37d03d Rock & Indie 8 Items

Innovative horn player, producer and songwriter CJ Camerieri returns with his deeply collaborative CARM project. CARM II, the second album due out this fall with 37d03d, was produced in Minneapolis by Ryan Olson and features Edie Brickell, Sid Sriram, Kristian Matsson, Justin Vernon, Gabriella Smith, SeanCarey and others. It is a genre-defying, heartfelt exploration of the possibilities in provocative musicmaking and provides a homespace for a profound variety of voices. Where the first record used horns in place of other instruments, CARM II places them even more prominently in the musical texture. The experience of playing live shaped this approach. "Standing at the front of the stage was a new experience for me and I wanted to create a record of songs that justified my being there." On CARM II, there is no mistaking that the lead "singer" of this band is Camerieri's horn. CJ also wanted to feature bandmateTrever Hagen, who takes on both production and performance roles. The featured artists on CARM II have opinedon their various roles in this project. Brickell contactedCamerieri asking him to participate in her short-formsongwriting project that she introduced on social mediaduring the pandemic. Camerieri and Olson were in themiddle of writing songs for the record, and one stood outas perfect for Brickell's request. Sent as a work-inprogress,she quickly responded, writing the first verseand chorus to what would become "More and More."They knew it needed to be fully realized. Says Brickell,"CJ's trumpet melodies and phrases inspired `More andMore.' I just listened to him and followed his lead, trustedwhat came to mind and sang it. It all flowed from hismusic.""For `I Fall' Ryan and I created the basic track and I reallystruggled to write on it. It wasn't in song form, and Icouldn't find my way into making it a coherent thought."CJ thought of Gabriella Smith, one of the leadingcomposers of our day, and on a whim sent her the track.Smith sent fragments to experiment wi...

Bonny Light Horseman's self-titled debut was a folk masterclass, reimagining centuries-old standards with effortless grace and wonder. Those Grammy-nominated, listtopping recordings not only suggested renewed possibilities for aging songbooks but also marked the arrival of a trio fully capable of reorienting the wider folk landscape. Still, if it felt at all like the work of some short-lived supergroup or a one-off diversion (it never was), Rolling Golden Holy rebuffs the notion with preternatural beauty and charm, and imagination. These songs, all originals, follow the paths of the traditional tunes the band cherishes to new frontiers, the sounds and situations of history given the gravity and shape of now. This is a band working at the edge of modern folk. After the release of their debut, Anaïs Mitchell, Josh Kaufman, and Eric D. Johnson began discussing their next steps, loosely planning on writing and recording stints. Those sessions were delayed for all the unpredictable but nowfamiliar reasons until the Spring of 2021, when the trio reconvened with their families in tow in upstate New York. Their chemistry remained intact. Johnson's wife Annie had listened to him work with dozens of collaborators over the decades, but, listening in from one room over, she noted he'd never seemed so at ease and productive as he was with Kaufman and Mitchell in Woodstock. They were perfecting "California," a timely and incorruptible classic about moving on in search of something else, something more. These sessions were a series of "yes, and" encounters, each one encouraging the others to take an idea and run with it further to the new safety net they've built together, for one another. These songs continually suggest and embody an unspoken continuum between traditional and modern folk. Mitchell finds self-sustaining adoration in steamy backseats, nighttime visions, and seasonal storms during "Summer Dream," crisscrossing generational symbols to tie past, present, and future into a Gordian knot of devotion. Johnson reaches back to 19th-century wartime on "Someone to Weep for Me" to empathize with someone else descended from "a long line of nobodies," just trying to live long enough to feel like he's mattered to anyone at all, a notion that knows neither age nor border. Johnson and Mitchell trade lines on "Exile," their luminous response to another of humanity's eternal conundrums_how to revel in relationships that we know will one day leave us lonely. Love and loss, death and fear: the songs may be different, but the emotional sources remain. The band thrives in rendering fresh wisdom and insight from old models, whether scraps of ancient songs or the spark of entwined voices. Theirs is a space created for sharing, learning, singing, and playing as one. Rolling Golden Holy is the band's testament to partnership and trust at a moment when we crave such connections so much. They fully appreciate what they have found in one another. On Rolling Golden Holy, we get to live inside that magic, too.

REVELATORS SOUND SYSTEM is the collaborative musical project of MC Taylor (Hiss Golden Messenger) and Cameron Ralston. Recorded throughout 2020 and 2021, largely at Taylor's home in Durham, NC and Richmond, Virginia's Spacebomb studio, where Ralstonserves as the house bassist, the album is a deep meditation on community that caroms from root-down avant-funk and spiritual groove to solitary cosmic minimalism and twinkling dubby ambience. Importantly_most importantly_Revelators is deeply emotional record, therunning soundtrack to a world in confusion. "Grieving," with its trunk-rattling double drums and searing electric Clavinet, imagines a rhythmic meeting of The Meters, post-Bitches Brew Miles and Can before dissolving into a smoky, time-smeared coda that is a directdescendent of Lee 'Scratch' Perry's headiest Black Ark productions, while "Collected Water" is a mournful, pointillistic improvisation between Taylor's drifting guitar loops, Ralston's loping double bass, and the melodic dancing between Daniel Clarke's chiming piano figures, J.C. Kuhl's insistent saxophone and Reggie Pa...

Joe Rainey is a Pow Wow singer. On his debut album Niineta he demonstrates his command of the Pow Wow style, descending from Indigenous singing that's been heard across the waters of what is now called Minnesota for centuries. Depending on the song, his voice can celebrate or console, welcome or intimidate, wake you up or lull your babies to sleep. Each note conveys a clear message, no matter the inflection: We're still here. We were here before you were, and we never left.On Niineta, Rainey finds himself in between cultures, collaborating with producer Andrew Broder, who brought his turntablist sensibility to the project. The two of them met backstage at Justin Vernon's hometown Eaux Claires music festival before crossing paths more through the 37d03d collective, and both contributed to the last Bon Iver album before partnering up. "At first I didn't know what I could add," Broder says. "I came to understand everything is rooted in the drum-even the songs on our record that have no drum." Each song started with Broder's beats, the two of them experimenting with various sounds and tempos before orchestrating and recontextualizing the ancient sounds in strange, new in-between places, also pulling from Rainey's vast sample folder of pow wow recordings, layering in slices of his life.Niineta is a short version of the Ojibwe term meaning, "just me," and Rainey is using the term only in the sense that he's taking sole responsibility for the music. He is protective of Pow Wow culture-once outlawed by the US government and maintained in secret-while trying to figure out where he fits and how he can be creative with it. "These are my creations, but they're pow wow songs, and our language is sacred," he says. Rainey suggests conceptualizing the album as him working the door at a Pow Wow after party. "If I'm answering that door, I want to say, hey, yeah, come on in. But there's fucking tons of us in here. It ain't just me."

Eighth Blackbird, Will Oldham and Bryce Dessner perform new arrangements of Oldham's cryptic songs, Julius Eastman's iconic Stay on It and Bryce Dessner's Murder Ballades.