About The Magazine

Grazing YouTube, you were once unlikely to find the channel (and now DIY label) GemsOnVHS unless you were specifically searching out its ‘field recordings’ of street-worthy Americana, folk punk, or roots music. And founder Anthony Simpkins liked it that way.

But now that those ‘Gems’ have been viewed nearly fifty-million times, Simkins finds himself in the wild west of a new kind of music industry, fighting for the integrity of song.

Festival season in New Orleans means nosefuls of night-blooming jasmine, vomit on Bourbon Street, and the mud indistinguishable from horseshit at the fairgrounds racecourse. When the crowds leave Fest and Mid City, they hit the grids: color-coded cubes of aftershows,

Tonight, thousand-person capacity Republic NOLA has been sold out by one groove ambassador from the city of Tours in Western France. The line is already long. Loyalists have eschewed Frenchmen Street for the relative purgatory of the warehouse district and a genre noone can seem to define. Years ago Vincent Fenton, the man, conceived French Kiwi Juice (FKJ), the experience.

New Orleans is a city brimming with artists. It has been a magnet for creative types for centuries, and today is no different. I had the opportunity to talk to some of the contributing minds of our thriving community, and find out where their passions came from, how they have struggled, and what unites their work in the end. Here are their snapshots

In a crowded musical soundscape where the alternative and the mainstream have blurred, South Carolina’s Brother Oliver have carved out their own path. Led by brothers Andrew and Stephen Oliver, the self-labelled “psychedelic folk-rock” band is a living testament to the creativity that can come out of a restrictive circumstance. An anomaly in our media-drenched world, the brothers grew up isolated from the currents of pop culture to now rigorously touring and channeling the raw expanse of the indie rock sound with a DIY edge.