Dave Longstreth has always seemed too sincere for the cynical, self-denying idiom of experimental rock. The genre steeps itself in alienating tools like harsh feedback, challenging song structure, and cold, abstract lyrics while often conforming to the guitar-bass-drum paradigm that grounds and distinguishes rock & roll from other styles. It postures itself as subversive and polarizing while at the same time denying its reliance on that tried and true music foundation.

More about: Dirty Projectors

This is not who I am. I am not who I appear to be. Yet the fiction of the truer self remains. Am I its remains of me? Am I what shimmers in the mirror still, after you shed a tear then parted? what shivers in the water’s gleaming when the wind surged in search of its longing? a disturbance of dust in an empty room? a quickening of the heart from nobody’s gaze?

More about: Laurel Halo

Space, for left-field musician Rafael Toral, is neither a final destination nor a beginning — at least space as it’s normally understood. Whether suspended in the gossamer haze of his early ambient work, honed to precarious improvisations in his Space Program series (which recently concluded after a 13-year voyage), or, freed from paternal stricture in his present projects, gone renegade past the pearly gates of free-jazz, Toral’s work has little to do with stargazing and everything to do with positioning.

More about: Hugo Antunes, João Pais Filipe, Rafael Toral, Ricardo Webbens, Space Quartet

in memoriam Cash Askew

More about: Them Are Us Too

Telepathically seduced by a being that might not be there anymore. You know, the old NYC. It’s there and always will be, but who’s still there: who didn’t want to make their music morph into something that wasn’t guitar-centric. Oh, how anciently thou strumeth your electric guitar, sire. But wait. Guitars or not, on the outskirts or not, Gang Gang Dance, during their 7-year gap, have became of another self: the one thusly come. Which was once two.

More about: Gang Gang Dance