Poet Karen Schoemer records and performs with several bands, including Sky Furrows, Jaded Azurites, Ivan the Tolerable, Day for Nights, and Karen & Peter. A former music journalist, she came to poetry and performance in midlife, with decades of music immersion in tow. Her first collaboration was with Oli Heffernan and Mike Watt in the band Detective Instinct; she contributed words and vocals to the 7” vinyl EPs Schoemer Songs and Falling in Lilacs in 2013. Sky Furrows has released two albums: Sky Furrows (Tape Drift/Skell/Philthy Rex) in 2020 and Reflect and Oppose(Cardinal Fuzz/Feeding Tube) in 2023, and has performed with Oneida, Garcia Peoples, Savak, and Sweeping Promises. Jaded Azurites, a bass/voice duo with Mike Watt, has released seven digital EPs since 2018. Day for Nights (Sparrows & Wires) was a collaboration with Chicago guitarist Zak Boerger, who passed away from cancer in June 2025.

Schoemer published a nonfiction book, Great Pretenders: My Strange Love Affair with ‘50s Pop Music (Free Press) in 2006. She hosted The Schoemer Show on WGXC 90.7 FM in the Hudson Valley from early 2010’s. In 2019 she earned a master’s degree in creative writing from The Writer’s Foundry at St. Joseph’s University in Brooklyn. 

In 2015-2016, Schoemer attended summer writing workshops with poet Bernadette Mayer, a former director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project known for her language experiments. In 1971, at the age of 26, Mayer took a 36-exposure roll of film every day for a month and kept fastidious notes on everything that happened. That material became Memory, an art exhibit with a 6-hour stream-of-conscious recorded narration, and eventually a book. August is partly an homage to Mayer, with 31 poems constructed collage-style into “a month of August.” Schoemer wrote the raw material in August of 2022, then spent weekends at an artist’s residency at Herman Melville’s Arrowhead in Pittsfield, MA (the house where he wrote Moby-Dick in 1851), cutting up the material and rearranging it into poems that float on top of the original hand-written notes. 

She recorded the vocals at home in the winter of 2024-25. Sky Furrows bassist Eric Hardiman, who contributed several tracks to the album, co-produced, mixed, and mastered. 

Sleepyhead was formed in a basement room at NYU’s Brittany dorm in the fall of 1989 by drummer/vocalist Rachael McNally, bassist Mike Galinsky and guitarist/vocalist Chris O’Rourke. They released their first 7″ single, the Kramer-produced “Play,” in 1991 on Picture Book Artifact Records. Four full-length albums followed, on three different independent record labels. Punk Rock City USA was released by Slumberland Records in 1993, followed by Starduster (Homestead 1994), Communist Love Songs (Homestead 1996), and The Brighter Shore (Sealed Fate 1999). They toured the United States and Europe throughout the nineties, sharing the stage with such legendary bands as Polvo, Half Japanese, Yo La Tengo, The Grifters, The Dambuilders, Nation of Ulysses, Helium, Royal Trux, Antietam, Luna, Versus, The Magnetic Fields, and Dungbeetle.

After a move to Boston and a few lineup changes, the band released Wild Sometimes on the esteemed Carrot Top Records label, which sadly closed up shop in 2016. Now, with a lineup including multi-instrumentalist Derek van Beever and bassist Ani Somasundaram, the band has found a new home with Dromedary, releasing the single “Hoping That You’re Lonely” b/w “Busted Lullaby” in advanced of a full-length coming in 2025.

JERSEY CRUNCH-POP

Our flagship band, STUYVESANT is the reincarnation of two New Jersey rock bands that were born in the early 90s. Footstone and Friends, Romans, Countrymen shared many a stage and a lust for the “have a good time, all the time” ethos.

Comprised of singer/guitarists Sean Adams and Ralph Malanga, guitarist Eric Greenberg, bassist Jeffrey Crowe and drummer Scotty Imp, the band are lovely, mild-mannered gents who bash away at their instruments like deranged dads. Over 13 years, the band has produced a bunch of records and 9 kids, along the way called “A zillion times over more smart and more sincere than the latest batch of ersatz flakes hogging the limelight” by The Big Takeover, with Spin magazine adding “even with the suburban mollification of the Vans Warped Tour, down-to-earth, old-school pop-punk is still spry and kicking.”

Discography

 Thalia Zedek – guitar + vocals
Jerry di Rienzo – guitar, backup vocals on “1,000 mph”
J.A. – bass
Adam Gaynor – drums
Phil Milstein – tapes on “Cell”

“I liked the word Via because it meant ‘in transition between one place and another,’ which is how I felt at that point in my life. I also liked the way the word looked on paper.” -Thalia Zedek, 2025

During the summer of 2024, Chris Brokaw and I were chatting at the bar at the Avalon Lounge in Catskill, New York, about various bands in the Boston underground rock scene in the late 80s and early 90s, and he mentioned the band Via. “Maybe Thalia’s best band,” he said, “Jerry’s, too.”

That’s a pretty big statement – he was, of course, referring to Thalia Zedek (Come, Live Skull, Uzi) and Jerry di Rienzo (Cell, Nuclear Theater). Of course I’d never heard of Via, but soon after, I had a folder of rough mixes emailed to me. And soon after that, I was sitting with Thalia and Jerry – again in Catskill – discussing releasing this music together.

Listening to it was like opening a time capsule – a group of 8-track recordings from 1987, before Come, before Cell, when these amazing musicians were just discovering themselves. The music was loud, aggressive, and actually ferocious in spots, these two brilliant guitar players coming into their own, with a rhythm section of James Apt and Adam Gaynor of the band Nuclear Theater and Phil Milstein of Uzi providing tape loops. I could instantly hear what Chris described to me months before.

Via splintered after playing just two shows – one in Boston, one in New York after the band members moved there to be closer to Thalia, whose work with Live Skull was becoming a more full-time endeavor. The only documents left by Via are these six songs, recorded in Jerry’s basement studio in Somerville, MA, along with one gig flyer and some lo-fi live cassette recordings.

Chris Brokaw, who wrote the liner notes to the album, states, “The music bears some cosmetic resemblances to Sonic Youth, but the songs are way more raw, primal, seething, coiled – inexorable. I still can’t get over it.”

We’re proud to introduce you to the music of Via.

-Al, Dromedary Records

The Whimbrels are a power art-rock band with lineages to some of the most influential and raw music New York City has produced – loud art with a back beat. The sound is dense, rhythmic, hard and sweet, with hooks and riffs that pop out at unexpected moments. Their three-guitar lineup features Arad Evans (Glenn Branca Ensemble), Norman Westberg (Swans) and Luke Schwartz (Glenn Branca, Wharton Tiers), along with bassist/vocalist Matt Hunter (Savak, Dusty Fates) and drummer Steve DiBenedetto.

A Whimbrels show involves racks of guitars tuned in different and unconventional ways, with the players constantly switching between them. There are counterpoint choirs, dueling e-bows phasing against each other; chunking, poly and cross-rhythmic interludes, soaring arias of distortion from Westberg and Evans’ melodic and inventive guitars.

The New York Times once said Arad Evans was “on an index of creative or experimental electric guitar-based music in America – young lords of the wild in the post-rock tradition.” That description fits The Whimbrels perfectly. You may need earplugs.