Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Ryan J. Prado
Review of We Are Underlings
Doretta Lau House of Anansi Press (Oct 20, 2026) Softcover $21.99 (336pp) 978-1-4870-1430-8 The commodification of death and the afterlife are focal in Doretta Lau’s comical, heartwarming novel We Are Underlings. When twenty-something marketing underling Zita is hired to galvanize favorable press toward the eventual opening of Nine Circles, the world’s first and only theme park focused on death, dying, and the afterlife, a series of mortal mysteries ensues.
Review of Floodmarks
Dale Neal Regal House Publishing (Dec 15, 2026) Softcover $19.95 (208pp) 978-1-64603-756-8 A cub reporter comes to terms with his past in Dale Neal’s gripping novel Floodmarks. George is a newcomer to the Citizen Times, a daily paper in Asheville, North Carolina—the home of his literary idol, Thomas Wolfe.
Spin Cycle: Go With the Flow
They say you should never shout “fire” in a crowded room, but that didn’t stop Imperial Teen drummer Lynn Truell from leaping up and doing just that. It happened mid-song, during the legendary San Francisco punk-pop crew’s first Portland show in ages, which I attended at Swan Dive, October 18. Though quickly determined to be a hasty alert (a scare due to an overachieving fog machine), the band leveraged the levity of the moment as a bit of an icebreaker.
Spin Cycle: Don’t Look Back in Anger
Music being a cyclical affair isn’t news, exactly. When I attended middle school in the early ’90s, fashion and tunes from the ’60s were infiltrating the airwaves, even as PNW grunge groups waged their own musical war with the dregs of hair metal in the underground.
Spin Cycle: Feel the Pain
It can be tough to focus on new music releases when you’re mired in the hell of aches and pains. I’m lucky to have been almost entirely free from it the vast majority of my adult life, but as I descend into the dreaded middle age (gagged a little bit writing that), the looming fangs of discomfort have begun to gnash out in ever-increasing acuity.
Spin Cycle: Feel Good In Your Own Skin
The world seems mired in a perpetual scheming to dash you this way and that, to discard the intended path of your momentum, and leave a great big sinkhole in the road. The older you get, the more it appears that little clouds follow you around, ready to sprinkle all over your best-laid plans. And maybe that’s just the residue from a week of unseasonable rain and overcast doldrums that hit Portland in early September, well before any of us were ready for it.
Tape Op Magazine Releases a New Book, Making Music
What follows is one of the many articles in the Mercury’s 2026 Fall Arts Issue. Find a print copy here, subscribe to get a copy mailed to you here, and if you’re feeling generous and want to keep these types of articles coming, support us here.—eds.
Spin Cycle: Hi-Fi High Fives
Consciously or not, the number five seems to have popped up in the selections for this edition of Spin Cycle. Whether for a project that took five years, or a fifth overall artist release, the power of the five hits clearly for this wide-ranging trio of new albums. Numerological, spiritual, and religious interpretations of the number proffer ideas of rebirth, of change. Humans utilize the five senses to help navigate the world around them, with five toes and five fingers on each appendage.
Review of Americans without Borders
The Radical Activists Who Fought for US Ideals Abroad While Facing Political Persecution at Home Julia Harte Redwood Press (Oct 6, 2026) Hardcover $30.00 (420pp) 978-1-5036-3283-7 Intimate stories of American-born activists whose travels to foreign countries wreaked panic in the United States are detailed in Julia Harte’s captivating book Americans Without Borders.
Review of Fail Sons
Adam Wilson Soho Press (Oct 6, 2026) Hardcover $29.00 (240pp) 978-1-64129-863-6 The anxieties of a generation arrive at loggerheads via alienated siblings in Adam Wilson’s hysterical novel Fail Sons. In the midst of COVID-19 restrictions, estranged brothers Scott and Nick are tasked with picking up their father’s frozen body at a closing Cryo Center in Arizona and transporting it to a Massachusetts facility.
Listen to the Sounds of Resistance (and Cumbia) on Orquestra Pacifico Tropical’s New Album
From the opening moments of “El Poder,” the title track from Orquestra Pacifico Tropical’s third album, the band establishes a wall of rhythmic positivity. The song, like the band performing it, emerges as a reaction to a society showing its frayed edges evermore, slicing through the political noise with bombastic blasts of psychedelic Northwest cumbia. The Portland-based 11-piece collective is a multicultural force that has been lighting up large stages for over a decade.
Spin Cycle: The Kids Are Alright
As I swayed gently in a dusty hammock at my campsite somewhere off the Logging Road trail of Pendarvis Farm at the recent Pickathon festival, the sky began its nightly shift from blue to purple to black. The spectral tones of three or four artists flitted through the moss and ferns of the camping zones all at once, threatening an unwanted early snooze on an evening promising late night Galaxy Barn freakouts and moonlit paddock meanderings.
Spin Cycle: Your Art Is Not an Island
The sticky wicket of adhering to the notion of artistic identity can either stifle or shepherd musicians across a variety of styles. But one of the more beautiful parts of anyone’s creative passage is when it becomes unbearable to produce within any predisposed bucket of categorization, and when the many hands that have helped you through become less like footnotes and more like guideposts. Foundations. We’re each a great big mashup of countless flotsam, despite our best efforts.
Time to Get LIT(erary) at Pickathon
Praise for Pickathon takes on many exclamatory descriptives and tags, and for good reason. The long-running music and arts festival has transformed the paradigm of what a summer festival can and should be, thanks to the tedious and visionary efforts of its organizers.
Spin Cycle: Into the Woods
Summertime respites are pretty much mandatory for Portlanders who can still hear the faint echoes of raindrops at the dawn of each day. For me, the unplugged therapy of Mt. Hood camping, kayaking, lakeing, and hiking is just the panacea for a steaming pile of societal noise. I escaped there recently, with the albums featured in this edition of Spin Cycle in tow—that is, until my trusty, aged Bluetooth speaker seemed to bite the dust.
Review of West Meets East
Stories of Americans in China William N. Brown Amplify Publishing (249pp) 979-889138825-3 Clarion Rating: 4 out of 5 With the hope of overcoming turmoil between the US and China, the encouraging cross-cultural survey West Meets East drills into relationships and projects between real people in the two nations. The longstanding and complicated affinity between Americans and Chinese people is placed in personal perspective in William N. Brown’s cultural survey West Meets East.
Sowing the Seeds
For a farm, summer brings a much-needed influx of sunshine to fuel the sustenance growing in the ground. The landscape comes alive with all manner of vegetables and fruits, flowers, berries, and temporary rainbows catching the light in arcs of sprinkler spray. For Topaz Farm, it also signals the beginning of their intimate live music series, now in its sixth year.
Spin Cycle: Brain Food
Look, it’s a very good problem to have when it’s so tough to whittle down all the great new music in Portland for this here humble column. The city has churned out a glut of formidable albums in June alone that have been dominating my earholes (Orquestra Pacifico Tropicale’s El Poder, Lexie’s Halcyon Days, and BendreTheGiant’s Swollen Eyes among them).
Reviewer Ryan Prado Interviews Juda Bennett, Author of QTOPIA: A MEMOIR OF LOVE, LAND, AND LIBERATION
“Everyone knew there was a party, but not everyone wanted to go. For me, it was transformative. … I ‘dropped out’ (which was a badge of honor back then) as the Vietnam War was ending and Nixon was being impeached, and lots of people were seeking change. … queer communards believed they could not just DO anything but also BE anything. We were not just escaping mainstream society like the others but also the closet and shame. We were not just leaving convention behind but shedding old masks.
Spin Cycle: Very Proud of Ya
Pride Month, like most if not all designated awareness months, ought to just be imbued into the everyday fabric of society. Pride in who you are, what you believe, how you identify, and how you show up is really about the freedom to be whoever and whatever the hell you want to be, with whomever you want to be.
Review of Scribblings from Storage
The Confessions of an English Major Charles Francis Guittard First Edition Design Publishing (356pp) 978-1-5069-1517-3 Clarion Rating: 2 out of 5 Scribblings from Storage is a wholesome, inquisitive, and rearward-gazing coming-of-age memoir that seeks general wisdom among recollections of years of hesitation.
Spin Cycle: Near, Far, Wherever You Are
The Spin Cycle setting has been on overload the past few weeks, with a heavy rotation of wide-ranging musical gems that run the genre gamut. And while I’d love to have some sort of thematic quotient to every edition of this humble column, aside from the following artists being talented, fierce queer forces of nature, there are nearly no discernible aural similarities. And you know what? THAT RULES. If variety is the spice of life, I’ll take mine triple-X hot with a side of fresh Carolina Reapers.
Spin Cycle: Songs From the Wild
A favorite pastime of mine is to take long walks in the Buckman neighborhood, trying to determine from where the echoes of practicing musicians are originating. Depending on the day, an acoustic performance thrums through a barricade of bushes behind my yard, where an unseen troubadour routinely serenades the streets in anonymity.
Get Into the Groove
What follows is one of the many articles in the Mercury‘s 2026 Music Issue. Find a print copy here, subscribe to get a copy mailed to you here, and if you’re feeling generous and want to keep these types of articles coming, support us here.—eds. Like many dot-com era ideas ushered into use just below the radar in the early 2000s, the Discogs project was poised to solve a niche problem.
Spin Cycle: Call It By Its Name
I didn’t set out to cover two Portland metal bands in successive editions of Spin Cycle, but here we are. The laws of the muses operating as they do, the heavier end of the audio spectrum has been dominating my brain space in the weeks leading up to summertime. Even a weeklong sojourn to Kauai with family, where ukuleles and slippery slide guitar music was the soundtrack du jour, couldn’t deter the encroaching shadow of what is a vibrant and, sadly, overlooked metal community in Portland.
Review of Qtopia
A Memoir of Love, Land, and Liberation Juda Bennett University of Wisconsin Press (May 26, 2026) Softcover $18.95 (200pp) 978-0-299-35704-7 The road to peace and love is paved with poise and self-discovery in Juda Bennett’s coming-of-New-Age memoir Qtopia. Bennett was expected and encouraged by his nuclear family parents to join the military upon his high school graduation in 1971.
Spin Cycle: Go Your Own Way
It probably goes without saying that it’s difficult to choose just three albums to feature for each edition of Spin Cycle. Inundated by a flurry of cultural crib sheets, personal recommendations, and last-minute rando diamonds in the rough, whittling down to what ends up in this column can be an internal struggle. And being off social media for years, in my case, makes the game a bit more insular.
Review of Sade's Wife
The Woman Behind the Marquis Margaret Crosland Pushkin Press Classics (Apr 28, 2026) Softcover $16.95 (176pp) 978-1-80533-062-2 Renée-Pélagie de Montreuil, the wife of the infamous French writer Marquis de Sade, is the subject of Margaret Crosland’s illuminating biography Sade’s Wife. De Montreuil’s 1763 betrothal to the marquis was orchestrated by her mother, Madame de Montreuil, who had connections to France’s elite.
Spin Cycle: Get Up to Get Down!
Somehow, until recently, I hadn’t yet attended any live shows at the Get Down—the subterranean Central Eastside venue thriving since its 2022 opening. With a flush of seasonably accurate sunshine tantalizing even the most curmudgeonly amongst us this past weekend in Portland, I made it a point to touch base with the venue during a regional tour stop by London art rockers Ulrika Spacek.
Review of Fermi's Paradox
And How Intelligent Life Arose on Earth D. Mark Yeomans FriesenPress (678pp) 978-1-03-832127-5 Clarion Rating: 3 out of 5 Expressing awe over the wonders of life’s emergence on Earth, the intricate scientific treatise Fermi’s Paradox reframes questions about extraterrestrial intelligence. The question of the existence of intelligent life beyond Earth is dissected in D. Mark Yeomans’s scientific treatise Fermi’s Paradox.
It Happened at the Palace
A History of New York’s Iconic Broadway Theater Stewart F. Lane Broad Book Press (208pp) 978-1-73751-789-4 Clarion Rating: 4 out of 5 A primer on the lived history of the theater through an ever-changing cultural landscape, the historical retrospective It Happened at the Palace is comprehensive and edifying. Palace Theatre co-owner Stewart F. Lane’s centennial-plus retrospective It Happened at the Palace pays homage to the legendary Broadway theater.
Spin Cycle: Three Albums of Transition and Calm in the Face of Oppression
If music truly is a salve for the weary heart, then I hope weâve all been slathering it on nice and thick the past couple weeks.
Spin Cycle Archives - Portland Mercury
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Spin Cycle: Three Albums of Transition and Calm in the Face of Oppression
If music truly is a salve for the weary heart, then I hope we’ve all been slathering it on nice and thick the past couple weeks. With the onrush of spring blossoms and the doldrums of wintertime peacing out in the rearview, it’s a time for transition, and for emphasizing the importance of breathing, of centering, of noticing, and of letting go when it makes sense to.
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back for Portland’s Music Venues
Whether you’re an avid reader of these pages, or just a Portlander with a discerning live music landscape radar, it’s been hard to avoid story after story of independent live music venue closures and fundamental business model changes to some of the city’s most esteemed entertainment sites.
Introducing Spin Cycle, the Mercury's New Album Review Column
Welcome to Spin Cycle! Itâs the biweekly aural hygiene you deserve in a handy-dandy cheat sheet format for albums of particular note from Portland and beyond! The Rose City is not unlike a homing beacon for discerning audiophiles, semi-professional appreciators of physical media, and folks who spend three-quarters of their waking lives with headphones fastened over, in, or around their earholes.
Review of The Story of Marceau Miller
Marceau Miller Blackstone Publishing (Mar 3, 2026) Hardcover $29.99 (256pp) 979-822836523-0 A complex web of buried secrets is unearthed following a bestselling author’s death in the thrilling mystery novel The Story of Marceau Miller. Famous novelist Marceau Miller dies following a free solo rock climb, sending his close-knit group of friends, his wife, Sarah, and his young children into a tailspin of heartbreak.
Review of Shattered Echoes
Luna Schadeck FriesenPress (156pp) 978-1-03-835349-8 Clarion Rating: 2 out of 5 Concerned with abuse and healing, the revealing poetry collection Shattered Echoes catalogs personal psychological scars in a visceral, pleading manner. The specters of past traumas are filtered through the hindsight of recovery in Luna Schadeck’s unflinching poetry collection Shattered Echoes. Concerned with abuse and healing, these revealing poems catalog personal psychological scars in a visceral, pleading manner.
Portland Artists to Pay Tribute to Todd Snider Feb. 9
Though he hadn’t called the greater Portland area home for decades, the echoes of Todd Snider’s upbringing and later-year escapades in and around the Rose City didn’t make his untimely passing on Nov. 14, 2025, feel distant. Tunes with proximity references like “Tillamook County Jail” and “D.B. Cooper” assured those paying attention that the Pacific Northwest had not been dropped from his wellspring of influences.
Review of Traverse
E.J. Meyers Sable Path Publishing (398pp) 979-899283511-3 Clarion Rating: 4 out of 5 A reeking yellow mist of unknown provenance haunts people across periods, assuming familiar, deadly patterns, in the foreboding literary novel Traverse. The mysteries behind a pungent yellow fog and the unspeakable horrors left in its wake take on time-traveling significance in E. J. Meyers’s excellent thriller Traverse.
Barry Walker Jr. Scores the Films Inside Your Head
The opening notes to “Quiessence,” the first song on Barry Walker Jr.’s new album, Paleo Sol, set a meditative intention. Walker’s spacey pedal steel floats like clouds above a dawning day, surveilling a wide-open landscape, the aural possibilities seeming endless and malleable as cymbal swells and sleepy acoustic guitar coo a score for a kind of living dream.
Review of The Skeptic's Paradox
A Nonpartisan Guide to the Riddles of Free Will Dario Tonelli Palmetto Publishing (Nov 11, 2025) Softcover $11.99 (94pp) 979-882298931-3 Clarion Rating: 3 out of 5 Considering a litany of cerebral problems having to do with ongoing debates about the existence of free will, The Skeptic’s Paradox is a probing philosophical exercise. Dario Tonelli’s novel treatise The Skeptic’s Paradox suggests new means of understanding free will.
From Reconstruction through Black Lives Matter Sylvester Allen Jr. Belle Boggs The University of North Carolina Press (Jan 27, 2026) Hardcover $30.00 (296pp) 978-1-4696-8999-9 A murder in the Reconstruction-era South is excavated in Sylvester Allen Jr. and Belle Boggs’s history book The Legend of Wyatt Outlaw.
Review of Feeding the Future
Restoring the Planet and Healing Ourselves Nicole Negowetti Georgetown University Press (Jan 6, 2026) Softcover $29.95 (336pp) 978-1-64712-647-6 The convoluted web of food system sustainability, land management, and ecological misfires populates the pages of Nicole Negowetti’s Feeding the Future. The apparatus of food production is herein magnified through dense, research-based pleas, warning of the harm caused by industrial agriculture across centuries of human intrusion.
When Wonder Ballroom Says All Ages, They Mean All Ages
On April 10 of this year, the Wonder Ballroom opened its doors for an evening of live music from Nashville folksters, TopHouse. The show was typical of the diverse booking by Wonderâs team, endearing itself to the equally diverse group of concertgoers in attendanceâa unique Portland music-going community comprised of a wide swath of ages and genre interests.
Review of Overcoming Information Chaos
A Guide to Cultivating Peaceful Communities in the Digital Age Danielle M. Reiff Upriver Press (Oct 1, 2025) (432pp) 979-899128470-7 Clarion Rating: 4 out of 5 With an eye toward transformational changes that require good-faith buy-ins from all consumers of mainstream media, Overcoming Information Chaos is a compelling political science text. Retired diplomat Danielle M.
Album Review: We're Heading To The Lake With Portland's Guitar
In an age where search engine optimization is a vital consideration for news headlines, business upstarts, and pretty much all creative endeavors, you’d be forgiven if you thought that a band called Guitar would drift into eternal, unsearchable obscurity. But ask Guitar brainchild Saia Kuli about the would-be gaffe, it’s the innate humor in such a milquetoast name that outshined the SEO pitfall.
Review of Throwing the Hammer
Gary J. Kirchner FriesenPress (294pp) 978-1-03-834411-3 Clarion Rating: 4 out of 5 Throwing the Hammer is a riotous novel about self-realization and the challenges of shifting private school politics. The educational escapades of a Canadian physics teacher are given a philosophical rinse in Gary J. Kirchner’s hilarious novel Throwing the Hammer. Mark is a former beach bum who is nagged by the ever-present judgments of his father-in-law, despite his wife’s consistent adoration.
Inside Portland’s Juvenile Detention Center, a Music Literacy Program Is Giving Youth the Tools To Tell Their Stories
Donald E. Long Juvenile Detention Center (DEL) abuts high concrete walls, dividing Interstate 84 from Portland’s North Tabor neighborhood. It’s shielded from view, tucked into the kind of street configuration that provokes wrong-turns and dead-ends. As with other reformatories, prisons, or jails, from the outside, the facility looks nondescript, with only a hefty amount of barbed wire coiled above its own tall walls to distinguish it from any other building.
Update: Monqui Presents Teams with AEG for New Music Venue in Lloyd Center
It might not have a name yet, but the realization of the much-ballyhooed mid-sized music venue by Portlandâs Monqui Presents and AEG Presents is well underway at the corner of Northeast 9th and Multnomah. Demolition at the site of the former Nordstrom inside the 1.472 million square foot footprint of Lloyd Center Mall has been ongoing since June.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Ryan J.
Contact Ryan J., search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack