“It was born out of real frustration,” explains New York-based musician Cameron Mesirow about her second album Interiors, which was released last week on True Panther. “I’ve always had fraught relationships with space. I’m either too connected to it—like I’m desperately clinging to it—or I feel sort of alienated in it. And when I’m in New York, I really want to be in my home, not even out in the area near where I live. I guess that was on my mind so much that that became what I was writing about.”

With New York Fashion Week starting today, the industry is flying in and preparing for the month-long marathon that is the collections. For those who were in Stockholm last week, the circus has already begun—albeit in refined, æsthetically functional (in other words, classically Scandinavian)—form. We sent our photographer Pablo Ravazzani to the shows at Stockholm’s eighth annual Mercedes Benz Fashion Week (certainly the most globally recognized edition to date) to capture the Spring 2014 collections. The resulting images—a quiet assortment of black-and-white shots drawing focus to simple lines and sharp silhouettes—mimic the clean minimalism of the clothes. This season was especially strong, with an emphasis on truly functional apparel: Whyred gave us architectural button-downs fit with transparent layers in steely, monochromatic colors inspired by the palette of Ingmar Bergman’s legendary Through a Glass Darkly; ALTEWAISAOME presented loose silk blouses and haute-structured collarless coats; and House of Dagmar was all about the shift in moods from day to night—near-chainmail knits, graphic printed minis, and periodic leather accents took shape in somber grays, midnight blacks, and dusty crèmes. J.Lindeberg brought utilitarian basics: slim-fit berry blue suits for men and classic leather jackets and pants punctuated with metallic accessories for women. It’s not all black-and white-minimalism, though. The look at BACK, Ann-Sofie Back’s diffusion line, was Nineties sportswear with a contemporary twist—boxy, neon orange T’s layered over baby blue, below-the-knee skirts and camel, lightweight jackets with Velcro fastenings. Still wearable, still practical, but far from quiet.

Electronic artist and frequent Panda Bear collaborator Scott Mou is the first person to admit that his debut album End Times, released under the moniker Queens a few weeks ago, isn’t quite what people expect. “When Dial Records asked me to do it, I was really shocked and very humbled—and I thought the label would expect something different—more techno, more house, more classic minimalist,” recalls Mou. What he gave them was of another mood entirely.

“I’m hugely selfish,” explains Canadian musician Airick Woodhead as he makes his way to Edmonton, Alberta. He’s in the back of a minivan, trying to describe his live set—a frenetic, deviantly energized mix of ever-changing falsetto-tinged electro beats—and we’re connecting for the first time over the phone, a few hours before his gig at the tiny punk house Wunderbar. Woodhead’s is the type of performance that whips you into a burning trance, one that you could just as easily experience drugged out and alone as surrounded by sweaty bodies in some unnamed Bushwick loft. “The whole point of this project is to avoid or put off repeating the same night every night,” Woodhead says. “That’s just not really for me.”

“It was fucking wild,” says Thomas Mullarney III, twenty-four, one half of Brooklyn-based electronic outfit Beacon. “St. Louis, down South, up the West Coast—I saw parts of the country I had always wanted to see,” continues Mullarney’s 29-year-old counterpart Jacob Gossett. “It was so beautiful. And we had to do it. We had to play shows to really settle into the idea of writing.”

There are bands that write songs in minutes, and pen records in a matter of weeks, maybe even days. Los Angeles’ Local Natives isn’t one of them. “We went home to LA and found this little abandoned bungalow thing—this one-bedroom house that we lived in as a band for three years,” explains drummer Matt Frazier of the origins of the group’s sophomore album, Hummingbird, which was released at the end of January. “We spent eight or nine months living and working together, just writing, writing, writing until we got to the point where we needed to look for producers—some songs took months and months.” The producer the band chose—the National’s Aaron Dessner, a friend and former touring mate—invited the quartet to move into his family’s home in Brooklyn, and thus began several more months of working and recording together. “We lived in an old Victorian house with Aaron and his family,” recalls Frazier. “And we worked through the highs and lows of the past couple years [on the album].”

No one can accuse thirty-year-old avant-R&B artist Arthur Ashin, otherwise known as Autre Ne Veut, of being overly scripted. He begins a new album when “a theme gels;” comes to lyrics not by writing, but by simply stepping into the studio and howling into the mike; and named his forthcoming record Anxiety because it was […]

“The boxes became a pet project of mine,” says New York-based jewelry designer Eddie Borgo on the origins of his latest endeavor, a series of handmade, exotic skin-covered jewelry boxes that he recently unveiled on his site. “I started paying closer attention to the way my friends store their jewelry, and actually started to shop […]

“It was really serendipitous,” says fine jewelry designer Megan Isaacs of her introduction to young ready-to-wear designer Katie Gallagher. “I was on vacation at the beach a few weeks before the show, and Katie’s stylist was actually staying in the same house—everything just came together.” “Everything” is a collection of white brass ear cuffs and […]

Last Thursday night, the Walkmen played their biggest headlining show to date at Terminal 5. That this one was their largest is a bit surprising, given that the band’s been around and popular for over ten years now, but their manager assured us it was.