Michael Frett

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Breaking down panda digestion

In one of nature’s more endearing displays, a panda paws at a narrow, basil-colored stick of bamboo.

Post-drought forest repair challenged

For more than a hundred years, Yellowstone has drawn millions to the American West. Each year, more than 3 million people visit the park, stopping for its 19,000-year-old geysers, its million-year-old mountains and its blankets of forests that look just as dense as they do in the hundred-year-old photos in the textbooks.

Post-punk band Protomartyr returns to Madison as headliners

On the track “Why Does It Shake?,” Protomartyr reaches into a viscid haze, where orthochromatic figures waltz with acrylic stills.

Land arrangement alters water quality

The Yahara Watershed reaches around the city of Madison and its defining lakes. It’s a large stretch of land, spanning farms and forests and dotted by the occasional construction site that slowly reshapes and urbanizes its traditional farms and prairies.  In the center are five lakes, each one fed by the rain that flows down the periphery of the watershed and into the Yahara River, ultimately leading through the rivers and streams that join the Mississippi and drain into the Gulf of Mexico almost a thousand miles away.  In a Birge Hall lab seemingly isolated from that network of water that flows around it, Jiangxiao Qiu studied models of the region, observing data sets created from Department of Natural Resources mapping, UW-Madison’s Center for Limnology and other organizations.

Glen Hansard croons through intimate night at Orpheum

I believe it might have been Bruce Springsteen who, in some lost interview, narrowed folk rock songwriting down to a basic formula: Use the verse to tell the story and use the chorus as a prayer. I probably have the canon wrong somewhere in there, but it’s a formula that didn’t fail Glen Hansard last Thursday at the Orpheum Theater. Between the balladeer sighs and the explosive choruses, I thought I stumbled into a bedside prayer-turned-rockist awakening.

Drive-By Truckers remind audience of true rock music

Record Routine: Ritual misses the intricacies of rage in self-titled debut

There’s few emotions rawer than rage. It’s an easy emotion to relate to—how often have some of us broken down against some misfortune or against someone who crossed all the wrong wires at the perfectly wrong times? Of course, most of us bury it and move on with our lives, since respect rarely follows bloodshot eyes and swollen veins.

Deafheaven experiments with the meaning of metal at High Noon Saloon

As Tribulation opened the night with their long hair tossed over their instruments, snapping to whatever beat ripped out behind them, a curious thought entered my head. While Tribulation howled and roared, sprinting and grinding through the hellfire and death wails of their black-metal home, I couldn’t shake the familiarity of it all; I had seen some ghost of all of this before, in the hands of hair metal bands.

Studio Ghibli signs off true to form with 'When Marnie Was There'

Two weekends ago, the Marquee at Union South played “When Marnie Was There,” the last movie to come out of Studio Ghibli before the studio’s indefinite hiatus. “Marnie,” Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s second film as director, toned back Ghibli’s trademark fantasy and wayward imagination for a more grounded story that flirted between being too convenient and incredibly touching.

Bronze Radio Return injects energy into Sunday night crowd

Bronze Radio Return faced that uphill battle at the Frequency this Sunday that all bands have to someday face: the Sunday night crowd. With the exception of a few loud members, the audience responded initially with awkward enjoyment. They were clearly receptive of the music, but something held them back.