“One foot out the door, another in the otherworld...” So begins Hannah Lew’s debut, self-titled solo record, soaked in imperious, wide-eyed pop songwriting and a girl-group/post punk aesthetic that belies the artist’s history in the U.S. underground. A towering, hook-laden album, it’s infused with an optimism and surrealism that conversely deals with the times we find ourselves in. Recorded at home in Richmond, CA and in The Best House studio with Maryam Qudus in Oakland CA, with the assistance of a crack team of West Coast musicians, this album sees Hannah Lew stepping out from behind the legacy of her two groups Grass Widow and Cold Beat. While musically bearing similarities with her previous work, “Hannah Lew” is a bold leap into direct pop territory, making ample use of a vocal style that teases out the inherent melancholy in her melodies. Mastered by Sarah Register, each song is a perfectly honed nugget that frequently pulls the heart in two directions at once. Themes of change, breaking up, shattering old ways of being are shot through the record. For the front cover, a photograph of the artist’s face was printed, ripped up and re-assembled, resembling the creative process embarked upon by Lew for her first “solo” material. The album feels instinctual, almost dream-like in its assemblage of sweeping synths and pulsating, propulsive drum machine beat patterns with Lew’s vocal performances sensitive and caressing over the top. Increasingly relying on the subconscious and dreams to guide her creative process, Hannah Lew frequently abandons literal interpretations or linear narratives, the songs seeming to exist in a swooning, effortless flow-state while remaining emotionally hard hitting.   Nowhere Flower is the musical project of Portland-based artist Lila Jarzombek, whose fractured home recordings drift between psychedelic folk, tape collage, and lo-fi pop abstraction. A longtime visual artist turned musician, Jarzombek builds songs intuitively from improvisations and fragments captured on cassette and digital recorders, allowing atmosphere and texture to guide the process as much as melody or structure. Across releases like Ruts the Place and Heat Dome, warped keyboards, skeletal guitars, fiddle, drum machines, tape hiss and blurred vocal lines move in and out of focus with a humid, dreamlike looseness. Drawing from the changing landscapes of the Pacific Northwest, her music traces themes of memory, ecological unease and transformation without settling into fixed meaning. Compared to outsider psych and DIY visionaries like Michio Kadotani, The Tower Recordings, Jim Shepard and Un, Nowhere Flower balances raw immediacy with drifting abstraction, creating songs that feel at once intimate, transportive, and quietly luminous.   Strange Babes  Strange Babes are a DJ crew started in Portland, Oregon in 2010 by music scene veterans, Jen Olesen, Kathy Foster and Maggie Vail a.k.a. DJ Jen O, KM Fizzy and Magic Beans. Strange Babes are known for creating compelling, kinetic sets across genres built for discerning dancers from the modern underground. As part of the formative vanguard of deejays who drove the inventive early years at XRAY.fm, Strange Babes enjoyed a broad listenership on their popular weekly drive-time radio show from 2014-2021 while balancing their monthly residencies at well-loved clubs like Dynasty and Dig a Pony, private and public gigs, and diverse roles within the music industry. Since Magic Beans’ relocation to Tennessee in 2019, DJ Jen O and KM Fizzy have continued to deejay a wide range of private events as a duo with public parties slated for the summer and fall of this year.