June explores the roots—and the promise—of blues, gospel, and folk music on her new album, The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers.

This excerpt is from BOMB’s Spring 2021 issue.

Like John Lennon and Jim Hendrix, Joanna Stingray has an FBI file. In 1984, the 24-year-old Angeleno accompanied her sister on a state-sanctioned tour to Leningrad and secretly met Boris Grebenshchikov, a star in the Soviet music underground.

A selection of recent and reissued music by Madrigal, Ulver, Royal Trux, and Bill Orcutt

“There might be more passion in amateurism than with much of the known, famous stuff. Those are the kinds of energies in music I’ve always found attractive, regardless of quality, expertise, or skill.”

Ghost stories, paganism, the blues, and silent cinema are just some of the fixations of two authors known for novels steeped in history.

Reissued several times with different track listings and sequencing since its initial release, Third has finally been given the deluxe box-set treatment it has long deserved in the three-disc Complete Third, which gathers all known demos, rough and final mixes, and outtakes into one lovingly produced package.

“I want it like this, just how it sounds.”

“The quest was always on. Inside, never out.”

Träd, Gräs och Stenar and the democratizing power of the riff.

“I’m the kind of guy that’s trying to get people to work together and make the Earth green.”

“I still seek for eternity, which maybe is like a rainbow-colored butterfly flying away, suddenly in front of your face.”

Kembra Pfahler is a downtown legend: a punk rocker, screen goddess, curator, and performance artist who moved from Los Angeles to the East Village in the early 1980s. Over the course of her time in New York, she’s modeled for Calvin Klein, sang lead in the death punk metal band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, and founded a performance art movement known as “Availabilism.”

“When it came to music, I always saw myself playing a punching bag. That’s just what I do on the guitar.”

Meg Remy of US Girls talks to the former Sic Alp about anger, publicity, lyrics, and Roald Dahl.

“When I’m home, I’m completely alone. I get the creative bug, and if I’m sitting here long enough not working on music, it drives me insane.”

Thanks to his son, Harrod Blank, the filmmaker’s forty-year-old documentary on musician Leon Russell is finally released.

“Lil Wayne explains a blade of grass.”

Faux reunion shows, B-sides, new-age garage music, and packing albums to the brim.

Memory, texture, and tradition.

Guillaume de Machaut meets Bone Thugs-N-Harmony through black metal.