John Fahey

Under-the-Radar Acts to See at Coachella

[Editor's note: Weekly scribe Jeff Weiss's column, "Bizarre Ride," appears on West Coast Sound every Wednesday. His archives are available here.] Beware any tutorial about the "right way" to do Coachella. Stay sentient, steer clear of phosphorescent forms in spirit hoodies, drink water, and never m ... More >>

Chelsea Wolfe - First Unitarian Church - 02/08/13

Chelsea Wolfe First Unitarian Church 02/08/13 Better Than... staring into the Nietzschean abyss. Chelsea Wolfe embraces darkness, seems to live by it, even. "Dark" is the best way to describe last year's Apokalypsis, an album that won accolades for melding black metal and American roots music, amo ... More >>

Henry Rollins: No More Talk About Shooting Americans, Please

[Look for your weekly fix from the one and only Henry Rollins right here on West Coast Sound every Thursday, and come back tomorrow for the awesomely annotated playlist for his Saturday KCRW broadcast.] See also: Henry Rollins: Tragedy, and How to Carry On I spent a large part of the afternoon at ... More >>

The Five Best Concerts in L.A. This Weekend

Friday, September 21 Azure Ray LARGO AT THE CORONET Both Orenda Fink and Maria Taylor went on to successful solo careers and side projects after their band Azure Ray broke up in 2004, but there was something irreplaceable about the way the two singers used to blend their sweetly sad voices together ... More >>

Henry Rollins: The Column! Being a Local, Temporarily

[Look for your weekly fix from the one and only Henry Rollins right here on West Coast Sound every Thursday, and come back tomorrow for the awesomely annotated playlist for his Saturday KCRW broadcast.] We are in beautiful Olympia, Wash. My shows in Hawaii and Alaska are behind me, and a few hour ... More >>

Music Picks: Dublab Anniversary, Ladyhawke, Flying Lotus

Music Picks: The Psychedelic Furs, Orgone, Raekwon, Beach Fossils, The Raveonettes

Also, Thao & Mirah, Sun Araw, Cass McCombs, Trinket and others

Congrats! LA-Based Aquarium Drunkard Wins MTV's First Indie Blog Award

​ A big congratulations to LA-based music blog Aquarium Drunkard, which beat all other music blogs in the country (including some high-profile ones from Brooklyn that like to proclaim their dietary restrictions) on an nationwide Internet vote for MTV's first "O Award." According to MTV, As ... More >>

Music Picks: Amanda Jo Williams, Usher, Masaki Batoh, Procol Harum

Also, Dustin Wong, Greg Dulli, Ghostface Killah

Legendary Indie Label Drag City Finds Way To Work "Tila Tequila" and "Juggalo" Into Headline Promoting Bizarre Anti-Comedian Neil Hamburger

This poor man is now the bitch of Tila Tequila and ICP​File this one under: "the Internet and search engines have turned all cool, interesting pop culture into the bitch of the stupidest forms of pop culture." Once upon a time, Drag City was a label that stood for the awesomely weird, from cu ... More >>

Today in O-Face News: I'll Have What The Mars Volta's Omar Rodríguez-López Is Having!

In the annals of "Guitar Face"--that pseudo-orgasmic grimace that some players pull-off, pretending they're playing something with the complexity of John Fahey when in fact they're running scales up and down really fast--there is a noble lineage going from the guy from Free to G.E. Smith (the SNL ba ... More >>

LA Weekly's Interview with Will Oldham: On Acting, Hollywood, the Nature of the Press, and Facebook

Yesterday Will Oldham, aka Bonnie Prince Billy, did an instore performance at Amoeba Records on Sunset, and West Coast Sound's Nikki Darling was there to report on the scene: Will Oldham gets French pedicures and shows them off while wearing flip-flops and Hawaiian board shorts. That's the first ... More >>

Chris Darrow's Kaleidoscopic Vision

A mentor to Ben Harper; a "world music" propenent before there was even a name for it

Rock Picks: Thurston Moore, James Blackshaw, Lisa Hannigan, Modest Mouse

Plus, Scott Walker Night, Dead Confederate, A.C. Newman

LA Weekly Music Podcast, Volume One: Fight on, Your Time Ain't Long

You know how some weekends you have the best intentions in the world and then they all fall to shit? Well, mine didn't exactly fall to shit -- it's just that the live music that I was hoping to see either didn't pan out, conflicted with scenes/events that I wanted to attend (like LA Weekly's anniv ... More >>

Late NYC Street Composer Moondog's Busy Afterlife as a Mixtape MC (MP3)

He sat at the corner of 53rd Street and 6th Avenue in New York dressed as a Viking, with a long beard and intense eyes, from the late 1940s through the mid 1970s. There, he recited poetry and performed music, and eventually went on to record stunning, rhythmic compositions unlike anything you've e ... More >>

Visions of Radiohead

Celebrating the 21st century's most interactive band

Matmos and Wobbly, Echoplex, July 13, 2008

Matmos, with Wobbly, at the Echoplex on July 13, 2008 (All photos by Timothy Norris) The tear that collected in my left eye was a long time coming, and began clouding my vision around three minutes into “Supreme Balloon, the 24-minute climax of the Matmos’ most recent album of the same name. I ... More >>

Hello Mommy Africa: A Hipster's Guide to Afro-Indie Rock

Here's eight records. Now go start a riot

Music Picks: Black Heart Procession, Vandelles, Minnie Driver, Ronnie Mack

For the week of Jan. 11 - 17

Rock Picks: Circle Jerks, Money Mark, No Age

For the week of Jan. 3 - 10

Rock Picks: The Police, Sage Francis, Radio Birdman and more

For the week of June 14 - 21

Love Is All; Urgent Originality Would Be Nice

Love is All at the Echo, Ecstatic Sunshine and Eastern Youth at Spaceland

Rock & Roll & Movies & Mom

Allison Anders and daughter Tiffany curate “Don’t Knock the Rock” fest by ear (and heart)

High & Outside

2005’s best outsider and experimental music releases

Music Picks

For the week of April 28 - May 4

Misty Mountain Stomp

Citay, and the unspeakable joy of harmonized lead guitars

High & Outside

2005’s best outsider and experimental music releases

Jesus Was a Luthier

High Water Blues

The life and times of Charley Patton

Dismembering Harry Smith

Scopophilial Pleasures

Dave Hickey and Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Williams and Leni Riefenstahl, James Hayward and more

Sugar 'N' Spikes

Captain Beefheart: The Mirror Man as mere man

Burn, Li'l Debby, Burn

Survival Songs

The Kinks revisited

Free Bird

Susan James plays (and sings and records and mixes and releases) it her way