An original member of Duval hip-hop collective L.O.V.E. Culture, Spiritxiii feels just as at-home in a DAW as he does onstage. In addition to L.O.V.E. Culture’s own albums, Spirit’s most recent production credits include Jacksonville R&B songstress Ebonique’s latest album, alterEBO, and he’s currently overseeing production of a collaboration between Rab G, Kale That Raps, and Sir Mayes, not to …
Black Kids and Visitation Keyboardist and Singer Ali Youngblood’s Gear Essentials
For decades, Jacksonville’s own Ali Youngblood has been making synth-pop magic happen in bands like Black Kids. “I come from the old time of little cutesy indie rock where people just used toy keyboards and Fisher Price items to make songs,” says the keyboardist and singer. (Has there ever been a more apt description of 2008 indie rock? We think …
The Gear that Jacksonville Band Folk Is People Employs to Achieve their Ever-Evolving American-Roots-Inspired Sound
A staple of the Jacksonville music scene for over a decade, Folk is People breathes new life into old country and bluegrass traditions. Singer and guitarist Stacey Bennett started writing songs for the band in 2011, releasing the first Folk is People EP the following year. “When we started,” Bennett says, “it was all acoustic instruments. I was playing mandolin, …
How Jacksonville Synth Wizard James Scott Rubia Spins Swamp-Pop Sounds as Animal Clinic
Gathering production influence from Brian Eno and songwriting inspiration from Leonard Cohen, solo synth act Animal Clinic aims for complexity in both sound and emotion. “I wanted to say something very personal,” says Animal Clinic’s sole musician James Scott Rubia. “I wanted to say it with detail, and I wanted listeners to be able to hopefully feel what I was …
Here’s How Jax Indie-Rockers Seagate Use Analog & Digital Gear to Achieve their Garage-y Sound
As Seagate frontman Sam Baglino shared his influences with me—Osees and Ty Segall, to name a few—I couldn’t help but notice that this local musician-of-all-trades is drawn to prolific artists. Both acts he named have, respectively, released more than a dozen records, and when considering Seagate’s own output, this influence just makes sense. Last year alone, the band released a …
Here’s What Jacksonville Musicians Dream of Using to Make Music in the New Year
Ask any musician, and they’ll tell you: they always have a wish list. There’s always a new sound with which to tamper and a new toy with which to play. Looking ahead into 2024, here’s what local musicians dream of adding to their gear arsenals. Angela Sitzler, synths for Glass Chapel Death by Audio SE-1 Space Ensemble Almost endless possibilities …
Here’s How Jax’s own Synthy Post-Punk Trio Glass Chapel recorded their single “Foreign Rain”
Calling all new wave nerds: you’re guaranteed to fall in love with Glass Chapel, a synth-heavy post-punk act hailing from Jacksonville. The trio, made up of Jake Phillips, Angela Sitzler and Nick Phitides, cites influence by punk acts of today, like Soft Kill, and yesterday, such as The Cure. Glass Chapel has released a slew of singles and remixes this …
The Gear That Gave Jax’s Ducats the Grungy Sound They Needed to Record Their Latest Single, “Painless”
“Our songs are pretty pop/melody driven,” says Trent Holton, leader of the Jacksonville-based lo-fi garage act Ducats. “But we like to make noise and sound ugly sometimes in practice. We just drone and wail. The essence of music-making, for me, is represented in those loose moments: creation, destruction, spontaneity, grit, grime, happy, sad, pure energy.” That playful, throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall approach shines …
The Unexpected Essentials that Helped Jax Experimental Act golfer two Create ‘bl00db4th6000’
With partner Casey Vandyke, Tyler Fleming is half of golfer two, an experimental noise outfit based here in Jacksonville. So far this year, the pair has released two EPs—dead mouse and, most recently, bl00db4th6000, which Fleming describes as a grouping of tracks that “encapsulates the sound we like to play live.” Each track you hear on the EP was recorded …
Dust Fuss’s Gear Essentials
Dust Fuss’s first full-length album, Motorsigh, is just what we need for a stoic start to a new year. Vocalist and guitarist Taylor Olin describes the feeling of the record as “liberating, like crushing a can with your boots, paired with the goofiness of amateur baseball and the bad-kid energy of a cigarette in the locker room.” That mix of …