Rob Moura

3 weeks ago | pastemagazine.com | Rob Moura

Listen to this article Your browser does not support the audio element. At the center of billy woods’ flickering, phantasmagoric GOLLIWOG is a pair of eyes. It belongs to the titular doll, a 19th-century caricature of pitchy tufts, red lips, shiv-sharp teeth, and casual cruelty borne of (allegedly unwitting) minstrel origin and commodified by enterprising English toy makers to line the shelves and arms of young white Western tabula rasas.

2 months ago | pastemagazine.com | Rob Moura

Listen to this article Your browser does not support the audio element. In October 2019, ahead of their second album Four of Arrows, Great Grandpa held a listening party at Life on Mars, a vinyl bar in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Sitting on the furniture with the attendees—many of whom were friends and participants in the local music community—and listening to the unreleased LP as it spun on the turntable, the shift seemed obvious.

Feb 26, 2025 | pastemagazine.com | Rob Moura

Listen to this article Your browser does not support the audio element. In October 2024, Japanese folk artist Ichiko Aoba, robed in snow-white garments and backed by a nine-piece band, took the Hitomi Memorial stage at Showa Women’s University in Tokyo. To the sold-out Japanese crowd, the show was exactly as expected.

Jan 29, 2025 | popmatters.com | Rob Moura

Two throughlines connected the disparate wonders of this year’s Iceland Airwaves, the country’s largest, and therefore most visible, music festival. The first was the breadth of native musicianship on display, frequently matching – and sometimes outshining – the invited international acts. Sandwiched in-between time slots held by R&B darling Ravyn Lenae and electropop heatseekers Magdalena Bay, you could spot indie band superserious across the way at Iðno, pounding their guitars into submission.

Oct 4, 2024 | washmusicmag.com | Rob Moura

The black-bricked building on the corner of 10th and Pike, just down the street from the previous year’s over-televised chaos, is crammed with vaccinated, unmasked ticket holders. After a year of lockdown it feels like an impossible number of people, too many people. Your brain might temporarily short-circuit from that many people, all crammed in there like a sealed jar of green olives, salty and sweating in the heat.