If you're a professional athlete, it's pretty easy to tell whether or not you're in shape. You can either play the game or you can't; you can keep up with the competition or you can't.  But for music industry professionals, everything is way more abstract. It depends so much on how you're feeling and what […]

Today we’re interviewing one of our own, Ben Heckler, the founder of Jam Addict. Heckler started the blog 3 years ago as a side project to share some of his drumming tips, provide his perspective on music, and just write some hilarious and entertaining music articles. Heckler authored hundreds of articles and got Jam Addict […]

In the spring of 2020, when Covid-19 swept the globe, Mo'min Swaitat, a Palestinian actor and filmmaker based in London, found himself stuck in his birthplace of Jenin, West Bank. He was lured to the shuttered Tariq Cassettes, a music store and record label he knew from his boyhood that had closed down years ago, […]

My play started in an epiphany, but it would take me ten years to complete. I had written it off as a failing effort until Roxana Silbert of Hampstead Theatre prompted me to revisit it. Covid intervened, and the production was delayed, leading me to believe it would never be broadcast; nevertheless, BBC Radio 3 […]

I believe it's OK to refer to myself as an outsider artist. It took a long time for me to join the group." Michael Hurley, a freak-folk singer-songwriter and artist of over 60 years, is pondering his place in the world on Thanksgiving Friday. He's phoning from his little house in rural Oregon, nestled amid […]

On the evening of August 9, 1956, a few hundred people crammed into a student union lounge at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, some 130 miles northwest of Chicago, for a musical recital. The launch of the Illiac Suite: String Quartet No 4, composed by a member of the chemistry department, Lejaren Hiller Jr, using […]