Album Review

The experimental composer Liz Harris—best known as Grouper—is Western Oregon’s resident ghost, conjuring delicate whispers and heavy drones that have haunted the bioregion for two decades. Her work drifts between the otherworldly and the intimate, from acclaimed atmospheres on Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill (2008) and Shade (2021) to her electronic collage piece […]

In your teens and 20s, there’s a pervasive feeling that love and having your shit figured out will undoubtedly happen for you in some distant future, manifesting out of nowhere—or somewhere, depending on your style of falling in love and problem solving.  On Rollercoasters, The Barbaras remind us it’s okay—and often more fun—to not have […]

In the wake of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan’s Tōhoku region, a resident of the small town of Ōtsuchi opened a public telephone booth in his garden. Inside, a disconnected phone invited visitors to speak their grief aloud, carrying on the wind painful stories that would be near-impossible to let rest anywhere […]

Even the most dyed-in-the-wool Portland music historian can be forgiven for letting Zipper slip through the cracks. After all, there’s so much of Fred Cole’s music to keep track of (and thank goodness for that!)—from the 1960s psychedelia of the Weeds and the Lollipop Shoppe, to the glorious, shambling rock he made with wife Toody […]

“What it means to be [an] amorphous teenager and not know what you’re becoming, and that kind of moment of potential magic that I think everybody has.” So says Emil Amos, the prolific artist behind Holy Sons, opening the first episode of his podcast, “Drifter’s Sympathy.”  “I wanted to delve into [the] atmosphere and romance […]

“You can never go home,” sings Matt Sheehy during the climax of “Afraid of Summer,” a familiar warning on the dangers of revisiting the past. It’s one of several songs on DRRT—the 2012 debut album from Sheehy’s band Lost Lander—that grapple with finding one’s place in the universe and locating the balance between past, present, and […]

In Peter Weir’s 1975 film Picnic at Hanging Rock, a group of boarding school girls in Victorian-era Australia don white lace, twirl parasols, and craft elaborate valentines before some of them vanish behind a boulder on a searing summer day, never to be seen again. Charlie Hilton, best known as the vocalist for the woozy […]