ARTS Pick: Punch Brothers

Imagine this supergroup: Chris Thile, Chris Eldridge, Paul Kowert, Noam Pikelny, Gabe Witcher, Sara Watkins, Sarah Jarosz and Aoife O’Donovan. The biggest bluegrass high of the summer rolls through town with the proggy, hypnotic stringmasters Punch Brothers joining female triple threat I’m With Her—playing sets of their own and together—for acoustic bliss. Tuesday, August 8. […]

ARTS Pick: Three Sheets to the Wind

Christopher Cross didn’t know it at the time, but when his massive hit “Sailing” blew through the speakers of car stereos and beach radios in the summer of 1980, it was charting the course for a niche musical genre to emerge 25 years into the future. Three Sheets to the Wind rides the current wave […]

ARTS Pick: Tennis

What is there to do to pass the time when you’re living at sea on a tiny sailboat with only your partner for company? Starting an award-winning band is always a good option. Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley, the duo that comprises Tennis, began writing songs to document their adventures on the ocean. Now, their […]

First Fridays: August 4

Sperryville artist Adam Disbrow isn’t interested in mimicking realism; after all, “a camera can do that,” he writes in an email. Instead, he communicates with his audience through abstract, minimalistic images, using layers of objective symbols to create a wholly subjective piece of art. His latest exhibition, opening at the Music Resource Center on August 4, […]

Charlottesville Opera builds community, closes season with ‘Oklahoma!’

What do cowboys, farmers and love triangles have in common with the United States of today? To Michelle Krisel, artistic director of Charlottesville Opera, the answer is a lot. That’s much of the reason why Krisel and Charlottesville Opera (formerly Ash Lawn Opera), chose Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! to close the company’s 40th summer season. […]

ARTS Pick: Gillian Welch

It took Gillian Welch eight years to release The Harrow & The Harvest. That wasn’t for lack of inspiration, but a stubborn streak of perfectionism that caused Welch to spend the better part of a decade honing down the album to the sparse, dark folk at its core. Hear the resulting classic Americana for yourself […]

Movie review: Okja

Bong Joon-ho is back once again with Okja, a parable that goes to stylistic extremes to make an existential argument, broadcasting the film’s central metaphor from the very first scene while being far more emotionally and politically trenchant than anticipated. Snowpiercer could have been a straightforward action/sci-fi yarn, but in his hands, it becomes a […]

ARTS Pick: Company

In Company, 35-year-old Robert examines his commitment to bachelorhood through mishaps with married couples and temporary girlfriends. Stephen Sondheim originally targeted his music and lyrics to a 1970s audience, but (with George Furth) gave the libretto an update in the ’90s to keep with changing cultural themes. The production marks the return of former Heritage […]

ARTS Pick: Josh Davis

Josh Davis, the brain behind DJ Shadow, began making original electronic music in 1991, and grew into an influential collaborator in the hip-hop scene (he works with Nas, Danny Brown and Oscar-winning composer Steven Price on his latest EP, The Mountain Has Fallen). But two decades later his legacy is still defined by 1996’s Endtroducing…, […]

ARTS Pick: Zen Mother

Zen Mother began in a windowless warehouse in Charlottesville not long before its members, Monika Khot and Adam Wolcott Smith, left town—creating a void in the local indie/experimental music scene—for Seattle a couple of years ago. The West Coast has been a nurturing place for Khot (of Nordra and Invisible Hand) and Smith (of Invisible […]