Cary Clarke

I had pretty great neighbors growing up. On one side was the kind, elderly Persian couple whose grandson frequently visited them and became my primary bike-riding and nacho-eating buddy. On the other was the Scientologist family with the scruffy dog and the massive trampoline they sometimes let me jump on. Nonetheless, I can’t help but […]

“Really fun” may seem like a counterintuitive way to describe a verbose concept album informed as much by the narrative traditions of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica as by those of post-Beatles North America, but that’s just what Beyond the Bells is. The first fully realized album by local violin-guitar-and-drums, garage-twee trio the Maybe Happening, Beyond the Bells […]

You know that Portlanders’ collective attitude toward tobacco has taken a decisive turn for the cancer-conscious when a local decadence-themed music venue that hosts recurring events with names like “Sinferno Cabaret” and “Karaoke from Hell” not only politely complies with Oregon’s freshly ratified ban on smoking in bars and taverns, but does so voluntarily a […]

In a move to match January’s sun-less gloom, Swan Island—Portland’s preeminent practitioners of post-punk, pre-apocalyptic proto-metal—announced this week they are going on “indefinite hiatus,” effective immediately. The five-woman-strong, unerringly riff-ready band—which many consider to be today’s stewards of our city’s politically progressive, hard-rockin’, feminist musical tradition—will be playing their final set at Holocene on Thursday, […]

Like other creatures of the Northwest, Portland musicians crawl into their dens for these darkest, coldest months. However, unlike their even scruffier wild counterparts who sleep through the winter, our city’s songsmiths are hard at work: recording at home, finalizing mixes, and titling albums. The number of local albums coming out in 2008 that should […]

Though much of my year was invested in the ongoing debate, alternately uplifting and frustrating, over what age people should (not) have to be in order to see live music, the substantial amount of time that I spent actually attending local shows was overwhelmingly rewarding. What follows is a list of my five favorite local […]

If you, like many Oregonians, are a hard-working musician who, in spite of your best efforts, just hasn’t been able to find a “real job,” I have some very good—if entirely illogical—news for you, just in time for the holidays. It is my pleasure to inform you that, if you have ever played a show […]

As I reckon, the best song of the year—an undeniably catchy, three-minute bedroom-pop masterpiece called “Rawnald Gregory Erickson the Second”—unexpectedly rode into town sometime in early August on a little blue pony. The loveably misshapen, two-dimensional colt in question was a hand-printed image, barely distinguishable from a Rorschach inkblot, that had been stamped on the […]

Artix is the Dread Pirate Roberts of Portland music events. Since it was established in 2002 by Pete Swanson (of peace-loving noise terrorists Yellow Swans), and Josh Blanchard (of drone-folk naturalists Plants), the annual wintertime mini-festival’s mantle of musical marginalia—like the black mask of The Princess Bride‘s infamous buccaneer—has been taken up by a succession […]

On August 23, 1964, the Beatles played at the Hollywood Bowl—a landmark outdoor amphitheater in Los Angeles—to a sold-out-and-then-some crowd of 18,000 frenzied fans. One of the ecstatic teenagers who made up the bulk of the audience, and whose crazed shrieking doubtless overwhelmed the amplification technology of the day, was my mother, age 14. Though […]

“When I was a little kid I made drawings of people and then drew wolf features on the other side of the paper so that when you held them up to the light they became werewolves,” says Brian Mumford. The enormously talented, circuit-bending, acoustic guitar-plucking visionary of Tesla-damaged noise-folk who has played music under the […]