Artists spend a lot of energy trying to evoke a sense of place, a presence of “other space” that is larger than the art object itself and envelops the audience. I’ve only recently become awakened to the sense of painterly space on a canvas or board that allows …

There is a moment of arrival in every musician’s career where they release a self-titled album. Some, like The xx, do it as their first album. Others, like Bon Iver, hold back and wait until the sophomore of their careers. A self-titled release is a calculated move, a …

Jón Þór Birgisson is an artist who needs a lot of space. Having built a prolific and visible career out of an experimental praxis, he’s something of an enigma to me, an oxymoron here in the American audience, which favors digestibility, marketability, franchisability in …

‘Lifetime’ by Romy starts playing on my speakers, and I immediately think of ABBA, how delicious pop music can feel sometimes, how EDM waves of a banging four-on-the-floor beat and swishing, swashing, swelling, flowing instrumentation express the headrush of …

Now Here No Where is the fourth album by meticulous techno wizard Kölsch, and it’s a wide variety of emotions from start to finish, a cinematic soundtrack to the year 2020 that runs the gamut from tragic death march, to sentimental nostalgic dreams, to midnight in …