OUR TEAM
Riot + Reverie is built by people who care about music more than metrics. Small team. Big opinions. No filler.
Owner / Editorial Director
Elena Stevens
Elena Stevens spent the late '90s in Toronto's dive bars and concert halls with a camera in hand, photographing bands like Bad Religion, Fugazi, the Beastie Boys, and Blink 182. Graphic design followed, eventually landing her work alongside iconic street artist Shepard Fairey. She built a career rooted in music culture from the inside. She founded Riot + Reverie for those who still read liner notes.
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Editor / Producer
Jake Remian
Jake grew up in the suburbs outside Washington, DC, where skateboarding, punk, ska, and the DIY scene shaped who he is.
With more than 20 years in graphic design and video production, he's built a career rooted in visual storytelling. Now he's bringing that experience and a lifelong love of independent music to Riot + Reverie as our new editor
and producer.
Music Journalist / Photographer
Ryan Del Rosario
Ryann is a photographer and chronicler of underground culture, documenting punk and skate scenes across Virginia’s Hampton Roads region. Rooted in the intersection of music, skateboarding, and DIY culture, his work captures the bands, crews, venues, and people keeping the scene moving. He brings that same on-the-ground perspective to Riot + Reverie as a contributing photographer.
OUR STORY
Music is full of people telling you what matters. Algorithms, playlists, marketing campaigns, industry hype cycles. Riot + Reverie exists for everything happening before that. The band playing a room of fifty people on a Tuesday night. The record that quietly changes your life six months before anyone else catches on. The conversation that tells you more about an artist than a press release ever could.
Part publication and part radio show, Riot + Reverie covers punk, alternative, indie, and underground artists at every level, from unsigned acts to major label releases, through interviews, photography, show coverage, commentary, and radio. Not because music needs more content, but because the stories worth telling rarely arrive wrapped in a marketing campaign. Some nights that means standing in a photo pit. Some nights it means sitting down with an artist for an hour and letting the conversation go wherever it wants to go. Some nights it means driving three hours to watch a band play a room that won't exist five years from now. That's the job.
GREAT MUSIC DESERVES MORE THAN A PASSING LISTEN.
The most interesting artists are usually building something long before the rest of the world notices. The venues change. The names on the marquee get bigger. The stories stay the same.