JEFF The Brotherhood is an art project started by brothers Jake and Jamin Orrall in 2002 in a basement in Nashville, TN. Their musical works are influenced by many types of music including krautrock, jazz, black metal, and the avant garde. Over the last decade their art has taken them all over the world including Hawaii, New Zealand and Russia. They have given well over a thousand live performances and created countless art objects including zines, puppets, videos, and twelve full length albums.  The Brotherhood was started with one goal in mind, to do or create whatever they feel with no rules or boundaries. Their latest offering Magick Songs marks a departure from the band's established sound. Elements of 80's Japanese experimental music meld with Indonesian Gamelan forms, clever improvisation and abundant hand percussion and synthesizer. The majority of the compositions were written in collaboration with Kunal Prakash (Viva L'American Death Ray Music/Quintron's Weather Warlock Band) and Jack Lawrence (The Greenhornes/Raconteurs/The Dead Weather), and also feature a host of guest collaborations including vocals by Jenna Moynihan (Daddy Issues/Fever Blush) and saxophone and clarinet by Reece Lazarus (Bully). The sprawling double album was written and recorded over six months at Jake Orrall's house in Nashville. The improvised bare bones studio contributed to the relaxed, exploratory nature of the compositions and was a new and enlightening experience for the group. JEFF The Brotherhood's Magick Songs will be released on Dine Alone Records on August 24th. It is available for preorder here.

Coupler is less a band than a creative organization. Founded in 2011 by Lambchop veteran Ryan Norris, its core is Norris along with Rodrigo Avendaño and Rollum Haas though its membership has at points swelled to as many as eight. At its root the project is an exercise in mutual cooperation of creative individuals and is an exploration of the intersections of man and machine, live and recorded, composed and improvised, stasis and flux.   Like the abused Lambchop descriptor "Nashville's most fucked-up country band," the phrase "deliberate ambient music" seems to have stuck for Coupler. Ambient music, originally conceived, implies a certain level of non-intention, non-deliberateness and similarly a potential level of non-engagement on the part of the listener. In this context, ambient is meant to be as ignorable as it is interesting. Coupler's music, on the other hand, has always used the language of ambient without being ambient per se. It should be difficult to ignore. If ambient music is meant to create a space in which to think, deliberate ambient music should transcend the space it creates to allow a threshold to be crossed.   Their upcoming release Gifts from the Ebb Tide, out November 17th on yk Records, sits at the center of several records that were gestating concurrently and shares DNA with each of them: HeCTAs The Diet, Lambchops FLOTUS and Couplers Blue Room Sessions.   "I prefer to think of Coupler less as a band and more as a multimedia project. Kraftwerk were fond of using the term "organization". I like that." - Ryan Norris