Soundcheck

The New York-based Haitian singer and songwriter Emeline Michel combines traditional Haitian kompa, rasyn, and twoubadou music with jazz, R & B, and her gospel choir roots. She is a Red Cross Ambassador, and some of her lyrics deal with social issues, especially those affecting women and children. Emeline Michel and her band play moving and joyful tunes, both old and new, for the Soundcheck Podcast. Emeline Michel plays at Chelsea Table + Stage on Friday, March 18. Set list: Pé Leténel, Que Tonne Reigne Vienne, Ban'm La Jwa (Give me joy) Watch "Pé Leténel": Watch: "Que Tonne Reigne Vienne": Watch "Ban'm La Jwa": 

Guitarist and songwriter Brad Barr of the Montreal-based indie-folk band The Barr Brothers has just released an unusual solo record of instrumentals, The Winter Mission -  “a kaleidoscope of sound” (Schaefer), featuring many different members of the guitar family, loops, and the shruti box (used to provide the drone in Indian classical music.) Over the 12 songs of the album (and perhaps 216 notes), there is “a gorgeous unsettledness that resists the drift into background music," (Missing Piece Group.) The conversation flows around the fixed numbers of baseball, the numerology of 216, the creative use of loops and delay, and the sounds of the Blues in other traditional music around the world. Brad Barr plays remotely for the Soundcheck Podcast, and there’s even a gong. Set list: “Ancient Calendars,” “Baseball,” “Your Dad’s Awake” Watch "Ancient Calendars": Watch "Baseball": Watch "Your Dad's Awake":

Finnish composers Tapani Rinne (tenor sax, clarinet) and Juha Maki-Patola (keyboards and electronics) skate between jazz, neo-classical, and ambient music, leaning heavily on improvisation and electronic processing for their collaborative album, Open. These two veteran musicians – saxophonist, clarinetist, and composer Tapani Rinne has been releasing records since the 1980’s while Juha Maki-Patola is a producer, musician, and engineer – connected online via Instagram during the pandemic, and began to share files. They talk about reverb, ice-swimming for health, and share some of the Nordic-seeming, spacious, immersive, and stunning results of their music-making, remotely.  – Caryn Havlik Set list: “Brevity,” “Still” Watch "Brevity": Watch "Still": Open by Tapani Rinne & Juha Mäki-Patola

Bluegrass quintet Yonder Mountain String Band dips into rock, prog, and improvisational music for their latest record, Get Yourself Outside. The band - founding members guitarist Adam Aijala, bassist Ben Kaufmann and banjoist Dave Johnston, plus fiddle player Allie Kral (who joined in 2015) along with new multi-instrumentalist Nick Piccininn - began writing the album remotely during the pandemic, collaborating virtually across time zones. The sound is entirely acoustic (and without drums) with foot-stomping sections of shred and solo-trading. Additionally, all five members sing, trading leads, and the vocal harmonies are rich and varied. Yonder Mountain String Band plays remotely from a permanent installation called Meow Wolf, in Colorado. - Caryn Havlik Set list: “I Just Can’t” “No Leg Left” “Into the Fire” Watch "I Just Can't: Watch "No Leg Left": Watch "Into the Fire":

Guitarist Shane Parish of the avant instrumental jazz-mathpunk band Ahleuchatistas, is also an educator, arranger, composer, and podcaster. Lately, as a solo artist, he has mined the world of folk music – specifically “weird old Americana” and  “traditional music filtered through one guitarist’s non-traditional subjectivity,” (Bandcamp) Shane Parish's most recent musical adventures on a new record called Liverpool are based around spacious, moody, unexpected arrangements of sea shanties for electric guitar and looping station. As he explains, the sea shanties happened to be a tangent of his podcast covering the Liverpudlian band, Echo & the Bunnymen. Now based in Athens, Georgia, Parish treats us to some remote performances of these tunes.  Set List: “Black-Eyed Susan” “Haul Away Joe” “Rio Grande” Watch "Blackeyed Susan": Watch "Haul Away Joe": Watch "Rio Grande":   Watch "Randy Dandy O":

The appealingly danceable music of Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, or OMD, as the trailblazing synth-driven electronic band came to be known, has delighted and charmed listeners for decades. They formed in the late 1970's, greatly inspired by Kraftwerk, and with influences ranging from CAN to Barry White. Their string of breakout hits stretched through the 1980's, like "Electricity," "Tesla Girls," & "So In Love," while their song, "If You Leave," written specifically for the John Hughes film, Pretty In Pink, was also a huge hit. The unusual OMD blend is one of melody and melancholia, created with keyboards, synths, sexy saxophone, and drums, while never straying too far from the dance club and pop radio. The band reformed in 2006, and with the 2017 release of their third album, The Punishment of Luxury, Andy McCluskey and Paul Humphreys - OMD - performed in-studio. (From the Archives, 2017.)  

Polymathic composer, producer, and video artist Emily Wells plays new works off her latest album Regards to the End. On it she explores the AIDS crisis, climate change, and her lived experience—as a queer musician from a long line of preachers, watching the world burn—in immaculately layered yet spare songs that impel the listener to be attuned, acting like a magnet on our attention. Wells, a multi-instrumentalist who comes from a classical background in violin, builds the songs by sampling her own vocals, synths, drums, piano, string instruments (violin, cello, bass), and wind instruments (clarinet, flute, French horn). Set list: "I'm Numbers," "Come On Kiki," "David's Got a Problem," "Two Dogs Tethered Inside" Watch "I'm Numbers": Watch "Come On Kiki" & "David's Got a Problem": Watch "Two Dogs Tethered Inside":

Portland, Oregon-based Pink Martini whisks listeners away on globetrotting musical journeys, singing in Armenian, Portuguese, Arabic, French & Xhosa, among many other languages - and that's just their latest record, Je Dis Oui!. Their founder, pianist Thomas Lauderdale, recently described the group this way: "If the United Nations had a house band in 1962, we aspire to be that band." The 'little orchestra'- some 12-members strong, takes over our studio. 

The wonderfully twisted, self-possessed, wry, leather jacket-armored dark humored queen of the downtown night, Shilpa Ray, survived working the door at the Lower East Side / New York City bar Pianos. And she’s turned that harsh reality into an album of cutting commentary. On the 2017 record Door Girl, Shilpa Ray plays with throwback “girl group” sounds – except she’s got backing guy vocals and crisp production. Her songs are full of acerbic observations on desperate people, some quite personal - "Manhattanoid Creepazoids," "Revelations of a Stamp Monkey," and "Rockaway Blues"; the portraits are far from pretty, and definitely no longer glittering, with a blaze-of-lights-at-closing-time-feel delivered in her singular brassy croon and growl. Shilpa Ray joins us, (sans harmonium), in the studio to play some of these songs. (Archives, 2017.) 

The musician, songwriter, and producer, Cate Le Bon, offers new music from her latest album, Pompeii, composed in the “uninterrupted vacuum,” of the current times –global pandemic plus climate emergency’s colliding eco-traumas. Le Bon plays every instrument (except drums and saxophones) on hazy, opulent, and sometimes sonically minimal songs, which are of the moment, playful, satirical, and surreal. Unhinged opulence rests in sonic deconstruction that finds coherence in pop structures, when Cate Le Bon plays these new songs. - Caryn Havlik Set list: "Moderation", "French Boys", "Pompeii" Watch "Moderation":  Watch "French Boys": Watch "Pompeii":  This session was recorded in The Greene Space. Many thanks to their crew, and our Senior Concert Engineer, Ed Haber.

FPA, aka Frances Priya Anczarski, the Minnesotan songwriter, producer, artist, and daydreamer, works with a slow and romantic beauty in her music. She loves the ellipsis of possibility, and on her 2021 release, Princess Wiko, fuses bedroom pop, folk traditions, spoken word, hip hop, and chamber orchestration (aided by producer/musician Andrew Broder, a mainstay of the 37d03d collective) for a melancholic, medieval-era princess on a journey of love and self-discovery. FPA performs a few of these songs remotely. - Caryn Havlik Set list: "Princess Wiko," "The Loved One" Watch "Princess Wiko": Watch "The Loved One":

Shamir is a musician, songwriter, producer, painter, chef, actor, and filmmaker, and on his new album, Heterosexuality, uses the sounds of rock, R&B, and industrial synth - all within a pop framework - to challenge perceptions about gender and to explore his own queer identity. As he croons on his song “Cisgender” that “I don’t want to be a girl / I don’t want to be a man / I’m just existing on this god forsaken land /And you can take it or leave it / Or you can just stay back”, he reaches heights with his self-trained voice that one would expect of Swedish pop star Robyn. “Having multiple skills and talents in a world of side hustles and late stage capitalism,” Shamir has released a book of mixed media – essays about paintings he has made, But I’m a Painter (from his statement published on Pitchfork), also runs his own record label, and pursues gluten-free cooking. For this remote session, (recorded while on tour), Shamir performs intimate, stripped-down versions of his intense but catchy music in a live trio setting. - Caryn Havlik Watch "Nuclear":

Folk collective Spell Songs was born as a musical companion to the two books of meditations on nature by writer Robert MacFarlane and artist and naturalist Jackie Morris. The recordings are tender naturalist-chamber-folk spell-poems of wildness, beauty, loss, and hope, inspired by the creatures, art and language in The Lost Words and The Lost Spells books. Each spell is a summoning of sorts, conjuring an animal, bird, tree or flower - from Barn Owl to Red Fox, Oak to Bramble, Jay to Jackdaw - with which we share our lives and landscapes. The musicians wrote together on their “open plan” of musical ideas for Spell Songs II: Let The Light In, combining their guitar, harp, cello, keyboard, woodwind, kora, percussion and vocal harmonies. Spoken voice, whispers, accents, dialects, native languages, birdsong, the bark of foxes, the soft sound of a moth’s wing, the sound of a children’s climate strike; all increase the intimacy and power of the musical world conjured by Spell Songs II. Spell Songs performs excerpts from the new album; and Scottish singer Julie Fowlis and Senegalese-born kora virtuoso Seckou Keita chat about the project from London. - Caryn Havlik Set list: "Heron," "Daisy," "Thrift" Watch "Heron":  Watch "Daisy": Watch "Thrift": "Oak": "Bramble":

British singer, producer, and composer Anna Meredith is a musical chameleon, fusing contemporary chamber with electronics and dance music on her record, Varmints. Actually, classical, rock, electronica, and minimalism are all part of Anna Meredith’s sonic palette, and in addition to a stint as composer in residence with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, she is also a singer/songwriter who leads her own unusually constructed band - wielding keys, laptop, bells, & clarinet alongside a band of musicians playing tuba, cello, drums and guitar. This creative and unusual band plays in-studio. (From the Archives, 2017.)  

The British singer/songwriter Laura Marling returns with a refined sixth record Semper Femina, whose Latin title implies a more gender-specific note. The album is a gripping collection of poetic takes on womanhood- complete with seductive and ravishing arrangements. Unexpected deployments of strings – all kinds - and electronics create graceful swooping textures to augment her poised and polished songs. Laura Marling and her band play some of these intimate literary musings in-studio. (From the Archives, 2017.)