Within contemporary post-punk’s revival of dark, austere synth, Boy Harsher stood out with a distinctly modern take on the genre. During the late 2010s, the North Hampton-based duo distilled its stripped-down brand of hypnotic darkwave across releases like Pain and… Read More
When Brian Eno recorded Ambient 1: Music for Airports in the late 1970s, he was intent on reshaping our experience with flying. Eno was put off by the stock muzak piped through most major airports at the time, and he… Read More
The past is sometimes said to be a foreign country, and for the mature musician, the chances of going there tend to be especially remote. If nations typically enjoy the assumption of stability, a music scene’s own monuments—genres, labels, magazines,… Read More
Of all the ways that Parris could have described his long-awaited debut LP, it’s unlikely that “This is an album built on Pop” is what anyone expected. In recent years, pop tropes have become commonplace even in electronic music’s most… 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
Since 2017, the prolific Chinese artist Yikii has been releasing albums that have become increasingly robust and difficult to pin down. Initial records like ❀ [no pain] and Gentle Nightmare were sketch-like, with curious dabbles into glitch, ambient, industrial pop,… 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
Fun is a central tenet of Yana Kedrina’s music. Liminal Soul, the Moscow-based producer and vocalist’s third album as Kedr Livanskiy, is defined by a wide-eyed, magnanimous playfulness, an openness to quirk that doesn’t inhibit the seriousness of her message.… Read More
For a place that’s meant to be fun, the club is home to a lot of demons. How we seek release can be a mirror of what made us so tense in the first place, and some of the most… Read More
In his book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks samples the following quote from biologist Gerald Edelman: “Every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.” For 30 years now,… Read More