Welcome to Stadiums & Shrines, as it is now, in the present. Ever since its early days as a simple outlet to share whatever played in my headspace, the site has been searching for something else, something that both celebrates music and tries to understand it better—its relationship to visual art, language, photography, and how that all interacts with our imagination. Finding the balance between this curiosity and participating in the discovery of new music has no doubt always been a work in progress.

I took a break these past few months to reflect and to consider what’s next—and, in turn, to appreciate the relationships that have come about directly and indirectly through our involvement in this wonderful community. I was able to see how much I’d miss the whole process, and it became clear to me that this wasn’t as much a time to move on as it was to evolve.

Joining Victoria and I on this progression is Nathaniel Whitcomb, the mind behind Think or Smile, whose visual work has been hung throughout our pages and projected across our live shows …a lot. The partnership formed naturally—he’s actually been inside the site for a while now, and its new home would not exist without him. S&S has earned its ampersand. We’re navigating this world together.

In the coming season, expect some different angles on content, and a deeper dig in general. For now, we’ll just enter what has become our central project: Dreams.

Here we will explore places, or rather, ideas of places from a bygone era by collaborating with musicians on pieces inspired by Nathaniel’s handmade collages, the very collages you drifted through above (with sound design from M. Sage). We call them “Dreams” because they invoke places we’ll never step foot in; regions and countries that are defined in large part by the imagination far outside the confines of cultural history or accuracy, or even more so, reality. And we are encouraging this—artists involved are given a collage with the incentive to engage the surreal and report back with their sounds like two dreams in conversation. What results is as much theirs as it is ours.

True to form, there is no end in sight. Dreams will be ongoing and open, and we invite you to join us in any way, shape, or form.

Thanks for your support, see you in the clouds.

Real Love,
S&S