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 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? Bettina Richards: I’ve always been a record geek and music fan. I sort of stumbled ...   More

Top 5 Califone, Quicksand/Cradlesnakes (2003)Not only a Thrill Jockey fave, but one of the best bands of the past decade, in my opinion. These dudes mix gorgeous folk melodies with out-there noise like    More

Music This is what it sounds like when an experimentalist goes pop. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't sound much like what anyone else would label "pop." Nick Bindeman is probably best known in Portland as a member of space-rockers Eternal Tapestry and longstanding improv-freaks Jackie-O Motherfucker (whose new record, Earth Sound System, came out this week -- hear it here), but he has also produced a lot of music ...   More