Of Monsters and Men

Arny Margret has spent the last year making waves, not only in her Icelandic hometown but across Europe and the US, touring extensively, supporting Leif Vollebekk, Passenger, Blake Mills and more, as well as playing the likes of Newport Folk Festival, Reykjavik Calling and Iceland Airwaves. She’s now released her gorgeous sophomore album, ‘I Miss You, I Do’ on One Little Independent Records.

Musically she draws inspiration from folk and blues roots, utilizing a less-is-more approach to convey openness, choosing to rely mostly on the delicate strumming of acoustics and her dulcet voice. She cites influences from the likes of Andy Shauf, Phoebe Bridgers, Bon Iver, and Gregory Alan Isakov. Born and raised in a small town called Ísafjörður, she attended music school from the age of 6 learning to play the piano and gradually taught herself guitar. She recorded the album at studio Hljóðriti in Hafnarfjörður and will continue to make her mark globally with her intimate and affecting live performances.

Syml

SYML is a musician, songwriter and producer based in Seattle, WA

The Milk Carton Kids

THE ASH & CLAY, Grammy-nominated for Best Folk Album 2014, out now.

VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE
The Foreword to The Ash & Clay by Joe Henry

The good doctor William Carlos Williams famously wrote that “the pure products of America go crazy;” and it should surprise me not at all that the thought would find me a trembling but easy target alone in a hotel room, late of an evening, in the city of Hiroshima, by the Inland Sea.

This town has a way of stopping time and then re-animating it like still images in a flipbook, its stick figure dancing halting circles upon an endless sky. It invites you into a frozen past that flashes forward like a lost silent movie of our future already in progress.

Of course, the demands of travel have a beautiful way of skewing all perception, rendering it liquid and wholly unreliable–but in the way that keeps hard facts from obscuring the elusive truth: night becomes day; seasons arrive disguised as others; the living and the dead take up together in your mind like lonesome wallflowers at a Sunday Social; I phone my wife and she answers me with breaking news from the closed book of yesterday; I relearn to speak my own name...

Songs have the same power to confuse, seduce, stop time and re-animate it; to skin the lion and to leave it both spread on the floor and still stalking you from a ghostly crouch, the blood of your dreams already on its jowls. Because songs are in motion–and only fully realized in mid air and real-time— they are as untouchable as they are insistent.

It is here in room 922 of The Mitsui Garden Hotel that I have my first encounter with The Ash & Clay by The Milk Carton Kids. And whereas for as long as I have known them I have always perceived the twin voices of Joey Ryan and Kenneth Pattengale as disappearing into one, I now hear that single and distinct character rising to speak for many...

For within these songs is a man himself in motion –a traveler who dances in silent, halting circles. And what he does is quietly bear witness like a weathervane, to the carnival of souls by the wayside, his eyes cornered but his face always pointing forward, his voice in our heads. He moves through love but is alone; laughs at the wreckage, weeps with lust; throws and sweeps confetti, stands at cold gravesides; raises a hand in promise, then picks your pocket and slips quietly back across the border. He slides outside the law, bound by honor and duty, the pure product of a mad country working with all its heart at fevered cross-purposes.

In the end it is mercy he is after, the character in this play—the kind of mercy that attends grace when truly living in spite of the inevitable, when singing the unspeakable to the unlistening. And from Hiroshima to Graceland, this character knows that the whole of human foolishness must be witnessed, loved, and forgiven for that mercy to be ratified.

Like Jesus and Harpo Marx, he does this for us all.

Joe Henry
Hiroshima, Japan
10 October, 2012

Hurray for the Riff Raff

https://linktr.ee/hurrayfortheriffraff

Buffalo Traffic Jam

Buffalo Traffic Jam is a folk band born in the heart of Bozeman, Montana, where its members, Frankie Cassidy and Nathan Ross, first crossed paths as students at Montana State University. United by a love for storytelling and the raw beauty of acoustic sound, they began crafting music that evokes wide-open landscapes and the emotions that live quietly beneath the surface of everyday life. The result was a self-titled debut ep followed by singles “Rescue Me” and “Forgot Your Roots;” the latter of which saw the band gain their first bit of online momentum and led to the signing of their very first record deal with Arista Records.

With rich harmonies, stripped-down instrumentation, and vocals that make you feel—whether it's longing, joy, or that bittersweet in-between—Buffalo Traffic Jam creates songs that linger long after the last chord fades. Their music is as much about atmosphere as it is about melody, rooted in folk traditions but carried forward by a modern emotional edge.

2025 has seen the release of two more singles, “Strangers Now” and “Milestone” and will see the band make their festival debuts at both Under the Big Sky and Red West Festival before heading out on tour with rising country singer-songwriter Dylan Gossett. From dorm room jam sessions to packed local venues, Buffalo Traffic Jam stays true to their roots—authenticity, friendship, and the natural beauty that first brought them together in Montana.