Welcome back Suziey!Recorded in a Russian cemetery in Portland, Oregon.Suziey Block kills it in the found footage insta-classic Horror in the High DesertHer performance in ‘Entrance’ is a haunting tour-de-forceSuziey was last featured on SRTN Episode 194!And you heard it here - Suziey Block is the official SRTN podcast SCREAM QUEEN (statue in development) . . . And we had some good ol' fashioned horror talk and we mutually developed a LABOR screed.SRTN Website

Pete Dryden is a portrait photographer based in Oregon. When he’s not deconstructing the world of photography he’s plotting ways to enter into it.Enter the world of Something

Let's go Hollywood!Something (rather than nothing) Podcast is pleased to present Lori Fetrick who is also known as ICE from American Gladiators!She stars in the Netflix Documentary 'Muscles & Mayhem: An Unauthorized Story of American Gladiators.'Lori does a great podcast called  "Chillin' with Ice" so you can go on a Gladiator nostalgia stroll but also learn so much from Lori in ways of living, eating, being yourself, entertaining, loving art and dealing with your shit.Fan-boy-host-Ken was in his glory. Sparkles of ICE.You rock Lori!Could write forever. But just listentoICEICEBaby

The daughter of two preacher’s kids, Pieta Brown’s early upbringing in Iowa was in a rural outpost with no furnace, running water, or TV.  There, she was exposed to traditional and rural folk music through her father, Greg Brown, the now beloved Midwestern folk singer.  Later, while living with her mother in Birmingham, Alabama during her formative years, Pieta drew on and expanded these influences and began writing poems and composing instrumental songs on piano.  By the time she left home at 18 she had lived in at least 19 different houses and apartments between Iowa and Alabama.In her early 20's, after experiencing what she describes as "the songs calling,” Pieta started experimenting with the banjo and eventually picked up a 1930's Maybell arch-top guitar during a visit to her father's place and never looked back.  Emerging from a disjointed and distinctly 'bohemian' upbringing, Pieta began performing live and making independent recordings soon after teaching herself how to play guitar. "I grew up around a lot of musicians and artists living on the fringe, and have always felt most at home among them," Pieta says.Continually revealing new layers as both a songwriter and performer, Pieta is being recognized as one of modern Americana's true gems.  In recent years Pieta has released multiple highly critically acclaimed albums, with much attention being paid not only to her distinct sound and style, but also the power of her singing and songwriting, including fan favorite Paradise Outlaw (2014 Red House, which Bon Iver master mind, Justin Vernon, called his “favorite recording made at our studio.”) Pieta has toured North America with Mark Knopfler, and toured various regions of the U.S., Australia and Canada with John Prine, Amos Lee, Brandi Carlisle, JJ Cale, Ani Difranco, Mavis Staples, and Calexico among others.  She has co-written songs with and made recent guest appearances on albums by Calexico, Amos Lee, and Iris Dement, whose latest masterpiece Workin’ On A World (2023) Pieta co-produced.  Pieta’s songs and music have been heard in various TV Shows and indie films including Everything Will Be Fine (Wim Wenders).  With the release of her most recent album Freeway (September 2019, Righteous Babe) co-produced by Bon Iver drummer, S. Carey, followed by multiple experimental collaborations since with various artists including JT Bates, S.Carey, and Howe Gelb & The Colorist Orchestra, as well as a new instrumental based side-project she calls Sylvee & The Sea, Pieta’s music and artistry continue to rise.~ "...a style and a sensuality that’s all her own...."- Pop Matters~ "Among the top tier of songwriters today..." - FAME (Folk and Acoustic Music Exchange)~ "...a gifted singer-songwriter whose lyrics are pieces of polished poetry"  - Huffington PostPieta's WebsiteSRTN Website

Cristina Lumague is a freelance podcast producer, editor and the host of Espooky Tales, Historias Unknown and Novelas Con Cafecito.Enjoy this SRTN Halloween Special! Cristina and Ken talk about spooky tales, horror movies, telenovelas, podcasting, art y mas . . . espooky Patreon SRTN Podcast

Charles Mulford is a sculptor based in New Jersey. He holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and a BFA from Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts. His sculptures have been exhibited in the New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ, the Attleboro Arts Museum, Attleboro, MA, the Bruton Museum, Somerset, UK, and The Center for Contemporary Art, Bedminster, NJ. Mulford apprenticed at the Seward Johnston Atelier, specializing in metal chasing and fabrication. His work is part of the special collection of the Vanderbilt University Library and Temple University Library.Charles Mulford’s sculptures explore the complex emotions surrounding anxiety through the lens of humor. Cartoon figures, 3D-modeled objects, and scans of human heads act as vehicles for theatrical narratives. Mired in tragic circumstances, the characters express their feelings about illness and death. Exaggerate scenes capture a sense of unease, reflecting the stress and vulnerability of anxiety. The result is a visual representation of a tortuous and sometimes humorous world.Mulford websiteSRTN Website

Host Ken Volante was watching some 'Dark Souls' gameplay and heard some rocking music down at the Albany, Oregon skatepark. He got to meet Nick of Skeleton Boy and here we bring you some of the sounds from the Willamette Valley. Thanks Nick for the great chat!💀Welcome to The Bone Zone💀💀Punk-ish band from Albany, Oregon💀💀Keepin' it spooky 24/7/365💀Skeleton BoySRTN Website

Carol Butler is a ballpoint illustrator based in Boise Idaho, where she works seasonally as an organic farmer.An avid cyclist, and Norm Macdonald fan. She spends her time being a day dreaming degenerate while getting lost in the throws of a good science fiction novel.Featuring special guest host Sarah Romano-DiehlCarol in Insta!SRTN Website

Producer / composer / multi-instrumentalist Angel Marcloid records music under the moniker Fire-Toolz. Though Marcloid’s output emerges in a litany of distinct aliases and projects — from the jazz fusion / new age of Nonlocal Forecast to the vaporous nostalgia of MindSpring Memories — the Fire-Toolz catalog remains the central focus of the prolific artist’s musical universe and a home for Marcloid’s most ambitious and combinatory work. 'I am upset because I see something that is not there.', the fifth Fire-Toolz album to join the Hausu Mountain catalog since 2017, follows 2021’s sprawling double-album Eternal Home (HAUSMO111) and 2022’s self-released EP I will not use the body’s eyes today. I am upset […] offers listeners a prismatic cross-section of juxtaposed genres and compositional contortions to explore, maintaining Fire-Toolz’s signature density and complexity while tightening the scope of Marcloid’s experimentation into the project’s most focused song cycle to date. Perhaps more than any previous Fire-Toolz album, I am upset […] presents some form of pop music, carried in Marcloid’s passages of clean vocals, in the bright synth and keyboard tones that animate its tracks, in the yearning saxophone lines that pour into view and whisk the narrative onto a new path. The format of a one-person “band” carries a different weight in a landscape of solo artists crafting abstract modernist productions that don’t allude in the slightest to various twentieth-century rock-related traditions. Fire-Toolz exists on both sides of this divide.Fire-ToolzSRTN Podcast

Jadon Allen is the founder of Guilt! or guiltpdx, a streetwear and street art company based out of Portland, Oregon with the main goal of pushing creative boundaries. Guilt! produces a plethora of goods including unique clothing, colorful artworks, photography, and videography sold both online and in local Portland stores. More work can be found @guiltpdx on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.Jadon AllenSRTN Website

Elle Nash is the author of the short story collection Nudes (404 Ink and SF/LD Books) novels Gag Reflex (Clash Books) and Animals Eat Each Other (404 Ink and Dzanc Books), which was featured in the 2018 June Reading Room of O - The Oprah Magazine and hailed by Publishers Weekly as a ‘complex, impressive exploration of obsession and desire.' Her new novel, Deliver Me (Unnamed Press) was released October 2023. Her work appears in Guernica, BOMB, The Nervous Breakdown, Literary Hub, The Fanzine, Volume 1 Brooklyn, New York Tyrant and elsewhere. She is a founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine and has edited fiction at both Hobart Pulp and Expat Literary Journal.elle's websitepodcast website

Alternative tragic Americana, invocations for peace & judgment reshaping with bleeding heart stream of consciousness poems.Originally from Connecticut, before becoming a western transplant, Anna May is a singular artist whose songs bear a placelessness that lends to their timeless nature.The deep exploration of heartbreak and trauma has been an ongoing quest throughout Anna's work.Her lyrics have been heavily textured by a lonesome whimsicality that finds itself most at home in the vastness of the American West.Anna's music honors the nomadic spirit with memory, meditation & fresh interpretations of folk music and jazz influence. She honors a hope to enhance connection, humility, healing, and joy among people in the process of parting with typical genre rules.Anna's lyrical sensibility is steeped in wisdom, and layered with evocative musicality and metaphysical embroidery while eschewing the mainstream & parting with platitudes. Anna explores both estrangement and connection while taking cues from artists like Billie Holiday, Shawn Colvin, Neil Young, and Leonard Cohen.As a yogi, pianist, teacher & poet, she masterfully blends all of her influences into her songwriting.Anna has performed at wildflower music & arts festival, treefort music festival, Boston arts festival, water lantern festival, trout lake hall, abbey arts in Seattle, Globe Hall in Denver, Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, Broadway Comedy Club in Manhattan, the Mint in Los Angeles, and many more.Anna May WebsiteSRTN Website

Sarah Romano Diehl is a comic artist based in Seattle, WA. Her work is published in Seattle Magazine, The Stranger, and Scarff Comics Newspaper. Sarah has been publishing her minicomics and collabing with other comix artists and writers for around ten years. She loves being outside and near water.Sarah's websiteSRTN Website

Over to the NYC to get exclusive coverage of the plays Sex Work, Sex Play by Caytha Jentis and Doris Day: My Secret Love by Paul Adams!Caytha Jentis is a former literary agent. She has written, produced and directed a number of award-winning features including Bad Parents starring Janeane Garofalo, Cheri Oteri, Christopher Titus and Kristen Johnston (Cinedigm), And Then Came Love starring Vanessa Williams and Eartha Kitt (Warner Bros), and The One starring Jon Prescott (TLA Releasing). She has an MFA from UCLA in screenwriting and a BS in TV/film from Syracuse University. She is a member of the Producers Guild and NYWIFT.Paul Adams founded Emerging Artists Theatre in 1993 and has been the Artistic Director for the life of the company. During this time, he has helped showcase hundreds of new works (plays, solo-shows, musicals & dance pieces) for off and off-off Broadway. Some of his favorite credits include directing the off-Broadway production of Sisters’ Dance by Sarah Hollister at Baruch Performing Arts Center and producing the solo-show The Sensational Josephine Baker by Cheryl Howard which had two off-Broadway runs at Theatre Row and received a rave review in the NY Times. Paul performed his critically acclaimed solo-show The Cleaning Guy at FringeNYC in 2016 and is currently workshopping his full length play, Doris Day: My Secret Love. He has also served on the NY Innovative Theatre Awards committee since its inception.Emerging Artists TheatreCaytha Jentis SRTN Podcast Website

Nataša Babič is a New York actress, originally from Ljubljana, Slovenia. Natasa studied musical theater at the Performing Arts Studios Vienna. She continued her studies in New York at The Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute. Upon completion, she joined the HB Acting Studios and studied with Austin Pendleton in his advanced scene study class.Nataša performed Off and Off Off Broadway for many years. Her first Off Broadway role was Sandra/Sissy a split personality character in Anne L. Thompson Scretching’s "The Sanctuary" at the American Theater Of Actors. One of her favorite roles was the impressionist painter Mary Cassatt in The Independents. The play opened Off Broadway at the Jerry Orbach Theater in 2019 and extended it's run twice. Nataša’s latest performance Off Broadway was Tammany Hall at the SoHo Playhouse. This immersive theater production was directed by Alexander Wright and Darren Lee Cole. Nataša has also developed her film and TV career. Amongst others she played a lead role in a horror movie Dark Tarot, a supporting role in an indie feature Life is Too Short and a thriller Gunpoint.Nataša joined the Hallmark Movie Channel family in their new production The Dancing Detective, A Deadly Tango. She is playing a lead supporting role of Mary Aston. The movie premiered on Hallmark in June 2023. Nataša is looking forward to what the future might bring and is a determined optimist on this ever changing path of life.Website SRTN Website

A special interview with Sadie Dupuis.Dupuis chats about art, labor, music, meaning, poetry and Speedy Ortiz's 'Rabbit Rabbit" record release out this very same day! Features the tracks "Scabs" and "Ranch v Ranch."“Rabbit rabbit” is a superstitious incantation repeated on the first of each month to bring good fortune—a belief practiced by Sadie Dupuis, the guitarist, singer and songwriter of the Philadelphia rock quartet Speedy Ortiz. As a child with OCD, she followed arbitrary rituals, a coping mechanism commonly triggered by early trauma, and “rabbit rabbit” was one that stuck. When Dupuis began to parse difficult memories for the first time in her songwriting, it felt like kismet to name her band’s resultant fourth record after an expression of luck and repetition: Rabbit Rabbit. Instead of re-treading old routines, the record finds Speedy Ortiz interrogating conventions, grappling with cycles of violence and destructive power dynamics with singular wit and riffs. Rabbit Rabbit finds Speedy Ortiz at its most potent: melodically fierce, sonically mountainous, scorching the earth and beginning anew.SadieSpeedy OrtizSRTN

Very happy to share a ranging conversation with activist Rick Staggenborg. Recorded at a union hall in Albany, Oregon, host Ken Volante and Rick talk about public banking, health care for all, philosophy, God, veterans, service and hope for the betterment of humans.Rick is a retired psychiatrist who specialized in PTSD and worked in community psychiatry before finishing his career at the VA, retiring in 2010.Rick advocates for universal health care as a member of Physicians for a National Health Program and by serving in multiple roles with Health Care for All Oregon and is  chair of the Faith Caucus.Rick is also an Army veteran and is active in the antiwar movement as the President of the Linus Pauling Chapter of Veterans For Peace.Listen in on this special and exploratory episode!SRTN Website

Charles Payne is a Madison transplant, a certified teacher, and self-taught social artist, originally from Michigan. Payne is a Shop One Educator/Artist Residency Finalist and a 2022 TMT New Play Development Playwright. Their play ‘Da Classroom Ain’t Enuf’ was an American Players Theatre New Voices: Creating the Classics of Tomorrow semi-finalist and a Wisconsin Wrights 2022 New Play Development project finalist. Payne is an Isthmus contributor, a Madison Magazine contributor and the Arts + Literature Lab’s inaugural ALL Originals Prize winner.Charles Payne - One Water MadisonSRTN Podcast Website

In a world dominated by overnight internet sensations and one-hit-wonders, emerging artist Ainsley Costello has her eyes set on creating a legacy that stands the test of time. A power house voice in the vain of Haley Williams or Pink, Ainsley's lyrics can also be delicately delivered. Costello's heartfelt and personal approach to lyricism translates into an easily digestible and heartwarming listening experience.At only 15, the Seattle native (now based in Nashville) released a strikingly diverse debut album titled ‘You Know I Am’ – on the surface, a collection of country pop songs, but dig deeper and you’ll unravel a multitude of diverse musical influences and lyrics that speak to all of the insecurities of today’s teenage girls.In February 2020, Ainsley and her family relocated to Nashville, just as the world and the music industry shut down due to the Pandemic. But that didn't stop Ainsley, throughout quarantine she used her time to write new material and connect with dozens of Nashville "row writers" to hone and perfect her craft. Creating a body of work that speaks volumes for her young age Ainsley already has a catalogue of nearly 200 unreleased, and 24 published works. In 2021 Ainsley released a song each month, the equivalent of her second studio album and in 2022 she has released 5 more songs.Ironically, after moving to Nashville (the country music capital of the world), Ainsley began to pivot away from the country music that had originally inspired her. Realizing that Nashville was more than just country music her creativity cracked open. Her newest songs clearly have a more pop-rock leaning vibe.  While many reviewers still hear elements of country tones in her voice, paired with the edgier music, some have started to describe her music as "country-punk" or "pretty pop." Inspired by Paramore, Kings of Leon and Caitlyn Smith (all hailing from Nashville) you clearly hear a unique sound emerging in her 2022 works. With a strong sense for live instrumentation others have described her music as a strain of LA/POP from the 90's and early 2000's. Another reviewer described it as acoustic college rock with a modern twist. With a dedicated and growing following it is clear that Ainsley is set on creating a career that stands the test of time.Ainsley began performing in school talent shows and musical theater productions at the age of 7. She has since gone on to study piano, guitar, vocal performance, and songwriting. She attended Tacoma School of the Arts as a freshman in high-school and shortly thereafter began traveling and touring the West Coast full-time. At just 15 Ainsley moved to online high-school (so she could tour) and simultaneously began taking classes at the prestigious Berklee College of Music Online. She graduated from high school at 16 and was formally accepted to the Berklee College of Music's Business Degree program shortly after. At just 19 years old, in May 2023 Ainsley graduated from Berklee College of Music with a Bachelors of Art in Music Business.Ainsley began performing live shows with a full band of adult professional-level musicians at just 13 years old. By the time she was 14 she could regularly hold down a 3-hour cover set. At 13 & 14 she was involved with unaired episodes of "The Voice" and "American Idol." At 14, Ainsley became one of Breedlove Guitars youngest endorsed artists and has since been endorsed by Mackie Sound and has strategic partnerships with Taylor Guitars and Sennheiser Microphones. To date she has performed over 200 shows in 20 states on festival, fair, and bar states alike.Ainsley Costello WebsiteSRTN Website

Born in the sterile hills of Happy Valley Keddies Resort is breathing life into the bloated carcass of the rock world. With an ever changing sound they continue to find a unique position in the current musical landscape. Maintaining a foundation of punchy riffs, temple throbbing breakdowns and melodic intricacy, they have set themselves on a continuous crash course for musical explosion.Keddies Resort fans lodge here InstaSRTN Podcast Website