Alexis C. Lamb created Refugia Festival in 2024 out of a sense of frustration. 

She saw a disconnect between environmentally conscious arts programming, which is usually presented indoors, and the natural place for eco-art: outdoors.

The second edition of the all-day music and arts Refugia Festival, which is at the Nichols Arboretum in Ann Arbor on September 28, provides a way to celebrate sound and become more aware of the needs and issues related to the climate while harmonizing with it. How does the music we produce resonate with nature? What do animals think of the music we blare through speakers whenever we want? And what can music do to explore and inform humanity’s relationship with the climate?

"[Refugia] came out of my doctoral dissertation work, which was in the School of Music, Theater and Dance at the U of M," Lamb said, "which was focused on exploring whether a sonic relationship between our human-made music and the sounds of the natural world was possible, without being threatening to that particular ecosystem.”

Friday Five was a column that highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

"Coda" is the Italian word for "tail," as in the end of something: a comet, a dog, a piece of music.

This is the coda for Friday Five, a column started on September 11, 2020, when the world was shut down. It was a way to keep content flowing on Pulp, a website that focuses on local events and creators, at a time when most of those things were shut down or kept behind doors.

Not music, though.

Magdalena J. Zaborowska makes connections across the experiences of and influences on James Baldwin in her wide-ranging book James Baldwin: The Life Album. Unlike her earlier two monographs on Baldwin, this unique and deeply researched biography is written for a general audience.

However, Zaborowska did not write James Baldwin: The Life Album as a standard biography but rather modeled it after a double vinyl record with four sides (i.e., sections), each with its own tracks (i.e., chapters). The table of contents serves as a track list. Zaborowska elaborates on this creative approach in her book’s introduction:

His critics’ desire that Baldwin straighten out is among the reasons why in James Baldwin I tell his life story in a deliberately unstraightforward, even queer, manner. To honor who he was, and how he viewed and wrote about himself, I revisit his life both chronologically and achronologically, and at times by mixing the two approaches. A brilliant stylist of the English language, Baldwin leaned on repetition and revolution, even re-evolution, of themes, phrases, and points of view, some of which were inspired by Black English and music. Exploding traditional syntax, style, and genre expectations, his long sentences remixed ideas, characters, events, and locations, embracing what he called “the beat.” Fascinated with how experience and emotion drove embodied imagination, will, and speech, he channeled their restless dance into his works, syncopating dates, locations, and personae, repeating riffs and refrains like a virtuoso improviser.

The biography’s structure as an album lends itself well to telling Baldwin’s life story and reflects the very way Baldwin himself approached his work.

If you’re among those feeling depleted by all the desperation, striving, and clickbait online, it’s downright refreshing to speak to Skyline High School math teacher Nick Bertsos about the music he makes with his alt-folk band, Little Traps.

“We’re actually playing at a chili cook-off in Saline in a couple of weeks,” said Bertsos. “That’s our next huge gig. Which I’m excited about, because I like chili.”

Though Little Traps plays most often at Ziggy’s in Ypsilanti, the band’s most recent performance was at a barn in Dexter, to celebrate the release of its second full-length album, Regular Love.

“Bruce Springsteen yells about that one beautiful love, and there are always these grandiose notions,” said Bertsos, Little Traps’ frontman and primary songwriter. “And it’s like, what about the regular stuff, like making coffee for my wife in the morning, and she doesn’t have to ask?”

The band started recording songs for Regular Love back in 2019, shortly after the release of its 2018 debut, Can’t Count. But after getting about three tracks down, the pandemic hit, and the project stalled out.

The first Remnants exhibit was staged on October 17, 2023, at Marjorie Mae Del-Radio's Ypsilanti house. The woman affectionately known as "Big Marjorie" was not physically present in her longtime home at 824 Jefferson Street, but her spirit filled the abode—once covered in family photographs, now mostly empty.

Del-Radio died April 12, 2023, at age 90, and her house was cleared out for its sale.

Takeisha Jefferson and Tywree Bailey, both Ypsi-born artists, wanted to honor their grandma and the house that was a family hub, so they did the one-day Remnants exhibit as a creative memorial for friends and family.

"So many family members spoke of how grandma’s house looked like a gallery because of all the photographs she displayed of family members," Jefferson wrote in a Facebook message. "Well, tomorrow it will be a gallery."

Jefferson and Bailey decorated the home with their own photographs and paintings, and also filled a room with Grandma Del-Radio's colorful muumuus, which floated in the space like joyful ghosts.

Even though Remnants was an impromptu event, first cousins Jefferson and Bailey knew they wanted to have a second edition of the exhibit in a traditional gallery.

Remnants II, which runs through September 26 at Ypsilanti's 22 North, doesn't feature any muumuus. But it is brimming with love and pride for their family's history, which stretches deep into Ypsilanti's past. There are photos of and correspondence from Del-Radio's grandfather, William Campbell, who worked as a janitor and porter for Ypsi's Freighthouse, from 1927 to 1936, as well as other images of other family members.

The core of the show belongs to Jefferson and Bailey's artwork, sometimes with assistance from other family members, such as Takeisha's daughter, Tylear Jefferson, also a visual artist.

Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This edition features minimalist techno by price, pop tunes by Larkn, hip-hop grunge by Prospecter, electronica by JDSY, and folk-pop by Brad Phillips.

Nick Baumgardner has a front-row seat to University of Michigan football. That's partly because he's an Ann Arbor resident, but it's mostly because he's a senior football writer for The Athletic.

Over the past few years, when Baumgarden hasn't been providing NFL Draft analysis or other football coverage for The Athletic, he's been penning books on the Michigan Wolverines, including 2023's Mountaintop: The Inside Story of Michigan's National Title Climb and 2025's The Program: Michigan, A Curated History of the Wolverines.

The Program is a collection of in-depth essays that focus on pivotal moments that have helped shape the Wolverines' legacy as the most successful college football team of all time and the first to reach 1,000 wins.

In an interview with Booksweet to promote his August 29, 2025, appearance at the Ann Arbor District Library, Baumgardner said The Program "is like a magnifying glass. My other writing and podcasting is more like a 20,000-foot view of what’s going on. The book is going back and really trying to zoom in as much as you can on people, on dates, and on context and trying to find out why certain things happened on a deeper sense, as opposed to sort of chronicling what’s going on in real time."

Baumgardner's Wolverines football talk is the second he's given at AADL: He debuted with a January 10, 2024, event to discuss Mountaintop, which he co-wrote with Mark Snyder. The book covers Michigan's 1997 National Championship, which had some mystery about it due to a few factors, Baumgardner told Pulp:

“A lot of it has to do with Lloyd Carr, who doesn’t like to talk about himself a lot. That’s a big part of it. … The other thing, too, is a lot of these [former players] … they’re protective of it, and they aren’t very trusting about people getting their stories right, so it’s a hard group to crack.”

You can watch both of Baumgardner's AADL talks below.

Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.

This edition features hip-hop by 3Steez and 14KT, grimy rap-tronica by Gvmmy, art pop by My Salamander, experimental percussion and spoken word by Jake A. Ellzey and VIRID, and speedy punk by Reckless Manner.

A roundup of recent Washtenaw County arts and culture stories from local media outlets Life in Michigan, WEMU, Concentrate, Current, Ann Arbor Observer, WCBN, The Sun New Times, The Saline Post, and Ann Arbor City Lifestyle. 

Last October, Ann Arbor record label 1473 put out he great Alike Untils album by Chicago vibraphonist Ben Zucker, which we described in Friday Five: "Drones and glitches bang against vibraphones and bells, creating a haunting industrial atmosphere that evokes walking in a city after midnight. Good headphones are a must to catch all the details floating around in these four immersive and resonant pieces."

Headphones were not necessary for Zucker's recent concert at the Ann Arbor District Library. On August 9, Zucker brought his vibes and interactive software to the Downtown branch for a 40-minute performance of ghostly sounds that mixed improvisation and electronic effects. Here's the full concert video: