RiYL

After touring around with prominent outfits like Yeahsayer and Of Montreal, Sinkane’s Ahmed Gallab really come into his own on 2012’s Mars. The breakout record found the multi-instrumentalist embracing musical selections as diverse as his background, from the polyrhythms of Sudan to the punk, indie and funk of the midwest. Released in February, Life & Livin' It builds upon his myriad influences and finds the artist crafting one of this most personal records to date, released amidst a cultural upheaval in a United States now turning its back on the immigrant cultural that helped build it. Sitting down in a coffee shop in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Green Point that he now calls home, Gallab discusses a childhood split evenly between Sudan and the States and how confusions over culture and identity helped shaped his unique musical voice. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tommy Stinson is exhausted. It’s the tail end of a long day of interviews, with appearances on high profile outlets like Fox News, and the Bash & Pop frontman isn’t not entirely sure he’s going to make it through one more. Things get off to a rough start, and for a while only get rougher from there, tethered only by the calming force of friend and Cowboys in the Campfire co-conspirator Chip Roberts. There’s talk of The Replacements and an off-handed mention of Chinese Democracy that doesn’t go over particularly well, for obvious reasons, but when the conversation turns his nine-year-old daughter, things calm down a touch. Her presence is clearly a grounding one, one that brings the musician back down to earth and puts everything into perspective. When he’s not touring or recording, he’s a full-time father, a sense of stability for musician whose lived most of his life on the road since joining up with the Replacements at the tender age of 12. It’s been a sometimes hard life, but a rewarding one, and when he reflects back on it, he laughs, “none of these mofos thought I’d live past 30.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Reverend Jen Miller was a Lower East Side fixture when I moved to New York more than a decade ago, an elf-eared, chihuahua-toting being who seemed to show up everywhere in those first few years, from The Village Voice to cable access. She ran a Troll Doll museum and wrote books, served as the sec columnist for nerve.com, starred in low budget films with names like Elf Panties: The Movie and Lord of the Cockrings. These days, her vibrant and idiosyncratic output has taken a major hit courtesy of sky rocketing Manhattan rent prices. When we sat down for an interview, Miller was grappling with a recent trip to a psych ward, spurred on by the recent passing of her beloved dog, Reverend Jen Jr., a pocket-sized chihuahua that rarely left her side. In spite of everything, she lights up when time comes to discuss her varied career as a performance artist, author and one-time professional submissive at a Manhattan S&M dungeon. Miller discusses coping with the changing state of the city and the first time she ever put on a pair of fake elf ears. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jon Ronson confesses with a laugh that he feels at least partially responsible for the rise of Alex Jones, the once-fringe Texas-based radio show host who since has become a central figure in Donald Trump’s political rise and the development of his subsequent White House policies. It’s a strange claim coming from the This America Life contributor behind The Men Who Stare at Goats. Ronson speaks in a soft Welsh accent, and in many ways seems the exact antithesis of the radio conspiracy theorist who growls loudly to millions of devoted listeners about Obama and Clinton smelling of sulfur. But it was Ronson who helped Jones grow from local radio personality to national phenomenon, as he recruited the right wing ideologue in his mission to infiltrate Bohemian Grove, a playground for the super rich, which helped launch both men’s careers, almost 20 years back. The pair’s link is at the center of Ronson’s latest work, The Elephant in the Room, a Kindle single exploring the rise of Trump and the alt-right, using his relationship with Jones as a springboard into the strange and scary world once simply dismissed as the fringes of the Republican Party. It’s perfect fodder, really, for a writer whose work has centered on themes like internet shaming, extremists and psychopaths. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Punk rock resumes don’t get much better than Kid Congo Powers’. The Southern California-born musician has been playing music professional for nearly 40 years, since the then-president of the Ramones fanclub was recruited by Jeffrey Lee Pierce for the band that would soon become the Gun Club.Soon after, Powers was recruited by fellow punk rock weirdos, The Cramps as rhythm guitarist, staying with the band for two of their most influential records, Psychedelic Jungle and Smell of Female. After another multi-album stint with The Gun Club, the musician joined up with Nick Cave, recording two records as a member of The Bad Seeds. For the past decade, Powers has served as the front man for The Pink Monkey Birds, an amalgamations of decades of music influence, including the Southern California Chicano rock sound that helped ignite his love of music.  To celebrate the release of the band’s latest, La Araña Es La Vida, Powers sat down for a far reaching interview about his long and storied career. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“I think about music as joy” sounds like one of those things that musicians just say. But then you go see Adele Bertei live, and there’s really no other way to describe. She ought to be rusty, out of shape and out of practice after a long hiatus, but when she took the stage at Le Poisson Rouge in Manhattan a few nights after out interview, she was a goddamned force of nature at 5’0 tall and dressed to the nines in a full suit and tie.A surviver of Cleveland art-rock, New York No-Wave and radio pop, Bertei’s solo may continue to be the thing she’s best known for, but the musician has seemingly leapt from one fascinating gig to the next, working as a personal assistant to Brian Eno, singing backup for Tears for Fears and Blondie and directing films for Playboy. Her next gig finds her embracing a number of past artistic passions, writing, directing and composing music for a web series about an all-female punk group and enamored with one member’s No-Wave surviving grandmother. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The latest Fuzz and Pluck (last year’s The Moolah Tree) begins with a rough visual — one I’m admittedly a bit hung up on during my conversation with Ted Stearn a few months ago. In it, Fuzz, the hapless teddy bear character, is unraveled until he’s little more than a long thread and a pair of eyeballs. I’d seen in before in an old issue of the Fantagraphics anthology Mome, and it had stuck with me ever since. Admittedly, it ultimately proves a dream sequence and one of the darker scene in what’s a fairly lighthearted fairy tale, but it’s a fairly good insight into Stearn’s sense of humor and visual sensibilities. The Moolah Tree was seven years in the making, with the odd seen (like the aforementioned dream sequence) popping up here and there, while Stearn focused on his day job, working on big budget network animated shows like King of the Hill and Futurama. It’s a testament to seeing a project through and the power of the comics media to allow an artist to see every aspect of a creation through, from beginning to end. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When I arrive backstage at Le Poisson Rouge green room, Charles Watson is digging into a pre-set dinner, with  Rebecca Taylor seated in the back on the phone with another interview. He’s asking her about Brexit — seeking advice, really, a mere day or so after our own shattering electoral upset. The duo flew in on election day, the whole thing feels like an unwelcome bit of deja vu — but they’re happy to help us through it nonetheless.Taylor, for one, has never shied away from the intimate in her own work, even as Watson’s contributions to Slow Club tend toward the fantastic.Their opposite approaches to music and life have ultimately proved one of the group’s greatest strengths, with two strong and divergent approaches coupling nicely on record, including last year’s fittingly bluntly titled, One Day All of This Won't Matter Anymore, that finds their sound stretching out and mellowing slightly (in tone, if not content) from the pop sensibilities that have defined previous efforts. Their distinct but complimentary personalities are on full display during a deep but light hearted backstage conversation that finds Taylor experiencing the wonders of American cold medicine for the first time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It was important to me that we have a special guest for episode 100. They Might Be Giants fitted the job perfectly, a band that played an incredibly important role in the early development of my musical tastes, as strange and idiosyncratic as they might ultimately become. With episode 200, the camera gets pulled make even further, to a man and a magazine that, for better or worse, let an indelible mark on my impressionable young mind, as they have for generations before and since. Weeks before I sat down to record this interview in Al Jaffee’s amazing Manhattan studio, upcoming guest Kid Congo Powers made reference to a club “looking like a scene out of Mad Magazine.” I knew what he meant immediately. The strange cross section of the human experience filtered through the lens of the Usual Gang of Idiots. And at their center is Jaffee. The cartoonist is now 95 (“closer to 96,” as he handily points out during the interview), with his signature fold-in having appeared in virtual every issue between 1964 and 2008, along with his other mainstays like "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.” The longest working cartoonist in history kindly agreed to sit down for wide ranging interview about life, death, cartooning and the importance of a steady gig. It’s one my absolute highlights of doing the show and great way to spend episode 200. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mari Naomi sat down for an interview a matter of days follow the election, a fact that unavoidably colored the conversation. It’s pretty clear listening back almost two months later that we were only beginning to process our thoughts at the time — not that most of us have made all that much progress in the meantime. For a cartoonist whose work deals so often with issues of cultural and sexuality identity, there were a number a of topics we likely would have broached over the course of our 50 minute long conversation even if the election had gone a different route entirely. But all of the recent goings on do have a way of bringing such concerns into sharp relief. As such, it’s a sometimes depressing, sometimes funny and always enlightening conversation with the cartoonist, who says with a laugh, “The worst part was that I couldn’t even draw a comic about it,” when referring to a recent accident that resulted in their breaking both of her hands. Hopefully it’s the sort of combination of darkness and light we can all use as we cast aside the darkness of a recently ended year and look toward the potential for hope in the months to come. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.