Music Blog

Brand new video debut from the new collaboration between Sadistik and Kristoff Krane. The album is now available for pre-order (with limited edition T-shirt packages as well) at both www.sadistikmusic.com and www.micheallarsen.com

1. Damien Jurado – Saint Bartlett2. Kent – En Plats i Solen3. Beach House – Teen Dream4. The National – High Violet5. Eels – End Times6. Sarah Jaffe – Suburban Nature7. Charlotte Gainsbourg – Irm8. John Grant – Queen of Denmark9. Breathe Owl Breathe – Magic Central10. CocoRosie – Grey Oceans- Anna-Lynne Williams, Music Editor

I end every year by making a list of my favorite albums. Some years there are as many as 30 albums that I couldn’t live without, but this year there were really only 10 for me. To be honest, the David Bazan and Fever Ray releases really monopolized a lot of my time. But there [...]

This past February, I spent a month in the mythologized town of Marfa, TX, recording an album with Robert Gomez for a project which has since been named Ormonde. I returned to Texas last Friday (this time to Denton, where Robert lives) to work on final mixes. Since it’s his home studio and he has [...]

Slate has an excellent article tracing the root causes of the recent demises of Vibe, Blender and other music magazines.Their three reasons for the decline of the music mag:1. There are fewer superstars, and the same musicians show up on every magazine cover. 2. Music mags have less to offer music lovers, and music lovers [...]

OK, these blogs have been woefully short of actual music content. Allow me to remedy this:Once, I watched the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on HDNet in Central Park. Karen O was nuts — writhing on stage, ripping off stuff, just really going crazy. Today, she sang very well, but didn’t have the same insane energy I [...]

So another thing I didn’t mention earlier: I’m here by myself. But the thing about Bonnaroo is, that’s not really a problem. You make friends with your neighbors and you hang out and get drunk or stoned and it’s a blast. Everyone’s naturally really cool and really friendly; everyone helps each other out. Most of [...]

Sergius Gregory has taken the musician-in-a-cabin experiment leaps farther than the likes of Bon Iver. After living in Hawaii, Oregon, New York, and Pennsylvania, he has spent the last few years in Homer, Alaska, holing away in the winters in his own cabin with an 8-track and a handful of instruments. And, finding Homer to [...]

Just saw on the wires that the Flaming Lips are heading up an Earth Day show in D.C. on the National Mall. Chevy Chase is also going to be part of the festivities, which pretty much juxtaposes one of my favorite bands of the last 20 years with…one of the worst actors of the last [...]

It seems fitting to launch the Identity Theory music blog with news about Leonard Cohen.This week, our Canadian Zen Buddhist folk hero/poet released ‘Live In London‘, a collection of 25 songs from his July 2008 performance at London’s O2 Arena. While Live in London is available as a 2-CD set and as a DVD, the [...]