Tonight at CAM Raleigh, John Darnielle, the musician (Mountain Goats) and novelist (“Wolf in White Van)”, closes out our 2015 Big, Bent Ears kissa series with a set he describes this way: “I’m calling it RAMPING DOWN and I’ll start with intense metal stuff and move into mellower stuff. So I think the image should […]

Thursday night’s kissa session at CAM Raleigh will be a unique treat.  Marshall Wyatt of Raleigh’s Old Hat Records will select and play around twenty favorite 78’s from his extraordinary collection of rareties.  Marshall is bringing in his own vintage sound system for the occasion.  He says the 78’s will roughly span the years 1925 […]

Improvising musician Jeb Bishop took the controls at the music kissa at the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh Thursday, October 8. He dug into his vast vinyl and CD collection with the theme “Groove vs. Antigroove” in mind. Bishop defines that (loosely) as “a kind of alternation between music with a beat you can dance to […]

Thursday night was a unique one in the early life of the Big, Bent Ears kissa at CAM Raleigh.  Grayson Haver Currin, a comrade in the endeavor of careful listening, filled the media lab and the lower level gallery with music at the highest decibels heard in the kissa to date, a set he called […]

  At Rock Fish Stew, we dig relics, artifacts, things left behind that mean something.  Below is the document that Art of Cool‘s Cicely Mitchell brought to our kissa at CAM Raleigh on Monday night.  As a motivator always looking to spread jazz further (when she’s not – or even when she is – performing […]

Laura Ballance (musician in Superchunk, co-founder of Merge Records) brought a careful array of records and had CAM Raleigh‘s kissa spinning last night, the latest edition of our Big, Bent Ears kissa experiment. Here are a few remnants.  First, her set list for the BBE archives.  Then a few snapshots by RFS friends.

RFS seeks two self-starting interns for summer 2015. Interns will help support current documentary projects, help manage the website and social media, contribute ideas and material, research and help write grants, transcribe interviews, and participate in fundraising. An interest in literature, film, and/or other creative endeavors is a plus. Video, photography, film editing, web design, creative research and […]

Last night, Rock Fish Stew Institute of Literature and Materials held its second annual tasting of rockfish stew at our offices in downtown Durham. Chef Ricky Moore, owner of Durham’s Saltbox Seafood Joint, took honors again this year, making a stupendous stew with a rockfish (aka striped bass) caught the day before in the Pamlico […]

RFS seeks two self-starting interns for the fall season 2014. Interns will help support current documentary projects, help manage the website and social media, contribute ideas and material, research and help write grants, transcribe interviews, and participate on a Kickstarter campaign. An interest in literature, film, and/or other creative endeavors is a plus. Video, photography, […]

Durham, NC — Rock Fish Stew is premiering “Leaving Traces,” a 75-minute documentary by RFS partner Ivan Weiss, at the Full Frame Theater at the American Tobacco Campus. Showtime is 6pm on July 12. The film follows a group of artists who converged on the Durham Bulls Athletic Park during the 2013 season for Rock Fish Stew’s […]