Lars Gotrich

After years of scrounging as an artist, Ali Beletic left New York City for the Sonoran Desert to find her own voice. "I went to get to know the wilderness there," she told NPR over email, "to drive muscle cars, ride motorcycles, explore adventures, work on large-scale sculptural ...

When the Buchla Music Easel was introduced in 1972, it was a philosophical compromise for a modular synth company that believed in the future of music, which did not originally include a conventional keyboard. The synth pioneer Don Buchla had to keep up with Robert Moog, whose keyboard-driven ...

It's been four years since The Haunted Man, Bat For Lashes' dark and shimmering third album, a "Technicolor canvas with shades of gray" as our own Stephen Thompson wrote in 2012. Last year saw the British musician Natasha Khan collaborate with TOY and producer Dan Carey ...

Eartheater, a.k.a. Alexandra Drewchin, makes psychedelic music that's at once familiar and mutated. On a pair of albums released last year — Metalepsis and RIP Chrysalis — Drewchin, with a penchant for pop subversion and vocal alterations, found folk music in synths and harsh noise, and vice versa.

Several months ...

Here's a quick way to get your blood pressure boiling: Turn out the lights, ease yourself into a state of calm with some aromatherapy candles, and play the strobe-light-incarnate post-hardcore of Primitive Weapons as loud as possible.

Okay, for some of us, that's just Friday night. The New York band ...

The stars shine over Big Sur and the ocean has receded, but the night sky just begins to open up as cosmic waves beg for cosmic riders. With a gentle voice that glides on warm synths, California's Shay Roselip makes music for surfing the spaceways.

"Sorted World" comes from his ...

The bedroom is where intimate memories between partners are made, love is cradled as we fall asleep, and remains there when we wake. So when it's invaded by, say, bed bugs, that sacred space is broken. This is the story of the not-quite-punk-or-pop duo Slingshot Dakota, who, after eloping while ...

On last year's Abyss, Chelsea Wolfe explicitly rendered the metallic tendencies that have always existed just below the surface of her music. Wolfe's soulful howl found its bite in gigantic riffs and devastating volume that suited some of her most significant songwriting yet. But at the Tiny Desk, ...

The darkness that pervades the music and characters of The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die tends to point inward, even as its subjects project outward upon the world around them. Even in the stellar "January 10th, 2014" from last year's ...

It's been seven years since the release of Cobalt's Gin, a masterful metal album that's savage in its bleakness and made distinct by the warped, inventive work of multi-instrumentalist Erik Wunder. In the time since, Wunder has been busy with his fuzzy Americana act Man's Gin and ...

During the climactic final scene of Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Brad Fiedel's moody, pummeling synth score turns tender as industrial sounds clang in the background. That melody is as seared into viewers' memory as the scene itself. So it's hard to shake that melody from the first half of Good ...

If your twee-dar's going off, it's because Free Cake For Every Creature's song "For You" is as cute as a one-inch button pinned to a thrift-store jacket. The VHS-quality video is equally adorable, shot on the streets of Philly on a budget befitting the back half of MTV's 120 Minutes, ...

Though often occupied by death and destruction, heavy metal is not short on longing. After the dissolution of Warning, Patrick Walker has written lyrics for his new band 40 Watt Sun that yearn for home and the past with soaring desperation; and Seattle's Bell Witch awaits ...

Three years ago, Save Ends released Warm Hearts, Cold Hands, an energetic and earnest pop-punk record with dueling guy/gal vocals; the sound was unapologetically in love with the turn-of-the-millennium emo of The Get Up Kids and The Anniversary. The Holliston, Mass., band returns in February with the Hugs ...

Remember that "mindblowing psychedelia from Thailand" YouTube video from five years ago, with the pan-generational band (Khun Narin), a hodgepodge of percussion, and a dude wailing on an electric, double-necked stringed instrument called a phin? It's still a trip to watch. Now imagine those droning Thai ...

First things first: Bloodmist is a kind of a messed-up name for a band, but it perfectly describes the sonic terror therein. Jeremiah Cymerman (clarinet, electronics), Mario Diaz de Leon (guitar) and Kayo Dot's Toby Driver (bass) are three of New York City's most extreme practitioners of dark experimental ...

Grindcore is about the economy of extreme music; about cramming as much metallic insanity into one minute as possible. It's been six years since the last album by Magrudergrind, a Brooklyn-via-D.C. trio that knows how to make the guitar-drums-vocals format sound something like fireworks exploding in an aluminum trash can.

Where the sun hits the snow, there you find beauty in the bleak midwinter, there you find a spectrum of bright color on a crystal white landscape, there you find the music of Pinkshinyultrablast. 2015's Everything Else Matters was a promising debut for the Russian shoegaze band, ably ...

Hit shuffle on Milk Teeth's debut album and you'll be blasted by sludgy pop-punk one moment, cinematic post-hardcore the next, before you wind up in a wild, grungy noise-rock squall. It's all tied together by bassist Becky Blomfield's disaffected alto, which brings to mind Shirley Manson on a not-so-sunny day. ...

The story goes that just about every label in Nashville had an opportunity to work with Margo Price, and rejected her. The Illinois-born, longtime Music City resident is steeped in that part of the country music tradition that kicks ass now and takes names later, if the devil and the ...