The 'Dreams Outside' EP presents the post-jazz instrumental trio dustlights at their collective spirit’s edge, moving in moments, with psychedelic peaks, synergic transitions, and melodic reveries singing and screaming over their signature foundation of minimalist groove and layered effects. Featuring many songs improvised right on stage when they toured their critically-acclaimed 2018 debut 'In A Stillness', dustlights’ second release with Ropeadope Records captures the raw energy and sonic explorations of true live performance, while still delving deeply into the same core of dark beautiful moods that captured critics attention in 2018: “The sax/bass/drums threesome is like well-designed mood lighting. Quiet and thoughtful, beautifully minimal, this is background music for the foreground, occasionally feeling like an instrumental Morphine on morphine.” - Jambase “Saxophonist Joe Wilson, drummer David Christian and bassist Ran Livneh make judicious use of electronic effects, and its harmonic influence is the sign of its strength. Every now and then, I field a “what next” question, both for people looking to get into modern jazz and those just looking for similar music to explore. If Portishead is the foundation of that what-next question, then Dustlights would make a fine answer. They’ve got just enough post-jazz in their delivery to make it an easy crossover from ambient rock tastes.” - Bird is the Worm https://dustlights.bandcamp.com/ https://open.spotify.com/artist/6U6O4VdHk388P73t37eZ9P

Volume is a FREE reading & music series featuring prose, poetry and a short DJ set. Every second Saturday at 7:00 pm at The Spotty Dog. Books are available for purchase and signing. This month's writers include: NICK FLYNN has worked as a ship’s captain, an engineer, and a case-worker with homeless adults. He is the author of twelve books, including the New York Times best-seller memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. His most recent book is I Will Destroy You, a collection of poems. MARCO RAFALÁ is a first-generation Sicilian American novelist, musician, and writer for award-winning tabletop role-playing games. He earned his MFA in Fiction from The New School and is a co-curator of the Guerrilla Lit Reading Series in New York City. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, he now lives in Brooklyn, New York. How Fires End is his debut novel. CHLOE CALDWELL is the author of the critically acclaimed novella WOMEN and the essay collections I'll Tell You in Person and Legs Get Led Astray. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Buzzfeed, Vice, Nylon Longreads, and many anthologies including Goodbye To All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving NYC. She teaches creative nonfiction classes in NYC at Catapult and lives in Hudson. Followed by a DJ set by DJ Kate Hewett. "Two Hudson writers seem to have found a new formula, turning the traditional reading into a party celebrating the best in new lit." --Jamie Larson, Rural Intelligence "Two 'dorks' pump up the Volume in Hudson, NY. Reclusive literati come out and play in a converted firehouse on the second Saturday of every month." --Benjamin Cassidy, The Berkshire Eagle www.facebook.com/volumehudson

The trick is to make a confession entertaining. A Private Picture, the debut album by Chicago’s Fran, delivers a collection of extremely personal experiences that have been distilled and abstracted to the point that you can see yourself in their imagery, find analogs to your own emotional history in their scenarios –when you hear them, it’s a conversation. It’s therapy, if therapy was allowed to turn you on and make you shake what you got. At its core, Fran’s music is about sharing a truth -–telling it, confessing it, yelling it—in the service of human connection. Or, as Jacobson puts it, “I feel that I am a songwriter for the same reason I wanted to be an actor. I want to tell the truth. I want to challenge myself to get closer and closer to the core of an experience, an emotion- I want to say it, sing it, in a way that says exactly what it is. I cry when I write songs because I am constantly making discoveries, about myself, about the world, about the best way to convey and connect and get closer.” jodi (Valatie via Montclair, NJ) Gentle, cathartic songwriting with a languid drawl. $8 cover, music starts around 8pm!

Two pianos, Celtic Harp, Steel Drum, Flute, Synthesizers, Alto and Tenor Saxophones, Recorder, Electric Bass and only three musicians in the band? Steely Din. Groovy tunes at talkable volumes.

Author and musician Cameron Dezen Hammon’s memoir of faith and faltering weaves her zealous conversion to evangelicalism with the search for a more progressive and fluid theology, and the endurance of marriage with an unexpected obsession that threatens to upend her carefully constructed life. “A generous and unflinchingly brave memoir about faith, feminism, and freedom.”  —KIRKUS

BEN SERETAN In the personally tempestuous summer of 2017 Ben Seretan was suddenly struck by an idea, the kind that arrives fully formed, gift wrapped and complete: a piece of dense, cinematic ambient music, one entire day long. A monolithic and kind of ridiculous project that, in its gargantuan scope, would be something to cling to while everything else seemed to be falling apart. In the ensuing 18 months, Ben walked the straight line of that project - cheekily named My Life's Work - dutifully recording 48 half-an-hour segments of dreamy, sea swell guitar tones over the course of three nights, sunset to sunrise, that were then released and paired with pages and pages of deeply personal writing. (My Life's Work is also available as a dial-in hotline - try it, call 561.926.9741). Ben has always been interested in testing limits of music, songs, guitars, and audiences - he has organized a concert series at dawn, he has performed for audiences of one, he has performed in actual bedrooms, and he has always paired his tender, almost inaudible songs and sprawling ambient music with loud, chaotically joyful full-band guitar pyrotechnic work outs (work outs that often contain a single word or phrase repeated ad infinitum like 2014's "Ticonderoga," 2015's "Yellow Roses"). Not quite just a songwriter, not quite just a guitar ripper, not quite just an ambient musician, Ben stays restless and prolific, while always looking for what's tattooed in purple ink above his heart: ecstatic joy. SINAI VESSEL "Sinai Vessel is a band about songs from Nashville, Tennessee. Conceived in 2009 as a songwriting vehicle for one Caleb Cordes, the project released several records, ebbed and flowed in member involvement, and shifted in map demarcation over the ensuing years, culminating in 2017’s Brokenlegged — a hard-won set of tracks Pitchfork called “superhumanly earnest”. Two years later, the project has circled back to just Cordes’ sole voice and vision. His second LP for Tiny Engines, made by enlisting help from collaborators with fellow southerners Lomelda and Hovvdy, is due out in 2020."

Taylor-Rae Yarrow is a contemporary artist, always evolving, and bouncing between folk, experimental, and noise inspirations.

Claude and Ola are experimental musicians working in improvised sound. They utilize modular synthesizer, piano, bowed banjo, voice, and various electronics to create a deep listening experience with audiences. In addition to their sound practice they publish Deft Esoterica, a zine dedicated to experimental music and sound art. Brian Dewan is an artist who works in many media, including art, music, audio-visual performances, decorative painting, furniture design, poetry and musical instrument design. Dewan writes, narrates and illustrates I-CAN-SEE Filmstrips, and collaborates with his cousin Leon Dewan in the electronic music duo Dewanatron. He has produced four albums of songs and concertized extensively as a solo artist, as well as having performed in various collaborations and as a sideman. His musical releases include: Tells The Story, The Operating Theater, Words Of Wisdom, and Ringing At The Speed Of Prayer. Dewan lives in Catskill, New York.