Music
Reaching For Transcendence
By Dave Cantor“I’m always reaching for transcendence. I feel like that’s as good a goal as any for music making and as good a reason as any for any human activity, really. How do we get outside of ourselves and how do we connect with each other in that outside-of-ourselves place?” Anderson asked.
Natik Awayez and His Songbook Of Melancholy
By Martin LongleyThe singer and oud player Natik Awayez has been involved with music since the 1980s, but hardly any of his work is currently available online. He’s dipped in and out of activity, down the decades, but a recent solo release, Manbarani, on the Sublime Frequencies label is now essential listening—pressed on vinyl this spring, but first released digitally in November 2020.
Canadian Cowboy: The Unfolding Story of Darcy Windover
By Geoffrey ClarfieldWindover is a 40-something young man whom, when we first met, I thought was Albertan, or some sort of Western cowboy, which for me would have explained his musical proclivities—except that he is not. Darcy was born in Sarnia, Ontario, in 1977. If one sees country and Western music as largely the artistic expression of the English, Scots, and Irish who came to the Americas after Columbus, then Windover comes by his musical calling honestly.
Jessica Hopper’s The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic
By George GrellaTo interpolate an old line about sports, fans hear with their hearts. Hopper is a critic who, like all of us, is originally a fan, and that delineating is often hazy and, in the space of this book, self-contradictory—not in the way that happens to us all, having an opinion about a thing and then later changing our minds, but in terms of values.
