Good Sad Happy Bad
Some artists make being in a band sound like absolutely the worst thing in the world, but not Good Sad Happy Bad (the new name for a rejiggered Micachu and the Shapes), who make you want to dive, headfirst and… Read More
music
Loraine James
Loraine James’ music often feels like it’s on the verge of tipping into chaos. Competing rhythms run out of sync, throwing sparks as they scrape. Straight lines bend without warning, and smooth surfaces splinter. Rather than conform to a flawlessly… Read More
Rian Treanor
In 1962, an American ad man named Martin Speckter proposed a new punctuation mark. The sublimely named “interrobang” combined question and exclamation into a single expression of quizzical incredulity: “What are those‽‽‽” This space-age innovation sadly didn’t catch on, but… Read More
Otto
At the turn of the century, around the same time as the rise of the Shibuya-kei movement, Japanese producer Nobukazu Takemura was spearheading the development of a style that writer and musician Nick Currie (Momus) would later dub “cute formalism:”… Read More
Isola
The Las Vegas-born musician Ivana Carrescia’s voice flits about the edges of her club tracks like a benevolent ghost. She sings in a downy falsetto that rarely rises above lullaby levels, and she whispers as often as she sings. Her… Read More
Theo Parrish
There are hard truths to be gained from burst myths. So it was in 2017, when I interviewed the respected Chicago DJ/producer Ron Trent about the birth of “deep house,” a dance-music genre often reduced to a palette of muted… Read More
A Certain Ratio
Since releasing their ninth studio album Mind Made Up in 2008, Manchester mainstays A Certain Ratio have been taking stock of their history and settling themselves comfortably in the present. Last year’s ACR: BOX tracked their evolution from the icy… Read More
Khotin
For Dylan Khotin-Foote, house music has long been a vehicle for careful studies of ambient tone and texture. On his 2014 debut album, Hello World, the Canadian producer used hardware synths and drum machines to craft muted compositions that traded… Read More
A. G. Cook
PC Music founder A. G. Cook settled on Apple as an album title, he says, because the word evokes so many things: the eponymous tech company (which, historically, has been regarded as the opposite of the Windows-based personal computer, or… Read More
Various Artists
Over the past decade, underground club circuits around East and Southeast Asia have grown from a collection of fragmented markets to an integrated community that’s dedicated to supporting local talents. Projects such as bilateral DJ exchanges and regionally-focused record labels… Read More