Jay Babcock

In the third decade of the 20th century, Alan Lomax left the highways and traveled the back roads of America‘s rural South, finding and recording street minstrels, blues shouters, gospel singers and tall-tale tellers. The music, words and sounds captured by Lomax on his Edison cylinder machine in the field......

NEIL MICHAEL HAGERTYNeil Michael Hagerty (Drag City) Ah, American indie-rock icons and their post-band solo albums named after themselves. In one corner: ex--Pavement leader Stephen Malkmus, whose recent Stephen Malkmus finds him still spending more brainiac time on the Sunday crossword puzzle than on song lyrics, still proudly wearing the......

Photo by Cynthia Hassey Liquid love/baby looks like a bottle/let me watch you dance your way into my liver . . . Heaven must be missing an angel/or the devil counted one demon short . . . My band will break up/just to have a reunion tour . . ......

ULAN BATOREgo: Echo (Young God Records) Ulan Bator: two words that conjure up some sexy female assassin from a forgotten Roger Moore--era Bond flick but are actually the name of an obscure and incredible French rock group (as well as the capital of Mongolia, ‘course). The album Ego: Echo was......

Enlarge image “I think in many ways our mission is not to try to re-create the Afrika 70, but to see where Fela was right and where Fela was wrong,” says Martín Perna, the 25-year-old founder, baritone saxophonist and conductor of Antibalas, on the phone from the snowed-in Brooklyn apartment......

This is what Sigur Rós’ music sounds like: Backspun layered vocals from the dream-time drop away into a submarine’s distant sonar bell toll, hovering just beyond a gathering cloud storm. A church organ begins to hum . . . drums are slowly, steadily brushed from the back of some lava-lamped......

“I don’t want to talk about that. It’s kind of a personal thing.” Jack White of the White Stripes is on the phone from Detroit, and he’s not giving up the secret. I’ve got a lot of questions for him about the astonishing things I saw him do at Spaceland......

Blink and you mighta missed it on Headline News, but this past Memorial Day weekend, the first-ever Detroit Electronic Music Festival went off for three days. The event -- peaceful, Motor City--government--sanctioned, with a lineup heavy on locally based techno legends handpicked by event organizer and electro-artist Carl Craig --......

Since Dutch Reagan‘s second term serving jellybeans, the Flaming Lips have been rolling into lucky towns across America on a near-annual basis, regardless of whether they’ve had a new album to “work.” Following some strange Saturnian calendar, Oklahoma‘s Finest Freaks regularly venture forth from their fabled compound in the heart......

Whistle While You Work ”I like making things,“ says Ben Eshbach. And so, by day, he‘s the guy at his family’s Burbank-based motorcycle-engine firm who works the CAD-CAM program, writing the instructions for the computerized machines that construct the tiny engine components for NHRA Pro Stock and Top Fuel nitro......