Had the notion of acid house not been comprehensively explored at the tail end of the 1980s, we might have minted the term to describe the Juan Maclean’s I Can’t Explain, which is inspired by mind-expanding drugs and old-school house… Read More
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
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
Azu Tiwaline has spent a lifetime wandering. She grew up in the West African nation of Côte d’Ivoire, the child of a Tunisian Berber mother and Cambodian father, but moved to France as a teenager. As an adult, she began… Read More
John FM recognizes what’s come before him. As a protégé of the enigmatic Omar S, the Detroit-based producer and vocalist is well aware of his city’s triumphs and tribulations, and keen to preserve the spirit of self-reliance and community that… 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
Sasu Ripatti knows that few things will humble you like time spent in the wilderness. “You learn to face your own limits and fears,” he’s said of his Arctic hiking experiences. His latest solo albums as Vladislav Delay take inspiration… 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
Centering polyrhythms and syncopation in the traditions of gqom, UK funky, or dembow may be the order of the day for club music, but Mexican producer OMAAR isn’t new to these kinds of sounds. Since 2012, Omar Suárez has cut… Read More
One of music’s chief pleasures is the way it conjures up a sense of the now, of displacement from the rest of the world into moods and grooves and hooks and melodies. But nowness isn’t just about sonic immersion, it’s… Read More