Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Musician Bob Holmes of the New York-based trio Suss talks about his unique and ambitious Across the Horizon music series. Bob and Northern Spy Records invited eight innovators from the wide landscape of instrumental music to curate the first volume of Across the Horizon, which was released at regular intervals over the past year, culminating in a double vinyl, which is out now and available to Bandcamp subscribers of the series.

Curators and participants in the project include Mark Nelson (Pan American), Luke Schneider, Dave Harrington, Marisa Anderson, Stelth Ulvang, Walt McClements, David Moore, William Tyler, Chelsea Bridge, Melissa Guion (MJ Guider), Julianna Barwick, and many more.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Estefanía Vélez Rodríguez (b. 1985, Mayagüez, PR) is a Puerto Rican artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. As a dual-tongued individual, she utilizes the symbolic language of painting as a bridge between many cultures and spaces. Her paintings formally address questions between abstraction, non-representation, simplification, symbol, and painting as a language with ambiguous structural limitations. Her landscapes meander and distort physical spaces like mazes meant to be misleading.

Utilizing chemical reactions within a painting, Estefanía experiments with raw pigments, spray materials, oil mediums, and acrylic polymers. Her painting language ruptures visual spaces, opening the viewer's receptivity to fleeting spaces, times, and emotional presence.

In this interview, she talks in-depth about the seven paintings she has on display as part of the group show Past Tense/Future Perfect at NYC's Marc Straus Gallery, which will be up through August 8.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and composer Amanda Ekery collaborates with everyone, literally. Historians, artists, engineers, bakers, you name it. Amanda works with all to create projects that invite others to explore and share their stories. She weaves her experience in improvisatory creative music, research, and jazz into her compositions, workshops, and performances.

Her new album, Árabe, is about Syrian and Mexican shared history and culture, and covers everything from food, gambling, and evil eyes, to immigration law, biracial identity, and the fraught relationship between immigrant entrepreneurship and workers’ rights. The vinyl release also includes an art book which contains essays for each track, and restored family and historical photos.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Friends since childhood, Eraserhood Sound partners, Vincent John and Max Perla’s unique songcrafting process includes sourcing and learning to play vintage instruments, and using reel-to-reel equipment to create the exact sound they are after. EHS also features an in-house boutique record label that specializes in vinyl releases. Operating out of the studio built for Questlove, EHS is uniquely positioned to carry on Philadelphia’s rich musical legacy.

Their latest television project is PBS KIDS’ groundbreaking Carl the Collector, the network’s first animated series spotlighting central characters on the autism spectrum. The team’s handcrafted music for each episode gives the show a sophisticated, stand out sound that has not been seen in children’s entertainment since Peanuts. The score features Eraserhood Sounds’ trademark Synth & Soul palette, a distinctive blend of vintage analog recording stylings of 60s soul and traditional 70s funk, with 80s based synthesizers and drum machines.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Good Friends: Bonds That Change Us and the World, author Priya Vulchi explores friendships across history, continents, and cultures to show how friendship can open up new levels of community. Through her inspiring prose, Vulchi reveals that friendship, in the right hands, is a brilliant act of resistance.

Studies show that loneliness is as deadly as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. We are not taught how to be good friends to one another. We cancel plans, lose touch, blame technology, and neglect our non-romantic loved ones. In Good Friends, author Priya Vulchi explores friendships across history, continents, and identities to show how friendship can open up new levels of joy and community in your life. What is the meaning of friendship, these miraculous bonds with once-strangers? How do you begin friendships? End them? Keep them vibrant? For answers, Vulchi weaves through Western classical thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and uncovers the private moments between good friends like James Baldwin, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Yuri Kochiyama, Toni Morrison, and June Jordan. Friendship, she shows, has ripple effects beyond just any two friends; it awakens solidarity and changes in the world.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Artist Heather Benjamin discusses the works in her first solo show at NYC's Olympia Gallery, NEW STRANGENESS BLOOM.

Benjamin’s paintings investigate the hyper-vulnerable experiences of existing in a female body. Building on her formal printmaking background and a prolific, two-decade-long zinemaking practice, her autodidactic paintings emerge as self-portraits.

Through a diaristic lens, Benjamin’s figures—part goddess, part flawed protagonist—manifest spiritual transformation. These figures navigate imagined desert landscapes, alive with unnameable flora shimmering under electric skies. Both literal and symbolic, these "strange blooms" embody perseverance and renewal amidst psychic and physical terrains that are barren, parched, and alien.

Benjamin’s approach to painting nods to Surrealist modes of narration and the idiosyncrasies of outsider art. Motifs such as impassioned couples floating in clouds or emerging from extraterrestrial blooms evoke dream states, memories, and internal monologues. Words scrawled across cowboy hats and bootstraps read like fleeting, nonlinear poems.

In New Strangeness Bloom, Benjamin explores sexuality, gender, trauma, and self-perception through intricate, labyrinthine mark-making, maximalist palettes, and a developed personal symbology. Broken mirrors, dead cockroaches, nail-polished claws, and butterflies blend with retro-futurist Americana, warping, refracting, and reimagining mythologies of femininity.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

JMikal Davis, aka Hellbent, is a muralist, painter, and street artist who lives and works in Brooklyn. Davis began making street-based artwork in the late 1990s while still in art school at the University of Georgia.

Upon graduating and moving to Brooklyn in 2000, he took up the nom de plume Hellbent, experimenting with various media and becoming known for his hand-carved plaques that he pulled throughout New York City and eventually across the globe.

Since 2011, the backgrounds that started on these plaques became the focal point of his work both on and off the street. The abstract configurations of multiple patterns layered on top of each other are derived from American quilt-making and folk art traditions, inspirations not typically associated within murals and street art.

In his public work, he aims to include elements from different textiles associated with the citizens of the community and weave them together harmoniously.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.