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Category: Interview

  • Holy Sun Opera House Turned Recurrent Dreams Into a Gothic Tale

    The Holy Sun Opera House press photo by Andres Herrera
    The Holy Sun Opera House (Photo: Andres Herrera)

    For years, Krissy Barker has been dreaming about houses. Some of the dreams are frightening. Others are not. All feature very specific dwellings that only exist in her dreams. “I’ll visit the same ones over and over and over again, sometimes multiple times in the same night,” the L.A.-based singer and drummer says on a video call. After so many somnial visits, Barker started turning those mysterious spaces into songs and, after forming Holy Sun Opera House with composer dl Salo, they became the basis for the project’s self-titled debut album, out now via Hologram Opera. 

    Holy Sun Opera House is gothic music in a way you wouldn’t expect for 2026. Barker and Salo- both classically trained musicians who met playing pinball and share a wide variety of non-classical influences- have made the kind of music you want to hear while you’re reading Rebecca or marathoning episodes of Dark Shadows. The album The Holy Sun Opera House is gothic in the sense that it gives you the impression of wandering through an old mansion on a stormy night, guided only by candlelight and unsure of what lies behind the doors you find. 

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  • How Making a Documentary on Scottish Girl Bands Influenced Carla J. Easton on Her New Album

    Press photo of Carla J. Easton by Craig McIntosh
    Carla J. Easton’s new album, I Think That I Might Love You, is out now. (Photo: Craig McIntosh)

    Throughout her career, Carla J. Easton wrote and played with piano and synthesizers. That changed, though, after spending eight years working on the documentary Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland’s Girl Bands. “I would just interview and spend time with these incredible, powerful, independent women,” says Glasgow-based Easton on a recent video call. “None of them ever waited for an invitation. A lot of them are just like, I’ll pick up a guitar, fuck it.”

    So Easton, too, picked up a guitar too. The result is her latest solo album, I Think That I Might Love You, out on May 8.

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  • Mignon Looks Towards Utopias in Dystopian Times

    Mignon Fist in a Honeypot video selfie
    (Photo courtesy of Mignon)

    In her video for “Fist in a Honeypot,” Mignon cuts a regal figure, decked out like a Marie Antoinette for late stage capitalism. With Benjamins dripping from her cage skirt, and more bills doubling as a fan, she sips tea and spits out lines like, “money to cheat for/they rob you.” Both the costume, made by the singer herself, and the song are a commentary on today’s “let them eat cake” elite. 

    “It’s about people having too much money,” Mignon says with a laugh about what she describes as the most anti-capitalist of her new batch of songs. 

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  • Crispian Mills of Kula Shaker Explains Who the Wormslayer Is

    Kula Shaker Press Photo by Sandrita Cardenas
    Kula Shaker (Photo: Sandrita Cardenas)

    There are few albums in my recent memory that have the transportive power of Wormslayer, the latest from English rock band Kula Shaker. Throughout its eleven songs, the album takes listeners into tales of devil’s bargains, bloodsucking villains and unassuming heroes. And, like all good fairytales, Wormslayer has its roots in the here and now, with songs like “Good Money” and “Charge of the Light Brigade” riding a lyrical line between social commentary and fantasy. 

    For their eighth album, Kula Shaker’s classic lineup (Vocalist and guitarist Crispian Mills, Hammond organist Jay Darlington, bassist Alonza Bevan and drummer Paul Winter-Hart) primarily recorded live and with analog equipment, the end result being an album that captures a similar urgency that’s steeped in the songs’ lyrics. Meanwhile, Mills’ brought together elements of “The Winged Boy,” a story that he had previously been developing as a film, and manifest in the song of the same name, as well as “Good Money” and “Shaunie,” with references to WB Yeats and dragon lore for the lyrical content. While Wormslayer may not be a concept album in the strictest sense, it does flow like a battle between good and evil, particularly when the tension mounts on the eight-minute title track. In an email interview, Mills shared some insight into the making of Wormslayer and explained who the worm and wormslayer(s) are. 

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  • Voxtrot Returns With New Album and Tour

    Voxtrot press photo Annie Gunn
    (Photo: Annie Gunn)

    For singer/guitarist Ramesh Srivastava, there are distinct eras of Voxtrot, the band he fronts. The first he references centers around the band’s 2005 EP, Raised by Wolves, where he sings about his first major love and heartbreak. “To me, those songs are very clearly that and don’t really have much poetic diffusion,” he says on a recent video call. With the band’s self-titled album, released nearly 20 years ago now, Srivastava sang about the pressure he says he felt being in a group with a record deal and big opportunities before them. “It was a very challenging time, so I feel like that album is lyrically mostly about my psychology. It’s not really about other people,” he explains. 

    Emerging from Austin, Voxtrot’s first run coincided with the rise of music blogs, file-sharing and early social networks like Friendster and MySpace, what people now might fondly refer to as “the good internet.” The band gained a buzz online, as well as in traditional media, with the EPs leading towards their 2007 album. While a couple singles followed the debut full-length, Voxtrot split in 2010. 

    A 2022 reunion and successful tour led to recording Voxtrot’s recently-released full-length, Dreamers in Exile. In the 12 years that passed between the band’s first and second lives, plenty changed, including Srivastava’s lyrical approach. “Now, I feel that I try to talk a lot about my own experience, to talk about my experience, being gay and of mixed race and how weird it is to be that and be from Texas and how hard it is to be that anyway,” he says. “I try to talk about my unique human experience, but also constantly bringing in stories and references of people and works of art that inspire me.”

    He adds, “I’m really into creating a world that is both deep and meaningful, but is also aesthetically enjoyable.”

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  • Boiled in Lead Embraces the Darkness of Folk Music

    Boiled in Lead press photo Darrell Eager
    Boiled in Lead (Pic: Darrell Eager)

    For Drew Miller, one word sums up the themes that attract Boiled in Lead to traditional tunes: Darkness. 

    Darkness extends to the Celtic punk band’s name too. Boiled in Lead is derived from an Irish song, “The Two Sisters,” specifically a version associated with Clannad and is a reference to the punishment that befell a murderous sibling. “In 1983, that seemed like a really good name for a punk rock band doing folk music,” the bassist explains.

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  • Grrrl Gang: Online 24/7 and IRL This Weekend

    Grrrl Gang press photo by Elizabeth Kezia
    Grrrl Gang photo credit: Elizabeth Kezia

    Grrrl Gang spends a lot of time online. “It’s just too much sometimes, to be honest,” says bassist Akbar Rumandung. But, the inspiration for the band’s latest release, Online 24/7, hit IRL via a photoshoot at a friend’s gallery. One shot of the Indonesian punk band, taken through a window with a sticker that read, “Online 24/7” on it, stood out. It looked as though people were watching the band through their phones. 

    “That photo it reflects what we actually feel as a band nowadays,” says Rumandung on a recent video call from Jakarta, “where people try to categorize us through social media through what they see about us through social media, where they don’t actually know us, they don’t actually understand what this band is actually about.” It also, coincidentally, fit the music that Rumandung’s bandmates, Angeeta Sentana and Edo Alventa, had been writing, which reflected what they were seeing online. “Before that, we didn’t know what we should name the maxi-single. There are so many options, but we didn’t feel it yet,” Rumandung adds. “After the photos… we knew that this was our title for the maxi-single.”

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  • Andrew Becker on Human Potential and Eel Sparkles

    Human Potential press photo by Daniel Roland Tierney
    Photo: Daniel Roland Tierney

    Andrew Becker awoke from a dream with a phrase “the house that kept Hemingway alive” in his head. “Did I make that up or did I read that?” he wondered. So, the LA-based musician, who records as Human Potential, looked around and found an article about the house in Idaho where Hemingway lived until he died of suicide in 1961. 

    “Out of the four or five houses that he lived in, that’s the only one that is not open to tourism,” says Becker on a recent video call, rain visibly beating against the window of his home in Highland Park. “I found that interesting. Then there are stories about all these people making pilgrimages to the house and trying to climb the fence and get in.”

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  • The Black Watch Just Wasn’t Made For These Times

    The Black Watch live at the Barkley press photo by Lee Gentile
    The Black Watch live at The Barkley in South Pasadena (Press photo by Lee Gentile)

    At some point in the middle of a conversation with the black watch founder John Andrew Fredrick and producer Rob Campanella the subject shifts to Fredrick’s flip phone. Or, really, it shifts to Fredrick’s unease with technology. “I’m a very right brained kind of person who thinks that technology is killing us,” he says as we sit on the back patio of the Echo Park bookstore/cafe Stories,  “and I don’t want to be the sort of person who is staring at a phone all the time or going on Tinder or anything along those lines at all.”

    That’s fair. Technology probably is killing us and scrolling is tedious. Plus, Fredrick’s flip phone has become a conversation-starter in its own right. “It’s a way to make people chuckle. They want to touch it and consider me a relic, which is fine. I don’t care,” he says.

    “Brian Wilson isn’t the only guy who just wasn’t made for these times,” he adds. “I was not either.”

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  • Lapêche Dance Through Third Album, Autotelic

    Lapêche press photo by Nicole Miller
    Lapêche’s new album, Autotelic, is out now. (Photo: Nicole Miller)

    For Krista Holly Diem of Lapêche, a dance background came in handy when it was time to make the video for “Happy 4U,” from the band’s recently released third album, Autotelic. “The subject matter of the song is pretty heavy and I wanted to do something that was kind of silly and danceable in a way, almost in a way where you’re dancing and crying at the same time,” she says on a recent video call from Salt Lake City, where Krista and her husband, Lapéche bassist Dave Diem, are based.

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