Club Imperiale - Maxime Denuc (53m, no vocals)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

Nachthorn - Maxime Denuc (37m, no vocals)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

We wish you a great start to your week.

Reductions 1995-1997 - Vainqueur (64m, no vocals)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

Libration - Vainqueur (18m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

Have a superb weekend.

N - Nisennenmondai (40m, no vocals)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

Destination Tokyo - Nisennenmondai (58m, vocals on track 3)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

Have a great Thursday.

Americana - Modern Mandolin Quartet (72m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

Modern Mandolin Quartet - Modern Mandolin Quartet (37m, no vocals)
Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

Have a great Wednesday.

0:00:00 - Modern Mandolin Quartet - Shenandoah

0:04:08 - Effective Dreaming - Physis

0:09:06 - Jörgen Gustafsson - Half Finished Sky

0:12:07 - Firephly - Someone Else’s Summer

0:16:29 - Yujin Baek - day 8

0:29:06 - Davi Music - All My Trials

0:32:58 - The Hardy Tree - lowering clouds

0:37:11 - numün - the darning night

0:43:30 - Ghost Dubs - Long Way to Go

0:47:41 - Jeremiah Chiu - A Floral Pattern

0:54:13 - Sakura Tsuruta - Unfold

0:58:47 - Alchemical Sisters - Double Acid

1:05:43 - Sakura Tsuruta - Push & Pull

1:10:12 - Jeremiah Chiu - Non-narrative

1:14:18 - The Prodigy - Stand Up

Burning Song - Kali Malone (40m, no vocals)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

Does Spring Hide Its Joy - Kali Malone (303m, no vocals)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

We wish you a great start to your week.

GEMZ - Sakura Tsuruta (36m, no vocals)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

C/O - Sakura Tsuruta (43m, vocals on track 5)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

Have a great weekend.

Edge Conditions - Jeremiah Chiu (42m, no vocals)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

In Electric Time - Jeremiah Chiu (38m, vocals at the start of “For Voices”)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

What’s your earliest memory of music?

It was very cute. I remember my parents and I would call my grandparents on holidays or to occasionally catch up – I must have been 3 or 4 – and at the end of each call I would sing Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You” to them. Because of that, the song has a permanent spot in my memory and life. As a teenager, I remember learning this song to cover in my pop punk band. Maybe it’s time I do a switched on version.

What was your first instrument and how did you get started with synths?

I started playing piano and violin at age five or so. I took private lessons on both instruments and eventually joined the junior high orchestra as well as a regional youth orchestra in the Chicagoland area. In high school, I decided not to continue playing in orchestra. It’s something I regret now, but at the time, I started learning guitar and bass and wanted to hang out with my peers in punk bands – a pretty normal desire for a highschooler in the suburbs, I assume.

Near the end of high school, all of the friends I had were in bands and equally into punk, emo, and rave culture. Chicago House and Detroit Techno were hugely inspirational and analog (vintage) synthesizers were cheap and plentiful. We were playing in emo punk bands – starting to incorporate synths – and also learning how to beatmatch drum machines to tracks on a turntable. At the time, you could buy a synth (something like a Roland Juno-106) for $100. It provided us with the opportunity to try out a bunch of different synthesizers and sell and trade them easily. A friend, Mike Bingaman, lent me his MC-505 Groovebox and that really got me interested in sequencing, programming synths, and connecting the instruments to each other through MIDI and CV/Gate.

In retrospect, it was a unique experience to have so many teenagers in a community that was really open to a lot of music and art.

What were your first recordings like? What did you use to make them?

My sister had this Casio WK-1200 that wasn’t being used. It sat in our dining room, next to the kitchen. When my parents would be fixing dinner, I would sit on that thing and make songs. It had the ability to record up to six parts using internal sounds. So I learned to make a drum part, bass part, chords, and lead parts. It really taught me how to put parts of a song together. I also spent a lot of time making mixtapes by recording snippets of radio onto boombox that had a record function. I still work like this quite a bit, except I use live performance as my “radio.”

Once I was in bands, we – like so many people – had a Tascam 4-track recorder and a single microphone. We learned how to record parts and bus them down to single tracks to add more tracks. From there, the evolution went a bit like this: a 16-track minidisc recorder, a Fostex digital recorder, a Compaq computer with Cubase controlled by a 12-track MIDI console, a Pro Tools MBox with that goofy dongle. All of the early recording experiments were done on cassette tape or CD.

What early artists/albums were most influential to you finding your own sound?

Isotope 217, Tortoise, and the whole “post rock” Chicago scene were and still are huge influences. I’m grateful and honestly in disbelief that I call a lot of those people friends and collaborators now. Beyond the sound of the albums and music, the proliferation of different groups within a community reminded me of other thriving music scenes, like ‘70s Dusseldorf, Cologne, and Berlin scenes and ‘80s downtown New York scenes.

I love looking at liner notes and personnel on albums and seeing a rotating cast of similar characters – especially when those relationships traverse mediums. In particular, I remember being in art school and finding out that Steve Reich and Sol Lewitt were close friends. Moments like that blew my mind because I grew up in a culture where everything seemed to have a defined boundary. Music was Genre, Art was Movements. But the actuality was much more fluid, hybrid, and boundaryless.

Ultimately, the goal is to participate in, and support a thriving artistic community where artists can come together, be in dialogue with each other and contribute positively to our understanding and experience of the world.

What was your studio setup for Edge Conditions? What instruments/gear/software did you use to make it?

I work in Ableton. All of the contributors on the album recorded remotely and then I edited and arranged the material. More than once, a drum take would get resampled or sliced and it would form an entirely new track. For me, a large part of the studio process is experimenting by taking improvisations or other performances and using them as material for new pieces. I also use these samples to re-synthesize things – i.e. as a carrier voice for a vocoder or as an envelope follower or any other idiosyncratic way of taking one thing and using it to transform something else.

In my modular rig, I have several samplers and oscillators that I use to create percussion and melody. The samplers are all routed via my mixer’s aux send, so at any given moment, I can sample something and work with that.

Only recently have I started to incorporate software synths as a way to work out some of the compositions in MIDI before recording them again with analog synthesizers. On this record, I used my modular synth rig, Roland gear (101, 202, 303, 606, 808), Moog Matriarch, and a few sample-based organs or pads that I made. Beyond that, Marta Sofia Honer (viola), Marquis Hill (trumpet), Patrick Shiroishi (saxophone), Ben Lumsdaine (drums), Booker Stardrum (drums), Takako Minekawa (voice & field recordings), and Will Miller (EVI) all contributed to the album.

How did your experience with SML affect your solo work?

SML has been a great experience in listening and making intentional moves. Josh (in SML) has talked about it as being a mode of self-producing, or live producing. I think what he means is that when we’re playing live, it’s all improvised, but since it’s a performance, we’re balancing risk-taking with intentionality. Every sound each of us brings to the table is a part of a five-person dialogue. However, each of us has the opportunity to shift the conversation as it’s moving, because we all respond.

In my solo work, I improvise a lot in performances. This is usually done with live-sampling and sequencing. With sequencers in my modular rig, I often have a sequence sequencing a sequence. To clarify, instead of sending a sequencer a steady clock pulse, I’m sending it a rhythmic sequence. This starts to articulate and move the sequence I’ve written in ways that are unexpected and forces me to listen, adjust, and react. What I’m interested in is having some volatility in the performance. An opportunity to have things go awry that force me to be present.

With my previous solo album, In Electric Time, it felt very close to how SML currently operates. It was collection of improvisations that was then edited down into an album. With Edge Conditions I intentionally swung the pendulum in the other direction. Instead of build the record based on improvisations, I wanted to compose some pieces from the ground up. Some of the songs were still born out of an improvisation, but I challenged myself to explore the album in a way that I hadn’t been doing with my other groups (SML, Marta Sofia Honer duo, and Jeff Parker Expansion Trio).

You’re also a graphic designer and educator. What are some examples, if any, of your work in those disciplines affecting your music, or vice versa?

When people ask if there’s overlap between my art, design, and music practice, I always talk about the vocabulary as a way to understand how similar they are. In all of the creative fields, we can talk about composition, narrative, contrast, tensions, rhythmic, dynamics, etc… While we generally pin art and design towards a more visual realm, and music to be more sonic, I don’t really separate them that way. When I make an album, I always approach it like a film, or narrative work. I’m thinking about the pacing from the beginning to the end. I’m thinking about the tension and release and the changes between songs as opportunities to carry a listener through a series of ideas tethered to one larger concept.

In a more direct example, some years ago I was commissioned by The Getty Center in LA to create a score for a player piano as part of their performance, Pianographs. The player piano score rolls vertically across the face of the piano as the music is played. Holes punched in the paper scroll activate notes. Because the scroll was such a visual part of the performance, my approach to the composition was to compose the score by drawing images and words onto the scroll. I was less worried about the exact harmony, melody, or counterpoint, and more interested in hearing how these images and text came to life through sound.

Name an underrated artist from the past 50 years.

I’m not sure if Franco Battiato classifies as underrated as he became one of Italy’s most famous singers. However, his early experimental records Fetus, Clic, Pollution, etc. are all so incredible, and I’m always surprised that they’re not more widely recognized by today’s selectors. Go listen to them!

What are you working on next?

I feel so grateful to have the support of International Anthem and to be collaborating with so many incredible artists in our wonderful community. In the coming year, I’m continuing the work with SML, Marta, and Jeff Parker in hopes that one or more of those will finish another album. At this very moment, I’m about to send this interview off and record on an amazing track for Marquis Hill.

For Flow State, we’re listening to two records by Lattimore, whom we’ve recommended a few times in the past, including an interview in 2023. Collected Pieces: 2015-2020 is a great survey of her work, showcasing the way she manipulates the harp sound with pedals to create atmospheres of profundity. Tragic Magic, her collaboration with vocalist and composer Julianna Barwick, came out in January. They recorded in a Paris museum, Lattimore using three golden harps from the 18th and 19th century and Barwick using synths and a vocoder. “It was terrifying to hear the cracks when tuning the harps; they’re very delicate instruments,” she tells Bob on the show. “You think about the person who played them last, the person who initially built them…”

Collected Pieces: 2015-2020 - Mary Lattimore (68m, no vocals)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

Tragic Magic - Mary Lattimore & Julianna Barwick (42m, Barwick’s vocals)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

Have a great Wednesday.

0:00:00 - Ryuichi Sakamoto - solari

0:03:28 - Adam Wiltzie & Jóhann Jóhannsson - Give Into Gravity

0:07:05 - Blanket Swimming - Sovereignty

Read more

Friendship Survival Guide - Adam Wiltzie & Jóhann Jóhannsson (43m, no vocals)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

And Their Refinement of the Decline - Stars of the Lid (120m, no vocals)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

What’s your earliest memory of music?

It would have been the spring of 1972. I was playing around the apartment in the upper east side of Manhattan & fell in my parents bedroom hitting the corner of their bed severely cutting my bottom lip, as my mother took me down & jumped in a taxi to the emergency room I remember the driver blasting “Rocket Man” by Elton John, I will never forget it…

What were your first recordings like? What did you use to make them?

My four-track tape machine at the dawn of the 1990s cost $300, and that was a fortune for me considering I lived in squalor. The sounds we created on these recorders were essential to the sounds we were creating at the time & was the catalyst for Stars of the Lid’s early textural aura.

How did you first get into ambient music?

My first love & major influence was Brian Eno, hard to say there was anyone else that taught me conceptually about how to get in the middle of your ideas, let go of your option paralysis move forward, than the great bald one.

You’ve collaborated with several composers best known for their film scores – Jóhannsson but also Dustin O’Halloran. Stars of the Lid music has been used in film and TV as well. Was Stars of the Lid and your other work influenced by scores?

No, not at all. I am guessing by your question you have never listened to Stars of the Lid? I would also propose that Friendship Survival Guide was not either, it just happened to be the catalyst that started our collaboration. Most of the time when you are scoring films it can be really uninspiring & what was originally going to be this specific sounding entity usually turns into this strange sculpture that is cobbled together by different producers pushing through arbitrary ideas that they feel are an important part of the storytelling process.

What are some similarities and differences in composing for film versus making standalone records?

The biggest difference is composing for film will always fall in the category of “commissioned work,” so essentially it will never be just for yourself. There is always another sentient being that will have a say in the final outcome. This is not always a negative, but the sooner you let go & realise this, you will spend less time fretting about the occasional rejection of your work & ideas.

One of the moving things about Friendship Survival Guide is that listening to it now, knowing the context, it evokes loss, grief, memory, and nostalgia. Yet most of the original material was recorded with Jóhannsson himself. What was your experience revisiting the original recording with not only his memory but also Steve Albini’s in mind?

There was a bit of anxiety leading up to the moment I dived back in but once I started creating again from the palette of sounds we made all those years ago I would say the experience was mostly pleasant, inspiring & rather cathartic. Not sad at all, as the one thing I still feel listening to this is that JJ still sounds so alive to me.

What were the first and second studio setups for this record? What instruments/gear/software did you use during the original collaboration and later completion of the record?

I suppose there were 4 major events to the recording.

#1 was the initial ideas that were recorded between 2013-2017. A lot of these were tape loops that were recorded on a Studer 2 inch 16 track machine, so that we could have our initial loops with multitracks of layers. Then next step was bouncing the loops down to another Studer machine but this one was 2 track 1/2 inch. This also gave us the ability to crush the multitracks a bit. A final bounce was then activated to Johann’s Revox 1/4inch machine & these ended with another layer of tape compression as it starts to get really nasty sounding by the time you shrink the bandwidth from 2 inch to 1/4 inch. Then we digitised & this is what you hear on the recording

#2 was a few years ago when I started to put the pieces together & started to create the arcs that would finish the pieces. This next major event was recording the guitars & re-amping of the tape loops in Chicago with Steve Albini @ Electrical Audio. We used Sovtek MIG 50’s heads through Marshall cabinets with Coles STC 4038 Ribbon mics for the close & Josephson C 617 condensers for the rooms & Steve laid them on the floor, which is a technique I never attempted but they sound incredible for my ears.

#3 was orchestrating the strings & recording in Budapest. We used 24 players & recorded everything in 4 hours.

#4 is the final & most essential which was the final mix with my long time collaborator Francesco Donadello (won a Grammy for his work on the Chernobyl series soundtrack)

How do you discover new music these days? Any recent notable finds?

I am basically forever an inveterate used record collector. I don’t engage in actively seeking out new music from this era, but I am continually fascinated by how much music still exists from the past I have never listened to.

A couple recent finds from the past few years as I am in the middle of some kind of jazz resurgence in my head are Donald Byrd / Electric Byrd & Freddie Hubbard / Red Clay.

Name an underrated artist from the past 50 years.

I am not exactly sure what underrated means as it is forever being used in sports analogy, but for music in my collection it would have to be Robert Hampson.

What are you working on next?

For the moment it is the new A Winged Victory for the Sullen, hopefully it will be released before the end of 2027.

DJ-Kicks - Djrum (82m, some vocals but not many)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

Under Tangled Silence - Djrum (62m, no vocals)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

Cheerio.

Los Ojos Del Cóndor - Hermanos Gutiérrez (32m, no vocals)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

Sonido C​ó​smico - Hermanos Gutiérrez (40m, no vocals)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

Have a great Thursday.

El Miedo No es Una Opción - Julia Gjertsen & Nico Rosenberg (52m, no vocals)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

Shadow Light - Julia Gjertsen (48m, no vocals)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

Have a great Wednesday.

0:00:00 - Ari Balouzian - Starlight

0:01:39 - Gollden - onward & upward

0:04:29 - Space Ghost - Visit Water

0:08:28 - Stars of the Lid - The Daughters of Quiet Minds

Read more

November Variations (2025) Monday 11/17/25 - Stuart Bogie & Buck McDaniel (38m, no vocals)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

November Variations (2024) Wednesday 11/13/24 - Stuart Bogie & Buck McDaniel (32m, no vocals)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

You’re performing with Korey Richey of LCD Soundsystem and comedian Rory Scovel soon.

Korey, Rory, and I have a performance in Denver. We’re going to start workshopping this collaborative improvisational process. We rented a warehouse. The show’s sold out. It’s an exciting collaboration. There’s something so fulfilling about the power of a musical texture. If somebody steps in and just starts illustrating narrative and dramatic and comedic possibilities that exist within it.

I can remember – even if the music is campy or corny or something, as soon as somebody joins it with a narrative context, it can become very affecting. Like if you think about cheap horn samples, some of the hardest music I’ve ever heard has like [horn noises]. It sounds so hard, and it’s like a cheap trumpet patch.

I love to hear music recontextualized. The more true and honest and heartfelt the music is, the funnier it will be. In the same way where when you watch a great standup comedian do an incredible impersonation, it feels hysterical because there’s a virtuosity to the authenticity.

What instruments are Korey and Rory playing?

Korey is doing electronics and guitar. I’m doing woodwinds and electronics. Rory is doing vocals, like comedic – theatrical vocals. We’re exploring different technological possibilities. We’re really just starting off. This is a one way ticket we have together.

And November Variations is in the works.

We’re releasing all of these November Variations from last year again. I’m thrilled with how they turned out. Fritz Myers tweaked the recording process, put some mics in different places, and the fact that we’ve been working together for a year since the first one – you can really hear all of those things in the music. It’s almost like a little miniseries. Like a television miniseries where one thing happens after the other. Over the course of the week it’s like five symphonic movements, with the penultimate one being this depths-of-serenity one and the last one containing the most speed and virtuosity. There’s one in the center that feels kind of angular and confrontational. They all have different aspects and colors. As in the first series, Buck’s motivic stuff – his recurring themes and his memory for melodic information – is fantastic. It gives everything a strong focus.

How did November Variations come about?

Fritz Myers, who produces the event, introduced Buck and me. Fritz is my manager, and early in our relationship, he was like what do you want to do? I said I want to find a place where I can play at 9am every day of the week in a public space. I wanted it to be near my kids’ school, so I can drop them off at school and go and play in front of people, but not necessarily people who expect to see me play. He introduced me to Buck McDaniel, who’s the organist and music director at a church not far from where my kids go to school. We connected immediately musically and artistically and as friends. The music immediately began to unfold from the very first chords.

That came out of your daily playing on Instagram after covid started.

Yes. Also, in my career, I’ve often focused on making one thing and then putting it away and reinventing a whole other thing to do. I go from far extremes one to the other. Before covid, I started looking at art more. I saw this series at the Guggenheim where they show a bunch of works by a particular artist – I saw this series by the sculpture artist Giacometti. I was struck by all the subtlety that emerges when you see someone doing something similar over and over and over again. I went to an exhibit of John Zorn’s sketches, and I thought about his work, how he will exhaustively go through all the little permutations of a subform. It’s beautiful to watch him investigate every corner of these worlds he takes on.

I realized that, in my own way, I needed to have a more repetitive process. I needed to go to the same well for water every day. Through doing that, I’ve gotten a whole new understanding of things, something that I thought was just one approach is dozens of approaches. If I use a rhythm in one piece, now I can use that rhythm in a hundred.

Last time we spoke, you talked about Eno and Indian classical as influences. Was there other music that influenced the daily series?

I have a teacher named W.A. Mathieu. He has a book called Harmonic Experience that I read for years and then in the pandemic, I started studying with him over Zoom – specifically the harmonic lattice, as he describes it. That went to work on the way I play music and the way I understand music.

What did you learn from that?

It increased my understanding of the relationship between the harmonic series, pure intonation, pure ratio, harmonies, and the equal temperament system. I learned a way of moving through different modalities, maintaining the same tonality – what he calls dronality. It’s something that I think most people who’ve taken a long listen and worked on this kind of music experience. His way of describing the subtleties and the tendencies in the melodic and harmonic activity really fit me to a T. It really spoke to me, and I gained a deeper understanding of things, I think. I’m still working on it.

One day he said to me, “Stuart, there’s no success in this. You’re not going to win music.”

It’s an infinite game.

He saw me being hard on myself and he tried to take the pressure off. It’s a beautiful practice studying these things.

Any artists or records that stuck with you in recent years?

Yeah, for sure. I’m always going to back to ‘90s hip-hop. I love all the layering. I love the line of dissonant sound and the looseness of it. I’ve also been working with a looper a lot, so I’m thinking a lot about DJ Premier and El-P and Erick Sermon. Some of my favorites are probably Jeru the Damaja’s The Sun Rises in the East and Gang Starr’s Hard to Earn. Those two records are fantastic, I can’t get enough of them. Nas’s records, anything Q-Tip does.

Gang Starr wasn’t the first artist I’d thought of as an influence, but Oneohtrix Point Never said their track “Robin Hood Theory” had a huge influence on his looping and sampling.

There’s a trial and error in the composition process that is so rigorous – so deeply rigorous that the results are always one of a kind.

You can’t plan the beat or the composition in advance.

You have to have the sound at your fingertips. Music is so elusive. That’s what’s incredible about it to me, because if I listen to something for an hour, I might love it. If I listen to something for two hours, maybe I’ll stop loving it, or I’ll start to doubt its beauty. Maybe the first time I hear it, it hits me sideways. So how do you preserve your sense of what you’re hearing? It’s incredible, I’m in awe of it.

How did you start playing professionally?

In high school and college, I had a band with Zak Mastoon (aka Caural) on guitar, the drummer Andrew Kitchen, the bassist Eric Perney, and the saxophonist Colin Stetson. We had a quartet called Transmission, and we would play around Evanston, IL (1990-1994) then Ann Arbor and Detroit (1994-1998) and San Francisco (1999-2000s). We made it all the way to the Knitting Factory in New York, which was a new music Mecca for us. It was a dream come true to play there.

Then I moved to San Francisco, and then Chicago for about six months, and then I moved to New York in 2000. After moving here, I joined a band called Antibalas and I fell in love with the music of Fela Kuti. And I learned to play the saxophone, in order to play that music. The first sound I went for was an afrobeat sound. I bought one of Colin’s old alto saxophones. He stayed in San Francisco. (When I was there, there was no point in me playing a saxophone.) I was working a job in New York, and I got laid off, and I had some time on my hands. So I started learning saxophone. And then I joined Antibalas through a mentor of mine named Michael Herbst, who was an early member of the group. The band was wonderful. They handed me a tenor saxophone and said, “Play this.” I got right to work. For the first time in my life I found I had an aptitude for a certain musical style.

You hadn’t experienced that before?

No, I had always struggled. I couldn’t play jazz, I couldn’t play blues. I wasn’t that good at classical music. I had gotten through musical school and everything, but one of the things I learned in music school was that I’m not good at playing other people’s music. But I hadn’t played Fela’s music yet. When I found Fela’s music, for the first time in my life I felt aligned. He’s an incredible figure.

A few years ago, I went to Lagos and visited the shrine. I performed there with some of my friends from the Antibalas world. The singer Amayo brought us there. He’s the old singer from Antibalas.

The last question, which is usually the first question, is what’s your earliest memory of music?

A lot of ideas I would feel would come out in little songs that I would sing to myself. I remember picking out a Rush record from the department store because it had a doggy on it. I was a little kid and I was like, “Ooh, doggy on the record.” So I wanted that.

The most interesting early memory of music I had was being captivated by a song called “Jam On It” by a band called Newcleus. It planted the seeds for the sort of rhythmic interplay – it set me up to love electric Miles, funk music, electro, hip-hop. It’s an incredible song. I listen to today and get so fired up when I hear it. I’m still chasing the dreams that this song gave me as a little boy. I remember in my school one of the breaking crews had a strobe light and their shadows were cast on the wall. They were doing these fantastic dance moves. I was eight years old, they were all 12 and 13, dealing with the dance floor in a beautiful way. It thrilled me. Also in that song there was a vocoder (I think), and I loved that. I love the robot sounds.

Read more

Read more

For Flow State, we’ve featured Anderson’s music a few times before (worth listening to if you haven’t heard it), so we’re playing records by artists mentioned on the episode. First up is portal iii’s self-titled album from 2020, a post-rock ambient record by Liz Draper (bass), Chris Gray (drums), and Charlie Parr (guitar). Second we’re playing Meno by Liz Draper, from 2025, which similarly uses silence to punctuate its spare instrumentation.

portal iii - portal iii (50m, no vocals)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

Meno - Liz Draper (20m, no vocals)
Bandcamp / Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Music / Amazon Music / Tidal

Have a great Wednesday.

0:00:00 - Líom - Like I’ve Known You Forever

0:04:52 - Acid Springfield - Petri

0:09:08 - Ben Seretan - 3pm Rainstorm

Read more