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Tone Madison

Madison-focused arts and music conversations you won't hear anywhere else, from tonemadison.com.

The post-punk mischief of Educational Davis

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Across most of the music Educational Davis has made in his bands and solo projects, it’s easy to get the sense that the Madison-based artist is messing with you, deliberately blurring the line between absurdity and sincerity. In the oddball post-punk/new-wave bands The No And Maybe Game and Baristacide, he often paired deliberately nonsensical lyrics […]

Podcast: knowsthetime’s wistful, old-school beat tape

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The new beat tape from producer knowsthetime, Summer’s End, uses an old-school, sampling-based approach to hip-hop. But knowsthetime, real name Ian Carroll, has been all over the map. Dividing his time between Madison and Milwaukee, he’s contributed to scores of hip-hop tracks—some of them under his former production moniker *hitmayng—he co-founded the hip-hop and electronic […]

The many worlds of street photographer Vivian Maier

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Vivian Maier was a street photographer in the latter half of the 20th century, capturing intricacies of daily life at a time when camera culture and street photography was on the rise. Though Maier was extremely prolific as a photographer, she worked professionally as a nanny, often carrying several cameras around while she was working. […]

Jessica Hopper’s memoir of music and a vanished Chicago

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Jessica Hopper’s new book, Night Moves, details the personal experiences that shaped her work as a music critic and captures vignettes of a Chicago that has largely vanished under layers of gentrification. Hopper has written for publications including The Chicago Reader, Spin, City Pages, and Pitchfork, and served as editorial director of MTV News during […]

Tony Castañeda’s life in Latin jazz

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Tony Castañeda is a Madison-based percussionist, a radio host, an advocate for social justice who’s worked in youth counseling and housing issues, and just generally a guy with a big personality and a decades-long history here in Madison. His Tony Castañeda Latin Jazz Band, which plays frequently around town, got started more than 20 years […]

A night with robotic anthropologists

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Back at the end of May, we reported from a one-night art event called Awkward Nocturnes, at which artist Claire Wilson and an audience of tinfoil-hatted thrill-seekers enjoyed a “performance” from a clattery ensemble of crude robots. On this week’s podcast, we revisit that story with a reading from Chris Lay. Give the story a listen […]