THE MAGAZINE FOR CURIOUS PEOPLE
Elsewhere is a concept and a place, and for many years Graham Reid has been going there for his wide angle travels, writing, music review columns and interviews with writers, musicians and artists.
Elsewhere is an ever-expanding on-line magazine for people curious about new music, different travel, interesting arts and much more. This site is dedicated to the diversity and possibilities of Elsewhere. It is an equal opportunity enjoyer. Subscribe here (it's free) for a weekly newsletter. Welcome . . .
Latest posts
MIRIAM CLANCY, AT AUDIOCULTURE (2021): The survivor thriving
27 Feb 2021 | 1 min read
The words – sung quietly over a hushed and haunting backdrop – speak about dead-end suburbs, tinny houses, boys getting young girls pregnant, and that place where “there’s always nothing to do”. The song is ‘Ghost Town’ on Miriam Clancy’s 2009 Magnetic album and as an encapsulation of lives on New Zealand’s... > Read more
rotor plus: Fugue States – After (digital outlets)
26 Feb 2021 | 1 min read
Words like “ambient” and “atmospheric” are used frequently to describe music which is often restful, quiet, spacious and understated. In recent decades these sounds have often been generated by synthesisers programmed for warmth and restfulness. Or from piano recorded so the notes have a long delay and seem to hang in the air. Brian... > Read more
THE WEATHER STATION, AN OVERVIEW (2021): Long distance outlook, fine
26 Feb 2021 | 3 min read
As if to telegraph a new beginning, the 2017 album by the Weather Station out of Toronto was simply titled, The Weather Station. By that point however the Weather Station – the vehicle for singer and songwriter Tamara Lindeman – had already released four albums and two EPs. However, you always had the sense Lindeman was on a journey from the folk of... > Read more
Foo Fighters: Medicine at Midnight (Warner/digital outlets)
26 Feb 2021 | 2 min read
Dave Grohl became such a part of rock's rich tapestry these past two decades you'd be forgiven for thinking he's always been something of a senior statesman. At 52, Grohl – Nirvana's drummer who emerged as the frontman/songwriter for his all-conquering Foo Fighters – is the well-adjusted rock star who has recorded with Paul McCartney, Queens of the Stone Age,... > Read more
Bilders: Move Along, Love Among (bandcamp)
24 Feb 2021 | 2 min read
Last year Bill Direen – aka Bilders, the musician, writer, poet and Swiss Knife of New Zealand culture – appeared as Ferocious on an album with composer/drummer Johannes Contag (Cloudboy, The Golden Awesome) and guitarist Mark Williams for their self-titled album on the Rattle label. Even in Rattle's expansive imprint, Ferocious was something unique in... > Read more
WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT . . . JOHN JACOB NILES: Murder, mountain music and a voice from the spheres
22 Feb 2021 | 3 min read
There's a fascinating, if brief, scene in Martin Scorsese's documentary about Bob Dylan, No Direction Home. It is of American folksinger, archivist and writer John Jacob Niles. He looks to be in his 60s as he sings to a small group of people and plays a large Appalachian dulcimer. The filmed scene probably took place in the late Fifties and Bob Dylan certainly knew... > Read more
Grant Haua: Awa Blues (Dixie Frog/digital outlets)
22 Feb 2021 | 1 min read
When singer/songwriter and guitarist Grant Haua was interviewed recently by Marty Duda for his 13thFloor website, he committed a great heresy. Haua laughed about how much he enjoyed recording his new album Awa Blues, “it wasn't like hard work”. What he should have said, to be taken as A Serious Artist, was that it was real struggle, there were a lot of... > Read more
This is the Place
RECOMMENDED RECORD: Cannonball Adderley: Somethin' Else (Blue Note/Universal)
22 Feb 2021 | 2 min read
The most commonly held opinion about this classic Blue Note album from 1958 by alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley -- his only album on the label -- is that he is outshone by his famous sideman Miles Davis (who wrote the bluesy title track). That's not entirely true but -- because Adderley was in Davis' band at this time -- there's no doubt Davis is on excellent form... > Read more
Dancing in the Dark
Favourite Five Recent Releases
RECOMMENDED RECORD: The Besnard Lakes: Are The Last of the Great Thunderstorm Warnings (Fat Cat/digital outlets)
22 Feb 2021 | 2 min read
From time to time Elsewhere will single out a recent release we recommend on vinyl, like this one which comes as double vinyl in a gatefold sleeve with a lyric sheet . . . Every now and again a 21stcentury psychedelic rock band emerges with its roots in the classic late Sixties/early Seventies sound of mind-expanding music with a widescreen delivery. Elsewhere... > Read more
Aztec Camera: Jump (1988)
22 Feb 2021 | <1 min read
By the time of their third album Love in 1987, Aztec Camera out of Scotland had effectively become just singer-songwriter Roddy Frame and whoever he chose to work with. Love was their/his most successful UK album and the single Somewhere in My Heart lifted from it went to number 3 on the British charts. The 12" remix of that single was more interesting when you... > Read more
Hearty Har: Radio Astro (BMG/digital outlets)
21 Feb 2021 | 1 min read
To give these two guys a break let's not mention their dad because too often that – as Julian Lennon would tell you – doesn't work in your favour much. However the offspring of some Big Names (Ziggy Marley, Liza Minnelli, Jakob Dylan, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Zac Starkey, etc) have done very worthwhile work. But let's just take this 11-song, post-punk but... > Read more
ZAWINUL: DIALECTS, CONSIDERED (1986): Keyboard player speaking for himself
19 Feb 2021 | 2 min read
Keyboard player Joe Zawinul had recorded albums under his own name before this one, but the self-titled previous one had been in '71, 15 years previous. In the interim he'd sprung to forefront of attention with Weather Report, the group he founded with saxophonist Wayne Shorter and bassist Miroslav Vitous which was not just in the vanguard of jazz-fusion in the Seventies... > Read more
FORTENSKY, INTRODUCED (2021): Musical travels during lockdown
17 Feb 2021 | 3 min read
The name will be unfamiliar – unless you followed the marriages of Elizabeth Taylor. Larry Fortensky was her seventh and final husband: they were married at Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch in October '91 after she met him – a construction worker – in rehab in '88. They were divorced five years later. She died in 2011, he died in 2016. None of... > Read more
Las Vegas
THE BEATLES AS BORROWERS (2021): Just let me hear that . . .
16 Feb 2021 | <1 min read
As original as they were, the Beatles – especially in their early days – drank from some very deep wells of rock'n'roll, country and black American soul. As we noted in What the Beatles Knew By '62, they had an enormous repertoire of covers in their armory, so when they came to write originals they knew how songs worked and could mix'n'match styles to create... > Read more
Favourite Five Recent Releases
Jane Ira Bloom/Mark Helias: Some Kind of Tomorrow (bandcamp)
15 Feb 2021 | <1 min read
Demanding times require new solutions and for soprano player Bloom and bassist Helias that meant duetting by the internet when their worlds were in separate lockdown. Not that you know of the physical separation from the evidence of the 11 pieces here. In the past Bloom has created conceptual albums but here with Helias with whom she has played off and on since the... > Read more
Travelling Deep
REDD KROSS: RESEARCHING THE BLUES, CONSIDERED (2012): Power pop with attitude
15 Feb 2021 | 1 min read
There are always those artists you hold an unnatural affection for: Elsewhere's list includes Pere Ubu, the Dwight Twilley Band, the Unforgiven, Bob Seger (before he went soft), the Rolling Stones (in the Sixties), the Chills and Clean . . . And Redd Kross out of California who managed to weld power pop to indie-rock, like the Searchers or the Shoes on speed,... > Read more
Gretchen Peters: Dancing with the Beast (2018)
15 Feb 2021 | 2 min read
These Essential Elsewhere album entries, by virtue of this being “elsewhere”, mostly sidestep the albums you'll find in any Greatest Albums Ever list alongside Dark Side of the Moon and Material Girl. Yes, we have pointed to Joni Mitchell's Blue. But albums by King Sunny Ade, John Martyn, Jacques Brel, Reem Kelani and Buffy Sainte-Marie are unlikely to... > Read more
Lowlands
Bob Dylan: The Usual (1987)
15 Feb 2021 | 1 min read | 1
Although in these days of online-everything there could be very few Bob Dylan songs described as rare, this one isn't too readily available . . . unless you have the soundtrack to the Eighties film Hearts of Fire on which it appeared. The movie itself -- in which Dylan plays an elusive and reclusive rock star, in very bad Eighties clothes -- was widely disparaged... > Read more
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St GERMAIN, RETHOUGHT (2021): 20 YEARS ON AND STILL TRAVELING
13 Feb 2021 | 2 min read
In the early 2000s, sitting in his office six floors above midtown Manhattan, Bruce Lundvall had every reason to be happy. As head of Blue Note Records – the company which defined the sound of classic jazz and the look in the 50s and 60s with artists like John Coltrane, Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock – he'd rescued the label, which had faltered in the... > Read more
Araki Kodo VI: Hankyo (bandcamp)
13 Feb 2021 | <1 min read
The background here does sound like an Irish story told in a pub over the fourth Guinness but . . . Apparently Hanz Araki is an American who is highly regarded as a traditional Irish flute player. So far so simple. However as Araki Kodo VI he is a sixth generation master on the shakuhachi (Japanese flute) whose family have been players for centuries. And so the... > Read more