The Creative Asylum

Few couples have lived in the world of independent music from as many angles as Colin Newman and Malka Spigel have. Colin is the co-founder, voice and guitarist behind Wire, the art-punk originators whose austere, angular sound still sound pioneering today , even decades after their formation in the 1970s. Malka was the bassist for Minimal Compact, the Tel Aviv-born post-punk outfit that became a cornerstone of the '80s European underground. In this episode, I get to have a conversation with these two artists who have been together for decades now and have built a remarkable shared body of work including their long-running duo, Immersion, their collaborative project Nanocluster and their band - about to be revived - Githead. They are more independent that they've ever been, running their own record label, swim~. We spend most of the conversation talking about where they are now: Immersion, the electronic duo Newman and Spigel formed in 1994, built on a genuinely collaborative process where the music comes first and the ideas evolve organically between them. We also talk about their ongoing Nanocluster series — a rotating-cast collaboration project pulling in artists like Laetitia Sadier of Stereolab, Ulrich Schnauss, Scanner, and ambient trio SUSSThis is a conversation about staying restless after 40-plus years in music, and what it actually looks like to build a life and a body of work with your partner, and why neither of them has any interest in coasting on legacy. VISIT https://immersionhq.uk

Working out of his studio in the Arts District of Saint Paul, Minnesota, Alex Kuno has spent over two decades building a visual language all his own. Alex's figures look like they wandered out of a medieval medical textbook and into a fairy tale gone strange. His characters sprout, mutate, and dissolve into hybrid states — part specimen, part storybook creature, wild and often as organic as the flora in the frame.  Kuno works primarily in oils these days, but we discuss a time in his development when he was experimenting with watercolor and colored-pencils as well as with acrylic. Adam Jones from TOOL noticed Kuno's remarkable work and has used his images on over a dozen concert posters.Alex Kuno has one of the most distinct visual styles in contemporary lowbrow and pop-surrealist art. It's dark, but maintains an element of humor, and it never quite explains itself. This is a conversation about making weird, personal work and building a career out of a life that is dedicated to making art. 

Swiss-born and Berklee-trained, Sharon Renold was Grammy-nominated before she'd even graduated Berklee. In this episode, Sharon and I talk about growing up in a Berklee household with international musicians as parents, an environment where she was surrounded by jazz legends throughout her musical journey which started with her learning to play bass at the age of four. She is one of the founding members of the Grammy-nominated Berklee Indian Ensemble, in which she's composed and performed on the group's acclaimed album Shuruaat, including her own original piece "Aakash." That group cracked open a world of Indian classical and fusion influence for her, pulling in artists like Tigran Hamasyan and A.R. Rahman, an experience that's informed the genre-blurring approach she's done since. In this conversation, we talk about her parallel life as a fixture of Scott's Bass Lessons, the massively popular YouTube channel where she's become a go-to voice for breaking down iconic basslines and albums for bass players worldwide — from Esperanza Spalding deep-dives to technique tutorials watched by hundreds of thousands. Renold gets candid about balancing session work, content creation, and her own songwriting, including her original track "Open Letter" and her long-awaited debut solo album. This is a conversation about groove as a language, the low end as a form of storytelling, and what it takes to build a career as both a world-class player and a creative explorer at the very beginning of what is bound to be a very long musical journey. 

I moved to Seattle in 1981 and met Charles Peterson the following year, pretty sure it was through U-Men, but you know - memory... He was already shooting pics and had a camera everywhere he went — front row, flash popping, catching the sweat and blur of bands nobody outside Seattle had heard of yet. Years later, as Sub Pop's de facto house photographer (at the same time that I was working there - EARLY on), he didn't just document the birth of a genre, his black-and-white images became synonymous with grunge itself, gracing early album covers by Soundgarden, Mudhoney and Nirvana. He largely defined how the rest of the world would come to picture the scene, and to that end is just as important to that history as any of the bands who have received the majority of the accolades. In this episode, Charles Peterson takes us inside the cramped, sweaty clubs of late-'80s and early-'90s Seattle, breaking down how his signature motion-blurred, high-contrast style — shot from inside the pit, up against the stage — became the visual language of an entire movement. If you're not already aware, Charles has published many books, starting with Screaming Life: A Chronicle of the Seattle Music Scene (Harper Collins, 1995) and Pearl Jam: Place/Date (Rizzoli, 1997), through Touch Me I'm Sick (with an introduction from Eddie Vedder) and Cypher (powerHouse), up to his most recent work: 2024's Charles Peterson's Nirvana, released on what would've been Kurt Cobain's 57th birthday, with a foreword by Krist Novoselic, plus its companion volume We're All Pros Here: Under the Covers with Charles Peterson's Nirvana. This is a conversation about being in the right pit at the right time — and how a self-described "music fanatic" with a camera ended up as the definitive visual chronicler of grunge. Here's to old friends who continue to keep the creative spirit alive.

From Keith Moon parading in an SS uniform to Siouxsie Sioux flashing a swastika armband, rock 'n' roll has been flirting with fascist iconography for decades — and nobody's called it out with this much rigor until now. Award-winning music historian Daniel Rachel — former musician turned best-selling author whose previous books include Too Much Too Young: The 2 Tone Records Story, Isle of Noises: Conversations with Great British Songwriters, and The Lost Album of the Beatles: What If the Beatles Hadn't Split Up? — joins the show to unpack his explosive new book, This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika and the Third Reich, with an introduction by Billy Bragg. We dig into why generations of performers — from punk provocateurs to arena-filling icons — have wrapped themselves in the aesthetics and mass hysteria of Nazism, and Third Reich iconography, whether for shock value, ignorance, or something far more disturbing, and what that says about an industry that's largely given them a pass.This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll isn't a nostalgia trip — it's a reckoning. Rachel walks us through the uncomfortable throughline connecting Keith Richards posing in an SS uniform through to Kanye West's own descent into open Nazi sympathizing, asking the question the music press has avoided for decades: how accountable should artists, fans, and labels be for glamorizing and trivializing the imagery of genocide? Critics have called the book "the most necessary music book of the year" and "as essential now as at any point in our history," and this conversation goes straight at the heart of it. If you care about music history, cultural accountability, or how far "shock value" can really go before it curdles into something darker, this episode is one you'll want to dig in to.

She was the red-haired firebrand fronting Lush when shoegaze was a dirty word and "the scene that celebrates itself" was getting mocked in the British press. Lush's demise was a story partially of pain, but decades later, Miki Berenyi is back at it and is playing some of the most compelling music of her career. In this episode, the singer/guitarist behind much of Lush's gossamer dream pop and shoegaze guitar pop talks about the band's rise through albums like Spooky and Lovelife, the conflicts that invariably run roughshod as part the band dynamic, and the devastating suicide of drummer Chris Acland that abruptly ended the band. Miki and I discuss her brutally honest memoir, Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me From Success — a book that transcends typical music-bio territory with an account that's absorbing, heartbreaking, and throughout, naked and surprising in it's unfiltered honesty. Miki's coming of age story in London led to the eventual messy reality of being a woman in the male-dominated Britpop machine.Miki Berenyi isn't a nostalgia act though. Her evolution to Piroshka — the moody post-punk/dream-pop project she built with longtime partner KJ "Moose" McKillop, Elastica's Justin Welch, and Modern English's Michael Conroy eventually led to her current outfit, the Miki Berenyi Trio (MB3), whose 2025 debut Tripla fuses her signature shimmer with electronics that show a marked evolution of songwriting and vastness of texture that can only be borne from a life well lived. From shoegaze pioneer to memoirist to indie-rock lifer who's somehow having more fun now than she did at her commercial peak, this is Miki Berenyi unfiltered — on life, reinvention, and why she's still not interested in being anyone's "woman in '90s music" cautionary tale.Keywords: Miki Berenyi, Lush, shoegaze, Britpop, Fingers Crossed memoir, Piroshka, Miki Berenyi Trio, MB3, Tripla, Chris Acland, dream pop, '90s alternative rock, Alt rock, 4AD, Vaughan Oliver, V23, Elastica, MB3, AI Music, Creativity, inspiration, writing music

When the republic is on fire and the algorithm keeps handing Zuckerberg a bucket of gasoline, who do you call? Meet Jesse Duquette — Chicago-based political cartoonist, creator of The Daily Don, and the most shadow-banned cartoonist on META — a distinction he's earned by doing what the mainstream press too often won't: holding a funhouse mirror up to the authoritarian clown show currently occupying the White House.From the weaponization of federal agencies and the gutting of due process, to ICE raids tearing apart communities, tariff chaos tanking the economy, and a cabinet that reads like a casting call for the world's most unqualified people in positions of power, Jesse has been drawing it all — one savage, ink-soaked cartoon at a time.In this episode, Jesse and I discuss the art and fury behind political cartooning in the age of Project 2025, MAGA disinformation, and a tech oligarchy that would rather suppress dissent than defend it. We dig into what it takes to document an unfolding assault on democracy — from attacks on press freedom and why it's important to turn political rage into something funny enough to share and sharp enough to hurt. If you think satire is dead, Jesse Duquette is proof it's just been shadow-banned. Subscribe, follow, resist.

If the L.A. music scene of the early '80s had a secret weapon, it was the Philadelphia-born Steve Berlin. Having cut his musical teeth playing R&B with some of the City of Brotherly Love's finest sessioneers before heading West and landing in the ranks of the Blasters — one of the most ferocious roots-rock outfits to ever come out of Southern California, Berlin had bigger wolves to run with. He took leave from the Blasters to co-produce Los Lobos' landmark 1984 debut 'How Will the Wolf Survive?' alongside T Bone Burnett, and quickly became a full-time member of the band. That album was later ranked among Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time — not bad for a kid from Philly who didn't know a lick of Mexican music when he first heard the band play. Then came the monster: in 1987, Berlin produced "La Bamba" — the Los Lobos cover of Ritchie Valens' classic for the hit biopic of the same name — and suddenly the whole world knew what East L.A. already did.As a multi-instrumentalist, Berlin has spent four-plus decades as the heartbeat behind Los Lobos' saxophone and keyboards, but his parallel career as a producer is equally jaw-dropping. His production credits include Faith No More, Crash Test Dummies, and Canada's beloved Tragically Hip, and his session work contributed saxophone to Paul Simon's Grammy-winning Graceland and John Lee Hooker's Grammy-winning comeback album The Healer — two records that redefined what American music could sound like. Add to that production and session work with the Replacements, R.E.M., the Dandy Warhols and Sheryl Crow, and you've got a résumé that reads like mind-blowing best-of compilation of the last four decades of American rock. Berlin has earned four Grammy Awards as a member of Los Lobos, with a total of ten nominations across his enttire career. In this conversation, we talk about his history — the records, the studios and a few of the stories behind one of the most inspirational music careers of our time.