Brown’s own words set the stage better than any description could:

“I began writing and recording this concept album in my small bedroom studio while undergoing treatment for Stage IV metastatic cancer. It became my own kind of therapy. A place to set down the weight of the heavy things, free my mind and focus on something I could control. In those moments, I learned to face my daily fears, acknowledge the people I love, and ponder the big questions — what life is, what it means, and how we all must accept that it doesn’t last forever.”

The album’s guiding philosophy is Newtonian in its elegance — for every action, an equal and opposite reaction. A dropped ball bounces back. Planets are pushed and pulled by gravity’s endless dance. Happiness and sadness, love and heartbreak — all part of the same rhythm. The bad things that happen to us, Brown argues, can become the catalyst for something extraordinary. Dreams, Monsters, and the Universe is his proof of that proposition, made flesh in nine songs.

Recorded entirely by Brown himself — guitars, bass, percussion, synths, piano, and an extraordinary array of found sounds sampled from objects around his house and yard, including flower pots, soda bottles, fans, his lawnmower, and a fence — the album achieves a sonic world that is both intimate and expansive. The only additional musicians are David Adkins, who played hand drums on “You’re Like the Sun,” and John Shade, who played drum kit on “Universe.” Every other note, texture, and layer is Brown’s alone.

For fans of Peter Gabriel, Pink Floyd / David Gilmour, and Blue October, the record will feel immediately familiar and entirely fresh at once — alternative and indie rock at its core, with progressive structure and indie pop sensibility woven throughout. It is the sound of a man who has spent decades studying music from the inside out, finally bringing all of it to bear on something wholly his own.

Dreams, Monsters, and the Universe is Brown’s first traditional solo album, his first time committing his singing voice to record, and the first project he has written, produced, engineered, and mastered entirely himself. For an artist with his background, that combination of firsts carries considerable weight.

“It was a labor of love,” he says, “met with humility.”

Brown grew up in rural Alabama, playing KISS and AC/DC songs on a Sears guitar — the classic origin story of a kid who found something in music and never let go. He later studied Recording Production and Technology at Middle Tennessee State University and, while teaching guitar outside Nashville, began studying orchestral composition. That path led to his instrumental works being licensed for use in television programmes around the world.

Today, he lives in Crystal River, Florida with his wife and best friend Lori, occasionally performing fingerstyle guitar covers of 80s New Wave music at local restaurants. He remains, in his own words, forever a student — as long as he is playing, he is learning.

He is also still in the fight. And he is optimistic.

“I’m optimistic about the future because I’ve come to believe the harder you fall, the higher you bounce back. At least that’s what Sir Isaac said.”

Set atop a mountain at the edge of reality, “Observer” follows its protagonist through an inner transformation rendered in sound — driving riffs, soaring vocals, melodic lead guitars, and a chorus built to fill an arena of the mind. It balances heaviness with depth, modern metal energy with genuine atmospheric weight, and arrives not as a standalone single but as a deliberate scene in a longer, carefully constructed narrative. This is a world being built, not a song being released.

“Observer” draws from mystical and philosophical tradition — the kind of inner work that strips a person down to something essential and asks what remains. It turns that process into something visceral and powerful, making the interior journey feel as epic as anything that happens in the external world. For listeners who come to heavy music looking for more than noise, it delivers exactly that.

The Lazz is the product of over four decades of accumulated craft — and a decision to stop letting it sit unused.

Ben Lazzaro has been a performing guitarist since 1982. Alongside that musical career, he built a parallel life as a formally trained visual artist, earning an Associate of Science in Visual Communication with Honours, and spent thirteen years as a professional 3D Digital Artist in the video game industry. The intersection of those two worlds — design theory and legacy musicianship, visual storytelling and sonic architecture — is exactly what defines The Lazz as a project.

Like many musicians of his generation, Lazzaro was initially sceptical of AI-assisted production. His instinct, shaped by decades in the industry, was that it lacked the soul of a true player. But as a long-time composer sitting on a vast catalogue of compositions written over forty years that had never been completed or professionally recorded, he came to a different conclusion. AI was not a passing trend. It was a permanent shift — and it was an instrument.

Rather than remaining sidelined by that shift, Lazzaro built what he calls a “Hybrid-Human” production engine: live guitar and bass performances, written, arranged, and mastered entirely by Lazzaro himself, integrated with a modified generative engine handling vocals, drums, effects, and overall sonics pre-mastering. Every music video — written, directed, and created by Lazzaro. Every lyric, every composition, every sonic and visual decision: his.

The result is a project with the full-band sound of a major label release and the complete creative autonomy of a solo artist who has been honing his vision since before most of his listeners were born.

The music of The Lazz is not a collection of singles. It is a structured, long-form exploration of the human psyche drawn directly from the analytical psychology of Carl Jung — divided into three thematic Acts, each built across a four-song series, mirroring the Jungian process of Individuation: the lifelong journey of integrating the conscious and unconscious to become a whole human being.

“Observer” is the third scene in the current Act — a series that maps the arc of inner awakening through heavy music and cinematic world-building. Each release advances the narrative. Each song is a scene. The project has a beginning, a middle, and an end — and it is being built with the patience and precision of someone who understands that the best creative work is not rushed.

“The mission of The Lazz is to bridge forty years of musical heritage with the frontier of modern technology to explore the depths of the human psyche. We are dedicated to the rebirth of dormant compositions — some held for decades — by fusing authentic, veteran guitar and bass performances with the precision of AI-assisted production. Moving beyond traditional rock tropes, we aim to provide a high-impact sonic experience that inspires self-discovery, deeper thinking, and intellectual honesty.”

“The Choice” began with a journey up the Hudson River on a brilliant sunny day. Standing before the white-rock Palisades, framed by greenery and the blue water below, Oledude found himself thinking about the history of that river — its struggle, its near-ruin, and its remarkable recovery. He thought about Pete Seeger, who sailed the Clearwater sloop for decades campaigning to clean those waters, and who understood that environmental change begins with human minds being moved, one at a time. He thought about choices. The song followed.

What makes “The Choice” musically distinctive is its source material. Oledude took the haunting, lullaby-like melody of the medieval hymn “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and transformed it into something urgent and contemporary — new lyrics, new meaning, a sermon built from a carol. Influenced by folk icon Pete Seeger and progressive rock giants including Jethro Tull, Rush, Kansas, Emerson Lake & Palmer, and YES, Oledude has long been a “big sound” composer who hears his songs through orchestras and guitars alike. The track was shaped in collaboration with Berkeley-trained guitarist Zachary Staples, engineered by Mark Dann and Kat Lewis, and brought to life by a chorus of ten family members and friends whose voices give the song its communal, congregational weight.

“Writing ‘The Choice’ was a bold experiment,” Oledude says. “I had written parodies before, but I had never attempted to expand the meaning of a well-known song. Doing this sort of cemented my commitment to using every means at my disposal to make music meaningful and powerful to people.”

The story behind “The Choice” cannot be separated from the story of the man who made it. Chris Owens — known to the world as Chris Oledude — is a Black, white-Jewish, and Puerto Rican-born New York artist whose entire life has been shaped by the intersection of music, politics, and moral urgency. He grew up in a household where classical, folk, pop, funk, and protest music all had a place, harmonising with his brothers — including actor Geoffrey Owens — under the influence of his mother, the late Ethel Werfel Owens, his first music teacher, and his father, the late Major R. Owens, a librarian turned elected official.

In the 1980s, he performed on the streets of New York City, in dance bands, and recorded Anyone’s Revolution (1984), a cassette album that voiced sharp frustration with the Reagan era and caught the attention of folk legend Pete Seeger himself — who encouraged Chris to keep writing music for peace and social justice and to collaborate with like-minded artists. He went on to join the People’s Music Network for Songs of Freedom and Struggle.

For the next three and a half decades, life pulled him more toward civic and political activism than music. It was grief that brought him back. The death of his father stirred him to perform again alongside his brothers. The death of his wife, Sandra Dixon, led to a deeper reckoning — a decision to reconnect with music in a wholly new way. In 2020, reborn as Chris Oledude, he re-emerged with a renewed mission: to fuse the “old school” genres he loves — pop, funk, R&B, folk — with the urgency of the present moment.

⇒ Have you missed our review for “The Choice”? Read here.

The results have been remarkable. His song-video tribute George Floyd: Say Their Names, directed by Alyssa Dann, earned over 150 film festival accolades worldwide. His blues jam Orange Blues 24, accompanied by a stop-motion video crafted from 2,000 photographs over the course of a year, has won numerous festival awards. His 2025 release No Crowns For Clowns brought a blistering political critique to the airwaves. And his debut album Preacher Man — Vol. 1 took listeners on a journey, as he puts it, “from disturbing troubles to eternal hope,” with tracks including Rainbow Soul, Turning Tables, and We Will Get Through This winning fans across the world.

“The Choice” is the next chapter. And given everything happening in the world right now, its timing could not be more deliberate.

“At a time when war and other conflicts dominate our thinking,” Oledude says, “we cannot forget that the health of our planet and its atmosphere is the most critical issue confronting our future as human beings.”

Musically, this song shifts more into musical theater vibes, with the dramatic organ and the style of arrangement for the backup vocals, as well as the lead vocals’ obvious preacher/showman quality. It’s a very rich sound that complements the epic scope of the song’s narrative.

Taking a well-known melody and reshaping it into something with an entirely different meaning is a risky move – it can feel gimmicky or forced. Here it doesn’t, because the original melody already carried a weight and solemnity that transfers naturally to environmental stakes. Oledude’s prog rock and folk influences sit comfortably alongside each other in a song that genuinely earns its ambition.

Straightforwardly, this is an ambient cinematic soundtrack more than it is a rock or prog track despite the genre tags. It opens with a deceptively calm piano, gentle enough to put your guard down, before an electric guitar trails in like a warning underneath it. From there, the track doesn’t move through key changes or time signature shifts the way traditional prog does – instead, it works through texture and pressure, tightening the sonic space around you gradually until it breaks open at the 3:28 mark. The 3D binaural mix is the real instrument here, creating a claustrophobic weight that surrounds rather than just hits. It is purposeful sound design as much as it is composition, and the two are inseparable.

Social Treble describes the project as “Cyber-Prog,” and it’s an accurate enough label. The Nine Inch Nails industrial influence is in the density, the Steven Wilson influence is in the patience. For the headphones-on, world-off listener this was made for, it delivers exactly what it promises.

Texturally, this song is very unique with the rotary guitar upfront, and the washed out melodic layers are reminiscent of Snowy White for but a moment, and then that modern, almost J-Dilla-esque groove comes in and gives the song an entirely different flavor, and then the vocals seal the deal. This is a fully realized artistic vision and is a beautifully fresh sound that everyone should listen to. It’s the kind of modern sound that would actually work really well in a live setting because there is so much room to play around.

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TillaTone cites Pink Floyd, alt-J, and Mac Miller as touchstones, and all three are audible without the song leaning too hard on any of them. Six years into releasing music independently, “Alien Love” feels like the point where the influences stop being references and start being just part of how he writes. Worth your time.

From the very first song on the album, “Man on a Wire” Mr. Grossman demonstrates his ingenious usage of harmony to create dreamy soundscapes – the colour palettes shift like a gradient from dark to light, all while the textures provide this distinct airy feel that makes it seem like we’re flying but not soaring, flying gently through gentle pink clouds. The listing on Apple Music categorizes this album as pop, but as we move to the second song, it becomes clear that this album is anything but pop. “Isn’t It Romantic” is like an avant garde fusion between trip-hop and vocal jazz of the 60s.

“Put a Scarf” feels like a marriage between 90s soul music and a Chick Corea song. The lyrics are very striking and very much are about pouring one’s heart out about personal insecurities, and the soulful vocal deliveries really help the delivery of such lyrics, and the harmony stays conventional for most of the song’s runtime to support this heartfelt outpour of emotion. But it evolves as the song goes on and gets spicier and more intense as the song builds to its climax.

⇒ Check our interview with Mr. Grossman here.

“Spice Tree” is appropriately full of spice with weird, slightly detuned synth lines and unconventional chord changes. “Blow Me Away” is instantly recognizable as a song inspired by the 90s trip-hop movement with its choice of textures and the way the vocals are mixed, and obviously the rhythmic devices at play. While “Fingertips” offers more of a Brazilian pop vibe with its harmonic choices, like a bossa nova with a more modern straight-ahead rhythm section. As you can see the album shifts genres almost every song like a chameleon that adapts its colors to the song’s narrative.

After a Fashion is the kind of record that rewards repeat listens precisely because it refuses to stay in one place. Grossman has been putting out material since 2022, and the range has always been there, but this album feels like the fullest expression of it yet – ten songs that cover serious ground without ever feeling scattered. For anyone with an appetite for music that doesn’t fit neatly into a single box like so many of our own emotions, this one is worth your time.

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⇒ Check our chat with the band here.

The four-piece, featuring Marie Gutierrez on vocals, David Ballon on guitar, Joan Torres on bass, and José Linares on drums (collaborating remotely from Puerto Rico), has great chemistry here, playing to each other’s sonic strengths, and the production is also aware of this. The mix gives everyone room to breathe without anything getting buried. The track has a real spacey quality to it – there’s weight in the riffs but also this expansive, almost atmospheric pull that keeps it from feeling like straight-up hard rock. Gutierrez is the centerpiece, though, and her high notes on “Starfire” are where the song really opens up. The production leans into that, letting those moments hit with the kind of clarity that makes them land.

With two more singles already scheduled, 6 Speed Supernova is clearly playing a longer game here. If the arc holds the same quality as “Starfire,” this comeback run is worth following through to the end.

Released via Geodesic Records, the band’s second full-length record unfolds less like an album and more like a current in motion. It does not pause for emphasis, nor does it organize itself around moments of climax. Instead, it moves steadily and insistently, carrying each track into the next as if interruption would mean collapse.

From the opening gesture of “Loading…,” there is already a sense that structure has been loosened. Not abandoned, but softened. “Another Castle” follows with a flicker of playfulness. Its retro, game-like references cut through the haze; yet even here, the band resists sharp edges. Everything feels slightly blurred, as if seen through movement rather than stillness. This is where Dose finds its language: in continuity.

The album’s creation process, shaped partly through live performance, partly through spontaneous studio emergence, reveals itself in how naturally the music flows. Some ideas feel worn-in, stretched over time and audience, while others arrive with the unpredictability of something discovered in the moment. The result is not contrast, but integration. Nothing feels separate enough to be isolated; everything belongs to the same evolving body.

Across tracks like “King of San Francisco” and “Temujin,” there is a grounding weight, something almost historical, or mythic;  while “Serpentine Tangerine” and “Jabberwocky” drift into a more unstable, surreal terrain. Yet even in these shifts, the current remains intact. The album does not fragment. It absorbs.

Once Sun Song emerges, there is a brief illusion of lightness, a kind of opening; only for “Dark Water” to pull the listener back under, closing the record not with resolution, but with depth.

India Tigers in Texas draw from the textures of psychedelic and garage rock: dense guitars, looping patterns, a certain rawness, but they do not linger in familiarity. There are echoes of other contemporary psych acts, yet the band avoids settling into any one lineage. Their sound feels less like a reference point and more like an ongoing process, shaped as much by instinct as by influence.

Through Dose it’s obvious that the band is listening: to both each other and to the music as it forms. Mel Mo’ Black, Jaron Hall, Kevin Barnes, and Victhor Resendiz move as a unit that does not impose direction so much as discover it together. You can hear it in the looseness, in the trust, in the absence of rigidity.

The album drifts across unexpected territories: fragments of history, flashes of psychedelic imagery, reflections from the road, even playful nods to digital worlds. None of it settles into a single narrative. Instead, it mirrors the music’s movement: associative, shifting, always in transition.

Dose does not offer itself in parts. It resists being paused, skipped, or extracted. To engage with India Tigers in Texas here is to follow the same thread that begins in “Loading…” and dissolves into “Dark Water;” a passage that refuses interruption, that insists on being lived through rather than navigated. You are here to surrender to the current!

• After the pandemic halted your 2019 momentum and prompted deep reflection during the creation of Galactic Boogaloo, what internal realizations about your role as a refuge for outcasts and misfits ultimately reignited the band’s drive to chase the next groove?

Well, the pandemic was a global event that impacted all of us. It was a time filled with uncertainty, but it was also a time that demonstrated just just how interconnected we all are. Perhaps this led each of us to reevaluate what we found meaningful. While we started Galactic Boogaloo prior to that, our desire to finish it was fueled by a need to bring people something that could unite us, something that we could talk about and enjoy as a community. However, during that time we all experienced some changes. Our needs and wants impacted our musical expression, and that’s where this new string of songs comes along. Galactic Boogaloo was perhaps a snapshot of a time where more excitement and celebration fueled the music, whereas Starfire, Lonely Godzilla, and Begin Again were fueled by a need to hold each up so that we can rebuild with synergy and continue inspire each other to do the same.

• The single Starfire draws listeners into the furthest reaches of the universal mind through its electrified riffage and tight rhythms. How did the collective songwriting process transform personal contemplations on isolation and humanity into this expansive, mind-expanding sonic landscape?

As a band we always strive to serve the song in a way that feels natural and hits us the right places. There are always some early iterations where we don’t quite know the song just yet, but as we keep playing it, recording ourselves (even if just with our phones) and listen back to the output, we begin to understand more what it is that we mean to say with each song. This in turn helps inform our next iteration of the song. Perhaps we extend verses, choruses, or shorten them. We tend to be fairly open to trying things out and then discussing how we feel about it. Thankfully because of all the years we have worked together, and the love we put into our craft, it has almost become second nature for us to respond to a musical seed with the right amount of nutrients to help it grow into full-fledged song that we feel ready to share with the world.

• Your sound has always fused jazz and progressive influences with classic rock swagger. In what specific ways did the recording sessions for Starfire allow you to push those boundaries further while preserving the raw, groove-driven energy that defines 6 Speed Supernova?

A key area where we grew during these years was on improving our workflow for recording high quality demos week to week, month to month. We recorded a lot of these parts multiple times at home, or at our rehearsal studio. This allowed us to virtually be “in the studio” for months before we actually physically went to a recording studio to make the release-ready versions of the songs. We were able to push ideas in one direction, given them a listen, and then fine-tune as needed to get them to where they truly fit and served the songs. This workflow also made it easier for us to communicate with José Linares the drummer who collaborated with us all the way in Puerto Rico to lay down those heavy beats for our songs.

• With “Lonely Godzilla” scheduled for May 4 and “Begin Again” for June 1, these sequential releases appear to signal a deliberate new era. What narrative or sonic arc connects the three tracks, and how do they collectively represent your “Renaissance” following global turmoil?

We certainly feel like it’s a new era. We more deliberately worked on cementing our storytelling and almost theatrical approach to our music while working through these songs and the narrative arc pretty much revealed itself naturally. We didn’t want to take the songs where they didn’t want to go to fit a story so we were fortunate when it all lined up the way it did.

Pre-order “Starfire” on Bandcamp.

The story itself feels like it’s one about rebirth. In fact, we debated started with Begin Again because of how strongly that topic feels for this era of 6 Speed Supernova. One that’s about accepting the past, lighting a flame in your creative engine, and rebuilding the things that we love and make us feel whole.  In that sense it made more sense musically and story-wise to start with “Starfire“. That songs sets the stage for us facing our fears and standing up for ourselves, our dreams and visions. “Lonely Godzilla” explores more how that path can be a long and isolating one filled with doubt and misunderstandings from others. When it really comes down to it, we are artists who long to be creative. Those emotions might delay us, but we were always going to “Begin Again.”

This arc represents our shared concerns that with so many terrible things going on with the world, why would people care about art? when would they even have time for it? We know one simple thing. We care about art, not just ours, but those from our favorite artists. We know their art helps us deal with adversity and we figure we could do the same for ourselves and others.

• The band’s ethos emphasizes providing an oasis for those who feel invisible. How do you envision the themes in Starfire and the forthcoming tracks resonating with audiences in live settings, particularly as venues reopen and communities seek connection once more?

I think we envision Starfire becoming anthemic. This is the kind of song with a big chorus that a large crowd could sing in unison and feel connected to its lyrics. Then again, even if you don’t feel comfortable doing that and you prefer to air-drum or air-guitar the parts, there’s probably something in there for you to let lose and join in on the fun. There’s something freeing about being at a concert and feeling yourself wanting to mime a part of the song you find iconic and realizing some of people around are doing the exact same thing. It’s not weird. It’s encouraged! There’s no need to feel self-conscious. We are all here to enjoy ourselves however we want! The upcoming songs have many of those same qualities, but touching on different layers and different moods.

• Looking beyond these initial 2026 releases, what larger projects or collaborative explorations are you developing-whether a full album, expanded touring, or new sonic territories-to continue serving as a voice in the silence and a light in times of apathy?

We may or may not have a full narrative for a concept album that may or may not include these releases. We’ll just have to wait and see. That might feel like a tease, but we do also want to be genuine with these choices and not do it because we committed to it even though it might not feel right anymore. We do hope these release will help us find new audiences that we can go perform for in cities we haven’t been to. We know there are people out there who don’t yet know they’d love to see us live.

Come what may, as bandmembers we continue being part of each other’s support group. A lot of our song ideas have come from “obscure sorrows” that we shared with each other unaware that it was a common issue we shared, but perhaps had no name or word for. For example, the feeling of being in the middle of a great meal, dinner party, movie, song, book and realizing that you’re really enjoying it all the while being well-aware that it’ll end. What do we even call that feeling? It’s a very human experience, but not one we seem to like acknowledging very often. We constantly dive deeper into those kinds of sorrows in order to create a score of what this emotion could be and gain more empathy, understanding, and mental wellbeing in the process. We believe music is able to do that, and what better vehicle than heavily-infused Jazzy-Prog Rock music that falls from the cosmos as if ignited by a supernova of the collective unconscious? That is how we serve each other in our band microcosm and by doing so serve all of those who feel similarly but don’t have the outlet we do.