Cary Clarke

If you feel like there’s a hole in Portland radio where hometown music ought to be, you’ll want to program 91.1 FM into your car radio presets right now in anticipation of 2009, when the recently announced, ad-free, listener-supported, full-power station run by MetroEast Community Media is projected to hit the air. For nearly 25 […]

The creative mind is perhaps nowhere freer to indulge itself than in the margins of a college-ruled notebook, the most lawless of places, where the restrictive logic of straight lines, physics equations, and complete sentences gives way to the vertiginous, free-associative liberty of blank space and wandering thoughts. Here, the ballpoint pen and subconscious mind […]

On June 1, poetically coincident with the beginning of school vacations, when tens of thousands of Oregonians under the age of 21 will be looking for worthwhile ways to spend their time and extra summer-job cash, the Oregon Liquor Control Commission will put into effect the recently ratified, long-needed changes to its minor postings rules. […]

This column last checked in with Portland’s busiest violinist and jack-of-all-strings Peter Broderick in July of last year, as he was preparing to take a break from his numerous local music projects—including Horse Feathers and Loch Lomond—to move to Denmark on a trial basis. In an instance of serendipity that most musicians only dream about, […]

Though there are certainly many factors to take into account when deciding whom to support for mayor of Portland in this week’s election, if you read this column, one of the issues that likely figures into your vote is the candidates’ positions on local arts and culture policy. With this in mind, I asked the […]

The most strikingly punk show I’ve seen this year did not go down in one of the many colorfully named, slightly foul-smelling residences that collectively constitute the Portland house show circuit, but rather in the cavernous front showroom of the Hollywood Music Center, a piano retail emporium on NE 42nd and Sandy. In spite of […]

Although much of the MP3-devouring world spent last week on hipster spring break hunting for a new live band to champion at the SXSW music festival in Austin, I feel no regret that I was not among them. Thanks to Portland’s enigmatic Italo disco scions Chromatics, I found one right here at home. As impressive […]

“I’m sitting at Spun Academy and this 68-year-old man comes in holding this CD, and he goes, ‘I want you to show me how to make this.’ I shouldn’t have thought this, but I was thinking it would be jazz or rock. I pop it in and it’s HARD BANGING TECHNO. And I looked up […]

I’ve long found it curious that Portland is home to more avowed garage-rock devotees and their bands than anywhere I’ve ever been, yet so few of the local acts anointed by major indie labels reflect that demographic fact. The relatively recent renaissance of Philadelphia’s long-dormant Siltbreeze label, a historical bastion of brazenly trashy homemade albums […]

There is something particularly upsetting about very, very tall people when they are sad. That being the case, there is an argument to be made that My Haunted, the mournful and lovely new solo album by the tallest man in indie rock—Menomena skin-beater Danny Seim—is the most arrestingly sad record of our time. Recorded by […]

Just short of a year since its inception, Brainstains—the quasi-official community center and music venue located in an unprepossessing yellow house at 3535 N Lombard—will host its final show on Saturday, February 23. The 12-hour all-ages event commences at 2 pm and features performances by over a dozen Portland bands that have formed the core […]

Just before 9 am on the morning of December 13, 2007, I was driving south on 99E, en route to a voting session at the Oregon Liquor Control Commission’s headquarters. I hoped that the agency’s five governor-appointed commissioners would do the right thing and approve a set of widely heralded rule changes that would’ve significantly […]