After hustling in the Washington, DC music scene for a decade, Annie Stokes arrived at the end of 2023 with a calm clarity: she was ready to write the type of album she’d always dreamed of. She and her husband and songwriting partner, Will Berger, holed themselves up in a cabin by the Shenandoah River for a weekend in December and sketched out the bones of what would become “Ghostwriter.” Built around themes of grief, belonging, and permanence, the album also visits topics of gender dymanics and double standards, the lingering ache for validation from past friends and lovers, reclaiming boundaries in the digital age, and the intense, alchemical friendship young women experience in their twenties.
“Ghostwriter” began to take form under the creative helm of producer and co-writer Austin Bello, who collaborated on 2023’s “Wild Rose” EP. Stokes leaned more on her banjo as a rhythm instrument, while Berger used the bass to push the melodic narrative of the songs. Marty Garfield, who joins Stokes on stage as part of her live line-up, added fiddle, alternating between highland-esque dirges and Appalachian licks. Before recording each song, the players loosely discussed the genre and sound they were attempting to create, while ultimately agreeing that the songs needed to take their own shape. The result is a collection of dark-hued, modern Americana music firmly rooted in folk songwriting tradition.
While recording this album in the spring and summer of 2024, Stokes also independently toured the East Coast, began hosting songwriter showcases in her hometown of Leesburg, VA, and parented her two young daughters. She loves that the grit and fatigue of being a working artist and millennial parent shine through in these songs. Americana and folk music is many things, but it’s ultimately defined by its connection to the earth and the everyday people who inhabit it. With “Ghostwriter”, Stokes hopes to crystallize and honor some of the sacred, ordinary experiences of everyday living.
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Blue Foundation are proud to announce the release of, ‘Ecstasy in Space’, the third single from their forthcoming new album ‘Close to the Knife’, which is set for release on April 18th. Recorded in 2024 and written by Tobias Wilner, this dreamy, shoegazey track takes listeners on a sonic journey through ethereal soundscapes and pulsating rhythms, capturing the essence of liberation and desire. The track also introduces a new member to the Blue Foundation lineup, Nina Dahlgaard Larsen, who provides vocals on this song.
‘Ecstasy in Space’ is a fuzzy and delicious snowball of pure dream pop that calls you to surrender to the moment. The track tells you to hold on tight and glide with grace and reminds you that true ecstasy comes from the freedom of choice and the strength to surrender. On the single, Tobias Wilner said, "I wanted to capture my feeling of floating high on feelings". His words echo in the refrain, "Wish you were mine".
The music video for "Ecstasy In Space" is a dreamy journey into the energy and emotion of a group of young people in Copenhagen. Shot with an artistic and cinematic aesthetic, the video follows them as they venture into the night on their way to an underground warehouse party. The music video, directed by Hannah Bertram, is a visual poem – hypnotic, raw and nostalgic.
Founded in 2000 by Danish singer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Tobias Wilner, the group was inspired by Mark E. Smith's method of forming a band (The Fall), with Wilner recruiting a rotating lineup of traditional musicians over the years to fuel creativity. Since 2010, the core members of the band have been Tobias Wilner and Bo Rande, working between Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Copenhagen, Denmark.
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| Photo by Allister Ann. |
Sister Sadie - Let the Circle Be Broken.
In a mostly male genre still known as much for its reticence about contemporary subjects as for its powerful harmonies and virtuosic picking, bluegrass music’s Sister Sadie have stood out ever since the all-female group’s founding more than a dozen years ago.
Now, with the release of “Let The Circle Be Broken,” the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) award-winning, GRAMMY-nominated ensemble is breaking new ground with a somber yet uplifting exorcism of the generational trauma of domestic abuse.
“Dani Flowers, Erin Enderlin and myself wrote ‘Let the Circle Be Broken’ right after my Dad passed away,” says the group’s co-founder, fiddler Deanie Richardson. “He was an abusive man who verbally, emotionally and sexually abused me for most of my 18 years living at home with him. When I confronted him as an adult, he said that it had been done to him as a child. This song is about that generational trauma and abuse that keeps getting passed down. The continuing of that trauma and abuse stops with me. It doesn’t go any further.”
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| Photo Loren Ipsum |
"Fake It Make It" is the newest single from Boston-based alt-pop mad scientist Daphne Blue Underworld (aka. Loren Ipsum).
"Fake It Make It" is the second single from Daphne Blue Underworld's forthcoming album, Memory Palace. Trading the frantic electronic drive of previous single "Kicking and Screaming" for wistful guitar pop a la Camera Obscura or Belle and Sebastian, Daphne Blue Underworld’s "Fake It Make It" may sound gentle, but loses none of the potent lyrical venom of its predecessor.
The song’s chiming guitar chords and plaintive vocal melodies may evoke nostalgia, but serve as a spoonful of sugar for DBU principal Ipsum's bitter ruminations on integrity and authenticity. The music may harken back to a simpler time of homespun indie rock that lived and died by short-run 7” singles and self-Xeroxed zines, but the message is bang up to the minute and all-too-relevant in a world where reality is being obfuscated more than ever before.
The forthcoming Memory Palace is DBU’s forthcoming mid-fi masterpiece—an evocative collection of songs that take the form of aural daydreams bathed in a nostalgic VHS glow. Flipping stylistic channels between the guitar-dominated heyday of MTV’s 120 Minutes and the warm synthesized landscapes of PBS’s Nova, Memory Palace explores themes of personal authenticity, courage in the face of change, and the tenuous escapism of a complex inner life.
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