Dead and Have You Lost Your Mind Yet?. He has toured with artists as varied as Sturgill Simpson and Chris Cornell, collaborated with Sting and E-40, launched his own Storefront Records label, and founded the Revolution Plantation, an urban farm aimed at youth education and empowerment. He is also confirmed for several film screenings w/ performances and to play a show in Italy in March 2023 as guest to Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Full list of live appearances here.
Soulful singer, songwriter, musician, and activist Fantastic Negrito (neé Xavier Dphrepaulezz) has announced his brand new album Grandfather Courage, a reimagined acoustic version of his acclaimed 2022 album White Jesus Black Problems. He previously offered fans a preview of the collection’s new version of “Oh Betty”, in celebration of its GRAMMY nomination in the “Best American Roots Performance” category. Today, he has released another taste of the special release with “Highest Bidder” (Reimagined Acoustic Version), debuted with American Songwriter and shares, “If you want to take your mind, body and soul on a trip check out the reimagined recording of Highest Bidder through the lenses of my touring band. At the time, I was listening to a lot of African drum patterns, and that definitely influenced this song. I’m trying to convey what I see when I walk down the street here in Oakland.”
Part love story, part history lesson and with acclaim spanning Pitchfork to NPR, the multimedia project tells the defiant tale of his seventh generation white Scottish indentured servant grandmother Betty Gallimore who was living in a common law marriage with his seventh generation African-American enslaved grandfather, Grandfather Courage, in the face of the racist, separatist, laws of 1750s colonial Virginia. Fantastic Negrito shares, “The incredible story of my seventh generation grandparents was so profound. I reimagined it through the lenses of my touring band. Please check it out unplugged unapologetic reimagined.”
A larger than life character, Fantastic Negrito’s own story is stranger than fiction. He first released an album in 1996, but a near fatal car crash in 1999 effectively ended the first chapter of his career. It resulted in him spending three weeks in a coma and initially losing almost all movement in his right hand, drastically limiting his ability to play guitar. Effectively reborn under his new artist identity of Fantastic Negrito, his career got underway when his phenomenal, charismatic performance won NPR Music’s prestigious Tiny Desk Concert Contest.
All three of his previous studio albums have won the GRAMMY Award for Best Contemporary Blues album: The Last Days of Oakland, Please Don’t Be Dead and Have You Lost Your Mind Yet?. He has toured with artists as varied as Sturgill Simpson and Chris Cornell, collaborated with Sting and E-40, launched his own Storefront Records label, and founded the Revolution Plantation, an urban farm aimed at youth education and empowerment. He is also confirmed for several film screenings w/ performances and to play a show in Italy in March 2023 as guest to Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Full list of live appearances here.
Today, soulful singer, songwriter, musician, and activist Fantastic Negrito (neé Xavier Dphrepaulezz) has released his brand new album Grandfather Courage, a reimagined acoustic version of his acclaimed 2022 album White Jesus Black Problems. He shares, “The incredible story of my seventh generation grandparents was so profound. I reimagined it through the lenses of my touring band. Please check it out unplugged unapologetic reimagined.” The collection has had support spanning Hypebeast, BET, American Songwriter, XLR8R, Consequence, KCRW "Press Play", WBUR, KUT "Song of the Day" and more. The three-time GRAMMY winner is nominated again this year in the "Best American Roots Performance" category for the original version of "Oh Betty".
Part love story, part history lesson and with acclaim spanning Pitchfork to NPR, the multimedia project tells the defiant tale of his seventh generation white Scottish indentured servant grandmother Betty Gallimore who was living in a common law marriage with his seventh generation African-American enslaved grandfather, Grandfather Courage, in the face of the racist, separatist, laws of 1750s colonial Virginia. Fantastic Negrito gives insight into the new collection’s title, “My Grandfather was listed as a man with no name so I felt like I needed to give him his credit and a name, Grandfather Courage. The two formed a forbidden union during the time of slavery in 1750s Virginia. If they can make it, what’s our excuse?”
A larger than life character, Fantastic Negrito’s own story is stranger than fiction. He first released an album in 1996, but a near fatal car crash in 1999 effectively ended the first chapter of his career. It resulted in him spending three weeks in a coma and initially losing almost all movement in his right hand, drastically limiting his ability to play guitar. Effectively reborn under his new artist identity of Fantastic Negrito, his career got underway when his phenomenal, charismatic performance won NPR Music’s prestigious Tiny Desk Concert Contest.
All three of Fantastic Negrito’s previous studio albums have won the GRAMMY Award for Best Contemporary Blues album: The Last Days of Oakland, Please Don’t Be Dead and Have You Lost Your Mind Yet?. He has toured with artists as varied as Sturgill Simpson and Chris Cornell, collaborated with Sting and E-40, launched his own Storefront Records label, and founded the Revolution Plantation, an urban farm aimed at youth education and empowerment. He is also confirmed for several film screenings w/ performances and to play a show in Italy in March 2023 as guest to Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Full list of live appearances here.
Today, Bridget Kearney - the bassist and founding member of Lake Street Dive - released the single “Don’t Think About The Polar Bear” across all platforms. Accompanying the single is an animated music video which is premiering today via FLOOD Magazine, and can be seen HERE.
The video was created by Mertcan Merbilek and Yasemin Yasu, and its deep winter aesthetic is perfectly timed for the holiday season.
“Don’t Think About The Polar Bear” is available across all platforms now.
A founding member of Lake Street Dive and writer of some of their most enduring songs, like"Good Kisser" and "Hypotheticals," Bridget Kearney is known for writing smart, unexpected lyrics and melodies that instantly glue themselves to the inside of one's brain. "I'm really fascinated by the layering of emotions in song," says Kearney, "it's a special art of complexity in miniature, where it's possible within three and a half minutes you can make someone feel loneliness and gratitude and humor at the same time, and also make them want to dance." Her work outside of Lake Street Dive has been extensive and exploratory. She has released two solo albums as well as an album and an EP with producer Benjamin Lazar Davis, both recorded in Accra, Ghana in collaboration with Ghanaian musicians. In the last year she's played bass for pop icon Ed Sheeran, folk darling Aoife O'Donovan, indie rocker Margaret Glaspy, country artist Bella White and Brazilian singer Tiago Iorc. This stylistic diversity is evident in her solo recordings as well. "I'm not really thinking about genres at all when making music," she says. "It's all about the fundamental building blocks of music and the way it all makes you feel." Her latest collaboration is with Los Angeles producer Dan Molad (Lucius, Buck Meek). "I heard Dan's production of Buck's song 'Halo Light' and immediately became obsessed with it and listened to it like 400 times. It was so dynamic and layered and tugged so deeply at my heartstrings. I thought, 'I want to make music like that.'"
“Don’t Think About The Polar Bear” is a sad, funky song about being bad at meditating, trying not to think about your ex-partner and a metaphorical polar bear, and is a reflection on the psychological phenomenon known as "Ironic Process Theory." The phenomenon is otherwise known as the "white bear problem" because of this Dostoevsky quote:
"Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute."
The accompanying music video shows two polar bear lovers that have broken up just before the holidays and are trying to distract themselves, but they are constantly reminded of the love that got away. Perfect for the holiday season!
The idea being that when you are actively trying not to think about something, you are actually much more likely to think about it.
“Don’t Think About The Polar Bear” is streaming across all platforms HERE, and the music video can be seen HERE.
Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith today announce the release of Correspondences Vol II, a new 2-track EP, out March 21 via Bella Union and available to preorder here. To accompany the announcement Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith have shared the first track from the EP titled “Children Of Chernobyl”. Click HERE to listen.
On the edge of the forest surrounding Chernobyl, a stone’s throw from the Pripyat River, stands the church of St. Elijah, the only house of worship still operational within the 1000 square-mile radioactive exclusion zone. There, in the courtyard, stands the Bell of Sorrow, which rings just once a year, at exactly 1:23am on April 26, the moment when human history was forever altered, 39 years ago, as Reactor Four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded, scattering its deadly, invisible poison throughout the land.
Ten miles northwest, at the centre of the zone, stands a much larger bell-shaped structure, a 31,000-tonne sarcophagus of concrete and steel, tall enough to entomb the Notre-Dame de Paris or the Duomo of Milan. Deep inside it, the nuclear fuel of Reactor Four still burns unstoppably, and will continue to burn for two millennia more, while outside nature thrives in the near total absence of human intervention.
It's here, where the natural meets the unthinkable, that the story of Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith’s CORRESPONDENCES continues. More than 10 years in the making, the audiovisual project centres on eight pieces initially composed as slow, meditative tracking shots for unmade movies using field recordings painstakingly gathered by Collective founder Stephan Crasneanscki on journeys of discovery, inspired as much by the interface of humanity with the natural world as by the lives of the canonical writers, filmmakers and revolutionaries both artists admire.
Presented with these invisible landscapes, Smith improvised and wrote her own spoken-word poetry over the top, often at a distance, allowing the sonic impressions to draw out thoughts and phrases that crystallise into moments of clarity and revelation. “It’s a process of discovery through improvisation and channelling,” she explains. “We are sort of two halves, and we merge together the mental and physical traveller to get the atmosphere and the visual content – the music, even – and the words that will articulate what we want to do.”
“There is a long literary tradition of correspondence,” says Crasneanscki. “Writing was the only way to create proximity across distance. Nowadays, the immediacy of social media abolishes that sort of experience. The longing. That inner ability to channel and reflect, to comment on and share the poetic and sometimes mystical dimensions of travel. Distance allows you to reschedule yourself to what seems new, what is inspiring; it creates conditions for new callings.”
“It sounds abstract, but it creates an atmosphere and almost an earth that I can walk around in my mind,” adds Smith. “I can walk to these places or feel the spirits of these places, because at this point in my life I can’t make difficult journeys. I become the mental traveller. I don’t have to buy a ticket, I don’t have to go to the airport; I just listen and let myself be carried away.”
Released in May 2024, the first two pieces comprising Vol. I explored intimate, multilayered connections between the Greek mythological figure Medea, vengeful daughter of the sun who murdered her own children, and Italian film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who directed the 1969 movie “Medea” starring opera singer Maria Callas in the title role. Responding to sounds and other material gathered from, among other places, the Caucasus mountains in Georgia, where Medea was supposedly born, and the beach on the outskirts of Rome where Pasolini met his hyper-violent end, Smith articulated beauty and terror alike, both chilling and warm, like fresh blood pooling on sand.
Vol. II is similarly conceived, not only as a dialogue between the artists but also between the two sides of the record – “Children of Chernobyl” and “The Acolyte, The Artist and Nature” – a correspondence spanning more than 500 years, from the turbulence of medieval Russia, through the terrible events of 1986, to the ecological crisis of the here and now. But where Vol. I was marked by death, Vol. II is, as Crasneanscki puts it, “more about the sacred, and how we as humans are damaging it.”
“Having worked with Patti for over 10 years now, I often use the metaphor of Rembrandt’s late paintings when we talk about her poetry,” says Crasneanscki. “There’s a deep blackness to it; a lot of gravitas, a lot of darkness. But it also has these beautiful gold highlights and clair-obscur. It reflects the transition of the world we are living in, and the feeling that there’s a new reality that’s setting in, and the realisation of what we’re leaving behind. There’s a lot of grieving in it, and a lot of longing too.”
Grief and darkness are palpable too in “Children of Chernobyl”, slowly clouding over like a gathering storm as the lush textures of a languid morning – birdsong, gentle rain, a distant bell – transform into a vision of the glowing, walking dead. Smith sings here too, in a fractured, wavering voice against a backdrop of Geiger counter noises and eerie, mutated notes played on the decaying pianos of abandoned Pripyat, once home to the most prestigious music schools in the former Soviet Union. More ghostly still are the same words sung in Ukrainian at the song’s end by the Chernobyl Children’s Choir: “There are roses underfoot that one cannot smell / There is fruit on the vine that one cannot eat / And they went to bed hungry / And hungry they’ll sleep / For a thousand years.”
For Crasneanscki, who has Ukrainian roots on his father’s side, the two pieces are intertwined not only with their Slavic past but also with issues that resonate today, not least with the ongoing Russian aggression. Only last month, a military rocket struck the bell-shaped dome at Chernobyl, penetrating almost to the substructure. Is containment then just an illusion? At a time when both nothing and everything is sacred, where do we turn? The struggle of humanity to sit with its powerful urge to create, while also being reckless and destructive, is something Crasneanscki sees playing out again with AI. “As humans, we put in place these systems, these structures, that we don’t know how to control when suddenly something goes wrong,” he cautions. “Which it always does, at some point.”
With CORRESPONDENCES Vol. II, Soundwalk Collective and Patti Smith continue to meditate on great darkness and great hope, calling and responding to each other across distance, textures and time. “What I like about field recording is that often it’s creating a bridge with the distant past, with people many generations before me who might have experienced almost the exact same moment of sound,” says Crasneanscki. Like Rublev at the monastery, crossing the snowbound courtyard, or walking through the forest at Chernobyl, with the wind in the trees, raindrops falling on leaves, and the distant flowing river. A bell ringing down through the years. “It’s changed my life,” says Smith. “So, I’m grateful.”
Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith live performances + exhibitions:
April 18 - Correspondences Exhibition opens at Piknik, Seoul
April 26 - Correspondences Exhibition opens at Museum of Contemporary Arts, Tokyo
April 29 - ROHM Theatre Kyoto (performance)
May 3 - New National Theatre Opera Palace Tokyo (performance)
Correspondences Vol II tracklist and artwork below:
