I made a chatty video featuring music by bands who’ve had to cancel shows or tours cause of COVID19 self-distancing. If you like what you hear, go to their page and support an artist today — buy an album or some tracks!

Many of us are stuck in isolation, unable to share or promote our work in the ways originally planned like tours, festivals, conferences, etc., so I was thinking it might be of help to offer a way to spread the word digitally about what’s happening with your work.

Filmmaker Alejandro Montoya Marin is in the finishing stages of producing his second feature, Millennium Bugs. It was supposed to screen at SXSW, and Antonio was slated to participate on a panel about independent filmmaking — but a nasty pathogen has thwarted his plans.

Host Peri Pakroo talks with Billy McCall about his new book, Four-Year Depression, shitshow politics, and using art to build new concepts and new realities.

“It was kind of surreal and didn’t sink in how crazy and legendary the room was when we were there. It almost doesn’t feel like OMG I was in the same room as Elvis and Johnny Cash; there is some kind of vibe in the room that I can’t describe.”

John Fugelsang is in Albuquerque to perform “Unpresidented: The true story of a comedian trying to raise a toddler while his country was electing one” and we were lucky enough to get him into the Pyragraph LIVE studio (a.k.a. my office) to talk about comedy, politics, religion, and how he’s pulled all those elements and more into his unique creative career. 

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

“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.”