Trying to condense a year’s worth of innovative ideas, while attempting to forecast which concepts and creations will shape the upcoming year, is a daunting task. It was a dream job working with the talented teams at Pitchfork and Giant Spoon to create the Culture Manual, a genre-spanning look at the latest in startups, advertising, art, technology and […]
One of my favorite semi-annual traditions is teaching “The Rest is Noise,” a music writing workshop for 826 Chicago, an incredible non-profit that provides tutoring and creative writing classes. Over the years, we’ve trained our crack student press corp to interview musicians such as DJ Shadow and GZA at the Pitchfork Music Festival. In 2014, […]
Review Playboy.com July 2007 Link The Pitchfork Music Festival embraced its music snob roots by booking iconoclast Yoko Ono. But the three-day celebration of sonic diversity — which spread 39 acts over three stages in Chicago’s Union Park — was more populist than its reputation suggests. Nothing made that more clear than Saturday night’s closing […]
Curbed August 2019 Carla Yanni can’t decide if the most over-the-top student housing amenity she’s seen is the pet-washing station at a LaSalle University dorm or the lazy river winding through an apartment complex near Arizona State. A professor at Rutgers, Yanni did extensive research on the evolution of how and where students live for her new book, Living […]
Interview Nylon Guys December/January It’s early in the afternoon and Cullen Omori is sitting behind a small table at Intelligentsia, a coffee shop in Chicago’s Loop business district, sipping a cup of black coffee and occasionally brushing back his long, dark hair like Mitch Kramer from Dazed and Confused. His bandmates in Smith Westerns— his […]
Review Pitchfork December 3, 2010 Link 7.1 Reissue releases usually oversell the now-clichéd story of a misunderstood musical genius. Farad, Stones Throw’s retrospective of electronic music eccentric Bruce Haack, does peddle that tale to a certain degree, much like the 2004 documentary Haack: The King of Techno. But the real pleasure of the disc, covering […]
Review Pitchfork Dec. 2, 2010 Link 6.3 Right from the start of album opener “Days of Our Lives”, it’s clear Restless People aren’t glass-half-empty types. The song’s mantra about being real is effervescent, an instigation to dance amplified by a combination of airy synths, pseudo-rave bullhorns, and precocious rhythms. The clichéd, pure-positive-thinking lyrics aren’t as […]
Review Pitchfork Nov. 12, 2010 Link 6.7 Both pastoral and a bit generic, the name Electric Sunset could have been spit out of a random indie name generator. But while the sun-dappled synths, warm guitar tones, and smeared vocals of Nic Zwart’s latest project are familiar building blocks, the sum total of this self-titled debut […]
Review Pitchfork Oct. 6, 2010 Link 6.9 As a compilation and mix concept, Fuck Dance, Let’s Art sounds hazy before you even begin discussing the music. Theories crumble, according to the compilation’s own description, when trying explain the current wave of lo-fi, synth-heavy nostalgic bedroom production. And attempting a timely, authoritative statement about a decentralized, […]
Feature Pitchfork August 30, 2010 Link Here are my contributions to Pitchfork’s rundown of the best tracks of the ’90s. 176. Orbital “Chime” [FFRR; 1990] Simon Reynolds called this early rave anthem “The British ‘Strings of Life’,” and the grounds for comparison between Orbital’s buoyant first single and the Derrick May Detroit techno classic extend […]