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Category: Interview

  • Cyrnai Embraces “Found Experience” and Future Sound on Calamity of Beauty

    Cyrnai (Carolyn Fok) press photo 2025
    Cyrnai, aka Carolyn Fok

    Carolyn Fok was in Los Angeles, cleaning out her late father’s house, when she discovered the statue of a woman, reclining in a seductive pose amidst the odds and ends stored in a dark room. She shined a flashlight through nearby glass and snapped a photo for what would become the cover of Calamity of Beauty, her latest album as Cyrnai. 

    Fok, who is also a visual artist and writer, refers to these kind of moments as “found experience.” As a child,  she found a drum machine that her father made and began playing around with it. “He didn’t give it to me, I just found it and I found a lot of things,” Fok says on a recent video call. “He would leave secondhand instruments in the living room and I started putting things together as a teen, so finding this statue was like, oh, did he want me to find this too?”

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  • Edward Ka-Spel on How AI Inspired New Legendary Pink Dots Album, So Lonely in Heaven

    Illustration of Legendary Pink Dots by Simon Paul
    Illustration of Legendary Pink Dots by Simon Paul


    On So Lonely in Heaven, the latest album from Legendary Pink Dots, the long-running psychedelic band leads listeners deeper into a tech dystopian landscape that doesn’t quite feel like fiction. A deleted file leads to disaster where all you can do is “pray to the server, pray to the cloud” on “The Sound of the Bell.”  A persona lives on after the body dies and the organs have been donated in “Pass the Accident.” It’s all very much within the universe that singer and lyricist Edward Ka-Spel has been building across the band’s vast catalog for the past 45 years, where scenarios that blur the line between sci-fi, fantasy and reality are told with a good dose of dark humor. 

    Where the band’s 2022 album, The Museum of Human Happiness, essentially documented the COVID-19 pandemic, this time around, Ka-Spel drew inspiration from AI. “My experience of artificial intelligence isn’t all that great,” he admits on a recent call from his home outside of London. 

    However, Ka-Spel had caught wind of AI-generated lyrics produced in the style of his own. “It was passable in that it was eloquent,” he says. “It was, I guess, coherent.”

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  • Anja Huwe on New Xmal Deutschland Box Set and Returning to the Live Stage

    German goth band Xmal Deutschland, Hamburg, 1987 (Photo Kevin Cummins)
    Xmal Deutschland box set, Gift: The 4AD Years is out on May 9, 2025 (Photo: Kevin Cummins)

    Last February, Anja Huwe took to the stage at the Grauzone Festival in The Hague for a set that included songs from Xmal Deutschland, the post-punk outfit she fronted throughout the 1980s. Huwe hadn’t performed these songs live since the band’s demise some 35 years earlier. In fact, after Xmal Deutschland, Huwe stepped away from the stage to focus on her career as a visual artist. Meanwhile, songs like “Mondlicht,”  “Incubus Succubus” and “Qual” have become classics of the era. Out in the crowd were multiple generations of fans. 

    “I had to go out there and I saw these people, so many people, so I just tried to concentrate,” Huwe says, adding with a laugh, “I’ve got to get it right.”

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  • Big Black Delta Makes Music for the Other Side

    Press photo of Big Black Delta Jonathan Bates by Josh Giroux
    Jonathan Bates is Big Black Delta (credit: Josh Giroux)

    “Honestly, nowadays, making an album is not a healthy thing,” says Jonathan Bates. “Spending a year and a half making a collection of music and then putting it out and people literally giving it 30 minutes is not good for the soul.”

    Bates, though, released his fifth album as Big Black Delta, Adonai, last February. It’s a fantastic mix of synthpop and rock. Since the album landed in my inbox earlier this year, I’ve spent much more than a half-hour listening to it. 

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  • Vague Lanes on Catharsis and Connection Through Music

    Vague Lanes (photo Steven Purham)
    Vague Lanes (photo Steven Purham)

    “I think all of the music that I’ve ever made is mostly cathartic,” says Mike Cadoo of Vague Lanes. “I almost need to make music for that means.”

    In fact, he notes, most of the songs on Divergence and Declaration, with the exception of “Exo,” are “pretty grim.” 

    “We’re not exactly making pop-punk music here,” bandmate Badger McInnes agrees. 

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  • Friend of a Friend Didn’t Intend to Record in a Haunted House, But That’s What Happened

    Friend of a Friend Claire Molek Jason Savsani press photo (Credit: Ashleigh Dye)
    Friend of a Friend (Photo: Ashleigh Dye)

    Claire Molek and Jason Savsani didn’t intend to record Desire!, their latest album as Friend of a Friend, in a haunted house. In fact, they didn’t know that the Illinois abode, once a home for spiritualists and said to be a site of demonic possession, had that reputation until a few days into their stay. 

    “I think when we share this tale, people might assume that we’re obsessed with this sort of stuff and we watch Ghost Hunters and we’re all about that lifestyle,” says Savsani. “We are not. We are not seeking that out.”

    In fact, he adds, “We weren’t thrilled about it.”

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  • Acidtrain Asks “What’s This Obsession with Cultivating Wealth?” in New Song

    Acidtrain live at Slipper Clutch on Sunday, April 13, 2025 (Photo: Liz Ohanesian)
    Acidtrain live at Slipper Clutch on Sunday, April 13, 2025 (Pic: Liz O.)

    Update (7/22/25): “Delulu” by Acidtrain is out now via Lollipop Records.

    It’s just before 9:30 p.m. on a Sunday night and red lights beat fast against the upstairs stage at Slipper Clutch. Acidtrain, aka Ryein Evan, has just launched into “Delulu,” a song, he says to the crowd, that’s about the billionaire class. 

    It’s the day after 36,000 people turned up for Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s Fighting Oligarchy event at Grand Park, just a few blocks away from this downtown club. Plus, “fuck billionaires, fuck Trump” has been the general theme of club conversations for months, so “Delulu” is a good fit for the moment. The frenetic beat and a squelchy synth sound that comes and goes throughout the song captures the vibe of downtown Los Angeles. Evan dances and bounces across the stage, growling lyrics like, “what’s this obsession with cultivating wealth?”

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  • Taleen Kali: “Sometimes, I think it’s easy to lose touch with the point of DIY”

    Taleen Kali - photo credit Sophie Prettyman Beauchamp
    photo credit Sophie Prettyman Beauchamp

    In early February, in a small L.A. venue called Love Song, Taleen Kali debuted her EP, Covered, a few days before its Valentine’s Day release. Every detail reflected the holiday theme. The EP, which includes versions of songs like “Ava Adore” and “#1 Crush,” was available on heart-shaped flashdrives at a merch booth decorated with cupids. The listening party was followed by a live set where Taleen Kali, the person, morphed into Taleen Kali, the band, as more and more musicians joined the singer/guitarist on stage for a set that included live rarities and music from Covered. 

    It was a killer night, and I’m not just saying that because I happened to be the DJ for the show or because Taleen and I have been pals for a few years. I mean, it was a very well-planned and well-executed show.

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  • Night Ritualz: “We won’t be here forever, but our music potentially could live for a very, very long time”

    Night Ritualz promo photo 2025
    Night Ritualz (photo courtesy of the artist)

    When Vincent Guerrero had a venue in San Antonio, called Vice Versa, he spent his days organizing, which also meant going through the vinyl collection housed in the space. “Every day, I would get a random record and I would listen to it,” he recalls. 

    He was struck by the album covers with photos of the musicians, sometimes large bands, all dressed up for the occasion. “At some point in their life, this was their dream,” Guerrero remarks. He’d listen to the music, some of which could not be found on Spotify or YouTube. “It was kind of scary, but kind of beautiful,” he says. “We won’t be here forever, but our music potentially could live for a very, very long time.”

    All this inspired Guerrero, who records under the name Night Ritualz. “I always wanted a record, a vinyl,” he says. “That was a dream.”

    So, after Vice Versa closed, Guerrero put his efforts into attaining that dream. On March 7, Night Ritualz’s self-titled debut album was released via Metropolis Records on both digital and vinyl formats. Following the album drop, he hit the road. He headed back to San Antonio for the record release shows, then to Austin, where he now lives, and played a string of South by Southwest dates. A West Coast tour, which concludes with Night Ritualz’s first headlining gig in California at The Cathedral in Pomona on April 4, followed. 

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  • Flashback to 1980s L.A. with Grey Factor on Live Album, A Peak in the Signal

    Jeff Jacquin and Joey Cevetello of Grey Factor (Photo courtesy of the band)
    Jeff Jacquin and Joey Cevetello of Grey Factor (Photo courtesy of the band)

    When first wave L.A. synth band Grey Factor originally played around town, it was the junction of the 1970s and 1980s, an era when synths were more cumbersome and complicated than they are today and local audiences weren’t totally sold on electronic music. 

    Back then, Jeff Jacquin and Joey Cevetello, the core of the group, and their bandmates lugged analog gear into punk clubs. Sometimes, they brought their own soundboard as well. Cevetello carried pieces of paper with charts showing how all the knobs on the synthesizers should be arranged. Their stands were repurposed shelving units. 

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