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Brian Howe

@brian_gray_howe

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Freelance arts and culture writer/editor. Pitchfork and INDY Week lifer. Music with Streak of Tigers. [email protected].

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NEW ON CHISELMAG.COM

@brian_gray_howe on coming of age in comics’ most hormonal era

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From volume 001 of Chisel, a story in which @brian_gray_howe is driven mad by a misplaced colon in Wolf Hall.

Read it on chiselmag.com

Featuring original art by @catrin_welzstein

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Nothing Abides"....even after a 2-3 yr hiatus
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Excited to join an amazing cast of story and sound weavers for this 60th Anniversary Benefit Concert for the Eno at Carolina Theater, organized by @enoriver
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Brian Howe and I will be adapting our piece, Nothing Abides, a dialogue through sound and poetry that we originally debuted in August of 2023. The piece emanated from six months of being writers in residence at @culturemillnc participating in the evolution of a community care practice and dance theater performance called Eclipse, which turns bricks signifying those laid by the Black builders of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill into amplifiers for their voices and legacies, reframing the university's own creation myth
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Get ya tickies!

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Down by the River | Ticket Giveaway! 🐍

We chatted with Meredith along the trail by the Eno River and gave her some free tickets to our Sept 12th concert at the Carolina Theater.

Buy tickets while they last at the link in our bio. We hope to see you there! 🎶🎟️💧

Music by concert headliner Pura Fé: "Before the Sky Split in Two" (Extended Instrumental), Pura Fé & Geneviève Gros-Louis

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Do You Dream of Me Too?, the new album by Anne-Claire Cleaver (@anneclairevoice), isn’t about her. It’s not about you either, even when it uses the second person.

“I think not being confessional is refreshing,” the Durham musician said recently. “My first record was kind of confessional, but now I want something bigger, grander, where maybe I’m just a persona. So much of songwriting can be visual.”

In the home studio where she gives singing lessons, she ran her hand over the piano keyboard, where her vocal range spans six E’s. Atop the upright piano sat a votive candle, a box of tissues, two songwriting books, a Pride flag in a mug of pens, and a little bust of Beethoven.

Presiding over all is a mall portrait of her grandmother, costumed for a Hello, Dolly! production in eastern North Carolina.

“She participated in the local theater her entire life,” Cleaver said. “This was her legacy. It’s the perfect encapsulation of what we’re doing in this studio.”

From this homey space came the highly staged songs on Cleaver’s second album, eight years after her first. The you in “Good Trouble” is civil rights hero John Lewis, with a country-kissed string arrangement by album coproducer Jeff Crawford. “Night of the Hunter,” with neoclassical noir orchestration by Chris Stamey, is about Robert Mitchum in the Southern Gothic film classic.

Instead of the personally revealing lyrical content we might have expected after her introspective debut, these vivid tableaux strike the listener with their newfound confidence. This growth was earned through eight years of personal challenges and starting a small business—eight years during which the arts of learning, teaching, and singing became inseparably entwined.

Read more at the link in bio.

Story by @brian_gray_howe
Photos by @mattrameyphoto

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Join us this Thursday, June 4, at Shadowbox Studio, Durham for the launch of Fred L. Joiner’s debut poetry collection The Mirror in Our Music—an all-star line-up of poetry, jazz, and film.

THE MIRROR IN OUR MUSIC is the long-awaited debut poetry collection of Fred L. Joiner—a nearly 200-page, full-color do-si-do document chronicling Joiner’s decades of community building and collaboration with countless poets, musicians, artists, photographers, and ancestors.

readings by
Fred L. Joiner
Nathaniel Mackey
Tsitsi Jaji
Tyree Daye
Destiny Hemphill

music by
Nicole Mitchell
Butler Knowles
Joe Westerlund

films by
Ben Felton

“The writing dazzles, but The Mirror in Our Music contains so much more. Joiner encrusts his poetry with color photos, drawings, essays, epigraphs, and annotations. Done up in square trim like a vinyl record, the book has an A-side, which grew out of Joiner’s graduate-school thesis. You flip it for the B-side, which features his ekphrastic writing—poetry responding to other works of art—an interest he curates on his website Black Ekphrastic. The B-side crackles with vernacular photographs from an Ackland Art Museum exhibit and powerful self-portraits by photographer Ewané Samuel Nja Kwa.

...the book is about jazz and moves like jazz. It’s about the mysteries of art...Most of all, it’s a hymn to community and collaboration. Almost every page is to, for, or about another person, or intimately dialoguing with their art.” - Brian Howe

Read more about Fred and The Mirror in Our Music in Brian’s fantastic Indy article “Hearing Jazz and Seeing Art the Fred Joiner Way, With a Poetry Debut 50 Years in the Making.”

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Thank you @indyweek and @brian_gray_howe for spotlighting us and for beautifully capturing our goal for Film Durham: cultivating a sustainable and inclusive film community in the Bull City. We’re so honored to be mentioned alongside @skinandbonestheater and super proud of what our friends are building. Link🔗 to the full article is in our bio.

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Thanks to Brian Howe of @indyweek for the kind words about the upcoming Long Relief album. The full thing drops this coming Friday, May 22nd, so get your preorder in right now!!

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We’re honored to be featured in INDY Week!

This cover story highlights the momentum behind North Carolina Opera, and the role our community plays in making it all possible.

Read more at the link in our bio. 📰

#NCOpera #NorthCarolinaOpera #RaleighArts #NCArts

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Honored to share a byline with @brian_gray_howe & @sarah_eddy_ today on the INDY website, talking about some local songs that are still on our minds as 2025 comes to a close. I wrote about @jooselord and @tab_one, they wrote about @tre.charlz, Blue Cactus, Watchhouse, Joseph Decosimo and more. It’s a gift to be turned on to great new music in the first place; even more so when your guide is someone capable of articulating that music’s essence so well. That’s something I can count on from people like Brian and Sarah every time, and I’m just happy to try to keep up. Hit the link in my bio and check out the tunes, and the words, for yourself 🙇‍♂️📰

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A favorite amongst our “remixes,” the porchlight features a bourbon base, augmented by Meltti Amari, Byrrh, and habanero shrub bitters. Doors open at 5 so be sure to ditch the gloomy weather and enjoy a drink with us @littlegembar and enjoy the song that inspired it courtesy of @thekingsburymanx

Don’t forget, Saturday night we’ll be featuring @brian_gray_howe and his curated vinyl collection starting at 7pm. Hope to see you there!

#littlegem #littlegembar #cocktailbar #cocktail #porchlight #friday #fridaynights #vinyl #remix #vinylgram #vinyllovers #saturday #saturdaynight #listeningparty

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