AURA

Hailing from Providence, RI, musician and multi-hyphenate artist Aura Moreno, formerly known as Iris Creamer, tells honest and vulnerable stories; shared with intention to dance, heal, and reflect with. Truly genre-less, Aura’s music ranges from house to hip-hop, experimental to reggaeton, truth to fantasy, and english to spanish. Her multidisciplinary art forms blend seamlessly between singer-writer, song production, digital art, film + editing, mixed media, collage, and fashion design. Creation upon creation, she builds her thoroughly unique and colorful DIY empire.

The  Serfs

The Serfs, hailing from Cincinnati Ohio, are a deliberately nebulous and incidentally industrialist gang of dance-floor hymners - perturbed and tranced-out troubadours whose sound and musical ideology seems to be a causal manifestation of their immediate environments. Like their Ohio predecessors, The Serfs seem askew from the art that surrounds them, and proud of it. Cincinnati, OH is a very real hotbed of musical creativity at the moment, and the three members of The Serfs - Dylan McCartney (vocals, percussion, guitar, bass, electronics), Dakota Carlyle (Electronics, bass, guitar, vocals) & Andie Luman (vocals, synths) - and their respective side projects (The Drin, Crime of Passing, Motorbike) are undeniably near the center of Cincinnati’s neu-underground scene. After releasing albums on Berlin minimal-synth label Detriti & Seattle-based DREAM Records in 2018 & 2022 respectively, the band makes the move to Trouble In Mind for their third and best album yet. “Half Eaten By Dogs” puts a decidedly Midwestern spin on the modernist twitch of future-forward bands like Total Control or Cold Beat as well as the post-industrialist dance floor grime of Skinny Puppy, Dark Day, This Heat or Factrix.

Linda Smith and Nancy Andrew

“A Passing Cloud” is the fruit of a rekindled long-distance musical conversation. In 1983, Nancy Andrews and Linda Smith shared a big house in Baltimore with a continuously revolving cast of artists and musicians. In the mid-80’s Linda purchased her first 4-track cassette recorder and embarked on a pioneering decade of solo, DIY home recording with a series of cassettes and 7” records of smart and moody singer-songwriter bedroom pop music. This trailblazing period was recently documented on the Captured Tracks retrospective compilation “Till Another Time: 1988-1996.” Her band, The Woods, made a record which was shelved for decades but will finally see release in 2023. During this same period Nancy pursued art, animation and filmmaking with occasional forays into music including another short-lived collaboration with Linda called The Gertrudes as well as a 7” under the alias Pinky on Harriet records in 1992. The friends stayed in touch but hadn’t worked on a project together in nearly thirty years.

In 2020, Linda rediscovered in the back of a drawer some old tapes of Nancy’s songs she had recorded for her in the 90’s. In the process of digitizing the old recordings she was inspired to reach out and float the idea of a new collaborative recording project with her old friend. They began the songwriting process by flipping through Nancy’s pulp fiction collection and pulling provocative phrases from the lurid titles and hard-boiled storylines. Then, they set out to create new stories from personal, feminist perspectives. All the songs were composed incrementally by passing tracks back and forth between Maine and Maryland during the late pandemic. A Passing Cloud’s lovely and beguiling pop music may be borne out of isolation but it draws us in with a carefully rendered intimacy made possible by decades of artistic collaboration.