Category: ESSENTIAL NEW MUSIC

Essential New Music: Eli Winter’s “A Trick Of The Light”
Eli Winter is Chicagoan by choice, and you know what they say about the seriousness of converts. The guitarist moved

Essential New Music: Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet’s “HausLive 4”
Bill Orcutt’s Music For Four Guitars is a bit like a favorite dish. It tasted great the first time, delicious

Essential New Music: Màiri Morrison & Alasdair Roberts With Pete Johnston & Friends’ “Remembered In Exile: Songs And Ballads From Nova Scotia”
The last time that MAGNET checked in on Scottish singer/guitarist Alasdair Roberts, surveying the stylistic zigzags of his last few

Essential New Music: Various Artists “Tsapiky! Modern Music From Southwest Madagascar”
About a month ago, producer/author Joe Boyd came to Chicago to promote his new book. And The Roots Of Rhythm

Essential New Music: Peter Brötzmann & Paal Nilssen-Love’s “Butterfly Mushroom”
If you die with unfinished business, there’s a good chance that means you were living right up to the end.

Essential New Music: The Ex’s “If Your Mirror Breaks”
In 1982, the Ex named its second album History Is What’s Happening. Four and a half decades since the band’s

Essential New Music: Dylan Golden Aycock’s “No New Summers”
Dylan Golden Aycock is generally identified as a guitarist, and with good reason. He’s an Imaginational Anthem alumnus, and while

Essential New Music: Hamlet’s “Light Under Repair”
Aficionados of dreamy, jangly guitar, particularly if it reminds old heads of the “college rock” of yore—like early R.E.M. or

Essential New Music: Sylvie Courvoisier / Mary Halvorson’s “Bone Bells”
Bone Bells is the third recording by Swiss pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and American guitarist Mary Halvorson. By dint of a

Essential New Music: Edith Frost’s “In Space”
Nearly 20 years separate In Space from Edith Frost’s last LP, It’s A Game. Where’s she been? Living life, moving

Essential New Music: Joe Chambers / Kevin Diehl / Chad Taylor’s “Onilu”
In a time when it’s hard to know just who and what to believe, Onilu shows how easy it can

Essential New Music: Gunn-Truscinski Duo’s “Flam”
Sand City, the Gunn-Truscinski Duo’s debut album, was the culmination of a half-dozen years of occasionally public and frequently private

Essential New Music: The Drip Edges’ “Kicking The Tires On The Clown Car”
Drip Edges singer/songwriter/guitarist Jeremy Scott—formerly of the Reigning Sound—is an avowed Bob Mould disciple, and that’s clearly evident as the

Essential New Music: Steven R. Smith’s “Triecade”
With Triecade, Steven R. Smith marks 30 years of mostly solitary music-making. Formerly a member of Thuja and Mirza (both