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
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
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
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
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