Producer and composer Ryan Lee West, aka Rival Consoles, makes ambient techno with a volatile soul. His recent records take the same analog approach he developed on 2016’s Night Melody, composing the album using real-life sketches to inform his writing,… Read More
Five months after the release of their duo album Mixing Colours, Brian Eno and his younger brother, Roger, pick up what they’ve called a “back-and-forth conversation” with Luminous, an EP featuring six new tracks and a tune previously restricted to… Read More
Disintegration, decay, black holes… these are a few words that might spring to mind at the thought of ambient composer William Basinski, who has somehow made music from all of the above in the past few decades. Two words that… Read More
Prole Art Threat takes its name and credo from a Fall song; according to Anthoney Hart, who produces grime under the name East Man, the title is “a reflection of working-class creativity and how the establishment marginalize us and (perhaps… Read More
Under the Lothario-like nom de plume of Martyn Bootyspoon, Montreal’s Jason Voltaire makes sexed-up club music that’s deliberately tongue in cheek. He got his start under the influence of booty house and ghettotech fixtures like DJ Assault and DJ Funk,… Read More
The PC Music philosophy boils down to two things. One: Normal people can be pop stars. Two: Avoid the middle ground at all costs. Pop music becomes extreme music in the hands of PC Music’s chief architect, A. G. Cook,… Read More
Jacknife Lee’s discography has historically moved in two very different directions. His production credits for acts like U2 and Snow Patrol display a penchant for self-serious adult-contemporary rock; like the nu-metal mashups of Missy Elliott and Eminem that brought him… Read More
Things change slowly at Cat’s Cradle, the storied North Carolina rock club that turned 50 last year. It took half that time to meander from a basement in Chapel Hill through several nearby locations to its current home in a… Read More
Ernest Greene seemed like he was finally about to turn a corner on 2017’s Mister Mellow. He switched labels, moving from the long-running Seattle indie Sub Pop to the more beat-oriented label Stones Throw, and shapeshifted samples from crate-digger classics,… Read More
Pontiac Streator’s music seems deliberately engineered to confuse; it arrives without any real clues as to how it’s meant to be parsed. The pseudonymous Streator is based in Philadelphia, but his releases are conceptually detached from place. They don’t belong… Read More