Summer is nearly over but, on the upside, that means Seattle's biggest music and arts festival is back. Running Friday through Sunday, rather than Saturday through Labor Day Monday, for the first time in its history, Bumbershoot otherwise hasn't changed much else in their formula: a mixture of musi…
At a particularly triumphant moment in his Paramount debut, John Carpenter looks out at the crowd and smiles. "All my career I've made horror movies", he laughs, while the crowd, obviously, shouts and cheers and screams in acknowledgement. "I love horror movies", he smiles, "and horror movies will …
KEXP has a special love for Operators in the live setting. Sure, synth-heavy brainchild of Dan Boeckner (Wolf Parade, Handsome Furs, Divine Fits) would fit on KEXP's airwaves regardless, but we have history together. Three days after the band announced it existed, they played on KEXP and later in t…
It’s time again for Friday on My Mind, our weekly blog post where we look at videos centered around one theme. This is a collaboration between KEXP and King 5 News. It’s that time of the season again, so we’re looking at holiday songs. In A.D. 350, Pope Julius I, bishop of Rome, proclaimed December…
KEXP's weekly guest DJ mix show is a multi-genre program featuring eclectic sets by a rotating cast of local, national, and international DJs and artists. Every late Sunday night at midnight, a guest DJ outside of KEXP's on-air talent will take you on an hour-long journey through their record colle…
Halfway through the American Football show at Neptune Theatre, the band is tuning up guitars and getting ready to launch into another number, and there's a small, singular moment of silence. Then, from somewhere in the throng of voices, someone yells out, "I still can't believe this is even happeni…
A student at Virginia Tech has to be giving credit for creating on of the most random news stories to surface in a while. This student sent an amusing and confusing email to local label Sub Pop, urging Nirvana to reunite and record a school-spirited video for Virginia Tech's homecoming. To fully u…
Okkervil River's 2005 masterpiece, Black Sheep Boy, is one of those records that grabs you wherever you're at. If you haven't gotten the divine pleasure of experiencing it yet, I promise you, it will grab you at some point soon. There's just something about the coming-of-age brilliance of its narra…
If there's a band member sweating on stage during Philip Selway's sets, how is it not going to be the drummer? Selway's work with Radiohead through the late 90s, 2000s, and even the 2010s continuously reinvents how we see and hear the art of drumming in the modern rock and electronic atmosphere. Th…
On September 22nd, it’s KEXP’s Good Mail Day! We’ll be playing all requests and reading messages that we get by mail. So send us a postcard!
Pike is out between Broadway and 12th, the whole block is in a frenzy, and the noise level has almost reached normal weekend levels - it must be time for Capitol Hill Block Party 2015! The layout has adjusted slightly - both Big Mario's Pizza and Vita Coffee sit outside the grounds, making it harde…
It's no surprise that British downtempo pop group London Grammar sold out their second Seattle show in six months Saturday night. Back when they played the Crocodile at the end of September, their excellent first full length If You Wait had just come out only weeks before in the states. Now that it…
Kanye West is crazy. Or so people like to say with a sort of flippant superiority. Only thing is, this time around on his highly awaited, hotly debated, and incessantly fiddled with latest album, The Life of Pablo, he’s saying it, too. In three separate instances on the record, he declares instabil…
Love him or hate him, you simply cannot call the Billy Corgan of 2014 predictable. For the dedicated Smashing Pumpkins out there, this fact is a wonderful, rewarding thing. Sure, Billy is currently rolling out an extensive set of rereleases and remasters of the classic Pumpkins years, each complete…
Nine decades deep into the electronic music genre, and the most startling and effective instrument it uses is still the human voice. From the earliest days of sampling and vocal splicing to the revolutionary vocal manipulations of Bruce Haack and Kraftwerk up through the live vocal looping we've en…
