Sounds of Saving (2026)

03/06/2026

A recent article reads: “Be careful what you say to yourself. Your mind is listening.”

A simple but cautionary imperative.

Not because every thought becomes reality, or because we should all suddenly begin speaking to ourselves like inspirational posters. But because most people underestimate how much of our life is shaped by repetition. Not dramatic events. Repetition.

The same private phrases, over and over.

“You’re lazy.
You’re difficult.
You always ruin things.
You should be further along by now.
Nobody really wants you there.
You missed your chance.”

After a while, certain thoughts stop sounding like reactions and start sounding like truth.

And unlike conversations with other people, there’s rarely interruption. No one pulls us aside in the middle of the day and says: that was unnecessarily cruel, actually.

“When you put yourself down, your mind believes what you say… What you say to yourself has sticking power, affecting your deepest feelings about yourself and sapping motivation to move on with your life.”

A lot of people move through the world carrying around an internal voice they inherited years ago. Sometimes from family. Sometimes from school. Sometimes from the internet. Sometimes from one terrible season of life that quietly became a permanent narrator.

This isn’t an argument for forced optimism. Some days genuinely are hard. Some people are grieving, exhausted, isolated, broke, heartbroken, scared. Pretending otherwise helps nobody.

But there is a difference between pain and narration.

“I’m struggling right now” is different than “I ruin everything.”
“I feel lonely” is different than “No one could ever love me.”
“I made a mistake” is different than “I am the mistake.”

Paying attention to - but not necessarily listening - that voice can change the script and reality may follow.

02/06/2026

Dove Ellis is both shrouded in mystery and rapidly adored. It was an experience of both seeing him play one of 2 sold out shows at .

Understandably drawing comparisons to other visionary vocalists such as & , the Irish singer’s voice is astonishing and the poetry of his lyrics no less so:

“You were named like bankers
Love set in one pile, s*x in two piles
Music, sport, and dancing
Like mirrors, we duel
Infinities of faults
So carry me to the end
Where the air and the wing are one
A nameless stroke of sun, until they’re memory
Yeah, now you’ll build the Rat Den
Wood with little dead flies
Little left hope
Me and my brother, we’ve got
Space and got hands, got space and got hands
So maybe we’ll start a band
With the strangler you have to like
‘Cause he knows how to play the drums, yu’re called
‘Forsakers’” -

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01/06/2026

Few accounts of mental illness & recovery have landed as poignantly across generations as “Girl, Interrupted,” Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 memoir of her late 1960s stay at McLean Hospital following a su***de attempt. Its newest form is a play at with music by legendary and starring as Lisa, the charismatic sociopath famously played by in the film. As playwright has said about the story:

“Anybody who’s gone through a period of their lives where something broke will completely connect to it. That’s adolescence, or they could be 40 in an AA meeting. Now you’re here, and how do you figure out what you do with the things that you can’t even sometimes see—who’s here with you and also who sees you? I wonder if this is one of the reasons why the movie was so successful was this collection of feral fu***ng women who were expressing things that are inconvenient, being deeply affected by them, acting out and being wild, and being being full of fu***ng sadness, and inexplicable emotions.”

, who plays Susanna, told about the role of music in this iteration:

“Though it’s not exactly a musical, the songs in this play are crucial to the emotional journeys of its characters, charting their pain and insecurities. The girls of McLean are all part of the chorus; in one haunting song, they harmonize to ask: ‘What’s to become of me?’ This play goes to really dark, underexplored caverns of the human mind and heart. And I think music is a way to go to those places.”

“Girl, Interrupted” endures as a powerful & irreverent account, even as the sociocultural and psychiatric norms shift around it. As per Vogue:

“What does it mean to be crazy? What does it mean to be well? What is recovery, and is it ever really possible? And what is the link between creativity and madness? (One song references other patients of McLean—Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Ray Charles, and James Taylor—probing the margin between mental illness and artistic genius.) The play raises all of these questions, resisting any simple.”

Resources onsite via

30/05/2026

A .info show is filled with chaos.

The songs arrive in bursts. Distortion, movement, fragments of melody. At times it feels as though three different things are happening at once. Ask the band what feeling comes to mind when thinking about their new album, Two Wheels Moved the Soul, and they’ll tell you: “joy.”

Of the song “The Sound It Makes,” singer / guitarist Nina Cates said:

“The more I’ve been thinking about this song after writing it, the more it feels like a social media feed.”

That comparison made more sense after seeing them live.

The songs often felt crowded in the same way a feed feels crowded. Noise competing with noise. Ideas stacked on top of one another. Moments of clarity appearing and getting swallowed again.

“A lot of the songs on the record are about reflecting on a moment in time and comparing yourself to others.”

For all its restlessness, the music remains oddly attentive. Like someone trying to make sense of too many things at once.

For those at last night, the band was one signal that made sense.

📸🎥:
🙏: Oona

27/05/2026

The ascending played the always intimate last night. She moved through three songs with the kind of loose precision that makes a room lean in for more. Between songs she spoke to the crowd about nerves, things “going well,” and the strange disorientation of finding yourself somewhere new while performing for years.

Any shakiness dissolved once the music started. What remained was what seems to be a particular Gracie Ives tension: songs that feel as though they could unravel at any moment, held together by wit, melody and a voice that never loses the thread. She filled out our ‘Song That Found Me at the Right Time, card afterwards - showing love for New Order’s “Love Vigilantes.” (Last slide.)

“I think ‘Stupid Bitches’ is the happiest song I’ve ever written,” she said recently. “It’s the feeling of euphoria that comes with realising that I don’t have to belong to anyone or change myself in order for people to like me. It’s my break from codependency.”

That freedom sits all over the new album. There are synths that swell to the point of rupture, half-muttered ad-libs, melodies that wobble just enough to feel alive. Even when the songs flirt with collapse, she never does.

Recently she described a post-tour low where she thought: “Oh my God, I used to be so good at being alive, and I don’t even know who I am right now.”

Maybe that’s part of why the songs land the way they do —they don’t posture toward clarity—they breathe in and out—and we all make it through.

📸:

27/05/2026

“I’m a cruise ship designer
I’m striking while the iron is hot
I’m making the most of a bad situation
Cruises are big business
I don’t personally like them
But I need to serve a useful purpose
I desire very much a place in society
“So designing cruise ships is my pastime
And my living and my challenge
Designing cruises is, for me, a privilege
And a lesson, need to do it all the time….

I make sure there are hidden messages in my work” -

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26/05/2026

“It’s a constant struggle while we’re here, and we have to fight the good fight. We have to keep fighting as long as we’re alive. I feel it’s a fight, it’s a struggle. But it’s a good struggle. It’s a good fight, that’s why I say now, “Fight the good fight, and fight the right fight.” Now I do want to fight, but I don’t want to just kill somebody because I’m fighting—“oh yeah, I’ve gotta struggle and fight, that means I’m doing anything to win”—no, no, that’s not it. It’s the good fight. The good fight is where you do unto others, as I said, that good old Golden Rule. That’s the good fight. You fight that fight, which is difficult in this world as we know. But that’s the fight: that’s the right fight, that’s the good fight. And that’s what the fighting is about in this world.” - Sonny Rollins

RIP to the saxophone colossus.

23/05/2026

It was a tight scene earlier this month as .unlimited joined the stage, pit and street outside .

Per

“For Orion Ohana, Evanora: Unlimited isn’t so much an artist alias as it is an ideology, or cinematic world. Inside this world are recurring characters, one of them being Marjorie W.C Sinclair, the artist’s randomly word-generated rapper alias… ‘Marjorie is anything that’s not Evanora. It’s like how Akira isn’t actually a person in the film, but an unseen zeitgeist, and then Tetsuo is the archetype who finds the power and then goes insane on an infinite quest’…

There’s a ketamic dissociation to the songs that feels bittersweet, akin to looking at the past through a fogged-up window pane. ‘I feel like I’m not the best at words in person, so I try to make up for that in music’…

With mentions of canola oil and broken memories, it taps into a generational zeitgeist where youthful hedonism and online discourse rub against feelings of alienation. ‘Sometimes I have intended meaning in my art, but for the majority of the time it’s subliminal and the meaning is added later.’”

📸:
🙏: Oona

22/05/2026

When did you first discover sad music?

: “Very early. As a nine- or ten-year-old I was obsessed with songs that could make me really sad. I would make myself sad on purpose, just for fun. I remember, like – what’s that song called? There’s a version of it in Glee – ‘Somewhere Only We Know’.”

Searows offered a treat for the heads before the Philly show - a few songs and banter during the afternoon sound check.

“I feel like the way I listen to music has always been like a soundtrack to what I’m feeling and experiencing, like a movie. So it’s very much a compliment when I’m a soundtrack to someone else’s sad thing, because that’s how I’ve loved to listen to music.”

When asked about the biggest challenge he’s overcome and how music connected to it, Searows shared:

“I didn’t think I could be trans and also be a musician. I always knew that I wanted to be a musician but thought I had to choose between the two. And that was very rough.” - all quotes via

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Sounds of Saving

03/06/2026

02/06/2026

01/06/2026

30/05/2026

27/05/2026

27/05/2026

26/05/2026

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22/05/2026

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