Woodland is the name of Gillian Welch and David Rawling’s studio in Nashville, and it’s also the name of their new album. On Woodland, the duo continue to show their deep connection as collaborators. The album has a wide open sound that features their seemlessly blended and intimately recorded vocals, and the light touch of a backing band that includes drums, bass, pedal steel, banjo, and airy strings on tunes like "What We Had" and "Hashtag". "Lawman" and "The Bells and the Birds" have a lovely somberness, and the album as a whole has a "live off the floor" feeling to it that we hear less and less of these days. Woodland will stay in our "recently played" column for the forseeable future.
We interviewed Gillian and Dave back in 2001 for Tape Op #85.
Tape Op is a bi-monthly magazine devoted to the art of record making.
It's not Idol, technically, but America's Got Talent and its dentally-impaired overseas cousin are still franchises helmed by Simon Cowell, who I think we can all agree has become somewhat of a figurehead for shitty pop music and...
I interviewed David J in 2015, as I had long been a fan of his bands Bauhaus and Love & Rockets, and had been buying his solo albums since his first works in the '80s. We ended up working on some music with Barton Carroll at my studio a year or...
I received several CDs recently, notably the Monsters of Folk (Jim James, M. Ward, Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis) and Porcupine Tree's The Incident, that I really wanted to listen to but was unable to hear. Why? Because these promo discs were...
THE ERA OF HI-RES DIGITAL AUDIO IS HERE
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Yup, I sit at my computer all day editing articles, writing stuff for the mag and answering the ridiculous amount of emails that always seep in over the course of a day.
illus by Eva Kihl
As we close the page on 2010 and its miserable economy, there was one bright spot for music lovers: VINYL. That's right, vinyl. That analog medium that just won't die. According to Rolling Stone* vinyl sales were up in 2010....
Tape Op Magazines and the Tape Op Book Vol. II are featured in the reading materials section of the "Sonic Youth, etc: Sensation Fix" traveling art exhibition. Thanks, Sonic Youth!
"The exhibition Sonic Youth, etc: Sensation Fix focuses on the...
Like any war, the loudness wars are a total mess brought on by territorial tendencies amongst those who fear losing their place in the world. And like a real war, the loudness wars cause people to throw rational thought out the window and replace it...
Guitarist Michael Belfer passed away March 20, 2022 from a series of compounding health issues. He was a friend and my bandmate in Black Lab back in the late ’90s. His unique playing and sound was an influence on players such as Sonic...