A timeworn means of rebelling against one’s parents: loud guitar music. But in Evan Majumdar-Swift’s case, embracing rock’n’roll represented a rejection of another strain of music long associated with youthful hijinks. His father, Matthew Swift, is hardly your garden-variety Boomer:… Read More
For claire rousay, ambient composition is not just a studio practice; it concerns real bodies in physical space. As a percussionist turned sound artist, the San Antonio-based musician has put out a whopping 19 releases since 2019, many featuring dizzying… Read More
A decade ago, the Manchester-based electronic musician Andy Stott extinguished the dub-techno torch he’d been carrying for Basic Channel and plunged into some lightless place where all the usual values got switched around. From that murk, he retrieved a pair… Read More
In tarot, the flame-licked Tower card represents a mercurial period of upheaval and personal transformation. After producer and experimental artist Vegyn moved from London to Los Angeles last fall, the foreboding card became a regular appearance in his deck. The… Read More
In a 2020 interview with The New Yorker, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, who turned 80 last October, said he hadn’t been listening to records for a while. “I listen to things that maybe some guys don’t,” he said. “I listen to… Read More
Dance music can only suspend your belief for so long these days. COVID has lapped us, and what used to be baked-in elements of our musical experience aren’t around anymore—the sparks of connection that fly at a club set, the… Read More
For the past decade, Blanck Mass has used the hallmarks of ambient electronic music to create albums that refuse to be relegated to the background. The solo project of Fuck Buttons member Benjamin John Power often alternates between dreamlike soundscapes… Read More
There’s a lot of pain, death, and destruction in the music of the Toronto noise duo Black Dresses. Across four full-lengths—as well as a smattering of EPs and other projects—Devi McCallion and Ada Rook detailed horrors both personal and cosmic,… Read More
2021 was supposed to cement the renaissance of Pauline Anna Strom. The electronic music composer originally self-released her music in the early 1980s, though it never resonated far outside the New Age cottage industry. Her music wasn’t enough to cover… Read More
Yu Su’s Yellow River Blue nods to China’s famous Yellow River, which flows alongside her hometown of Keifang, in the country’s Henan province. The album was inspired by a 2019 tour across China that took the Chinese-born, Vancouver-based electronic musician… Read More