Smoke Music was recently featured in a Wall Street Journal article on the recently released Creatavist platform from Atavist. The piece describes the multimedia capabilities of Creatavist through the experiences of the first users – and we’re delighted to be included. The article mentions both The Night She Slept with a Bear by Holly Anderson and the first issue of Smoke Music.
The recent Atavist publication The Last Clinic is a feature documentary film with essay and a powerful portrait of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the last abortion provider in Mississippi. Award-winning filmmaker and photographer Maisie Crow and writer Alissa Quart provide an intimate portrait of the lives at the center of this political maelstrom.
Poet and lyricist Holly Anderson assembles the work that brought her attention in the downtown New York poetry scene and with post-punk bands such as Mission of Burma and Consonant. Fabulous tales of passion, lust and redemption unfold with author readings, video, and images – with a companion soundtrack by Chris Brokaw (Come, Codeine), and design and illustration by Grammy-winning designer Susan Archie.
Poor Moon (Tompkins Square), the latest recording by Hiss Golden Messenger is the most richly rewarding music to arrive recently. It presents a struggle in song for attachment to spirit, to family, to meaning in an indifferent wilderness of temptation.
Ballads are consequential music. Something happens, often something dark or violent, and effects are felt. Consequences. Hell to pay, whether emotional desolation in this life or divine retribution in the next. Once ballads lost their ages-old function as lurid entertainment and breaking news, they ebbed into the shadowy hollows of Appalachia, forming deep pools of [...]
“… common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” – Nabokov The ghosts are there, when we can bear to look. We inhabit the past, or, more properly, the past inhabits us. It’s the only dimension we can know (imperfectly, interpretatively), the present being [...]
It’s old home week at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia, where hometown heroes the Drive-By Truckers are gearing up for the second of their annual run of charity shows. Friends, relatives, and hangers-on swarm the club’s smoke-filled backstage area, clamoring with excitement. But there’s an extra level of anticipation tonight. The blues-rock foursome [...]
For the recording of their previous album, I and Love and You, the Avett Brothers spent much time in a studio in Malibu, California. It showed. The album had a laid-back groove that some felt lacked the powder-keg vibe of their live shows. For their latest, The Carpenter, Seth and Scott Avett and bassist Bob [...]
“C’mon, you can do it!” Duane Allman was goading his younger brother, Gregg, in the backyard of their house in Daytona Beach, Florida. Duane had been drinking all day, and he was growing impatient. “Well, you’re just a chicken,” he scoffed. It was 1965, and Gregg and Duane were at a crossroads. Not even twenty, they had [...]
