Photo Credit – Gretchen Pellaton
When you cue up a song titled “Highway 1”, you probably anticipate a great driving song. Greg Connors delivers with his new single, which if you let it, will take you on a journey to both your own bitter end and recreation.
“Highway 1” manages to relentlessly unbalance and rebalance its discord and flow. The lyrics have that signature Connors flair, the mercurial duplicity and winking turns of phrase.
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I started Nocturnal Company when I got to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for my freshman year of college. I often stayed up all night in my dorm recording on my laptop with the only live instruments being guitar and keyboard. Luckily, my roommate stayed at his girlfriend’s dorm most of the time. That kid was a character, he smoked hella pot and took watermelons full of vodka to parties, where he feigned a french accent.
To the best of my recollection, I can’t recall ever being tear-gassed.
My first instinct should probably have been to turn around and run away from the plaza, just like everyone else who went scampering, screaming and covering their mouths. The old, indigenous woman, with the multiple petticoats and black pork pie hat, sitting at her usual location half-way up the block, from whom I usually bought a daily newspaper, suddenly bent over and vomited. Moments before, I had heard a “pop-pop” and saw white, billowing clouds of smoke. A young Ecuatoriano adult, running in a hooded sweatshirt, gave a sudden yelp and stumbled, after getting hit in the leg with one of the tear gas canisters.
In 1986 it all began near Cologne (Germany) in a little town called Kerpen Sindorf. For me, it was clear that it would be a long journey, and it still is. Now 33 years later and after 33 released albums, it is still something special and every day something new to create music.
Right now, we just released the album “Laughter filled with pain” – eight acoustic songs with some electronic elements here and there. It is a very personal album reduced to the essentials.
It is Free!! It costs nothing!! Stated the elderly anesthesiologist to the boy’s family. To put your son to sleep for his surgery costs absolutely nothing!! It is Free!! Free!! But to wake him up??………very very expensive!!
Indeed.
Moments earlier, in the same pre-operative area in this public hospital in a large Central American city, I witnessed another local medical doctor, drill a metal rod horizontally and completely through an indegenous patient’s femur, with the patient wide awake, and only after injecting numbing medicine, not much deeper than the skin, on the entry site of the thigh.
Such is the plight of the poor and marginalized, of which I have witnessed as an anesthesiologist, in over 30 international surgical missions, and which dominate the lyrical content of Ojos Feos’ original psychedelic Afro-Latin rock compositions.
by Alex Panait
I started recording my own music about seven years ago, when I was 14, by myself in my bedroom – like a lot of people do. I haven’t formally released anything over this period of time, but I still organized my songs into albums and made artworks for each of them. I’ve got about 11 of these ‘albums’ which I’ll probably never release, but they are certainly a good way to document my evolution as a singer-songwriter.
That being said, this first LP Postponed Arrivals means a lot to me – not only because it’s the first one, but it’s also the most uncomfortably personal thing I ever wrote.
Appendix to my new album, “Quel Nouveau Minette,” which is a compilation of jam sessions 2016-2019.
I’m Jesse, an independent singer/songwriter/producer. I’ve been recording music in different projects since 2009. Juliet’s Funeral, The Freddy Velcroman Expedition, and International Spies just to name a few. I’ve always been inspired by the DIY concept of garage rock and punk bands. I’m a huge fan of the ’60s and ’70s psychedelia and pop music.
I would describe my music as Alternative Pop Rock with explorations into Folk/Blues, Reggae and Jazz. I’m trying to find that someplace out there for my music, those ears to hear it and hearts to feel it. It’s been hard with such a wide range of influences. That’s when I realized I’d have to carve out my own corner here on this earth to fly my freak flag.
“Life goes on” has come out with quite a psychedelic buzz – it has had a big CD release party in the Hangar49 in Berlin on May 24th. For me, “just a girl with guitar from Eastern Europe,” the album turned out to be a momentum of all the things unsaid, a story of moving abroad, a cry-your-heart-out type of collection for self-therapy.
by Eli Stevick
After we started Soft Milk in 2015, there was a little buzz going because of our music but also some of wacky on-stage antics. It was just two of us then. We played with some cheap 10-watt amps and wore nothing but ghastly bed sheet costumes.