Jake Klar’s newest album, Until the Wildfire Becomes Paradise, will drop you into a desert and envelop you in the troubadour’s crooning narrative, and then carry you back to your living room, your ear pressed against a radio like a hit-hungry kid of the 1960s. This album longs to wander, just as it longs to come home.

That stands to reason. Klar found his voice in the desert of Texas at age 17 on a pilgrimage of sorts, where he returns every year to partake in The Crooked Crow Songwriter’s Retreat. He’s got wandering feet and a hot air balloon heart, steeped in the desert songwriting tradition, but those feet always carry him back home to his DIY community of hardworking artists in Western Massachusetts. Klar’s gathered moments congeal here as soul-feeding collaborations of all sorts. This album is its rock-n-roll manifestation. It’s for the heartbreaker and its subject, the wanderer and the homeward bound, and its release will be at The Parlor Room on November 4th, alongside collaborator Max Wareham.

This latest outpouring of Klar’s is two years in the making, its characters filled in and placed with care into each song. “Because I’m coming from a writing standpoint,” Klar says, “the songs are driven by words—those are the stronghold—words and emotion.” The poetry comes first. In “Counting Stars,” he sings, “leaving’s just the feeling of forgetting when you’ll be coming home.” And then there’s the album’s instrumentation, which wraps itself around Klar’s voice, echoing and feeding its fully bared and seriously beautiful howl.

Performed solo—just the crooner and his guitar—these songs hold a refreshing clarity. Klar’s voice, on and off the record, bellows from a seemingly deeper source than the belly, and while the worthiness of this record could rest on his voice alone, it doesn’t. Each song’s needs have been lovingly attended to—filled in with harmonies and quirky embellishments in spots, and pared down at crucial moments. “I’ve been thinking about space and silence as such a crucial part of music,” Klar says.

While his voice carries through the album, at its middle is a heartbeat, an instrumental interlude, called “Hot Air Balloon.” In this breathing pocket, the listener is granted a moment to reflect on Klar’s narratives and a moment to appreciate the album’s instrumentals. Max Wareham holds that heartbeat on the bass, while Joel Helander twinkles on the keys, a supernatural adornment throughout. Holding it down at the drums is Karl Helander, who also served as the album’s primary producer at Sleeper Cave Studio in Easthampton, Massachusetts.

These songs—a self-proclaimed bricolage of collected stories and emotions—find Klar nested in his artistic responsibility to make you feel something. “I want to work until I’m dead,” he says. “I want people to cry the way I have to songs, or, I don’t know, go fall in love with someone.” Klar is the storyteller and the trickster, sneaking around the country, plucking stories to gather and disperse beauty.

Want to hear what Klar listens to for inspiration? Check out our Take a Listen Spotify Channel. While there you can listen to what other musicians we’ve profiled are listening to as well.

Jake Klar–musician
Pelham, Massachusetts
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Top image: Jake Karl. Photo by Alex Pines

The post Seeking Paradise Through Song appeared first on Take Magazine.

Clint Baclawski makes billboards, but he is not trying to sell you anything. With a background in advertising photography, he has a keen eye for its aesthetic, but his images are sculptural photographs rather than pushes for product. “There’s no better billboard than art, and these images are displayed as such without something to advertise,” Clint says.

After six years of practicing traditional photographic methods, Clint had the notion in 2006 to get the photograph off the wall, and so he did, transferring the images into light boxes, double-sided and free standing, lit from within with fluorescent bulbs. He was taking photographs and inverting them, flipping text, asking the viewer to question how the photograph was taken. His images dealt with commercialism, but some muddled aspect of it. A Walk in the Park, for one, represents The Macy’s Day Parade, but a small crowd from the night before.

Baclawski’s concept started evolving while he was constructing a light box during graduate school at MassArt. A print fell onto a fluorescent bulb and draped itself over the long tube of light and voila! He created Chromogenic, a composite of LED tubes separated and laid out on a wall, each wrapped with a section of a photograph—an abstracted landscape fading from bright greens to blues. The effect is disorienting in a way; the image is obscured and then clarified as you move around its parts, an effect that goes for his body of disembodied billboards.

As he moved from light boxes to more complex photographic sculpture, Baclawksi changed his subject matter changed dramatically. “No longer did I need the imagery to be dense and complex, full of crowds and tension,” he says. “I went very simplistic.” Using the structure of his work itself to stir the viewer, he layers lights on mirrors, representing simple images with complex modalities and concepts.

“There’s beginning to be two distinct bodies within the light bulbs,” Baclawski says. His nature images exist on pure color Plexiglas, but he is creating a distinct body of work on mirrored surfaces. “They’re all about places one would inhabit but devoid of people. My latest, Oasis, is a houseboat.”

Thoreau, image courtesy of Clint Baclawski

Another piece, Thoreau, sits ironically in a corporate lobby on a gold background, a minimal and humble abode glowing on a gold background in a place surging with money. His works on mirrored surfaces, such as Thoreau, seem to expand in two directions. The mirror pushes into infinity, while the glowing bulbs emerge toward the viewer. As you witness the empty replica of Thoreau’s home, you witness yourself reflected back as well, occupying the home in a way. While Baclawski’s work plays with commercialism in the digital age, he still works with film and refuses to outsource work, making sure to be a part of his work in every aspect. He’s begun creating miniature versions of his work as well.

These days, Baclawski is working on his largest commission to date, utilizing eight-foot-long bulbs, and is preparing for HUBweek, Boston’s “festival for the future,” a weeklong event in October bringing innovators, scientists, artists, and thinkers together. He’ll be occupying a shipping container in Boston’s City Hall Plaza, where his viewer will be pulled into an indoor billboard of sorts, a consumer inside an ad without a product to consume, save the thought-provoking work itself.

Clint Baclawski–artist
Malden, Massachusetts
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Top image, Oasis, photo courtesy of Clint Baclawski

The post Seeing the Light appeared first on Take Magazine.

Four times a year, Michael McCarthy hauls his pots from his studio in Florence, Massachusetts to his wood-fired kiln up in the hills. He says that the general rule when it comes to pottery is to “build a kiln bigger than you can use alone and invite friends.” It’s a community event, one in which an entire season’s worth of work takes its final form.

McCarthy will be showing the results of his most recent firing at the Hilltown 6 Pottery Tour, a weekend-long 45-mile radius event through the idyllic back road towns of Western Massachusetts. On this one weekend—an annual event—nine potters come out of the woodwork—or claywork rather—to showcase and discuss their work, and provide demonstrations in studios speckled throughout the hilltowns. This year, on July 29th and 30th, a sampling of McCarthy’s work, as well as the man himself, will be stationed at Sam Taylor’s studio, Dogbar Pottery, in Westhampton, Massachusetts. There you’ll find a smattering of cups, mugs, vases, flasks, platters, and covered jars colored largely in blues and decorated with delicate and repetitive lines, as well as refreshments from The Lone Wolf.

Michael McCarthy, photo by Jen Morris

McCarthy’s work is elegant and simple. Where he diverges from the straightforward in his decoration of the surface, as he marks the clay with frenetic and methodical lines made with an X-acto knife. The work is unique and bold, as well as totally unobtrusive visually. It is also highly functional. His bottle forms, for instance, can be used for secondary fermentation of a batch of beer.

McCarthy tweaks his process each time he creates the hundreds of pots that will get fired each season. Right now, he’s interested in “grandma ware,” a sort of 1950s, weathered, and whitewashed look. To achieve that look, he lowered his kiln’s temperature and is now experimenting with colors accordingly.

Wood-fired, salt-glazed porcelain with slip inlay, photo by John Polak

McCarthy uses the traditional method of firing his pots with wood and lives in a hilly bucolic town himself, but his work contrasts starkly with the back-to-nature scene one might associate with this lifestyle. His pots reflect behavioral patterns and repeating habits with their line work. Layers of straight rings around a cup reflect patterns of thought. He takes the earth’s material and shapes it into vessels that remind a viewer more of the machinations of the human mind than of the earth from which it comes. “I work with the most amorphous material but choose to define it,” he says, adding that he’s less rigid in his practice than he once was.

McCarthy moved to the area in 2000 to apprentice with Mark Shapiro, a veteran potter in Western Massachusetts. As an established potter now, McCarthy remembers when a teacher had to remind him that he was actually doing it, making pottery his life. He realized, having found himself in a valley rich in pottery and pottery aficionados, that he could work the way he wanted to work. “I stopped searching for a place. I had found it,” he says, and if you pick up a Hilltown 6 Pottery Tour Map, you’ll find it too, down a series of scenic and winding roads.

Michael McCarthy–potter
Florence, Massachusetts
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Top image: tea cups, 5″ height, wood-fired, salt-glazed porcelain with slip inlay, photo by John Polak

The post Potting with a Purpose appeared first on Take Magazine.

Cousin Moon is and isn’t a band. Yes, they are a group of people that play music together, and, yes, they just released an expansive album, a self-titled 17-track doozy of a project. It’s just that the term “band” cannot hold the entirety of their identity.

Cousin Moon is more like a recording collective, one whose roots took hold in 2004 between Karl Helander and his cousin, Aaron Moon, and one that’s been evolving since. The album itself is a masterpiece of DIY resolve. It places you on a vibrating string, dips you into melancholy wells, and then places you gently on the ground, slightly out of breath. Its sonic texture and layered harmonies leave your ears searching for an end to its depth. “Faraway,” a Karl tune, fills you with helium and takes your mind on a run around the block, while “Florentine,” Max’s song, weeps you into a trance. Cousin Moon is both deeply nostalgic and starkly contemporary.

Cousin Moon album art / created by Karl Helander and Phoebe Helander

When Karl met Max Wareham and Phoebe Berkel (now Phoebe Helander), he quickly folded the two into his familial project with Aaron. They were called Pale Cowboy, and they played out as a four-piece band. They rehearsed, played shows, and developed a local fan base.

Then, they met Andy Cass, who began recording the group tenaciously, and joined the group as their bassist and sound engineer. “A big part of the equation was Andy. He’s a part of the band, and he’s always believed in the group, at times more than us,” Phoebe says. “The key difference between us and other groups that like recording is that we have Andy.” The group decided to prioritize writing and recording, so they played their last show in January of 2014 and turned inward to record the album. Together they began chasing a high standard of quality.

“Having something to lean against was a natural propellant to hold down the sound,” Karl says, speaking of Andy and the group’s need to develop a common language. They started with around 30 songs and experimented endlessly. “We kept adding new instruments and sounds, and then subtracting—trying to create more polyphony,” Karl says. “As songwriters, a lot of the music we like is larger than life. As you start to develop a song, it tells you what it wants. We had unlimited tracks and time because we had the engineer.”

Engineer Andy Cass / Photo by Georgia Teensma

Now, three years after its inception, the album is finished. Cousin Moon won’t be touring, but they’re moving forward. As Sleeper Cave Records, the group is now recording other groups. “We have three separate projects that will be coming out of the studio soon,” Karl says. Adds Phoebe, turning to Karl, “You and Andy are now a two-headed recording beast.”

“We’ve got some stuff cooking,” Max says, and it’s clear that wherever this group is going, it’s upward and it’s for the sake of the song.

Cousin Moon
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Photos by Caitlin Driscoll

The post Cousin Moon’s Polyphonic Ride appeared first on Take Magazine.

It is filled to the brim with folklore; the ghost of a young boy haunts the halls and has trouble spelling through a Ouija board, having passed before learning his ABCs. What differentiates this farmhouse from the rest is its recent history as a sanctuary and gestation space for New England musicians. The home warbles melancholic sound.

Photo by June West

Asa Irons lived in the house on and off through the early 2000s, creating and performing pastoral folk music and bringing his friends around to play. He joined the outsider folk group, Feathers, and played in the stoner metal band, Witch. In Behind a Hill, a documentary about “New Weird America” and the underground music of the region, Irons sits in the Barrington barn and speaks of his love for the area, how it remains his source of inspiration. Irons, it seems, sparked a musical flame in the house that has not gone out.

In 2011, lo-fi psych-rock group MMOSS moved into the house and spent several years recording inside and touring from the old walls. Then, it housed psych-folk group, Soft Eyes. Rachel Neveu, a member of both MMOSS and Soft Eyes, is the current and longest standing resident of the house. She and her husband/collaborator, Lukas Goodreault, also of MMOSS and Soft Eyes, have witnessed a constant flow of bands over the years in the house. It’s caught the sounds of Herbcraft, Lina Tullgren, Bong Wish, Merlyn’s Magic Music Box, The Miggs, and countless others. It’s captured the sounds of the New England web, the interminable unfurling of a widespread and longstanding community.

Photo by John Andrews

Today, the house is the nesting ground of John Andrew’s project, John Andrews and The Yawns. He’s spent the last year fastidiously writing and recording in the house for his upcoming album, Bad Posture, which is due to come out on the Woodsist record label in March of this year. Andrews is a mainstay of New England’s freaky musical network. He has toured extensively with his groups Quilt and Woods and has recorded with Kevin Morby, EZTV, and Widowspeak. Now, as Asa Irons did, he’s taken to the woods to work on his own project. He feeds the wood stove and plays to the trees, honors the house with sound. Andrews describes his music as good old-fashioned rock n’ roll. “I like music that’s timeless,” he says, moseying around the house in his overalls. He croons over the keys, embodying the title of his upcoming album, bent over his piano and lulling his listeners.

Photo by John Andrews

Three quarters’ of The Yawns reside in the house now: Andrews, Neveu, Goodreault, and Joey Schneider, the group’s bassist, and its drummer, Keven Lareau, is no stranger to the house. They exemplify the intermingling of New England’s psychedelic underground. They’ll be touring the northeast with Hand Habits (also on Woodsist Records) in February. If you catch them, you’ll hear the Barrington house in Andrews’ songs. He will sing to you, “live free or die,” and there you’ll be placed in the yard, echoing through the web of New England’s folk past, its psychedelic present, and its unfolding future.

Photo by John Andrews

Top photo by June West

The post New Weird America in an Old New England House appeared first on Take Magazine.