Lamniformes Radio Roundup: February 2021

Plus, The Human Instrumentality Podcast

Ok! That’s two months of weekly episodes in the books. Now that I’m in the flow of things it seems kind of nuts that I didn’t do the podcast like this in the first place. Like, what was I spending my time doing in March 2020 anyway? Going places?

So four episodes of Lamniformes Radio, and then one episode of a new project I just launched.

First I spoke to Jay Kohler, the guitarist and songwriter for the band Juan Bond. Kohler is a figure in the same scene as previous guests from Detach the Islands and Semaphore, all of whom I met through the Mathcore Index Fest in 2018. After some northeastern sports patter Kohler and I go over his musical biography from rap rock to the music school avant-garde and finally to the metallic mode he works in now. This was recorded just before the release of Juan Bond’s debut album Womb.

Second, I spoke to writer Langdon Hickman about the band Rush. After drummer Neil Peart’s death in January 2020 Langdon wrote a series of reviews for all Rush’s studio albums, grouped into distinct eras to mark the changes in the band’s sound and lyrical philosophy. While I’m no Rush superfan, spending time with their discography last year has deepened my appreciation for how consistently they were able to reinvent themselves over the years. You can read Langdon’s work on Rush at Treble here, here, here, here, and here.

Two years ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Dan Barrett for a piece about his band Have A Nice Life’s new record for Kerrang. Barrett released a new album through his synth pop solo project Black Wing called No Moon. I tried to pick up the conversation where we had left it in 2019 so we could cover how Barrett and his various bands approach performing live, his thoughts on the creative process, and balancing his professional and artistic life. Have A Nice Life has been an influence on my own music, so this was a big deal for me.

The last episode of Lamniformes Radio in January was an interview with writer and podcaster Gary Suarez. Suarez launched a hip-hop newsletter last year called Cabbages that focuses on new music from independent artists. This eventually spun out into the Cabbages podcast, now in its second season, where Suarez and his co-host Jeffrey Laughlin have conversations with writers and rappers about movies and television. Suarez and I talked about his decision to focus the Cabbages podcast on pop culture, the overlap between his freelance work and the newsletter, and we take a short detour to talk about New York noise rock in the late 00s. Check out the Cabbages on podcast on Apple.

Finally, something new and different. Back in 2019 my former editor (and former Lamniformes Radio guest) Joseph Schafer asked if I wanted to do a re-cap podcast of the 90s anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. Since NGE is one of my all time favorite shows, I immediately said yes. Less immediate was our process bringing that podcast to life, but in the last week of January we released our first episode, covering the historical context for the show. This podcast is a limited run 16 episodes in total. It’s not going to have much appeal to anyone who hasn’t watched NGE, but if you are fan I think you’ll really dig what Joseph and I came up with. And if you’ve been meaning to watch NGE but needed an excuse to start, this podcast would make great accompaniment for a first run through of the show. We cover two episodes of NGE per episode of the podcast.

You can find The Human Instrumentality Podcast on Apple, or on our website.