Music

What pressure? On the eve of Timo Maas’s 27-gig, 6-week North American tour to promote Loud (Kinetic), his debut album as an artist, the jovial Hanover, Germany, native is holed up in a San Francisco hotel watching dark clouds and rain spray the Bay area. But the dank atmosphere doesn’t…

Jeff Rollason, lead singer and guitarist of Miami’s experimental rock outfit the Curious Hair, is not at all interested in the music industry. “That’s not what I think about every day,” the 29-year-old professes before a late-night performance on the patio of a Coral Gables bookstore. Behind his small black-framed…

Growing up in Puerto Rico’s projects, or caseríos, may be no different than in any other hood on the U.S. mainland. Bullets, drugs, and a rap sheet are part of everyday life. But so is music, a legit way for many a street philosopher to escape the surrounding crude reality…

First-time director Michelle Lindenberger enjoys the wild. She was raised near the mountains of Arizona, did social work with delinquent kids, and led expeditions through the Florida river systems of Everglades National Park. But it was the sonic-and-strobe jungle of South Beach that propelled her to filmmaking. “I went to…

here’s a story of a jazz saxophone player, one of the great avant-garde tenors, who was approached after a concert in Europe a few years back by a fan wanting an autograph. The fan handed him two CDs recorded by the sax player’s son, Joshua Redman, and asked him to…

Who the hell is this tramp, Miss Kittin? Just a few short months ago, nobody but snobby music journalists and in-the-know hipster DJs had ever heard of this sardonic Frenchie. But now she’s, like, everywhere — featured prominently on Felix Da Housecat’s 2001 album Kittenz and Thee Glitz, as well…

Purveyors of the myth that trance music germinated in Detroit in the late Seventies or on the beaches of Goa, India, sometime after that had better hope that not too many Day-Glo-sporting members of the trance nation get their hands on Egyptian drummer Mahmoud Fadl’s new The Drummers of the…

The legendary Cuban-born percussionist Francisco Aguabella certainly doesn’t have anything left to prove. After pioneering the mixture of Afro-Cuban rhythms and jazz with a handful of others from the 1950s on, his legacy would be assured even if he decided to hang up his batá drum and congas for the…

Pitchshifter is trying to earn a black belt in Digitsu, fusing breakbeats, schizo dynamics, and rapid-fire techno with industrial rock. Unfortunately its influences seem to only stretch back to early Nine Inch Nails with a pinch of Filter’s sense of melody. And lyrically, save for the cryptic refrain “Science never…

Bowery rock cooked up in Spokane, Washington. An interesting elixir. The Makers look and sound like a mission statement for Seventies rock glam: leather and scarves and skinny legs, lyrics charged with suicide, vintage Gibson SG’s for authentic buzz. And on their tenth LP, Strangest Parade, the Makers expand on…

The strongest, strangest folk-based music out of Western Europe sounds closer to medieval Bulgarian grain-threshing songs than anything from modern Scandinavia. But don’t tell that to the members of Finland’s “girl group” Värttinä, who have invented a delirium-inducing flavor of pop anchored to a seventeenth-century Finnish Karelian musical genre called…

An upbeat Pepe Alva stands unrecognized outside Billboardlive, passing out flyers to clusters of concertgoers scurrying down the escalator after the Fito Paez show. With his wavy hair tangling in the breeze, Alva sifts through the crowd unnoticed at first even though the flyers are plastered with his face. The…

Dang-dut! The sound of the tabla is unmistakable. Sharp, hollow, and surprisingly melodic for a drum, it can percolate in the background like water dripping in a subterranean pool or rattle at full throttle at machine-gun pace. Many people know the distinctive timbre of the tabla from its backbone role…

On first impression, pretty much everything about 28-year-old singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright has a regal air — his musical bloodline, his wise-old-soul artistry, his bored-but-focused conversational tone, even his model good looks. Ask him how he wants to be remembered and he’ll smoothly answer, “As a great beauty — in every…

Lyrics free of the gratuitous violence, misogyny, expletives, and overall “thugged-out/pimpin’/flossin’ my ice/packing a gat” mentality that litters the bulk of commercial hip-hop, Blackalicious — rapper Gift of Gab (Tim Parker) and his partner DJ/producer Chief Xcel (Xavier Mosley) — is, as Gab rhymes, “prone to leave your dome blown…

Dieselboy is, without a doubt, America’s most in-demand drum and bass DJ, and after releasing dozens of underground mix tapes and six highly successful commercial mix CDs, it’s understandable that he’s a little wary of putting out just another straight-ahead mix CD. So why not assemble a diverse group of…

If Elf Power had emerged in 1985 instead of 1994 from Athens, Georgia, it’d most likely be lumped in with the (mostly) ill-fated Paisley Underground bands (Rain Parade, the Three O’Clock, Dream Syndicate) or the more general niche of “neo-psychedelic” (the Church, Bevis Frond, Spacemen 3). Fortunately there’s been a…

Lovers of fado — the sublimely melancholy Portuguese ballad that is something like that country’s Delta blues — will find reason to rejoice in Mariza’s international debut, Fado Em Mim. The 26-year-old singer is already a rising star in her native country, with critics there likening her to the last…

Describing Gino Sitson, the Cameroonian-born singer who now resides in New York, as an African Bobby McFerrin might give listeners a clue as to the vocal acrobatics that define his sound, but it wouldn’t quite do justice to the broadness of his palette. On Sitson’s new Song ‘Zin, the singer…