The sound was dirty, brittle and shrill. There was no bass to even out the unrelenting treble of the two-guitar assault of Jon Spencer and Judah Bauer. Russell Simins maintained order with the beatings he gave his drum kit. The deepest tones on the songs were often Spencer’s voice. There was a lascivious sexuality in it, summoning something between Isaac Hayes and Barry White when not rivaling Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard in the unadulterated audacity of his screams.

Spencer made a name for himself with Pussy Galore, as deconstructionist and nihilistic a post-punk band as there was in Washington, DC, and then on the Lower East Side of New York in the mid ’80s. When that band melted down, he joined the Honeymoon Killers, where he met Simins. The two began staying after practice to jam. Bauer, a wide-eyed kid fresh off the bus from Wisconsin, showed up to borrow some gear and ended up getting in on the action. The Blues Explosion was born.

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An interesting thing happens once a year in Borlänge, a nondescript town in central Sweden known mainly for slaughterhouses and factories: for three days, it’s inundated with a slew of top-notch bands and thousands of fans who twist and swirl to the music with the aid of glitter, face paint and a happy load of happier drugs. It’s called the Peace & Love festival, and it’s not unlike Bonnaroo—except there’s no Waffle House nearby. This is where Niki and The Dove’s singer Malin Dahlström and instrumentalist Gustaf Karlöf are today, covered in fluorescent streaks and ribbons, minutes before they take the stage. And they’re pumped, but not just for their own set, or even to be back in their home country. “We are most excited to see Rihanna!” Dahlström says in soft-spoken, Scandinavian-tinged English. 

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It’s a steaming hot late summer day in New York City. The air is breezeless and it feels just as sweltering in the shade as it does under the relentless sun. Everyone is sweating buckets without even trying. Yet when Talking-Heads-frontman-turned-multimedia-solo-artist David Byrne walks into a Lower West Side studio for an interview, he looks remarkably cool. Dapper, really. Dressed in a dark-slate, short-sleeved shirt and yellowish green pants, his near-white hair is swept back neatly. He doesn’t seem to have perspired at all.

A few minutes later, the door opens and Annie Clark—better known as singer-frontwoman-multi-instrumentalist St. Vincent—sweeps in looking equally put-together and unaffected by the heat wave. She’s in all-black summer wear with the exception of a brown leather band that rings the wide-brimmed floppy hat hiding her dark curls. 

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“I’ve been dreaming again of a lonesome world, where I’m lost and I’m on my own.” —George Ranger Johnson

George Ranger Johnson, born March 11, 1946, published over two decades of material from 1966 until his last story, “The Ghost on the Shore,” in 1987, in a collection of hardbound, pulp-novel adventures entitled Lonesome Dreams. The author currently resides in Tuscon, Arizona, and it is not known if he will ever finish the series.

Don’t go looking for George Ranger Johnson. For one, his books are all sadly out-of-print. For another, he doesn’t exist. At least, not in reality. His stories belong to someone else.

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There’s a popular aphorism—coined by Martin Mull but often attributed to Thelonius Monk or Elvis Costello or some other ineffable minister of cool—that suggests that writing about music is akin to dancing about architecture. Logical inconsistencies notwithstanding (dancing, while it can be inspired by something, is never really “about” anything, whereas writing is almost always about something), we’ve stuck with it because it sounds so good, smacks so deeply of truth: Of course you can’t recreate in writing the way that music makes us feel. Nothing makes us feel the way we feel when we hear music. You don’t live in a blueprint, either.

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The Sunday mornings were always funky.

As a young teenager, Steven Ellison and his family traded weekend worship in their Baptist church for an ashram run by his aunt. Hindi bhajans replaced hymns and the sermons switched from the Gospels to a nondenominational homily: God is not omnipotent, but a power to be found inside of you. His aunt, Alice Coltrane—jazz musician and wife to the late John Coltrane—played the organ over the congregation’s otherworldly percussion and wild chanting. With magnificence and captivating intensity, his aunt led the show. God is within you, she would preach. It’s you. You’re God. 

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When John Hillcoat sits down for our interview at the Cabana Restaurant at the Four Seasons, he immediately relaxes when he hears a fellow Aussie accent asking the questions. Now living in Los Angeles with his family, the filmmaker is making some concessions to his new Hollywood lifestyle, even ordering a soy cappuccino. (“That’s very Californian, isn’t it?” he laughs.) Despite his peripatetic childhood in Australia, Connecticut and industrial Hamilton, Ontario, his fondest memories are of film school in Melbourne amidst the thriving pub rock scene that gave rise to some of Australia’s most internationally recognized bands like Midnight Oil and INXS. It’s where he forged his early bond with Nick Cave (a laser in Melbourne’s post-punk music scene in the late ’70s, first with The Boys Next Door and then The Birthday Party, before moving to London in 1980 and forming The Bad Seeds) and where he made his mark as a young filmmaker editing and directing music videos.

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2012 marks FILTER Magazine's tenth year in print. To celebrate, we are looking back at some of our favorite magazine features, from July 2002’s Issue #1 all the way up to this coming November’s Issue #50.

Getting To Know is a section in the magazine that serves as a good gauge for our predictions of greatness. In FILTER ISSUE #19, released Winter 2006, we introduced the English indie rock quartet, Arctic Monkeys. Here is a brief look at the band, then and now.

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2012 marks FILTER Magazine’s tenth year in print. To celebrate, we are looking back at some of our favorite magazine features, from July 2002’s Issue #1 all the way up to this coming November’s Issue #50.


Below you will find Issue #19’s cover story, in full, where we spent time with Chan Marshall of Cat Power in Miami and talked about everything from the moon, to Johnny Cash, to what sharing your music actually means. 

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2012 marks FILTER Magazine’s tenth year in print. To celebrate, we are looking back at some of our favorite magazine features, from July 2002’s Issue #1 all the way up to this coming November’s Issue #50.


Below you can read the entire cover story from Issue #18, in which we get the honest inside scoop from Oklahoma City-bred frontman of The Flaming Lips, Wayne Coyne, regarding his personal truths, the band's growth, and organized musical mind explosions hosted in parking lots. 

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