Cary Clarke

Is it possible that national media conglomerates are beginning to understand the implications of “the long tail” and the advantages of community-specific programming? I wouldn’t bet on it, but the good news locally is that Entercom Communications, our nation’s fourth largest radio broadcaster and operator of six FM stations in the Portland area, is giving […]

There is no shortage of “indie”-prefixed music projects in Portland. You got your indie-pop, indie-folk, indie-hiphop, indierock, as well as, on the occasional oddball marquee, the hilarious malapropism “indy-rock,” calling to mind detuned Fenders with Pennzoil stickers on them. But the 500-person vocal ensemble set to kick off PICA’s 5th annual TBA Festival with a […]

Local Music News As you may have gathered from the tortured cries of your nicotine-needing friends, or the jubilant cheers of your clean-living colleagues that still echo through the halls of Portland’s few remaining smoke-filled venues (the last on the West Coast)—change is in the air. Back in June, the Oregon legislature passed a long-expected […]

It is tempting to account for Portland’s rise as a creative capitol in poetically compelling terms—painting a picture of progressive young artists attracted to our city’s inspiring geography, vegan doughnuts, and permissive culture. (Claims no doubt true, in their own fuzzy way.) Yet it seems to me that the most convincing explanation is economic. In […]

I just heard local avant-pop band Au for the first time a couple of weeks ago, so you’ll have to forgive me if I gush. You see, my love is still fresh, and being newly smitten I may be prone to idealizing the object of my affection. I think this is the real thing, guys. […]

It seems to me that Portland’s music community has in recent years grown noticeably less provincial, and more welcoming to immigrants. Conspicuously absent is the glimmer of rage and fear that used to flash across native Portlanders’ otherwise smiling faces when I told them I had just moved to town from California to play music. […]

The 11 tracks of doleful, spacious, loop-based electro-acoustic confession on The Burning Beard—the compelling second album by Portland music polymath Sam Schauer under his Modernstate moniker—feature a diverse set of instruments, nearly all of which Schauer played himself. His disciplined, intricate guitar work glides over a rhythm track that shifts from spare drum-machine blips to […]

Photosynthesis, the fourth album by local psychedelic folk group Plants, is easy listening in the best sense of the term. It’s the kind of lush, vibrating, darkly gentle mood music Brian Eno’s hip masseuse would have been playing in her office. The record has quietly become my preferred soundtrack for post-workday relaxation, and I have […]

A few months ago, on the second floor of the Ethos Music Center, a business-casual dressed Alan Singley—Portland’s most wonderfully weird neo-Bacharachian songwriter and one of the nonprofit music school’s most popular pedagogues—was using a conductor’s baton to direct the attention of six mini-guitar-wielding elementary schoolers toward a music staff he had scrawled on the […]