At Take Magazine, we take music seriously, regularly featuring New England’s coolest, most unusual and most diverse set of musicians and music-adjacent artists. In the past two years of publishing, we’ve brought you everything from Grammy-award winning pop stars to musicians crafting their own experimental instruments. As the music industry reinvents itself, and people continue to subvert and transcend genre classification, we promise to continue to scour basement shows, online forums, and music festivals for the region’s best.

In the meantime, we’re upping our music game to bring new music right to your ears. Each time we feature a musician, we are going to ask them what they’re listening to and then create a playlist for that artist on our Take Spotify channel. Though not all the artists on these playlists are from New England, several New Englanders have already made the cut. For example, Vermont’s own bedroom pop crooner Bella Ortiz-Wren, aka bella, shared a Ruth Garbus track on their playlist. Garbus is also a super confessional dreamy pop crooner from Vermont like Ortiz-Wren…who knew there were so many!

Some of these playlists feel like a personalized mixtape (see The Rap Scholars‘ playlist or the picks from Home Body), while others are lists of full albums from different artists. Either way, you’re guaranteed to hear something new or fun and familiar.

In addition to these custom playlists from featured artists, Take Magazine staff curated a playlist of some of our favorites. The strange diversity of tracks on the Staff Picks playlist mirrors the eclectic tastes of our staff as a whole. You’ll find catching pop tunes from New England heroes, classical chamber music, sad bastard indie, neo soul, and much more. We’ll be adding more tracks to the playlist each week, so be sure to check on it frequently.

But wait there’s more. We want to know what you’re listening to as well.

Submit your favorite songs right now to pr@takeindustries.com email or get us on any social media platform with the hashtag #heytakealisten with an artist name and the title of the track you’re currently obsessed with. Check our Spotify channel soon and see if your pick made it on our list. Extra points for New England bands and songs we haven’t yet heard.

Playlists From Across New England

The Rap Scholars

David Seidel aka Mysterybear

bella

Soggy Po’ Boys

Jenn Van West

Molly Brown

Home Body

Top image: Hannah Mohan of And the Kids, featured on our staff Spotify playlist | Photo by Montgomery Sheridan

The post Take a Listen: A Spotify Playlist Just for You appeared first on Take Magazine.

When I reach Haley Morgan by phone at home—which is fitting—she is stretching—also fitting—to prepare for a show later that night. Morgan is the singer for the Western-Mass.-based electro-art duo Home Body. Home Body play dance music, which is inherently about the body—moving the body, feeling and articulating rhythms in the limbs and hips, a physical correlation between the body and the music. The body is an important part of who and what Home Body are.

Clubby dance music can sometimes seem oriented toward physical pleasure, but the meaning of connecting with our bodies through sound and through organized movement is greater than just our ability to pursue or project physical desires. We learn to carry ourselves in space, to convey poise and grace and self-possession through movement.

“It’s so easy to become separated from our body or not think about it as something that you have agency over or to think about it as something that you can reinvent yourself through,” says Morgan. Not surprisingly, Home Body have made fruitful connections with the world of fashion and galleries, sometimes making their music specifically for settings that showcase the multi-media art potential of music.

Haley Morgan, Home Body, photo by Michael Kusek

Morgan and her partner Eric Hnatow met at Hampshire College in Amherst. The two were a couple for five years or so before they formed the band, with Morgan having a theater background and Hnatow having played in some industrial electronic bands in Ludlow and Palmer.

Morgan and Hnatow want their project to connect with people, and they put thought and effort into making their shows visual, interactive, kinetic, and stimulating. They’re into “the power of spectacle,” says Morgan. “We use sound, we use light, we use costuming, we use dance, just to try to figure different ways to hook people,” says Morgan.

The music strikes a nice balance between the synthetic and the organic. Hnatow gets the beats pumping along with mechanistic oscillations, handclaps, and robotic clicks and hisses. Sometimes the bottom-scraping synth bass lines sound as if giant kazoos were buzzing beneath the fabric of the mix. The glitchy and smeared sonic textures serve as a fitting background surface for Morgan to sing, intone, and blurt over. She has a rhythmic force and emphatic articulation to her singing. Her vocals—with growls, coos, yips and dips—can bring to mind a range of idiosyncratic vocal stylists like Grace Jones, Sinead O’Connor, Robyn, Bjork, Yoko Ono, and even Alanis Morissette and Dolores O’Riordan of The Cranberries. Home Body are working on a new full-length record, one that could come out by year’s end.

Eric Hnatow of Home Body, photo by Michael Kusek

Listen to Morgan on “Inner Red” from the duo’s most recent release, 2014’s Guts. “Bite your tongue and swallow it whole/No need to name it, your gut will know,” Morgan sings. Another song, “Something Tempting” has lines about “turn[ing] our bodies back on.”
There are ways of knowing that don’t involve the brain, and that’s seems to be part of this band’s point.

“I think that sound vibrations, the music that we make—sound is movement, and I think that sometimes life can get too heady, literally coming from our brains,” says Morgan. “There’s so much more that we can understand about the world around us if we employ all of our senses.”

Want to hear what Home Body listens to on Spotify when they’re not making music? Check out our Take a Listen channel.

Morgan Hanley – singer, Home Body
Western Massachusetts
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Top image by Robert Tobey

The post Art-Dance Duo Home Body Keep It Corporeal appeared first on Take Magazine.