Soundcheck

Photo of Lara Downes by Ebru Yildiz

Pianist Lara Downes has spent the last couple of years traveling the country and collecting not only music, but also stories, for a pair of projects that celebrate America at 250. One is her multimedia piece called The Declaration Project, and the other is an album of music that spans at least 250 years of American history called Hold These Truths, which amplifies the stories gathered in her Declaration Project. The music ranges from before the nation’s founding to new works – an overall reflection on revolution, resistance, and resilience from early 20th cent...

The New Orleans band Tank and the Bangas have been public radio favorites since they won NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest in 2017. Since then, they’ve built their considerable reputation on their high octane, dance-ready blend of R&B, hip hop, spoken word and pop. The Grammy-winning band has some new songs to play for us from their latest album, The Last Balloon. After that, we welcome Rodney Crowell into our studio, who helped create the genre known as alternative country. He’s written #1 hits for himself and artists like Bob Seger and Waylon Jennings, as well as collaborating with J...

For Dallas-born folk singer-songwriter Anjimile, who grew up in a conservative Christian family with immigrant parents from Malawi, life wasn’t always easy to figure out. Their journey as a young adult, trans man, while simultaneously battling addiction, resulted in the brutally honest 2020 album, Giver Taker, which the artist deemed to be full of prayers. A few years later came The King, his most defiant and intense record to date, which helped Anjimile deal with the complex emotions that stem from existing as a Black, trans person in the current political climate. And though that album felt like one fill...

Elizabeth Ziman, who performs as Elizabeth and the Catapult, is a singer-songwriter from Brooklyn. Over the past twenty years, she and a slowly rotating cast of musical friends have released six LPs, full of songs that offer a neat, often unexpected blend of the witty and the vulnerable. Her latest release is called Responsible Friend, "about slowing down in a world that keeps accelerating. It’s a commitment to friends, family, and self, at a time when everyone seems to be carrying more than they can reasonably hold" (Bandcamp). Elizabeth and the Catapult play in our studio. 

Set...

On this episode of Soundcheck, revisit a special live performance and interview from our archives, recorded in 2019. Multi-instrumentalist, composer, host of the podcast Aria Code, and MacArthur Fellow Rhiannon Giddens collaborated with Italian pianist and percussionist, Francesco Turrisi on there is no Other: twelve songs that explore the connections between European, Arabic, African-American, and Mediterranean sounds with an opposition to "othering" and “a celebration of the spread of ideas, connectivity, and shared experience” (Nonesuch Records).

The duo’s artistic cross-pollinations and discoveries draw from Italy, Ireland, Iran, Africa, and Brazil, among other places, and reflect the history of the...

The London-based art rock band, Mary in the Junkyard, is getting ready to release their debut album after four years of trying to make sense of strange things in life through music. “I think that life is very surreal,” says the vocalist of the group, Clari Freeman-Taylor, as she explains why she enjoys “writing about things that may be a little bit unsettling”. Nothing about the order of life is rehearsed, so why should their music be? Their practice relies heavily on their songwriting and arranging rituals where they carefully piece each layer of sound together. But preparations for live per...

Bassoonist Joy Guidry is a versatile improviser, performance artist, and composer of experimental ambient electronic music, who has founded her own record label, Jaid Records. While she is classically-trained, she has also listened deeply to some of the spiritual jazz of Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, Shabaka, and Nala Sinephro, and collaborates widely, most recently at the Park Avenue Armory in New York with Jessie Cox, Tcheser Holmes, and Scott Li. Her latest album Five Prayers, is a collection of works for bassoon with electronics, in which the Houston-born musician and sound architect takes inspiration from the spirit of the...

Imagine the tropical grooves of Colombia and Mexico in an avant-garde setting. That’s the ethos of Ruido Tovar; the new collaborative project between Eblis Alvarez of Meridian Brothers and Camilo Lara of the Mexican Institute of Sound. 

Before releasing their debut self-titled record together, both Alvarez and Lara were known to experiment with electronics, fusing modern sounds with music styles that are typically considered traditional. Alvarez put a spin on cumbia and salsa with his band Meridian Brothers, while Lara pushed the electronica movement in Mexico forward with his project, the Mexican Institute of Sound. 

Co...

British singer and songwriter Paris Paloma, a very sharp and thoughtful young artist who considers grief, politics, creativity, love, art, Greek mythology, and power structures in her music and in interviews, has opened for Florence & the Machine, played Glastonbury, and lent her voice to the Tolkien universe. She has built a community – her fairies –over the past few years, from her first EP, 2021’s cemeteries and socials (you want dark? Folk-horror-pop? She’s got you) to what will be her latest album, The Fatal Flaw, due out in September 2026. [View the artwork for the single “Good Boy”]

Paris Paloma...

The New Orleans band Tank and the Bangas have built their considerable reputation on a high-energy, exuberant blend of R&B, funk, hip hop, spoken word, gospel, and pop. Listeners may recall how the band first introduced themselves to the public radio community in 2017 by winning the NPR Tiny Desk contest, and have since been awarded a GRAMMY. Their new album is called The Last Balloon, and it completes a trilogy that began with Green Balloon in 2019 and Red Balloon in 2022. Tank and the Bangas play a few fizzy-lifting, playful, and cathartic songs from the Last Balloon, in-studio. 

Nottingham post-punk duo Sleaford Mods have built their career on going against the grain, challenging the British class system, capitalism, and pop culture. They’d tear it all down if they could. Vocalist Jason Williamson and producer Andrew Fearn are known for their relentless streams of expletive-laden takedowns of social and political hypocrisy, but they’re also catchy in their own minimalist, not suitable for a workplace way. Sleaford Mods’ latest album is called The Demise of Planet X, and they perform some of these danceable and ferocious rants, in-studio.

Set list: 1. I Don't Rate you 2. Megaton 3. Elitist...

Emma Hospelhorn is known as a flutist when she goes by her full name, especially as a member of Chicago’s Ensemble Dal Niente; the acclaimed collective that brings experimental chamber music to the masses. But when she steps into the universe of her solo project, Em Spel, she writes and sings surreal, beguiling songs that fall somewhere in between dream pop, art rock, and folk music. 

The multi-instrumentalist has a new album out, titled Bird or Snake, in which she occasionally breaches the constraints of tonality and uses layering techniques to texturize the organic elements that defi...

The Klezmatics have never been just a klezmer band. From their beginnings 40 years ago, they’ve fused klezmer music, rooted in the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, with the sounds of jazz, psychedelia, Latin music, punk energy, gospel fervor, global rhythms, and even ambient music. They’re also a band whose music rises to meet the moment, from their debut album Shvaygn = Toyt, silence equals death, released during the height of the AIDS epidemic, to their latest album, which is a 40th-anniversary statement called We Were Made For These Times. It uses music as activist art to speak to quest...

Ryan Bingham may be known as the character, Walker, on the hit neo-Western television series Yellowstone by many; but he’s also built a fandom around his rich Americana discography, spanning seven studio albums in 19 years. Earning an Oscar and a Grammy for “The Weary Kind”, the theme song for the film Crazy Heart co-written with T Bone Burnett, jumpstarted Bingham’s music career back in 2010. Since then, he’s been composing, recording, and performing his heartfelt songs that sound like they belong in a different time from decades past. 

Playing slide guitar and singing raspy melodies with ease...

Hiss Golden Messenger is the band led by singer/songwriter and guitarist M.C. Taylor, whose Americana folk and roots music has featured a rotating cast of characters, many but not all of them from North Carolina’s rich and varied musical scene. The band’s latest album is called I’m People, a simple enough title for a record that opens up onto some expansive ideas on what it means to be human and alive in America in 2026. Warm and twangy, soulful and jangly, M.C. Taylor and the current lineup of Hiss Golden Messenger play some of these...

Mexican singer-songwriter Julieta Venegas is considered a living legend among her peers. But when it’s just her and her favorite musical instruments, like the piano, the accordion, or the Venezuelan cuatro guitar, her artistry is just as raw, honest, and vulnerable as it was in her early days in music. 

On her new record, Norteña, Venegas acknowledges the fact that none of us are as innocent as we used to be. Missing that pre-internet naïveté and going back to her roots played a big part in her writing process. Still, she’s not one to live...

Gamelan Yowana Sari is a Balinese art ensemble in residence at the Aaron Copland School of Music at CUNY Queens College made up of students, alumni, faculty, and community patrons – all guided by GYS founder Michael Lipsey and co-directors Fred Trumpy and Ruka Shironishi. This contemporary group of percussionist ringers (ahem) are “fostering the creation of new works for gamelan”, and are “deeply committed to the transmission of Balinese culture through traditional music” (Bandcamp). GYS recently traveled to Bali to record some of these new works - some for gamelan and electric guitars- for their self-titled debut album, (which is out now...

New York-based Sofia Rei is a Grammy-nominated vocalist, songwriter and producer from Buenos Aires, Argentina who was classically trained as a singer and fell in love with Brazilian music. Her new album, Antónima expands the concept of chamber music, looks to South American and Caribbean dance music (cumbia, candombe), and combines elements of Oya’s healing thunder and improvisation – all while flirting with jazz and experimental pop - as she and longtime collaborator and co-producer JC Maillard skillfully layer her voice and electronic sounds. Then there’s the all-star lineup of featured guest musicians on the album - many of...

Morgan Nagler writes new songs every day, whether she’s in a room with the likes of Phoebe Bridgers and HAIM, or by herself playing an acoustic guitar in her bedroom. When she’s collaborating with other artists, there’s a lot of thought put into what each song is supposed to be about. But in private, Nagler refers to her tried and true “puke method”, eager to see what emerges, unfiltered. 

Then perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that her debut album, which was born after a series of side projects, carries an intimate, conversationa...

Alisa Weilerstein is more than just a virtuoso cellist; she is also a winner of the MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called “genius” award. There is a real genius in the way Alisa Weilerstein connects music in her solo concerts, combining core classical pieces and commissioning new works to expand the solo cello repertoire. Take, for example, her latest project called Fragments, which is a multimedia series that weaves 27 newly-commissioned pieces into all of the solo cello suites by J.S. Bach. She imagines anarc of listening, where one might hear Serbian-born, Quebec-based composer Ana Sokolović; American-born Joan Tower; cellist/composer Paul W...

Brooklyn-based folk-rock band The Lone Bellow have stuck through thick and thin for the past 15 years. Their creative output has been fairly consistent, only disrupted recently by a burglary on the road. Strangely, the thieves who broke into their tour van stole the hard drives containing the vocal takes for their latest record and left the precious instruments behind. Still, the financial burden was significant enough to delay the release of What a Time to Be Alive. After a successful crowdfunding campaign, the trio had their second shot at realizing their vision. 

Now back on the road af...

Texas-born folk singer-songwriter Jana Horn lives in Brooklyn, NY now. Perhaps it was this lifestyle change that established the introspective and fragmented nature of her eponymous third album. The calm in her voice, guided by instruments that sound as though they follow their own communal continuous clock, softens the blow of her existential lyrics: “Seeing eternity as a quality of time / Done with my dying / I can breathe again”.

Drifting between melancholy and optimism, Horn writes and performs conversationally, blurring the line between speech and song. The core team of musicians she opens her heart to play a bi...

The band Art Brut has been making excitable, eccentric indie rock since their debut LP Bang Bang Rock N Roll was released in the UK back in 2005. The music is catchy, hook-laden, guitar-based indie rock.  The lyrics are delivered in a kind of speech-song by Eddie Argos; they could be about falling in love or hitting the dance floor, but they’re just as likely to tell us a story of a double-crossing superhero or the joys of riding public transportation. Art Brut delivers a gleefully feral set of songs from their vast catalogue (including the recent second volume of a...

Mike Doughty is many things; a solo artist, founding bandmember of Soul Coughing and Ghost of Vroom, and a published writer – who not only wrote two memoirs but also an oratorio based on the biblical Book of Revelation that was staged at WNYC’s Greene Space. 

Simply put, Doughty has built a long-lasting career since his days of working as a doorman at the New York club, The Knitting Factory. On his way up, he embraced all aspects of the art of writing good songs, from welcoming “cowboy chords” when they come, to opening his mind up to the un...

The Syrian-American rapper, poet, and peace activist Omar Offendum blends the sounds of hip hop and classical Arab music and literature into his stage works.  He has spent much of the past few years on a New York-themed work called The Little Syria Show, named after a historical neighborhood in Lower Manhattan. In a celebration of Arab-American cultural heritage, Omar Offendum shares insights on diasporic memory and performs some of the songs from The Little Syria Show, in-studio. – "Sinsyrianly"

Set list: 1. Peddling Dervish 2. Mojaddareh 3. Not Quite White

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American folk singer-songwriter Annahstasia’s music career blossomed since the day she got kicked out of her teenage choir. Her voice didn’t blend homogenously with others, as it always meant to stand out. Today, with her soulful contralto register, she often gets compared to the greats like Nina Simone, Tracy Chapman, and Sade. But the way she utilizes her voice and songwriting melds a distinct brand of her own. 

As a storyteller, Annahstasia doesn’t worry too much about predictable song structures with repeatable sections. Instead, she invites her collaborators and listeners into her safe space to part...

Rapper, singer, and songwriter Dessa is a longtime member of Minneapolis’s influential Doomtree collective, has toured and recorded with orchestras, and been artist-in-residence at The Greene Space, our ground floor performance venue here in New York. But Dessa is also a writer, a poet, and a keen observer of the times. Her explicit commentary on the state of American politics, along with digressions on art, science, business, love, failure, and creativity fuel her latest songs, which she performs in-studio.

Set list: 1. Camelot 2. Tough Call 3. What if I'm Not Ready

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The duo called Dalava has put out three albums based on old Czech, specifically Moravian, folk songs, sourced from melodies transcribed over 100 years ago by the great- grandfather of Dálava's singer, Julia Úlehla. Their latest record, Understories, uses symbolic birds and stories to set a series of progressively darker, more experimental arrangements that seem to cast those songs adrift in both time and place. Julia Úlehla and guitarist Aram Bajakian (Lou Reed, John Zorn) explore magic and realism, harnessing the intense emotion in the body memory of ancestral connections as they perform in-studio. -Caryn Havlik

Set list...

Argentine singer-songwriter Marilina Bertoldi’s brand of rock 'n' roll contains multitudes between the old and the new. Her electric guitar, though it may only be a decade old, has all the markings of a seasoned instrument that has taken the stage at sweaty clubs and music festivals across the Americas and Europe. And the sound of it adds an unmistakably retro touch to Bertoldi’s music, which is often accompanied with glitchy and sampled production elements (and a state-of-the-art pedalboard to control it all). All the sonics aside though, it is Bertoldi’s intensely honest storytelling, which takes on a d...

Canadian indie rock collective The New Pornographers has a history that spans almost three decades. Leaving nine albums behind, the band enters a new era with The Former Site Of, which, as always, centers on frontman A.C. Newman’s introspective songwriting, studying self-destructive tendencies and character building with power pop soundscapes in the backdrop. While writing the new batch of songs, some of which originated prior to the creation of the previous record Continue as a Guest, Newman looked for ways to not “ruin them with lyrics”; sporadically revisiting demos, muting and unmuting the vocals, looking to achieve symbiosis...

Experimental music composers Elori Saxl and Henry Solomon found common ground in electroacoustic duets in their collaborative album, Seeing Is Forgetting. 

Solomon is a Los Angeles-based saxophonist who can improvise in any musical setting, whether he’s recording with Paramore, Miley Cyrus, and HAIM, or assembling a score for a film. Saxl’s intricate music writing also knows no bounds, dancing between classical and electronic music in her commissions from PBS, Guggenheim, and This American Life. Together, the duo recorded three hours of music in LA, embarking on a sonic adventure free of hesitation and doubt. Blurring the r...

Martin Hayes is one of the great Irish fiddlers of our time, and one of the things that makes his playing so distinctive is the way he incorporates elements of jazz and contemporary classical music. Hayes is a founding member of the Irish-American supergroup The Gloaming, and he’s led a couple of ensembles, the Martin Hayes Quartet and the Common Ground Ensemble, that include musicians from the New York new music scene. Guitarist Kyle Sanna, for example, is part of the Common Ground Ensemble, who are part of a St Patrick's Day 2026 concert at Carnegie Hall and he joi...

As both a musician and an activist, Steve Earle has been a voice for people living on the margins. His songs blend folk, country, and rock, and among his many awards are a bunch of Grammys and his recent induction into the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. And yet, many people will be more familiar with Steve Earle’s work as an actor, on screen, on stage, and on TV series like The Wire and Treme. Add in a tumultuous personal life, and you have a guy with stories to tell. Steve Earle’s current tour is called Fifty-One Years of...

The young Mexican singer-songwriter Humbe is no stranger to posting short clips of his songs on TikTok. He feeds on the transparency between his artistic universe and the fans that flock to it like a moth to a flame. His authentic brand of soul, contemporary R&B, and Latin dance music triggers the algorithm time and time again, connecting with audiences across the globe. The latest album, Dueño del Cielo, marks another milestone in his artistic exploration, “looking into the sky when there’s nothing left on the ground”. Filled with religious imagery, voice memos of lived experiences, and drea...

Spanish indie folk artist Guitarricadelafuente has come a long way since his days of posting covers on social media. Back then, he wasn’t only inspired by his own culture, but American folk music as well, reinterpreting songs of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. Eventually finding his own vein within the art of storytelling, Guitarrica began drawing inspiration from folklore, viewing it as not a snapshot from the past, but “something that already lives within us”. In his two albums, La Cantera and Spanish Leather, this is the concept he embraces, embodying the curiosity and joy of a kid that liv...

The singer and songwriter Niia has spent much of her career confounding expectations. She’s done smoky versions of old jazz standards as well as original songs that draw on dance music, hip hop and R&B, and live The self-dubbed "goth jazz princess" is something of a provocateur, with her sensual music "living in the tension between control and collapse".  Niia and her band play some of the songs from her latest release, V, in-studio. 

Set list: 1. Pianos & Great Danes 2. fucking happy 3. Maria in Blue

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Singer-songwriter Justin Hicks spent years recording and touring with acclaimed bassist Meshell Ndegeocello, experiencing her genre-agnostic approach to music first-hand. In his debut album, Man Of Style, he is just as hard to pin down stylistically as his long-time collaborator. Yet he manages to fuse a rich array of R&B, soul, rock, jazz, and folk music, dressing his songs in each genre effortlessly. The intricate vocal harmonies and avant-garde textures put Hicks’ stories in an other-worldly realm on the album. But his songwriting skills snap into focus when he performs with a piano and an autoharp live in-studio.

Composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Emily Wells works in the space between art-pop and neoclassical chamber music using electronic and acoustic instruments: synths, strings, and hip-hop production in elegant layers to support her singular and dramatic vocals. For her 2019 album, This World Is Too _____ For You she expanded her sonic palate to include a string quintet and French horn for a collection of swirling and dramatic chamber-pop showpieces. 

Together with the Grammy-nominated chamber orchestra the New York-based Metropolis Ensemble, and drummer Shayna Dunkleman (Xiu Xiu, Peptalk), she performs some of these songs, in-studio. (From the Archives, 2019.)

S...

The spiritual and spirited sounds of Qawwali music, the Sufi devotional style from Pakistan, go all the way back to the 13th century. And incredibly, the Saami family of Pakistan has kept that tradition going in an unbroken line for almost 800 years. The Saami Brothers belong to the best known Gharana (a system of connection or “house” in Hindustani music) of Qawwali, the Qawwal Bachon Ka Gharana of Delhi, and are the custodians of the traditions of Qawwali and Khayaal of Hazrat Ameer Khusrau and Ustad Taanrus Khan Sahab, (The Aga Khan Museum). The brothers are well-versed in several genres o...

Drummer and composer Marcus Gilmore looks to the creative openness of his drum elders – like his grandfather, Roy Haynes, the late tabla master Zakir Hussain, or renaissance man and drummer Milford Graves - and underscores the drum set as melodic instrument – exploiting all of the potential of the components – bending notes, playing with the natural vibrations, or augmenting his set up with Sunhouse Sensory Percussion. (With thanks to Modern Drummer Magazine’s June 2019 issue.) He joins us in-studio to amaze and delight with his percussive sorcery. (From the Archvies, 2019).  – Caryn Havlik

Set list: 1. Silhouwav 2. Excerpts of Nube 3. Flashforwar...