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Khalivius won’t stop with ‘Red Light’
Khalivius is used to traversing middle ground. In high school, the musician said, he tended to occupy that space between divergent groups, never entirely at home in any particular social circle. And in creating, he’s become increasingly torn between writing and recording raps – a form that served as his earliest introduction to music – and staking out new ground as an R&B singer, which has become more of a focus over the last year.
Local Politics: Same cruelties plague the new James A. Karnes Corrections Center
Children who have a parent incarcerated in Franklin County will not see their parent in person until release. This is true for the Jackson Pike Corrections Center and for the new James A. Karnes Corrections Center. As of May 28, people incarcerated in Franklin County also cannot hold a piece of mail sent to them by their family – or anyone else. Mail is scanned and sent as an electronic attachment to a message in the facility’s app.
Ajanaé Dawkins addresses heavy questions in ‘No One Teaches Us How to Be Daughters’
Around 2016, Ajanaé Dawkins sat down and recorded an interview with her great grandmother as the elder neared the end of her life. “I knew she was dying. She had lung cancer and another form of cancer, so her time was limited,” Dawkins said in late July at Urban Arts Space, where her debut exhibition, “No One Teaches Us How to Be Daughters,” will remain on view through August 3. “So, I sat with her … in the rehabilitation center and asked her a lot of questions.”
Fust continues the search at Nelsonville Music Festival
A feeling of wanderlust permeates Genevieve, the excellent 2023 album by roots-oriented North Carolina band Fust, which arrives populated by characters who set out for the West Coast, make late night, starlit drives in cars cursed with busted odometers, and hold tight to concerns that even in new towns they’ll continue to be the same troubled people.
Artists Against Apartheid launch exhibition to highlight Palestinian resilience
When Artists Against Apartheid staged a one-night-only exhibition at the Citadel in December, much of the art displayed at the time was more “descriptive” of the horrors unfolding in Gaza amid Israel’s ongoing assault, according to Columbus illustrator and organizer Shenby G. But for a new exhibition...
Printmaker Felicity Gunn centers the cycle of life
Though printmaker Felicity Gunn grew up in the Short North area, the inspiration for her artwork often comes from more remote locales, featuring abandoned Nelsonville houses reclaimed by nature and overgrown, wooded trails located somewhere off the Blue Ridge Parkway outside of Asheville, North Carolina. In a mid-July interview at...
EDwen watches it all fall apart
When EDwen started work on what would become Confessions of a Capricorn, he was in the early stages of a new relationship, envisioning the album as one that would capture the heart-fluttering bloom of a fresh romance taking root. This idea is reflected in slinky, R&B-tinged songs such as “Go”...
Magnetic Love: Nathaniel Jordan worked tirelessly until his death to distribute naloxone to Black Ohioans
To truly meet people where they’re at, Nathaniel Jordan II once told me, “You come with love. You come with an open heart. And you come with a mind of helping. And that spirit that you generate, it illuminates from you. It’s almost like a magnet.”. It...
The Fossil Record hopes to give some permanence to life’s more ephemeral moments
Rachel Scott started work on the songs that would become the Fossil Record’s debut album, Together We’re a Modern Person, seven years ago, with the initial writing taking place in the six months of maternity leave that followed the birth of her first son. At the time, Scott...
The Other Columbus: Columbus police stay in the news for all the wrong reasons
Here is a description of events that occurred yesterday in Milwaukee that cannot be disputed by anyone: Dozens of Columbus police officers traveled to Milwaukee to provide security support to the Republican National Convention. A number of them were assigned to the outer security perimeter, approximately one mile away from the convention. Five of those officers encountered, shot and killed a Black homeless man named Samuel “Jehovah” Sharpe Jr., who was in an altercation with another man. Body camera footage released by Columbus police showed Sharpe holding two knives.
Ebri Yahloe meets trauma with grace on new EP ‘Candid’
After Ebri Yahloe finished her initial vocal take for the song “Holy,” she and producer Noah Bolte sat together in silence, struck by the lyrical bloodletting that had just taken place. On the track, which serves as a jarring centerpiece on Yahloe’s recently released five-song EP, Candid, the...
Mandy Shunnarah gives voice to an overlooked skate community in ‘Midwest Shreds’
As a middle schooler growing up in small town Alabama, author and poet Mandy Shunnarah became obsessed with breaking down the skateboard tricks they watched unfold on MTV shows such as “Jackass” and “Viva La Bam.” In an early July interview, Shunnarah recalled how they would press their face close to the TV screen, locking their eyes on the skaters’ feet in the hopes of decoding how they managed to exact all manner of flips, grinds and spins while maintaining control of their boards.
Brotherhood brings depth to the new collaborative album from TrigNO and Soop
While working on collaborative album Just Due Right, rapper TrigNO and producer/rapper Soop would bookend late night in-studio bursts with escapes to the garage of Soop’s home, where the two would often slip into deep conversation, sharing the ins and outs of past experiences and current day-to-day struggles. These heart-to-hearts, in turn, began to influence the record’s lyrical content, with the two increasingly unpacking accumulated traumas and reflecting on modern horrors, including the death of 25-year-old Black motorist Jayland Walker, who was shot and killed by police in Akron, Ohio, in June 2022, his body riddled with 46 bullets.
On Development: Ohio foots bill for Delaware County sprawl
The spine of Delaware County is a clustertruck. Every day, huge pickups, sedans, SUVs and semis cruise and coagulate up and down U.S. 23 between Worthington and Waldo. The Ohio Department of Transportation is looking at investing more than $1 billion in various traffic-decluttering measures over the next decade after Gov. Mike DeWine swooped in to address what should be a local issue.
Ghost Shirt makes tenuous peace with death on ‘Crayon Dragon’
As an only child growing up in rural Kentucky, Branden Barnett said he spent a lot of time on his own. In late June, the Ghost Shirt singer and songwriter recalled how as a kid he would boot up the Super Nintendo game Chrono Trigger and immerse himself alone in imaginary worlds for hours on end. The nostalgia inspired by these memories helped to inform the song “Chrono Trigger,” off of the excellent new Ghost Shirt album Crayon Dragon, which borrows from Barnett’s recollections but adds a long-wished-for companion.
Ohio spends billions to rehabilitate the incarcerated. Current state laws make it difficult for employers to then hire them.
John Rush, a small business owner on the West Side of Columbus, has hired and trained more than 5,000 employees, many facing barriers presented by the criminal justice system. He is a believer in second chances. Rush said he empowers his employees to “not be so naive or belittled into...
Matter News wins two awards in Ohio’s Best Journalism Contest
Matter News earned a pair of awards at the statewide Ohio’s Best Journalism Contest, with winners informed via email last week. Sponsored by the Cincinnati, Cleveland and Columbus chapters of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ), the awards honored work done in 2023. Matter’s awards included a first-place win...
Mark Sims searches for solace in a world growing dark
Mark Sims fills new album Take Me Faster with references to a planet and people struggling with endless wars and an economic system that continues to bleed the lower and middle classes, making daily survival an ongoing struggle. And yet, at its core, there remains a sense that a better future is worth fighting for, with Sims repeatedly finding respite in the small circle of friends and family in which he moves.
Didi embraces the collective struggle on ‘Feel It Enough’
Five or six years ago, when the members of didi began writing the songs that would become new album Feel It Enough, the musicians were grappling with everything from the reality that the U.S. political and economic systems relentlessly grind down on our most vulnerable populations to the evils perpetrated in service of a foreign policy that too often leaves an extended trail of destruction in its wake.
Columbus has taken steps to address the housing crisis. It’s not enough.
“Carried to its logical conclusion, [the private control of land] means that some have the right to prevent others from living.” -Ambrose Bierce. In the May 6 Columbus City Council meeting, Council President Shannon Hardin and Councilmember Shayla Favor called out “the greedy investors, property managers and landlords who are exploiting our vulnerable residents.”
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