RiYL

They didn’t go into the forest to create a record. One evening of music and words surrounded by nature was plenty enough reason to gather.Still, Saul Williams meets Carlos Niño & Friends at TreePeople emerged, as the first official document of the two long-time friends collaborating.More than 30 years into his career, Williams doesn’t have anything in particular to prove. The mid-90s saw him quickly rise the ranks of New York’s slam poetry community, and he’s since proved himself as a musician, book author, science fiction writer, actor, and more.But in a world forever teetering on the  edge, there’s still plenty left to be said.

On 2022's I Don’t Know My Words, Anand Wilder embraced DIY in a different way, performing each song entirely by himself. Three years after Yeasayer's non-amicable split, the musician clearly had something to prove. Three years later, however, collaboration is back on the table with Psychic Lessons, a celebration of music making, genre, and just about anything else that popped into Wilder's head.

Nothing throughout the Descendents' long history can be taken for granted, started with I Don't Want to Grow Up. The band's second record, which celebrated its 40th anniversary this May, arrived after a two-year hiatus, which found singer Milo Aukerman at college (as the debut album helpfully noted) and drummer Bill Stevenson joining Black Flag. Certainly no one could anticipate, in spite of a few recent health scares, that the pioneering punk would be around to celebrate the album's reissue. Aukerman and Stevenson join us to to discuss the group's legacy and what keeps them running after all these years.

Bursting with the vitality of NYC's outer-boroughs, Laveda returned in September with Love, Darla. The Brooklyn by way of Albany harkens back to the heyday of noisy indie, while forging its own playful path.

A radical departure in a music career defined by them, Jamie Lidell's first full length in nearly a decade finds the artist exploring a new instrument, genre, tones, and collaborators. Born of the pandemic, Places of Unknowing is a work of ambient neoclassical piano music with no clear common sonic connections to the electronic-turned-soul musician's earlier work, beyond pervasive and deep emotional resonance.

Debi Derryberry's fifth album, Go to Sleep, combines longstanding loves of music making and animation into a single YouTube project, pulling together nine tracks aimed at lulling kids to bed. The work is a labor of love for a voice actress with somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 IMDB credits to her name. Along with playing the title character in the long running Jimmy Neutron franchise, the actress has voiced iconic roles ranging from the Toy Story aliens to the animated Wednesday Addams. We also dig into some fascinating early work with Jim Varney and a roller skating seal on the Chris Elliott masterpiece, Get a Life.

Earlier songs were political, but never as overtly so. There isn’t much value left to wring from subtlety these days.Battlewear is, fittingly, angry. It’s the product of navigating an unpredictable – and increasingly bleak – landscape. An hour before we hop on the call, a right wing reactionary is murdered in broad daylight.Kadhja Bonet believes in the power of art and community. And while they’ve never been particularly fond of performing live, busking holds a certain appeal, in its immediate and unfiltered connection between artist and audience.

Ahead of their upcoming Image series, Death to Pachuco, artist Rachel Merrill and author Henry Barajas discuss the process of bringing the historical fiction to life. Set against the backdrop of the Sleepy Lagoon Case and Zoot Suit Riots, the book explores themes of racial tension through a lens of hard boiled detective fiction. The pair also talk about picking up the mantle for long running newspaper strip, Gil Thorp.