The Scandinavian design trend continues to be wildly popular as people continue to decorate their homes in the Nordic style. As such, the demand for Scandinavian furniture and home accessories have skyrocketed, and in 2020, Sweden-based furniture brand IKEA became the seventh most valuable retail brand in the world. The company is reportedly now valued at $19 billion. Moreover, the latest design trend, Japandi, which marries traditional Japanese design elements with Scandinavian ones, is predicted to create even more demand for Nordic design in 2022. While you can have a beautiful Japandi home with the right IKEA finds and some inexpensive pieces from a Japanese store such as Muji, there are ways to make this design trend more luxurious to satisfy even the most selective homeowner. Here are a few luxurious ways to infuse the Japandi interior design trend into your home.
Look for customized furniture
Instead of getting ready-made pieces, consider getting customized furniture to start your home’s Japandi makeover. Since this design scheme calls for simple furniture shapes that allows light to flow throughout the room, as well as furniture that’s low to the ground, you’ll want to have the right pieces that truly embodies this home decorating style. For furniture that perfectly fits a Japandi home, consider getting pieces from the studio of the iconic Japanese-American architect and woodworker George Nakashima. His work is the very definition of Japandi style, long before it became hip.
To this day, the late artist’s estate is still producing custom wooden furniture that can be found in celebrity homes, as well as art enthusiasts’ abodes. Before heading to the studio’s location in New Hope, Pennsylvania, you’ll need to book a design appointment for wood selection. Take note that all their pieces are priced individually based on size, quality, and the rarity of the wood selected. Once you have your piece, you can enhance the look of your furniture with a few styling tricks. For instance, if it’s a wooden chair or sofa, you can drape a sheepskin over it to make it look cozier and give it that Nordic touch.
Tread carefully when adding pops of color
The Japandi color scheme is all about using neutral colors from the typical Scandinavian palette of white and beige, combined with the darker earth tones of a traditional Japanese palette such as terra cotta, charcoal, and black. To make your interior look more cohesive, use no more than 3 to 4 colors per room. Adding pops of color here and there can actually make your room look cheap, so tread carefully if you want to inject a bit of color in your home design. Keep it to a bare minimum, such as adding throw pillows or cushions with a Japanese pattern like uroko (scales) or karakusa (winding plant). Another option is to add a large green house plant like a Monstera deliciosa or a fiddlehead fern if you really want to break up all the neutral tones in a room.
Be selective when it comes to artwork
Japandi may be all about neutral minimalism, but there’s no rule that says you can’t incorporate artwork into your home with this kind of design scheme. Choose artwork that fits with your interior, so this means paintings in neutral tones and small sculptures. Consider artwork from the likes of contemporary Nordic artists such as Karin Mamma Andersson, Mats Gustafson, or Maja Safstrom. You can also infuse more of the Japanese element into your home design with pieces from Yutaka Sone, Aya Takano, or Shinoda Toko.
The Japandi design trend is about to get bigger in the coming years. Consider these tips to transform your home into a luxurious space that evokes the quiet and serene aesthetics of Scandinavian and Japanese design.
NYC-based collective MICHELLE have announced their new album, AFTER DINNER WE TALK DREAMS, which comes out January 28 via Transgressive. Today’s announcement comes with the release of the lead single ‘SYNCOPATE’. Check out its music video below and scroll down for the album’s cover artwork and tracklist.
“The song at its core is about desire,” MICHELLE said of the new track in a statement. “Communicating your desire can feel vulnerable, so we wanted to have some fun with that and show our funky and seductive side. It really feels like we’re hitting the street for the first time by putting this song out into the world.”
‘SYNCOPATE’ follows a string of singles by MICHELLE, including ‘SUNRISE’ (and its rework featuring Arlo Parks), ‘UNBOUND’, and ‘FYO’. Their debut LP, HEATWAVE, arrived in 2018.
Calicoco is the moniker of multi-instrumentalist Giana Caliolo, who grew up in Long Beach, New York. After moving to Rochester in 2008 to study photography, they became involved in the city’s local music scene and decided to settle there. Their first release as Calicoco, Needy, arrived in 2017 via Dadstache Records, followed by their introspective 2018 debut, Float. That album’s striking honesty is all the more brutal on Underneath, Calicoco’s sophomore full-length, which grapples with the weight of depression and anxiety while finding new avenues for their soul-baring songwriting. Caliolo, who relocated to Long Beach in 2019 but recorded the album in Rochester in January 2020 with friends Stephen Roessner and Phil Shaw, brings a raw, explosive physicality to the performances, which can be cathartic in their intensity – “Just give me a goddamn lobotomy,” they demand on highlight ‘Heal Me’ – or suffused in crushing waves of melancholy and guilt, like the one on ‘I Was the Devil’ that carries the album to its end. The hurt is almost too much to bear, but Caliolo invites you on a journey that makes it worth enduring: “I’ll hold your hand baby, please hold my hand/ I can’t wait to be there with you, underneath.”
We caught up with Calicoco for this edition of our Artist Spotlight interview series to talk about the origins of the project, the making of their new album Underneath, and more.
How do you look back on the time you spent in Rochester after you first moved there? Do those years occupy a similar space in your mind as a chapter in your life?
I feel like I’ve had different chapters in Rochester, starting off in college and doing this band Buckets that was with my college friends, and then meeting new people and being in this band called Secret Pizza, and then I was in a band called Pony Hand – I feel like they’ve all been chapters in my life. I didn’t really know that much about the Rochester community when I was in school, and I slowly started meeting people in the community and it just grew and grew and grew, and I finally felt like I was like in this really beautiful music community. It’s weird, it’s like I don’t want that chapter to close yet. I feel like I’m not quite done with Rochester, like I’m trying to figure out if I can get back here for a little while to sort of continue that journey. I have a lot of really amazing friends that I have played music with over the years and I still want to be making music with them.
What do you find beautiful about the community?
It’s just a really supportive community, and there seems to be a lot of people willing to help out. Like, when I was in college and I was first starting off in this band Buckets, I met this guy Tim Avery, who’s one of my good friends now. And he used to book at this venue called the Bug Jar, and that was sort of where if you had a band, you played. And he heard me play I think in a basement somewhere, and he was like, “Come play a show at the Bug Jar. I’ll get you in.” He made it super easy to take those next steps. And then when my college band ended because people moved away, I was sitting outside of the Bug Jar with my new friend Phil [Shaw], who I wound up being in a band with. He was like, “Don’t be sad, let’s make music! You’re done with Buckets, but this doesn’t mean that your music-making has to end.” And, and I was like, “Okay,” and we scheduled a day to practice we got my friend Kamara [Robideau] and Tim Avery, we got him to play guitar, and we just like started a band. And it sort of came out of something ending, which was really cool.
Did your approach to songwriting change when that shift happened and you started this project?
Yeah, I feel like the songwriting has changed over the years. With Secret Pizza, I wasn’t actually playing guitar, I was playing drums and singing, so that was a different sort of challenge. I was doing more lyric-writing and we were doing more jamming on the spot and trying to come up with stuff together as a band. And then, with this other band that I was in called Pony Hand with my friends Karrah Teague, Brandon Henahan, they wrote the music and I wrote the drum parts. And in between those bands happening was when I started writing solo stuff for Calicoco, and I don’t even think I had a band name yet. I started to realize that I had songwriting that I wanted to be doing that didn’t quite fit in with these other bands, and that’s sort of how the evolution happened, from being in all these different bands and then learning how to compose my own stuff. It was just different, and it was a lot more internal stuff, I think, that just didn’t work for those two bands.
In what way do you mean?
I think lyrically and sonically, just the fact that I was writing this stuff separately from the bands, and I just felt connected to the songs in a different way. I don’t know, I think there was just a little bit more internal, like, turmoil that maybe didn’t feel I was ready to share. I think I needed another creative outlet to get a bunch of other shit out that apparently I had, and I guess I felt like I wasn’t able to like get it out in that way, with the two bands that I was in.
What comes to mind when you think of your first releases as Calicoco? Are there any parts of yourself that you feel like you have outgrown, or that are still integral to the identity of the project?
I feel like I’ve seen a lot of growth going from Needy and Float to Underneath. I feel like I’ve found my sound a little bit more. And I still love those songs so much and I love playing them, but I definitely feel a little bit more removed from them. It was just such a different time in my life. Some of those songs I haven’t played in two, three years, but some of them I still feel really connected to. There’s definitely ones though that are harder to play now. Like, I don’t feel as much of a connection to them, which is okay. I think it’s okay if songs have a time and place for you, you know. I feel like I have a sound that has sort of continued from the beginning, but I definitely feel like it’s gotten more dense, like there’s a little bit more going on there. And I feel like I’ve let myself be a little bit more vulnerable with the actual songwriting.
I think that definitely comes through on Underneath. When you started thinking about the album, did you go into it knowing you wanted to do things differently?
I think I just wanted to go in there and really give it my all. The recording process was a little bit different for Underneath; musically I had more things ready and I had demos that I had mixed on my own, I knew a little bit more sonically where I wanted to be. I didn’t do demos and stuff for Float, and I kind of needed a lot more guidance and help – I couldn’t see as much before we actually recorded it. And I think, when I recorded with Stephen Roessner, who engineered and produced Underneath, we literally took some of my demos that I did at home in my bedroom and kept some of those stems and used them for the actual final product. So I think I learned a lot over the years, and I was starting to mix at home and produce at home, and I was just a little bit more prepared for what I was going to be going into when it came around to start recording Underneath.
I wanted to talk about ‘I Hate Living With Me’, because it’s a really striking and strong introduction to the album. Do you feel like it’s representative of the kind of headspace that you want to capture with the album as a whole?
Yeah, definitely. I wanted to start off the album with that theme, because I felt that that feeling throughout the time that I was writing the music. I was just having a really hard time living with myself, and just a lot of pain and a lot of depression and anxiety. And I felt like it was like an honest way to set the tone for how the rest of the album was going to be.
A lot of the album revolves around feeling a loss of self as well as a loss of control. I’m wondering how you went about externalizing those feelings, and whether that creative process shifted that internal balance at all.
Yeah, I think it was really important to be able to write during that time. It was super cathartic for me, and it was the outlet that I needed. I was struggling a lot at that time, and I was spending a lot of time alone in my room, just sitting with myself. And I needed that – I wasn’t doing a lot of other good things for myself, like I wasn’t in therapy yet, and I wasn’t trying to get support from friends and stuff. I felt lucky that I could put this energy into something that was positive, even though the music is really dark.
I didn’t sit with a lot of the music for a long time. I feel like all of a sudden Ι would write a song in like two days, it was kind of crazy. In the past, it would take a long time to like to like really get the song together and compose it and figure out all the parts, but so many of the songs that are on this album, like I vomited them out of me. [laughs] It was very present, and when I was recording with Steve, that was when I think I did a little bit more reflecting.
When it came to recording these songs and bringing them to life, were there any challenges or pleasant surprises that came along the way that shifted the energy again?
Yeah, I think, again, having my having my really good friends work on this album with me brought a lot of positive energy and change into how I was feeling about the music. Steve, my engineer, who also produced it with me, and also our friend Phil Shaw, was also a co-producer, being able to really share what was going on during these songs and feeling really comfortable talking about them, and also them feeling comfortable really giving me feedback, even if it was tough – I wouldn’t have been able to make this music with people I didn’t know. It was really important to have friends that knew me through all the shit that I was going through, and also being able to help me translate it in a positive way.
Can you give me an example of a song where you felt like it turned into something positive?
Yeah, ‘Heal Me’, we recorded that in the middle of the pandemic, at the same time as ‘I Hate Living With Me’. Those are the last two that we did. ‘Heal Me’ is also literally like, “Give me a goddamn lobotomy,” like I felt rough during that time. And I came here and I was just able to have fun with it. Steve was like, “We need bongos in the beginning of the song.” And coming in and being able to play drums on the record, that was another really fun thing for me. On demos I had MIDI drums, so I got to bring the songs to life by playing drums live. Something like that, taking this heavy tune and putting the literal work of playing the instrument, makes it feel that much better.
Another example I could think of is ‘I Was the Devil’. That was on an EP of mine, and it was just an acoustic version, and we recorded it live with synth sounds in the studio, which is a classroom setup at the University of Rochester. And I got so emotional during that recording session, like literally started crying, but also the music came out so beautiful. And I feel like that energy, just in general, shifted, just from being able to share that moment with Steve and Will [Bellows], the assistant engineer. Just so many moments of taking these demos and making them feel so much more alive.
Speaking of positive elements, I know we’ve been talking about this more from a musical angle, but one similarity I noticed between the writing on Float and this album is that it kind of catches these glimpses of beauty and really holds onto them. I was thinking of the song ‘Shade of Blue’, where you sing, ‘“My head was underwater/ I muted out the tune/ The fog was suffocating/ But it was beautiful.” For you, how does a moment like this fit into the big picture of the album?
I think moments like that – the one that sticks out for me the most in that sense of finding a beautiful picture is ‘Melancholy’, where I’m literally saying, “Make me something I can feel again.” Like, this internal fight with myself where I’m telling myself, “Why don’t you give up?” and then the other part is telling me, “You shut up!” You know, like, I can get better, and I can – what’s the word I’m looking for – I guess, like, prevail. I’ve gone through periods of my life, multiple times, where I’ve had really big ups and downs, and I think especially ‘Melancholy’, I needed that song to almost shed some light on the rest of the darkness. I think with ‘Shade of Blue’, too, there’s those little moments that feel important to shed light on the dark stuff.
With darkness being the prevailing mood on the album, it’s easy sometimes to just focus entirely on that. What do you think helps you pay attention to those moments of beauty?
I don’t know, I think just… [pauses]. I don’t know, just holding on to the fact that I’m really lucky to be here. I’m lucky to be alive, I’m lucky to have the support that I have with my family and with my friends. I literally have a tattoo on my arm, it says, “Progress is not linear.” And it’s just this constant reminder that even though there are ups and downs, that doesn’t mean that you’re not growing and changing and getting better and becoming a better version of yourself. I think having the support and the desire to keep going and the love that I have for music, all of those things are what makes it beautiful. And I really have to hold on to that and remind myself that sometimes, when I’m really low. Like, Giana, don’t look at the glass half-empty. There’s good things. There’s good things around too. And just having the opportunity to create is a beautiful thing in itself, and I feel really lucky to be able to do that.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Last year, Jason Isbelltweeted that if Joe Biden won the US presidential election, he would make a charity covers album dedicated to the state of Georgia. Today, Isbell and his band the 400 Unit have detailed the LP, titled Georgia Blue, which is out October 15 and features covers of songs by Cat Power, Otis Redding, Indigo Girls, the Allman Brothers Band, Gladys Knight & The Pips, and more. Guests on the record include Julien Baker, Brandi Carlile, Amanda Shires, Béla Fleck, Chris Thile, Brittney Spencer, Adia Victoria, and more. Check out Isbell’s take on R.E.M.’s ‘Driver 8’ below.
All proceeds from Georgia Blue will benefit three nonprofits: Black Voters Matter, Fair Fight, and Georgia STAND-UP. “Georgia Blue is a labor of love,” Isbell said in a statement. “On election day 2020, when I saw that there was a good chance the state of Georgia might go blue, I came up with an idea: to record an album of Georgia-related songs as a thank you to the state and donate the money to a Georgia-based non-profit organization. I will admit my motivations were a bit selfish. For years, I’ve been looking for an excuse to record these songs with my band and some friends. The songs on this album are some of my favorite Georgia-related songs… I hope you enjoy listening to these recordings as much as we enjoyed making them. Keep listening to good music and fighting the good fight.”
Georgie Blue Tracklist:
1. Nightswimming [feat. Béla Fleck and Chris Thile]
2. Honeysuckle Blue [feat. Sadler Vaden]
3. It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World [feat. Brittney Spencer]
4. Cross Bones Style [feat. Amanda Shires]
5. The Truth [feat. Adia Victoria]
6. I’ve Been Loving You Too Long
7. Sometimes Salvation [feat. Steve Gorman]
8. Kid Fears [feat. Julien Baker and Brandi Carlile]
9. Reverse
10. Midnight Train to Georgia [feat. Brittney Spencer and John Paul White]
11. In Memory of Elizabeth Reed [feat. Peter Levin]
12. I’m Through
13. Driver 8 [feat. John Paul White]
Makthaverskan have announced their next LP: För Allting, the Swedish band’s fourth album and first since 2017’s III, is due for release on November 12 via Run for Cover. Recorded with HOLY’s Hannes Ferm, the album includes the new single ‘This Time’, which is out today. Take a listen below and scroll down for the album artwork and tracklist.
För Allting Cover Artwork:
För Allting Tracklist:
1. –
2. This Time
3. Tomorrow
4. Lova
5. All I’ve Ever Wanted to Say
6. Ten Days
7. –
8. Closer
9. Caress
10. These Walls
11. För Allting
12. Maktologen
Hatchie, the moniker of Australian singer-songwriter Harriette Pilbeam, has signed to Secretly Canadian. Along with today’s announcement, she’s shared a video for the new single ‘This Enchanted’, her first new music since her 2019 debut album Keepsake. Check it out below.
“‘This Enchanted’ encapsulates everything I wanted to do moving forward from my first album,” Hatchie said in a press release. “I started writing it with [producer Jorge Elbrecht] and [guitarist Joe Agius] in February 2020 and completed it from afar in lockdown later in the year. We had been talking about making something dancey but shoegaze.”
She added: “It’s one of the more lighthearted, lyrically vague songs of my new recordings about falling in love; it’s not a perfect relationship, but you’re enthralled by one another and it’s an easy love. It’s one of the most fun songs I’ve written, so it was a no-brainer to pick it as my first solo release in almost two years. It feels so right to be working with a label as exciting as Secretly as I step into new territory with Hatchie. I’ve been counting down the days until its release for a long time.”
The Nowhere Inn, the new mockumentary starring St. Vincent and Carrie Brownstein, is being released on Friday (September 17). Ahead of its arrival, Annie Clark, who also did the soundtrack for the film, has shared a new song called ‘The Nowhere Inn’, alongside a video directed by Nowhere Inn director Bill Benz. Check it out below.
St. Vincent issued her latest album, Daddy’s Home, earlier this year. The soundtrack for The Nowhere Inn comes out September 19.
Marissa Nadler has released a new song called ‘If I Could Breathe Underwater’. The track is lifted from her upcoming LP Path of the Clouds, which was announced last month with the single ‘Bessie, Did You Make It?’. Check out the music video for ‘If I Could Breathe Underwater’, directed by Jenni Hensler, below.
“When I wrote ‘If I Could Breathe Underwater,’ I was contemplating the possibilities of possessing various superhuman powers: teleportation, shapeshifting, energy projection, aquatic breathing, extrasensory perception, and time travel to name a few,” Nadler explained in a statement. “As a lyrical device, I married those powers with events in my life, wondering if and how they could change the past or predict the future. I loved working on the melody for this song and bringing the choruses to their climaxes. Mary’s layered, hallucinatory shimmers really echo the netherworld of the story.”
Hensler added: “This song took on many meanings to me and I love that about it. How beauty and tragedy collide. Dreaming of having supernatural powers to change reality and have the ability to live and breathe underwater. It could also speak to the duality of existence. That we all have inner personas or shadow selves, and how we envision those different masks we wear. I chose to make something that touched on the idea of duality and the inner persona. To connect to the two worlds.”
My Morning Jacket have shared a new single, ‘Love Love Love’, alongside an accompanying video. The track is the second offering from the band’s upcoming self-titled album, following last month’s ‘Regularly Scheduled Programming’. Check out the visual, co-directed by frontman Jim James and George Mays, below.
“‘Love Love Love’ is trying to steer the ship away from everything I’m talking about in ‘Regularly Scheduled Programming’ and speak toward positivity and pure love, finding truth within yourself and in the world around you,” James said in a statement.
My Morning Jacket, the follow-up to last year’s The Waterfall II, lands October 22 via ATO.
Coco have shared a new single from their forthcoming self-titled debut album. It’s called ‘Come Along’, and it comes with an accompanying video. Check it out below.
“The skeleton of ‘Come Along’ was recorded live, all together, with Oliver on guitar, Maia on drums, and Danny on bass,” Coco stated in a press release. “The underlying chord loop plays throughout as other instruments are weaved in one by one, picking up momentum and rolling forward as everything joins in harmony.”
Of the video, they added: “The video mimics the song in this way, portraying our individual days-in-the-life with each of us filming one another on handheld camcorders. The day culminates in our first performance together as Coco, at a house show in Oliver’s garage with our friends as backing band. When it all came together we were pleased with the juxtaposition of the comically low fidelity and fast-paced editing, like a homemade action movie.”
Coco’s self-titled debut is set to arrive on October 29 via First City Artists. The band – composed of Maia Friedman (of Dirty Projectors, Uni Ika Ai), Dan Molad (of Lucius, Chimney), and Oliver Hill (of Pavo Pavo, Dustrider) – announced the album with the single ‘Knots’.
