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Ryan J. Prado
Posted inSpin Cycle

Spin Cycle: Your Art Is Not an Island

Three albums of homage and escape to elevate you through the dog days of summer
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The sticky wicket of adhering to the notion of artistic identity can either stifle or shepherd musicians across a variety of styles. But one of the more beautiful parts of anyone’s creative passage is when it becomes unbearable to produce within any predisposed bucket of categorization, and when the many hands that have helped you […]

Posted inMusic

Time to Get LIT(erary) at Pickathon

The Sunday sessions bring poetry and storytelling to the Pendarvis faithful.
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Praise for Pickathon takes on many exclamatory descriptives and tags, and for good reason. The long-running music and arts festival has transformed the paradigm of what a summer festival can and should be, thanks to the tedious and visionary efforts of its organizers. Amongst the many evolutions that Pickathon has proffered across its 26 years […]

Posted inSpin Cycle

Spin Cycle: Into the Woods

Get lost with three mesmerizing new drops repping the West Coast.
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Summertime respites are pretty much mandatory for Portlanders who can still hear the faint echoes of raindrops at the dawn of each day. For me, the unplugged therapy of Mt. Hood camping, kayaking, lakeing, and hiking is just the panacea for a steaming pile of societal noise. I escaped there recently, with the albums featured […]

Posted inMusic

Sowing the Seeds at Topaz Farm

Topaz Farm’s 2026 live music series continues an annual tradition of intimate cool.
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For a farm, summer brings a much-needed influx of sunshine to fuel the sustenance growing in the ground. The landscape comes alive with all manner of vegetables and fruits, flowers, berries, and temporary rainbows catching the light in arcs of sprinkler spray. For Topaz Farm, it also signals the beginning of their intimate live music […]

Posted inMusic

Spin Cycle: Brain Food

Satiate your appetite for summer listening with these delectable deep dives.
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Look, it’s a very good problem to have when it’s so tough to whittle down all the great new music in Portland for this here humble column. The city has churned out a glut of formidable albums in June alone that have been dominating my earholes (Orquestra Pacifico Tropicale’s El Poder, Lexie’s Halcyon Days, and BendreTheGiant’s […]

Posted inSpin Cycle

Spin Cycle: Very Proud of Ya

The sounds of queer liberation via shoegazin’, folk singin’, punk rockin’ baddies.
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Pride Month, like most if not all designated awareness months, ought to just be imbued into the everyday fabric of society. Pride in who you are, what you believe, how you identify, and how you show up is really about the freedom to be whoever and whatever the hell you want to be, with whomever […]

Posted inMusic

Spin Cycle: Near, Far, Wherever You Are

Three new releases with heart that goes on and on.
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The Spin Cycle setting has been on overload the past few weeks, with a heavy rotation of wide-ranging musical gems that run the genre gamut. And while I’d love to have some sort of thematic quotient to every edition of this humble column, aside from the following artists being talented, fierce queer forces of nature, […]

Posted inSpin Cycle

Spin Cycle: Songs From the Wild

Hearing music everywhere is what summer is all about.
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A favorite pastime of mine is to take long walks in the Buckman neighborhood, trying to determine from where the echoes of practicing musicians are originating. Depending on the day, an acoustic performance thrums through a barricade of bushes behind my yard, where an unseen troubadour routinely serenades the streets in anonymity. Multi-home applauses are […]

Posted inMusic Issue 2026

Get Into the Groove

How Discogs evolved from a Portland vinyl collector’s dream to a worldwide phenomenon.
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What follows is one of the many articles in the Mercury‘s 2026 Music Issue. Find a print copy here, subscribe to get a copy mailed to you here, and if you’re feeling generous and want to keep these types of articles coming, support us here.—eds. Like many dot-com era ideas ushered into use just below the radar in the […]

Posted inSpin Cycle

Spin Cycle: Call It By Its Name

A trio of menacing albums to rally around in the face of a perilous world.
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I didn’t set out to cover two Portland metal bands in successive editions of Spin Cycle, but here we are. The laws of the muses operating as they do, the heavier end of the audio spectrum has been dominating my brain space in the weeks leading up to summertime. Even a weeklong sojourn to Kauai […]

Posted inMusic Issue 2026

Spin Cycle: Go Your Own Way

Dispatches on three wildly different artists just doing what they gotta do, man.
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It probably goes without saying that it’s difficult to choose just three albums to feature for each edition of Spin Cycle. Inundated by a flurry of cultural crib sheets, personal recommendations, and last-minute rando diamonds in the rough, whittling down to what ends up in this column can be an internal struggle. And being off […]

Posted inSpin Cycle

Spin Cycle: Get Up to Get Down!

Earworm audio dispatches from formidable live acts near and far.
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Somehow, until recently, I hadn’t yet attended any live shows at the Get Down—the subterranean Central Eastside venue thriving since its 2022 opening. With a flush of seasonably accurate sunshine tantalizing even the most curmudgeonly amongst us this past weekend in Portland, I made it a point to touch base with the venue during a […]

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