Music In this week's print edition, Jonathan Frochtzwajg reviewed the debut EP from Portland indie pop group Genders, who are celebrating the record's release Sunday at Rontoms. Well, there's another artist playing that night who's also enjoying an album release. Kismet is the first full-length effo...   More

Music Every Tuesday, we list the top selling albums from local record stores Music Millennium, Jackpot Records and Everyday Music, and the top streamed tracks in Portland on Rhapsody, for the previous week. The week's in-st...   More

News "Working" Kirk Reeves, the longtime Portland street musician known for serenading motorists with his trumpet at the eastbound onramp of the Hawthorne Bridge, has died. He was 56 years old. A former computer analyst, Reeves became a fixture along Hawthorne Boulevard after moving to Portland from Boston in 1991, performing renditions of classic standards (including the Loone...   More

Music In this week's print edition of Willamette Week, we spoke with Bettina Richards, the founder of venerable Chicago-based independent record label Thrill Jockey, about the label's 20th anniversary. Here is an extended version of that conversation.Willamette Week: What was the impulse to start the label in the first place? ...   More

Music Stories Twenty years ago, Bettina Richards lived in a cramped fourth-floor walk-up in a particularly heroin-infested section of pre-Giuliani Manhattan. Out of that apartment, Richards, a self-professed    More

Music Here's what we know about new Portland band Slim Fortune: It's a group featuring Rex Marshall and Max Avalon of electro-R&B trio Mattress and Jay Winebrenner of 31Knots. It's making its debut performance this We...   More

Movie Reviews & Stories Flight is about as subtle as a plane crash. And the plane crash at the beginning of Flight ain’t too subtle, either. At 30,000 feet, a commercial airliner carrying more than 100 passengers desce   More

Music Stories Edna Vazquez’s life in music began with a crush. When she was 13 years old, a boy in her tiny hometown of Tonila, in central Mexico, attempted to win her affections by giving her a guitar. Growi   More

Brew Views In the Bathtub—the fictional Louisiana bayou settlement that forms the backdrop for the enchanting Beasts of the Southern Wild—the price of existing off the grid is living in waterlogged squalor   More

Music In the current issue of Willamette Week, we profiled Portland blogger Christopher Kirkley, who lived for over a year in West Africa, making field recordings and trading regional pop songs with locals via MP3s stored on cellphones, which he eventually compiled and released through his label, Sahelsounds. We asked Kirkley for his top five favorite t...   More