photos by Erez Avissar

Imagine you’ve just stepped into your favorite venue for a night of live music from a band you love. You’ve exchanged your ticket for a stamp on the hand. You’ve scrutinized the merch and visited the restroom. Only one question remains: Where do you stand? This, as it happens, is a question of some consequence. So go forth. Stand wisely.

Photo by Bruce Pavitt

April 8, 1994 was supposed to be just another day at the office for Charles R. Cross, the editor-in-chief of Seattle alt-weekly The Rocket. “I can still remember my finger pressing the flashing Line One button on my office phone, but I had no clue, at the time, that this little red light would announce a sea change in both music and culture,” he writes in Here We Are Now: The Lasting Impact of Kurt Cobain. The call was from a DJ at KXRX-FM, asking if Cross could confirm whether or not Kurt Cobain was dead.

Shake Appeal is a column that highlights new garage and garage-adjacent releases. This time, Evan Minsker shares the long-awaited new album from Sonic Chicken 4, a compilation of early recordings by Danko Jones, a video from Audacity, a demo cassette from Line Traps, and the debut EP from Geyser.

Down Is Up discusses music that falls slightly under the radar of our usual coverage: demos and self-releases, as well as output from small or overlooked labels and communities. This time, Jenn Pelly highlights the upcoming cassette release of an apocryphal riot grrrl prank call  from 1993.

Over at The Dissolve today, David Ehrlich interviews National frontman Matt Berninger and his filmmaker brother Tom about their recently released documentary Mistaken for Strangers. (Read Jillian Mapes' review of the film here.) The brothers talk about the band's evolution, life on the road, and... that time Werner Herzog almost directed a video for the National ontop of a volcano? Says Matt:

"[H]e wanted to do a video with us, and we were really excited about that, even though it never ended up happening. His idea, he said, was [Werner Herzog impression], “I want to put the whole band on a live volcano, very close to the lava. I want it to be very dangerous for you, and I want to see you try to play your instruments while the lava  is all around you.” And we were like, “That sounds awesome!” I don’t know about the logistics of making that work, but he definitely wanted us to be in serious danger, just to see if a band could actually play a song while lava is surrounding them."

Read the whole interview here.

Hell Awaits is a column by Kim Kelly and Andy O'Connor that shines a light on extreme and underground metal. This week, Kim dives into a slew of new black metal releases from Old Wainds, Krigsgrav, Woman Is The Earth, and Voidcraeft as well as a couple Southern surprises from Thou and Mule Skinner. Welcome to Hell.

The mixtape is having a renaissance: On any given day, I can do a coffee-break social media scroll and find half a dozen different co-signs to choose from. But in the last year, few have shined quite as bright as 100% Galcher, an hour-long blend of originals from Brooklyn-based producer Galcher Lustwerk. Harkening back to soul-cleansing washes of vintage house, the softly glimmering 100% Galcher is both supple and forthright, embellished by hushed free-association wordplay. It's the sort of gem you felt inclined to pass around—and by year-end list time last year, word-of-mouth intensified. It was Resident Advisor and Juno's mix of the year, and earned a top-ten placement in Fact Magazine's albums list, as well as Philip Sherburne’s personal rundown for Spin.

Kate Losse, a writer and former Facebook employee, recently published an essay about gender and “surveillance culture.” “The outrage over NSA surveillance,” she wrote, “has occurred and received massive coverage not because the deployment of technology for citizen surveillance is new but because white, technical, American men have finally become targets of the surveillant gaze rather than its aloof masters.” In her time at Facebook, Losse got to see how the male gaze functions in social media, and in this essay she concludes that women and men do not have equal access to privacy online.