Xeno & Oaklander—the duo of Liz Wendelbo and Sean McBride—came up through Pieter Schoolwerth’s Wierd Nights, an endearingly gloomy fixture of late ’00s New York. In the early days, the pair’s music was of a piece with the sounds popular… Read More
A DJ set from aya can be both thrilling and disorienting, a giddy maelstrom of jungle breaks, Dutch techno, UK funky, South African gqom, and who knows what else—plus edits of Charli XCX and “Call Me Maybe,” for good measure.… Read More
The bell sound on “Concept of Credence,” from Markus Guentner’s new album Extropy, is just the bees’ knees. It comes out of nowhere, through a crack in the dense clouds of choir-synth-string-harmonics that form the bulk of the record, and… Read More
On the opening track of Heartbeats, Cherise Gary snarls, “I just want to fuck.” It’s exactly the sort of direct statement you’d expect from Jersey club, the “X-rated” dance music that Gary, aka UNIIQU3, first heard as a teenager in… Read More
Before 2019, Alice Longyu Gao was known in downtown Manhattan clubs for her Harajuku-inspired fashion sense, energetic DJ sets, and, occasionally, releasing music that sought to translate her jester-like personality into well-written pop songs. Then, her song “Rich Bitch Juice,”… Read More
There’s something profound about the uncanny, half-rendered graphics of 1990s technology. The same way space-age art from the 1950s sought to capture the unattainable dream of travelling through the stars in small flying cars, the eerily smooth computer models of… Read More
In the rabble-rousing pantheon of UK girl groups, only the Spice Girls have had more domestic No. 1 singles (nine) than the Sugababes (six). The mutable British trio were a defining band of the 2000s—and yet this 20th anniversary reissue… Read More
In 1969, Dieter Moebius played a 12-hour gig at an art space above a Berlin shopping mall. Behind the drumkit of newly formed improvisational trio Kluster, he had the markings of an artist most at home when embracing the unknown.… Read More
Near the beginning of the documentary SHAYA!, the filmmakers note that amapiano “was born in the soil of the streets of South Africa, therefore it belongs to all of us.” The sentiment reflects the organic, bottom-up growth of the genre;… Read More
Take it as an auspicious omen when you have to google the instruments used on a recording. Many listeners may find that the case with Máscaras, the fourth album by Canadian-Nicaraguan musician Brandon Valdivia, aka Toronto-based Mas Aya. A deft… Read More