Andy Shauf's Foxwarren New Album, 2, Out Now Via ANTI-
Alongside the album they release the new single/video 'Deadhead'. Following 'Yvonne,' praised by AV Club as 'an understated kind of gorgeous,' 'Deadhead' sees Foxwarren on a quest for levity. The song seamlessly moves from an MF Doom -like pitch-shifted sample to a line-dance guitar lick to honeyed country-rock harmonies of the titular band all in three minutes. There are darting flutes, mangled electronics, and meticulous snippets of rhythm, all expertly placed to illustrate the song's emotional tumult. 'I won't stop dancing,' as Shauf sings, is exactly the feeling the song evokes.
'Deadhead' exemplifies the unique approach Foxwarren took in creating 2. After touring their lauded 2018 self-titled debut, the band dropped the familiar band-in-a-room routine. Instead, in their own home studios across four provinces, all five members would upload song ideas, melodic phrases, or rhythmic bits to a shared folder. In Toronto, Shauf would then plug these into a sampler and construct songs from the fragments supplied by his bandmates, leaning into classic hip-hop techniques and musique concrète alike as unlikely lodestars. Foxwarren would convene at weekly online meetings, offering long-distance suggestions about which way a song might shift. The result is mesmerizing and uncanny, an album that traces two sides of a relationship through 37 minutes of collage art that aspires to 'sound best blasting out your car window,' as put by Shauf.
By himself, Shauf has already had a stellar career, his reputation built by the sweet melodies and uniquely imaginative and precise storytelling found on 2016's The Party through to 2023's Norm.
Foxwarren, especially here, is a crucial part of that ongoing process, but 2 represents something even more significant—five friends now nearing the end of their second decade making music together, pushing against what they've learned how to do in order to venture somewhere new. It is the sound of friends who trust each other, cutting themselves loose from their past and their preconceptions to have some fun with a sampler and the very idea of songs.
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Otago Daily Times
4 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
Female big band to visit Dunedin
After years of being the only woman in the big bands she performed in, Lana Law has embraced the idea of an all-female big band. She tells Rebecca Fox about her passion for big band music. At a diminutive 5ft, there is not much of Lana Law to see when she plays the baritone saxophone. What she lacks in size, she likes to make up for in sound, loving the "really honky", grunty, big sound a baritone saxophone produces. It has been that way since she convinced her music teacher to dig out the saxophone from a storage cupboard at high school. Though when she first saw it, her reaction was "holy moly". "The baritone saxophone stands a metre high so it comes up to just above my belly button if I was to stand it on the ground, so when I play it takes up quite a lot of me." She was not deterred by its size or the fact most people learn saxophone on alto or tenor instruments first. "I played baritone sax through high school and the rest they say is history." Law discovered big band music when a music teacher, who played in a band, took her along to a rehearsal. "That was pretty much it. Something about the brass, something about the groove, usually the swing, that you can't just keep still listening to it. So when I'm playing, I can't keep still either." It sealed her fate — from then on she played in big bands, and she went on to study the saxophone at Victoria University in Wellington. After graduating, she wanted to travel and got a job playing in bands on cruise ships for the next four years. "I was playing in a 10-piece band then, it's a cut-down size one, but I was always the only female in the band." The band was mostly American and Canadian male musicians with the "Kiwi girl" on baritone saxophone. Back home in Christchurch, Law established a teaching career and began playing in different bands. One day, she and another female musician wondered if it would be possible to create a band of female musicians from Christchurch. "And ta-dah, we did." That was nearly 10 years ago. They rattled off a few names, sent out a few messages and in next to no time had volunteers for an 18-piece band made up of saxophones, trumpets, trombones and a rhythm section. "Next minute we had our first rehearsal, in January 2016." About 80% of the band are regulars from those first concerts, with other players coming and going depending on what is going on in their lives. "We have a base of probably about double the size of the band." Many of the members are music teachers in Christchurch, a lot are mothers and some are students. "It's just a really nice environment and full of very responsive female musicians and it's just a joy to work with them all." Due to their busy lives, they do not have a regular rehearsal schedule, instead coming together when they need to, often on a Sunday night. Keeping on point and doing what needs to be done is essential in those rehearsals. 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It has become so popular male musicians have wanted to join. "I'm like 'well, you're missing a few things'. And they're like, 'but we can put on a wig, we can wear a skirt'." Big bands also enable musicians of all skill levels to take part. "Players who like playing in a group situation, you've got five saxophones, four trumpets, four trombones, so you might not be a flashy trumpet player, for instance, but you can help your section by being a strong third or fourth player, and that goes for any of the instruments." Law leads the band from the alto saxophone as it is easier, leaving the baritone saxophone to another musician, although they reckon she still selects music with some "really cool bari lines it it". Overall, audiences enjoy listening to the band and watching them as they interact with each other as they play. "We've had so much fun and we make such a great sound. It's just a good time but we make sure the music's good because it has to be." The band is not a quiet bunch. "You know if someone does a great solo or there's a line that happens and it sounds really good, you're like 'yeah' and everyone will go 'yeah'." One expects a big sound to come out of a "big band", but there is also a range of dynamics a band can express. "To take you on that emotional journey through the tune so you can feel all the feels in one tune." There are a couple of tunes that give Law "goosebumps" when the band plays them — (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman and Here's to Life . "Those two tunes are ballads, right, so they're kind of slowish but very expressive, whereas we've got other tunes like Let the Good Times Roll , really punchy tunes. So they'll still have the dynamics." Her day job is as an itinerant and private music teacher. So she gigs in the evenings and at weekends. "It's nice to do something that you enjoy, it's something fun that I get to do all day, every day." She also squeezes in two school big bands, which she is taking to Blenheim for the Southern Jam Festival in August, and she is music director of the Christchurch Youth Jazz Orchestra, which plays in the big band festival at Labour Weekend. While down in Dunedin, she will be adjudicating the Dunedin Youth Jazz Festival. It is a role she enjoys, having co-adjudicated the National Youth Jazz Competition alongside the late Rodger Fox. But one of her top priorities while in Dunedin will be to get a photo of the band in front of the railway station. "That's a must-do, isn't it?" TO SEE All Girl Big Band, "The Ages Show", Hanover Hall, Dunedin, July 26, 7.30pm
NZ Herald
14-07-2025
- NZ Herald
Book of the day: Endling by Maria Reva
Endling author Maria Reva: 'Life gives you an opening, even during the most horrible times'. Photos / Supplied What do you do when you're a Ukrainian-born Canadian fiction writer deep into the composition of your first novel, which is set in your homeland and written in the absurdist, dark comedic tradition of Kundera, Kafka and Hašek, when Russia suddenly invades your home country, your relatives start fleeing to safety while bombs explode all around them, and your beloved grandfather refuses to leave Kherson, which is being eviscerated in real time? How can you keep on writing imaginatively when atrocities are being perpetrated against innocents in your homeland? Can you keep on living as before, when your reality has dramatically split in two? Such was the dilemma facing Maria Reva while working on Endling. At first, she was seized by panic and debilitating self-questioning. She stopped writing the novel; fiction seemed a folly during times of existential crisis. The only way she could conceive of completing the novel was to fold all those questions into the trajectory of the plot. She did that by breaking the fourth wall: inserting herself as a character narrating her own experience of stopping writing the novel to travel through her war-torn homeland. What began as fiction ended in nonfiction, making Endling neither a work of magical realism nor auto-fiction or memoir, but an original piece encapsulating elements of all three forms. Though written in four parts, the book is riven in two by Russia's very real invasion of Ukraine. The first fictional story is the cinematic unfolding of a complex metaphorical plot, which suddenly concludes by something like the running of credits at the end of a movie. The second section is marked by Reva actually entering the novel to recount her experience of viewing the horrors of wartime and retracing her failed efforts to encourage her grandfather to leave Kherson. But somehow the fictional plot is not left behind, and is woven into the war narrative. What results is a braided tale of extinction, survival and love, concluding in the resurrection of hope. If this sounds like an unattainable ambition, it might just be, but what must be admired is Reva's determination to finish the novel as an act of both desperation and renewal. So what is the plot? And what exactly is an endling? The story revolves around three Ukrainian women, Yeva, Nastia and Solomiya, who meet working for a romance tour company, Romeo Meets Yulia, which brings eager bachelors to Ukraine in search of 'docile' Eastern European wives untainted by feminism. In truth, Yeva is a maverick scientist, a malacologist, who scours Ukraine's forests and valleys in her mobile RV laboratory, collecting, cultivating and nurturing snail endlings – the last existing specimens of a species – in the hope of keeping their lines alive. Why snails? 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Rather than driving away from the fierce fighting, they move towards it in search of Lefty's last living mate. At this point in the fictional narrative, the curtain falls, the imagined tale is over, credits roll and the author offers her thanks to all those who have helped her publish this fiction. Then the second part begins and the reality of war sets in. Maria has entered Ukraine and is narrating her journey to save her grandfather, but the three women are still on the road, kidnapped bachelors in tow, in search of a snail. This non-fictional fiction I found gripping but confusing, and also a bit of a slog. Like the RV going off-road, the story veered into allusive and metaphorical tangents filled with elegant explanations of snail copulation and gruesome depictions of slaughter. But like the kidnapped bachelors, I often felt like I was being driven through a void in the dark, not knowing where I or the plot was going. In the end, I admired the novel's intelligence, dark humour and ambition, as well as the author's stated belief that 'life gives you an opening, even during the most horrible times'. For in our worst moments, stories, real or imagined, remain, so we never forget and never lose hope.
NZ Herald
12-07-2025
- NZ Herald
Justin Bieber drops new album Swag after three-year hiatus
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