Todd Clouser Preview

Todd Clouser, selected by the New Music Seminar/New York Music Festival as one of 100 "Artists on the Verge," is a regular contributor to this blog. His writing on music will also appear in AlteredScale.com issue 3, out in March. What follows is an audio link to a cut from his forthcoming album, The Naked Beat, slated for release in February:

Wake and Shake Your Heart

This cut represents just one of the many modes explored by this restless artist of the wilderness. Genre-bending, box-defying, he is one moment working off the early 70s James Brown riffed Miles Davis, and the next playing weird blues or rock and roll. Then he sings, then plays his arrangements of singer-songwriter Elliott Smith.

In short, he resists branding, which is not the way to easy stardom.

Because, I suspect, art and exploration, for him, come first—but you'll have to ask him yourself.

Clouser's band, in all its mighty myriad forms, with various and varied personnel stretching from Minnesota to Mexico, is called

THE LOVE ELECTRIC