Pylon didn’t really want to be a rock band. When art-school classmates Michael Lachowski and Randy Bewley started banging on cheap instruments in their Athens, Georgia, apartment in the late 1970s, they were more into performance art than music. “We… Read More
Jake Muir’s sonic collages, made from vinyl samples and field recordings, pair pristine detail with a shadowy, secretive pulse. His 2018 album Lady’s Mantle was a foray into surf-pop plunderphonics, incorporating aquatic field recordings taken from expeditions in Iceland and… Read More
Since introducing his Tobacco alias in 2008 in the shadow of his more cosmically inclined electro-psych act, Black Moth Super Rainbow, Thomas Fec has been engaged in a prolonged game of, as a track from his debut record put it,… Read More
An astronaut, a filmmaker, and a drum’n’bass producer. It sounds like the setup to a joke, but these unlikely bedfellows were among the base ingredients of The Edge of Everything, the first new album in 14 years from Bristolian jungle/drum’n’bass… Read More
In his shattering memoir Stammered Songbook: A Mother’s Book of Hours, Erwin Mortier charts his family’s struggles to care for his mother (and each other, and themselves) as Alzheimer’s takes her from them. “I can no longer hear the music… Read More
The underlying theme of Ela Minus’ music is the idea that resistance grows from everyday practices. There are whispers of this across her meticulously crafted debut full-length acts of rebellion, but it’s Minus’ intricate production that commands the most attention.… Read More
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
Machines don’t care. Self-driving cars, data-harvesting algorithms, Boston Dynamics’ hideous quadrupeds—all these things unnerve us in part because we know that they can’t be trusted. They are indifferent to us by design. Autechre have long played to this unease, channeling… Read More
More than a few of us, these days, have been keeping an unusual, deliberate focus on our memories as they form: which ones we’d keep, which ones we’d prefer to destroy, whether any were worth keeping at all, and how… Read More
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