All I wanted to do was make a cigar box-style guitar, and in this town there were no cigar boxes to be found. The next best box to find for free were the torobako, the crates used to ship sanma from northern Japan to southern ports.

There are so many things in our lives that might be considered “incurable” or terrifying, why not work with them?

I loved SOMOS because it wasn’t just aimed at adults. I love downtown, but I’m in middle school, and downtown there are a lot of bars and not a lot for kids. SOMOS had both. They had a beer garden for adults and fun installations and booths for both adults and kids!

I’m recording stories from my life that I find most entertaining and maybe it’s at the expense of other people but I’m not using anyone’s real name. I am a bit worried how I’m portraying myself and my family reading it ’cause I think they’ll be scandalized or concerned by it.

Dear Rich: I want to know if it is considered sampling when you record sound coming from a synthesizer that is playing electronic note data stored on a memory chip. Technically when you play an NES game (’80s video game system), the music that is playing is not pre-recorded. It is actually played “live” from musical note data on the game cartridge (gameplay triggers a MIDI pattern) in the console into the internal synthesizer.

After last week’s tragedy in Parkland, Florida, I reached out to Maggie Byers and Emilie De Angelis of Moms Demand Action NM to talk about recent developments on the gun control front. Moms Demand Action is a bi-partisan grassroots organization fighting the epidemic of gun violence in the US.

It is a both an opportunity and a personal commitment to use my place as an artist to make art that is both visually pleasing while telling important stories about my cultural experience as a Chicana, as an environmental feminist, and as a member of the human race. My existence is my resistance.

Welcome to the inaugural Coffee + Creatives Job Listings! We are pleased to bring you the latest in gigs, jobs, and funding for creatives around the world. Jobs and funding opportunities included in our listings tend to be flexible and/or remote, though we will include some from our home state of New Mexico.

We are close to something truly sprawling and ugly, so the big monsters are inundating us with lesser demons. In the spirit of keeping our attention on what’s really behind that flash flood, I created this Scale of Sexual Predation.

I asked all the members of Chicharra, a band I’m in, to come up with three questions for another player. And it’s like they’ve been giving interviews their whole lives. Their curiosity about the nuances of how music is made, how the other people in our band-fam experience practice and performance, was so spot-on. I loved hearing them talk shop.

Zine fests make small cracks in the foundation of authoritarian, nationalist, dictatorial power that hides under progress of the digital age.

“The extreme end of showbiz would be something like American Idol where people are trying to fit into this mold, have to athletically win this competition by making themselves as appealing as possible to a very broad denominator and it’s very bizarre and it doesn’t have anything to do with feelings.”