It.started.as.a.joke.2019

This Mess is a Place, Tacocat’s fourth full-length and first on Sub Pop, finds the band waking up the morning after the 2016 election and figuring out how to respond to a new reality where evil isn’t hiding under the surface at all—it’s front and center, with new tragedies and civil rights assaults filling up the scroll of the newsfeed every day. “What a time to be barely alive,” laments “Crystal Ball,” a gem that examines the more intimate side of responding emotionally to the news cycle. How do you keep fighting when all you want to do is stay in bed all day? “Stupid computer stupor/Oh my kingdom for some better ads,” Nokes sings, throwing in some classic Tacocat snark, “Truth spread so thin/It stops existing.”

Interactions: A Guide to Swiss Underground Experimental Music is a double compilation curated by Luis Alvarado and published by Buh Records, which brings together 27 works by more than 30 artists from the current experimental music scene in Switzerland, in a variety of sounds, ranging from free improvisation, ambient and industrial music, to synthesizer music, sound collage and more, which gives an account of an intense activity of the Swiss underground that runs through cities such as Zürich, Bern, Geneva, Lausanne, Basel, Biel, Chiasso and Lucerne .

Little Rock, Arkansas native Ben Dickey has been turning heads toward the silver screen with his acting debut portraying Blaze Foley, a singer-songwriter in the 1970’s and ’80s, in the Ethan Hawke-directed biopic film BLAZE. A seasoned musician in his own right, Dickey’s affecting performance as the troubled troubadour gracefully showcases his natural talent, both in acting and in music. However, Dickey had to put his own career as a singer-songwriter on hold while making the film. What resulted from the experience on the film was a flood of songs that became Dickey’s next chapter: an album of left-of-center, sophisticated folk songs, A Glimmer On The Outskirts, produced by renowned musician Charlie Sexton (band leader for Bob Dylan) and released as the debut album of SexHawkeBlack Records, an imprint label of Dualtone started by Sexton, Ethan Hawke, and SXSW founder Louis Black. …”a soulful, exquisitely textured portrait of the Arkansas-born, Texas-raised country-blues singer-songwriter Blaze Foley, played by Benjamin Dickey in the kind of deeply inhabited performance that goes far beyond the usual biopic mimicry. Dickey, a guitarist himself, brings this boozy, irascible, dirty-joke-telling troubadour fully to life.”