Ulla
Brian Eno was wrong when he declared that ambient music “must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” In reality, there’s little in music that’s as powerful as ambient; its effects on the mood of any given space take hold… Read More
love
Squarepusher
Feed Me Weird Things, originally released in 1996 on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label, is the Squarepusher LP you could take home to meet your mom—the well-dressed eccentric to “Come on My Selector”’s slobbering psychopath. That’s not to say it is… Read More
Kele
In 1984, London’s Bronski Beat rejected the industry’s ideas about which in-your-face marketing tactics could be applied to a trio of working-class gay men. Instead, they crafted “Smalltown Boy,” a kitchen-sink drama about a bullied outsider who flees home but… Read More
3MB feat. Magic Juan Atkins
3MB feat. Magic Juan Atkins is a story of a musical friendship being forged, of techno spreading its steely tentacles, and of Berlin’s musical rebirth. To understand 3MB—Berlin producers Moritz von Oswald and Thomas Fehlmann, joined here by Detroit techno… Read More
Not Waving
In 2017, Alessio Natalizia made an interesting claim about the brusque, intelligent dance music he was making as Not Waving: “We live in such a fucked-up world, so it’s important to make some optimistic music once in a while,” he… Read More
Reigning Sound
On their 1995 album Soul Food, which sounds like it was recorded in a deep fryer, Greg Cartwright’s old band the Oblivians released a song with an n-bomb in its title. The Oblivians were Memphis garage-punk kingpins, and Soul Food… Read More
Fatima Al Qadiri
Like certain Celtic druids or Rome’s emperor Constantine, the 7th-century Arabic poet known as Al-Khansa leapt into an unfamiliar cosmos, converting to the nascent faith of Islam during middle age (Muhammad himself was said to be a fan). She composed… Read More
LSDXOXO
The past year has not been good for dancefloors, but it’s been an incredible year for dance music: Mining the rich histories of drum’n’bass, bitch and Baltimore house, juke, hardcore, and gabba, beat culture has been pushing so far and… Read More
96 Back
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
Sonic Boom
Hackneyed as it may sound, you can learn a lot by taking the right drugs at the right time. You can also learn a lot by quitting drugs, but the emotional and physical lessons of substance experimentation aren’t to be… Read More