Maggot Brain N° 15: What’s inside! Bjork: Our cover feature is a career-spanning piece by Tamara Palmer on Iceland’s most noted export since the foundation of their parliament in 930, with a terrifically gorgeous cover image by our illustrator, Marly Beyer. Marcellus Hall delivers a 30-plus page excerpt from a graphic novel about life in indie-rock in the early 1990s that’s just stunning and lyrical and we are so stoked to be able to run it. Hot on the heels of their world tour, it’s an engaging photo essay from Detroit’s premier music photographer Doug Coombe on the return of garage punk heroes Be Your Own Pet. Mike Turner spends serious time with BMX champion Chelsea Wolfe, right when she might be suspended from competition for being trans. Ana Gavrilovska digs deep into the work of up-and-coming multimedia artist Wayne Phoenix. Uncharacterizable instrumental musicians Penguin Cafe are back (under the direction of originator Simon Jeffes' son Arthur Jeffes) and Kurt Reighley is writing beautifully on them. (Their first two records for Eno’s label are The Shit.)
Cassette tape reviews; Lucy Sante delivers a tribute to the olden days of mp3 blogs, because she writes in every issue and we are lucky AF for this fact; Mimi Lipson weighs in on cats versus dogs in her advice column; Andy Beta talks of Annea Lockwood in the Icons column; the reissue of the issue is a box set of Pauline Anna Strom, by Michelle Dove; Fred Thomas on “why Sonic Youth's most underrated record deserves a second look” (guess which one it is!); an overview of reissue label Mesh Key for a new column on the people who run labels and stuff like that. In the new column Tracked (on music supervisors) Martin Douglas talks to Tiffany Anders, and it’s largely about her work on Reservation Dogs! Then there’s the column Physical Graffiti by editor McGonigal, an epic look at dozens of recent LP releases plus a few books (that’s right, it’s a bona fide multi-page record review column), plus the debut of our food column with a disastrous visit to the Russian Tea Room courtesy of noted genius Quintron.
