Last summer, we were fortunate enough to catch a couple of shows by *Cathedral Ceilings* as they put together a few weekenders to celebrate what seemed like the end of the pandemic that’s never going to end, and to support the two singles they’d released on Dromedary.
Continue reading Coming May 27: Cathedral Ceilings – “Summer of Misguided Dynamite”All posts by Al
Karyn Kuhl

Hoboken’s Karyn Kuhl has always evoked the hum of NYC right across the river, with all of its tension and light. Her new Dromedary Records single No Traces (produced by Charlie Nieland) is no exception, evoking post-punk with a touch of the ethereal. Karyn draws a scene of loss and transcendence, with her lush voice and icy synths glinting off the driving guitars and drums, all tough and glossy. The Tower (produced by Larry Heinemann) rounds out the two-sided single release, with moonlit swampy grace.
Karyn Kuhl first received national acclaim for her early bands Gut Bank and Sexpod, growing out of the vibrant Hoboken music scene and the legendary club Maxwell’s. Over the past 20 years, she has released nine LPs, EPs and singles under her own name and with her band. With her solo material, Karyn lets the unexpected and the familiar take shape into sculptures of melody and noise, sensual, ethereal and heavy. With her alluring mix of different rock styles, she continues to push the boundaries with No Traces‘ retro and modern sound, finding the enigmatic in the everyday.
These days, she performs both as a solo act and leading Karyn Kuhl & The Gang. In addition to her long-time rhythm section of drummer Jonpaul Pantozzi and bassist Lou Ciarlo, the band now includes guitarist/producer Charlie Nieland (Debbie Harry, Rufus Wainright). Karyn’s music has been used in several films & series and is available on all streaming platforms.
No Traces b/w The Tower will be available as a 7” single and digital download at dromedaryrecords.bandcamp.com
Discography
Moviola
Earthbound. Interstellar overdriving or rooted in terra firma? Both, both. On their 11th album, 30 years down the line, Columbus, Ohio collective Moviola step on with a world-weary stride, holding two thoughts at the same time, containing multitudes, making the most personal, direct, and urgent music of their lives.
In between the cracks of the musical Rust Belt, Columbus, Ohio’s Moviola has quietly—FOR 30 YEARS—produced an expansive catalog, with (now) 11 records and countless 7” inch singles, a radio show, and a concert film to their name, spanning everything from 4-track fuzz-pop to hi-fi country soul. With five equal singers and songwriters—the whole is greater than the parts, democratic ideals, Gestalt theory in action.Recording themselves, in studios that they built themselves. Writing and performing fully fleshed concert films. As much prankster art collective as…band. Some parallel universe Midwestern EGOT stuff, right there. A small cadre of supportive labels, writers and fans have followed along for the ride. This August, they return with record #11, Earthbound, their first on Kingston, New York-based Dromedary Records.
Started by Jake Housh in 1993 in a duplex near Ohio State, the band, on early 45s and 1994’s Frantic sounded less like their Columbus punk contemporaries, and more like “Neil Young’s noisy nephews” (LA Weekly). Throughout their early career, the group played live shows with kindred bands like Fruitbats, Flaming Lips, Calexico, Califone, Guided By Voices, and many others, yet it was the pursuit of collective learning-by-doing, happy accidents, experimentation and recording in various basement, warehouse, and attic studios that became their primary raison d’être. In quick succession, The Year You Were Born (1997), Glen Echo Autoharp (1998), and The Durable Dream (1999) saw the group cover wide sonic turf, traversing buzzing lo-fi rock, Space Echo® folk, pure pop arrangements, and nooks in between. Split singles were fast and frequent as well, sharing sides with like-minded friends like the Handsome Family, Cobra Verde, Tobin Sprout, Hiss Golden Messenger and Eric’s Trip. Rumors of the Faithful (2001), East of Eager (2004) and Dead Knowledge (2007) came next, and found the band growing in sound and scope. A singles compilation Broken Horses (2008), Scrape and Cuss (2019), Broken Rainbows (2022) bring us up to the release of Earthbound.
As has been the unique blueprint for how they approach music-making, Earthbound contains multitudes: shared songwriting from each member of the group, at times lush, at others coarse, yet the result has a singular “Moviola-ness” about it all, occupying its own headspace. Recorded in Columbus, Brooklyn, and Brattleboro, it’s the most realized, succinct and least ambiguous effort of their career. Five separate voices, coming off as one, a band of brothers, no time for mincing words. Can a group be hitting its stride 30 years in? It seems so. Listen in.
Overheard
Overheard’s offbeat brand of indie rock is both tender and frenetic. Weaving together elements of folk with rock and grunge, their dynamic and melodic songs shift between delicate moments and knotty catharsis. Originating in the Hudson Valley, Overheard now has members in both Kingston and Brooklyn.
After becoming friends at a dive bar in Kingston, NY, guitarists Erin Barth-Dwyer and Will LaPorte made a drunken vow to play music together. Unlike most promises of artistic link-ups made by 20-somethings, they committed. After adding Kenny Thomas on bass guitar, the group chose the name Overheard for reasons lost to time.
Having formed just before the COVID-19 pandemic, the band spent most of their first year together engaging in socially-distanced backyard practices. During this time, they honed Barth-Dwyer’s tender, folk-leaning songwriting and LaPorte’s tendency toward distortion and hard rock into original songs. Post-lockdown, the band went on to perform at many Hudson Valley staples, including Kingston’s Tubby’s, Catskill’s Avalon Lounge, and Woodstock’s Colony. After releasing their debut single ‘Doesn’t Matter’ in May of 2022, the trio was approached at a house show by Kenny Hauptman (Top Nachos, Larry Locust). Having heard the ghost of his future parts in their performance, Hauptman was an immediate fit, rounding out the group on drums.
Overheard has become known locally for their ‘soft-then-hard’ style. Barth-Dwyer brings intricately finger-picked guitar and a voice that ebbs between soft lullaby and emotional belt, delivering lyrics of being, memory, and home. LaPorte, providing backing and occasionally lead vocals, writes of childhood and what it leaves us, underscored by tastefully chaotic, overdriven guitar melodies. Thomas carries the group through its moments of peace and aggression with their lush and harmonious bass lines, while Hauptman is either a smooth resident of the pocket or a blonde blur behind the kit – all while providing backing vocals.
After a year of dialing in their sound, the band connected with Hauptman’s long-time friend, producer and local musician Dylan Nowik (Camp Saint Helene, Steady Sun). In January of 2024, they spent a week at Dylan’s Pine Knoll Studio in Palenville, NY. Over the course of seven long days, many fresh pots (of coffee), and several sandwiches, the band and Nowik crafted Overheard’s debut LP, the forthcoming indie rock diary, Intertwined.
KAREN SCHOEMER

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.
New cover: “Plainsong”
The latest *Smallpox* cover to be added to The Covers Album is “Plainsong,” originally recorded by The Cure on their Disintigration LP.
Continue reading New cover: “Plainsong”
