Toby

Here's where I am: I'm standing on a beach, four time zones away from "home." It's March, but here it feels like July. The Pacific Ocean is blue and ethereally tinged equal parts grey and white. It's mid to late afternoon and the sun burns low in the sky, doggedly sinking towards the horizon. The air tastes salty and good. … Read more

In recent years, post-rock has become the urban sprawl of independent music. Invasive, bloated, and undeniably comfortable, it has steadily, albeit consciously, delineated from its richer, more substantive origins to assume the role of pleasant background music, antiseptically reliable but hopelessly predictable. Tortoise's feral meanderings and Mogwai's bulky, aggressive overtones have been replaced by Explosions in the Sky's brand of … Read more

I can remember being seven years old and staring bleakly at the television screen while Magic Johnson announced to the world that he was HIV positive. It was late afternoon on a grey fall day and I was sitting on the living room couch with my father, unable to fully grasp either the gravity of the situation or the defeated … Read more

On The One A.M. Radio's 2004 full-length, A Name Writ in Water, songwriter Hrishikesh Hirway surprised critics and listeners alike with his apprehensive brand of esoterically compact and personal lo-fi composition. Falling somewhere in the dark crevice between electronica and singer/songwriter melancholia, Hirway demonstrated an almost uncanny ability to be both rhetorically personable and musically reserved. The vaguely metropolitan musical … Read more