As his cult classic 1986 album Wind receives an expanded reissue, Italian composer and ambient pioneer Gigi Masin takes Siobhan Kane through his life in 13 records
The renewed interest in Gigi Masin's 1986 album Wind has taken the Venetian by surprise. He sees it as "strange and wonderful… I am really happy and honoured". The expanded album, reissued by Numero Uno 40 years later, recontextualises Wind as an ambient gem, but an appreciation for Masin started some time ago, with artists such as Björk referencing his work, sampling 'Clouds' on her 2002 song 'It's In Our Hands'.
Growing up in Italy, playing the guitar and working in radio, Masin was exposed to lots of different kinds of music, but his life...
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The American composer, producer and audio engineer warps time and space on a slow-burning album that riffs on Philip K. Dick's "orthogonal" temporalities
Photo credit Charmaine Lee
Imagine your entire life, your entire world, being dreamed into existence by a creator who, night after night, gradually gives shape to your being, only to discover that he, too, is someone else's dream. This is the premise of Jorge Luis Borges' short story 'The Circular Ruins', after which Randall Dunn christened his Brooklyn studio. He's the man behind the production of some of the highest peaks in experimental metal, from Earth's The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull to Sunn O)))'s monumental Monoliths & Dimensions, via Old Man Gloom's Light of Meaning and...
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Silverwingkiller
Desperate Struggle
Manchester duo's second album feels like inhabiting a video game - from the perspective of a non-player character
DESPERATE STRUGGLE by SILVERWINGKILLER
On 'Worldstar', Silverwingkiller's arpeggiators resemble the swirl of evil slot machines, a rigged jackpot ringing above breakbeats and blown-out electronics. The duo say its pulse comes from a loop of 1970s Somali disco. Across five tracks, Desperate Struggle feels less like a collection of regular songs than a series of playable locations: stations, street corners and checkpoints. It's a post-cyberpunk carnival, closer to the multicultural streets of the video game Jet Set Radio Future than an exoticised East reflected in Western mirrorshades, with those once reduced to scenery grabbing hold of the camera in the Reality Studio.
There's a particular...
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It's the second cut to be unveiled from forthcoming album A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans
Photo by Clemens Habicht
Liars have shared a new song, titled 'Beat Creep Some Eyes'.
It's the second cut to be unveiled from forthcoming album A Ban On Plastic Bag Bans, which was announced in September with lead track 'Ice Pick, Kalamazoo'. Liars' Angus Andrew recorded the album between the US and Australia, where he now lives, with jazz drummer Laurence Pike and multi-instrumentalist Cameron Deyell, who also both worked on 2021 LP The Apple Drop.
In a statement about 'Beat Creep Some Eyes', Andrew said: "Sometimes I think the strangest thing isn't that the world is absurd, but how quickly we get used to it. You can...
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The UK artist has taken on Vini Reilly's 'Your Shadow At Morning'
Vini Reilly, AKA The Durutti Column, photo by Michael Stef
Four Tet has shared a remix of The Durutti Column's track 'Your Shadow At Morning'.
Clocking in at almost 10 minutes, Four Tet's rework of the track from Vini Reilly's recent album, Renascent, pushes the original cut into dance floor-ready territory, while retaining the delicate, understated touches and vocals of the source material.
In a statement about The Durutti Column's past work, Four Tet, real name Kieran Hebden, said: "It's had a big impact on me so I was thrilled when a new album was announced, and then when I was asked to do a remix it felt like the universe was...
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The tracks, dating from 1987 to 1991, have been made available on streaming platforms
Photo by Renaud Monfourny
Four rare Pixies songs originally recorded between 1987 and 1991 have been shared on streaming platforms for the first time.
The tracks - 'Dig For Fire (Albini Version)', 'Go Man Go', 'Brackish Boy', and 'Punk Loop' - had previously only been made available on two bonus 7-inch singles included in the recent limited-edition remastered vinyl pressings of Pixies' albums Bossanova and Trompe le Monde.
The Steve Albini recording of 'Dig For Fire' is from 1987 when Pixies were doing recording sessions for debut album Surfer Rosa, and is significantly different from the version that was officially released three years later. 'Go Man Go' was co-written by Black...
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Andy Ingamells
Vanity Project
The solo debut album by the British composer-performer is full of fun - and no shortage of questions
"Search for fun, types of fun, source of fun, apply for fun, awarded fun, get fun, have fun," enumerates Andy Ingamells in the opener of his first solo album Vanity Project. It would indeed be fun, were it not for the call bell that keeps cutting in, turning fun into fun-ding - a never-ending, soul-sucking loop. Silence falls after 'decision pen-ding'.
This semantic, even conceptual playfulness of 'Ding' permeates Vanity Project, which gathers pieces from 2008 to 2026. Ingamells is the sole musician on all but one track, speaking, singing, playing melodica, pipe organ and more. Central to his practice is the intersection...
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With a manic grin leering from the cover Aphex Twin's fourth was readily incorporated into blather about dill & bass but his best, most cohesive album was neither wacky or a novelty, says Toby Manning
Richard D. James Album by Aphex Twin
The year is 1996, the era of Britpop and lads' mags, of Euro 96 and 'Three Lions', the retro complacency of which has seemingly no connection to the restlessly innovative Aphex Twin's fifth album. Yet the depthless positivity of Cool Britannia didn't just produce Britpop but 'comedy is the new rock & roll', the wipe-clean irony of Chris Evans and the music weeklies' suffusion with puns, gags and exclamations of 'arse!' This comedification of culture hence predicated the media presentation...
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As celebrations of Daphne Oram's centenary culminate with an all-day celebration in Bradford, Claire Biddles speaks to a host of artists, from her contemporaries to previous Oram Award winners, to get a measure of her immense contribution to electronic music
Photo © Daphne Oram Trust
The pioneering work of Daphne Oram was not fully recognised until after her death in 2003 - but now, over 20 years later, she is rightly recognised as one of the most important electronic musicians of the 20th century. A co-founder of the BBC's legendary Radiophonic Workshop in 1958, Oram was one of the first composers to use electronic sound in her work, and is known for her early use of electronic tape, turntablism, and musique concrète...
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Daryl Worthington considers the extent to which Spool's Out offers investment advice, and reviews a crop of tapes including a footwork legend from Japan going ultra-crisp, mesmerising live code improvisations, ferocious eco-pop and more
Roxanne Harris, photo by Cecilia Díaz Betz
Five thousand dollars. That's how much an original copy of Prince's The Versace Experience on cassette could be worth, according to Finance Buzz, a website which offers "the resources and support necessary to navigate the complexities of personal finance".
That Prince tape, which contained previews of tracks from his then forthcoming The Gold Experience, was issued in 1995 and given to attendees at a fashion show in Paris. It tops the Finance Buzz '10 Cassette Tapes From The 90s Worth A Small...
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Marta Salogni & Stefano Pilia
Phren
Spooky sounds from two Italian masters of modern electro-acoustic composition
Phren by Marta Salogni & Stefano Pilia
Marta Salogni and Stefano Pilia's Phren is music of accretion. Inputs are fed through Pilia's chain of filters and tape echo and on into Salogni's Revox reel-to-reel tape machine for further manipulation and modulation, the signals absorbing new layers and mutations as they go. According to the release notes, that initial input is often Pilia's guitar, but the pair's plastic approach to sound makes that far from obvious. They telescope the act of mediation, mottling, shading and bending signals as they pass from sound source to ears.
'Sopra l'acque scavate' opens with distorted notes sparking like a frosty firework display. The more...
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Alex Maiolo salutes the visionary musician and "The Originator" of techno who died on Saturday night
Juan Atkins was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1962. His parents split when he was a teen. The plan was for him and his father to move to California, but his grandparents made the case for them to take up residence down the street in the Detroit suburb of Belleville. This was only the first time Juan's grandmother, Lily, had a direct effect on the history of electronic music.The second was when she helped the 15-year-old buy a monosynth. Already playing in funk bands, Atkins took note of Bernie Worrell's work in Funkadelic. Apparently Lily could absolutely tear it up on the Hammond B3 she...
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From avant garde beginnings to ambient endings, Cluster reconfigured rock music as much as Kraftwerk, says Toby Manning.
In the late 70s and early 80s, British music took a distinctly European turn, from Bowie's "Heroes" in 1977 to Ultravox's 'Vienna' in 1981, peaking with Kraftwerk's 'The Model' hitting UK no. 1 during the same year. Whether it was the after-effects of the EEC referendum or a growing anti-Americanism in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam, this new Europeanism temporarily sidelined music's traditional Transatlantic passage for the artier terrain over the Channel. Chart hits like Visage's 'Fade To Grey' in 1980, The Passions' 1981 'I'm In Love With A German Film Star', or The Mobiles' 'Drowning in Berlin' from the same year...
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Pete Paphides reaches for the Gaviscon as he considers national identity, large plates of fried food, and what would be on the playlist were he celebrating British culture on the airwaves
Pete Doherty eating his breakfast at the Dalby Cafe, via Instagram
It's been ten years since, over a Muswell Hill cuppa, my pop-loving compañero Bob Stanley floated a theory that was, on the face of things, a mite fanciful. He suggested that a key factor in the outcome of the 2016 referendum on leaving the EU was the similarity between the words 'Brexit' and 'breakfast'. Bob contended that those of us who wanted Britain to remain in the EU didn't have a comparably snappy word to which we could align our...
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Here's everything our Subscribers had last month, including over four hours of listening treasure in the multi-platform playlist
It's that time of the month when we take the heavy lifting from our Subscribers' ears and keep them on top of all that is new and good in tQ's world. Before we give the Subscriber and Subscriber Plus tier members the links to their playlist on the various streaming platforms, here's a bit of a catch-up on what we've sent out to our top two subs tiers in October. In the Low Culture Podcast, John and Luke discussed the original 1954 film that kicked off the Godzilla series, as well as the recent Godzilla Minus One. The Low Culture Essay was on...
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The Last Path
Blunt Synopsis
Formerly known as Bad Amputee, trio from the north-east of England take things slow. Real slow
Blunt Synopsis by The Last Path
When the sort of music The Last Path play really lands, the secret to it doing so is in how it just teeters on the absolute precipice of unsalvageable dourness. Guitars that sound innately metallic, not as in the genre but evocative of a large amount of lead ingots plummeting from the sky onto rural limestone. Vocals that draw out nigh on every vowel sound, not for melismatic or otherwise showy reasons but just to figuratively look you in the eye and say, "I'll finish singing this line when I'm ready, thanks".
Blunt Synopsis is the second album...
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Where do you go, what do you do, after you have created a riff for the ages? For Keith Kahn-Harris, that's the question that Boris & Sunn O)))'s Altar seems to ask
By any objective standard, the riff that dominates 'Etna', the opener to the Boris / Sunn O))) collaboration Altar, should be as celebrated as 'Walk', 'Whole Lotta Love' or 'Symptom Of The Universe'. As a song, there is little else to it but the riff - an extended intro that builds and locks into an audaciously simple chord sequence, eventually giving way to a lavishly elongated breakdown into a squall of guitar noise. It's 9 minutes and 50 seconds of metallic perfection, the apotheosis of focused guitar power, without...
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Repressed for the first time in nearly thirty years, Derek Jarman's book Kicking the Pricks, including the director's notes and diaries from the making of his seminal film The Last of England, offers a portal into a rotting UK that feels all too familiar
The Last of England (Derek Jarman, 1987). All images courtesy: British Film Institute
In Kicking The Pricks Derek Jarman poses the question: what use is a film, book or artwork that presents a nostalgic future warning for an unloved and thwarted isle? A companion piece to Jarman's most overtly political film, The Last Of England, the book is part memoir, part production diary, and a scattering of interviews. Taken together, the two works show Jarman drawn into a...
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Keith Kahn-Harris looks back at a landmark release full of surprises and possibilities
To push back a genre label is, all too often, a reliably generic move by artists desperately seeking to differentiate themselves from other artists who sound much the same. Occasionally though, pushing back against genre label is a more subversive move, the mark of an artist pushing against anything that would close off their creative development.
Such is the case with Carcass. It didn't take them long at the start of their career to reject the grindcore label, they are currently rebelling against the extreme metal label, and on Necroticism: Descanting The Insalubrious they were reluctant to be labelled as death metal, preferring 'progressive'. And however much one might...
The post Gutted, Hashed and Deboned: Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious By Carcass At 35 appeared first on The Quietus.
As we hurtle through the final months of 2026, tQ's staffers select another round-up of everything we've loved over the last few weeks
We are only a few weeks away from end-of-year chartmageddon, the point at which we will be forced, whether we like it or not, to put on the record what defined our 2026. Given that a person's relationship with music is constantly-shifting - I find that the side of bed I've woken up on can determine whether a song makes me feel ecstatic or annoyed - I've always found the idea of making a permanent declaration of what's 'best' slightly daunting.
I have a soft spot, by contrast, for the simplicity these more casual roundups, presented unranked and ad...
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Andy Stott
Late Loop
The British electronic music producer proves himself, once again, a consummate perfectionist - but it's the subtle imperfections that make his music really sing
It didn't take Andy Stott long to find himself drawn towards the frayed edges, to wear and imperfections. Less concerned with gleaming dancefloor patterns than the accumulation of hiss and grit, he made his name with slower tempos, tracks that went a little wonky, marked by age and rust. A sound in love with the 'stuff' of sound, the sense it had a physical surface that got under your fingernails, that carried the marks of time. On Late Loop it settles to a stillness, a richly emotive minimalism under the slow shroud of attic dust.
It's...
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Pedro João Santos reports from the latest edition of Portugal's premiere festival for experimental music, where stellar sets from Noémi Büchi, Tygapaw, Marta Salogni and more lead the way
Malcolm Pardon and Gustaf Broms, photo by Adriano Ferreira Borges / Semibreve
A startled Jocy de Oliveira looks out at the sea: it's well past time the grand piano should be brought ashore. She oversees a woman playing the ivories, drifting in the tide. "What do you expect to achieve this late?", she blurts at the walkie-talkie, wrangling with the producers of her 2005 short film, Noturno De Um Piano. What starts off as an elegant allegory - the instrument set adrift in the ocean, a metaphor for the erosion of high culture...
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Angus Batey looks back 35 years at the 360-degree attack of one of the most creatively independent yet offensive hip hop albums ever made
Classic albums are supposed to be celebrated, but Death Certificate doesn't permit unqualified responses. It's a record made by a young man as talented at needling his listeners as he was at constructing and delivering some of the angriest lyrics in the hip hop canon, and is impossible to love without qualification. If you're not offended by a significant portion of it - no matter who you are, whatever your background - you're not listening properly. Just about the only universal reaction Death Certificate generates is one of awe at the 360-degree ferocity Ice Cube maintains for...
The post America's Most Offensive? Ice Cube's Death Certificate Revisited appeared first on The Quietus.
Leo Chadburn's latest work expands outwards from a seventeenth-century manual of folk dances to a kinetic exploration of human movement, from St Vitus' chorea to raving at Castlemorton Common
English Dancing Master is a dance album, but not in the sense you would usually associate with the term. There is no "succession of repetitive beats" (the phrase used by the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 to criminalise outdoor raves), ribcage splintering bass or woozy toplines. Instead, we are treated to a reticent male narrator - voiced by Leo Chadburn - and the Phaedra Ensemble in conversation with each other. In fact, it's not really an album at all but a singular radiophonic piece broken up into brief episodes that...
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Maria W Horn
Melting Pillars of Snow
Melting Pillar of Snow is a dense exploration of time and decay that feels more like a static monument than a living listening experience
Melting Pillars of Snow by Maria W Horn
On Melting Pillars of Snow, Swedish composer Maria W Horn attempts to map the relentless passage of time across five expansive compositions. The record sets out to chart the friction between microscopic moments and deep historical time. Yet for all its conceptual weight and formal intent, the listening experience remains curiously remote, leaving the pieces sounding like static, glass-encased dioramas which may be meticulously assembled, but are emotionally lacking in power.
Lead single 'Scythe of Saturn' sets the template. Built around slow-motion acoustic and electronic friction,...
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From 80s synthpop and 90s trip hop through to mischievous, glitched-out electronics, Andy Stott talks through 13 records that hold significance to him ahead of the release of his new album, Late Loop
Across a career that now spans more than two decades, Andy Stott's name has become synonymous with a style of electronic music that is patient and understated. Early records like Passed Me By and Luxury Problems dealt in dubbed-out minimalism and hauntingly gritty chuggers, while albums like 2016's Too Many Voices and 2019's It Should Be Us retained some of those qualities while introducing shades of dream pop into his captivating oeuvre.
On new record Late Loop, which is his first studio LP in five years, Stott explores those...
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Dis Fig
What To Make Of These Mortal Hands
Her debut was called PURGE and it was about her. This one is about what people do to each other, and it is named after the part of the body that does it
What To Make Of These Mortal Hands by Dis Fig
The title tells you where to look. Hands make things and hands wreck them, and Felicia Chen has built her second solo album around that double function. Track ten is called 'A Hundred Hands'. Track six is 'The Snake You Built'. The third track is named after the psaltery, an instrument you have to pluck with your fingers to make a sound at all. None of this is decoration. What To Make...
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Drukqs has long been one of John Doran's favourite LPs; with a reissue looming, he attempts to articulate why he loves this critically derided album so much
Drukqs by Aphex Twin
Rereading the contemporary reviews of Drukqs 25 years later is like rubbernecking the aftermath of a motorway crash. Just ahead of release in October 2001, it became wince-inducingly clear that some previously long-term supporters of Richard D. James were ready to start questioning the validity of his art if not gearing up to fully turn on him. His traditional allies in the leftfield press hated the album, that much was clear. "Too much cake and no nuts" was the stinging but memorable summary minted by Rob Young for The Wire, who...
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The festival of leftfield electronic music returns to Central London next month for its second edition
Soho Electronic, the Central London festival championing leftfield electronic music, will return for its second edition next month.
More than 30 artists are scheduled to play across four stages on and around Dean Street, with the likes of Nik Colk Void and Mark Van Hoen, otherwise known as Locust, set to make appearances. The festival will also host sets from reel-to-reel tape manipulator Howlround, Sculpture, Sonny E (FKA Adamski) and Agnes Haus, in addition to our very own Reviews Editor, Bobby Barry.
Alongside the aforementioned acts, the full lineup includes live sets from Axon, Death Magazine 52, Artificially Yours, Lifeloose, E.M.Arson, kWeRk + Ch20, Disinformation, Xuanni_Space, Dom...
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The album has been out-of-print for some time
Photo by Andrew Catlin
Throwing Muses' self-titled debut album is being reissued to mark its 40th anniversary.
The album has been out-of-print for some time, in addition to not being available on streaming services. It marked the first release from the band on 4AD, with the group being the first American signees to the label.
The release of Throwing Muses on 4AD in 1986 marked a shift in the label's direction going forward as it looked more significantly towards the American market and signed Pixies via their connection to Throwing Muses not long after. The album went out of print in the early 1990s when plans were made by the band's American label, Sire Records,...
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It marks the band's first release for Jack White's Third Man Records
The Flaming Lips have a new album on the way, titled The Teardrop Throbs.
Featuring 13 tracks, the record marks the band's first release for Jack White's label, Third Man Records. It's the band's first album in seven years, and their first in 35 years to not feature multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd, who is no longer a member of the band.
In a lengthy statement about the album and each of its tracks, frontman Wayne Coyne said: "Please keep in mind there are a thousand things that go into making a song. I don't really believe any song has a fixed meaning, and I don't want my songs to have a...
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They've also shared two tracks from the LP
Photo by Harry Ward
Factory Floor have shared details of their first studio album in 10 years, titled One Trip.
Spanning 10 tracks, it marks the first full-length release from the current formation of Gabe Gurnsey, Nik Colk Void and new member Joe Ward. The new record's foundations lie in a set that the group played at MUTEK in Montréal in 2024 after returning from an extended hiatus, with the performance providing a catalyst for a new chapter in the project.
In a collective statement, the group said: "After the MUTEK performance, we felt an appetite to work in a space where artists could connect emotionally and physically, both in the studio and on a live...
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Our electronic music editor tunes out the latest online culture war, and instead reviews 10 recent releases of an auteur-ish bent, spanning avant-pop, experimental electronics, fractured club music, dubwise mutations and form-bending DJing
I've not yet jumped on the discourse bandwagon about 300SkullsAndCounting & Jenny Sparks, debates over whether its treatment of millennial aesthetics is an act of hackneyed recycling or innovative salvaging. Rather than participating in online battles (music heads love culture wars more than any other species), I spent most of early autumn listening to college rock trailblazers The Replacements. I somehow missed them in my formative years, but I am now all the more glad I did as I can savour their brilliance in my 30s. As they...
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Johnny Marr
The Age of Everything
Former Smiths guitarist settles some scores - with himself, and others
When I spoke to Johnny Marr for Huck in 2019, all Morrissey talk was off the table. Marr is a very affable interviewee though, and given that the conversation was going so well, I couldn't resist slipping in a cheeky question about how an unnamed "certain person" was chipping away at the legacy of The Smiths with his increasingly unhinged pronouncements. "Honestly? I'm not concerned, is the answer," he replied, generously. "I'm just not. I'm concerned about so many other things in my day and in the living of my life, you know, that that just isn't one of my concerns. I go out and play...
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@
Autosmile
Philadelphia duo with an ungoogleable name create dreamy psychedelic worlds with Waterboys flutes adn Beach Boys harmonies
Autosmile by @
It's a great time and a nightmarish time to be an @ (pronounced 'at') fan. It's exciting that the Philadelphia art-folk band's second album has just been released, but it's also a faff trying to explain to friends who @ are. Victoria Rose and Stone Filipczak are making fresh, entrancing music that communicates places and mindsets in contemporary ways that can't quite be reduced to any generic label or category.
Selfishly, when you listen to the self-proclaimed SEO wet dream's latest album Autosmile you almost want to keep them to yourself, to simply eat your comforting slice of @ pie, and sit there...
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Ahead of an appearance at Deep Time, the Irish experimentalist gives Alastair Shuttleworth 10 entry points into a back catalogue which includes an opera with Barbie dolls, 12 fictional aliases and a board game for them to play
Jennifer Walshe by Blackie Bouffant
Flann O'Brien, one of Jennifer Walshe's favourite Irish writers, once wrote of speaking Irish "when it was neither profitable nor popular." Walshe has been ahead of the curve herself in speaking about the rise of AI, which brought her career-spanning questions about art, truth and technology into focus. A prolific improviser, composer and researcher, she is one of the most celebrated figures working in contemporary classical music today - but the scope of her catalogue may baffle newcomers. She...
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Oliver Leith
Doom and the Dooms
Based on transcriptions direct from tapes found at a jumble sale, the latest from Oliver Leith may be the ideal entry point to the British composer's oeuvre
Steady pulse, parallel melodies. Strings undulating with opulent vibrato. Percussive garnish that, clinking and clattering, sounds just like a five-year-old breaking a piggy bank. Endless vacillation between hope and despair. Endless vacillation between stately ceremony and soft frolicking. All processed as if through a stereo-widening plug-in. This is Oliver Leith's signature style, and it's easy to start taking it for granted - mostly because of how effortless he makes it sound.
Commissioned by Wigmore Hall, where it received its debonair premiere in June 2024, Doom and the Dooms offers a half-hour...
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The London party series is aiming to take over a complex formerly used by London College of Fashion
Lost, the secretive London party series famed for its big-name lineups, has revealed its pursuing a 24-hour license for a new venue in the heart of Oxford Street.
Taking to Instagram yesterday (22 October), the team behind the party revealed that they had secured use of a building complex formerly used by London College of Fashion. Writing on social media, they said: "An entire block on Oxford Street to reimagine the heart of London, we want to build this with you."
In a further update to email subscribers issued today (23 October), Lost encouraged people to contact Westminster Council in order to support them in...
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He revealed that he is now in talks with a record label to produce an official box set of the group's material
Kevin Martin has taken to Instagram to reveal that he's successfully blocked an unlicensed reissue of Possession, a 1992 album by GOD, the band that he was part of from 1987 until 1996.
Updating his social media followers, Martin thanked people who had offered him legal advice on the matter and said he'd fought back against the planned reissue on "legal and moral grounds". He added that the process of blocking the release had been "difficult and stressful", but ultimately successful, and that none of the members of GOD had approved the reissue.
The dispute was over a planned new edition...
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Exploring the theme of Continuity, it will feature contributions from affiliates of the Príncipe label and tQ's own Jennifer Lucy Allan
DJ Marfox, photo by Marta Pina
Portuguese festival SQUARE has revealed the first details of the conference programme for its 2027 edition.
Returning to Braga for its third edition in January, SQUARE will host a number of panel discussions and artist interviews for the second consecutive year. The programming will revolve around the theme of Continuity.
One session will explore 15 years of Portuguese label Príncipe, with key affiliates DJ Marfox and Helviofox set to be interviewed. tQ's own Jennifer Lucy Allan will also moderate a panel discussion called Archives And Memory: Exploring The Unfamiliar, which will explore the practice of recovering sound...
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Robbie Williams' hip hop pivot is widely seen as one of the most obnoxious failures in pop. Claire Biddles & Fergal Kinney deal with an LP which is experimental outlier, outsider art & baffling mess all at once
There's a moment in 2016 captured in Chris Heath's bestselling journalistic portrait of Robbie Williams where the singer is struggling with his infant child emotionally pushing his father away. "Maybe," offers his wife Ayda Field-Williams, "she's finally heard Rudebox."
The September 2006 release of the 'Rudebox' single remains the most controversial moment in Robbie Williams career, a turning point that decisively ended his imperial phase as Britain's biggest pop star that he had sustained since the 1997 release of Life Thru A Lens. Where...
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Rising Damp expert Sophie Sleigh-Johnson tunes in to the 70s pub sports telly series that celebrated regional specificity through a fug of cig smoke and the rituals of indoor combat
Something was afoot in the corridors of Yorkshire TV during the early 70s, fuelled by crates of Double Diamond beer. The chipboard sets of Rising Damp, a luridly claustrophobic set piece transmitted into the country's living rooms, shared production space (if not a specific studio) at Kirkstall Road Studios, Leeds with another domesticated strain of British culture: the pub.
Long before Luke Littler brought darts to the TikTok generation and Sky homogenised the arrows' presentation, The Indoor League brought pub-based sports to British living rooms. In 1972 audiences had been able to watch the...
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Shit And Shine
0 aa Riot
The ever-prolific Craig Clouse gives us four tracks of skipping needles and sporadic glitches, but it's the subtle details and small shifts that prove most beguiling for JR Moores
0 aa RIOT by SHIT AND SHINE
Paul Du Noyer compared Paul McCartney's "stylistic breadth" to Pablo Picasso. Will Gompertz eulogised David Bowie as "the Picasso of pop". Leonard Cohen saw Bob Dylan as "the Picasso" and considered himself a lower-rung Matisse. Kanye West and Madonna have likened themselves to the great master. Mike Skinner said he was "the Pablo Picasso of geezer garage". Notwithstanding this painter's stranglehold over Western aesthetic thinking and ignoring his personal shortcomings for a moment, whose output can truly be hailed as the musical...
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Discrepant founder Gonçalo F. Cardoso tells tQ about a stacked lineup celebrating the underground scene of the Canary Islands and beyond
Alejandra Cárdenas, aka Ale Hop
The last three days of October will see London's experimental music lodestar Cafe OTO host a three day program organised by Tenerife-based DIY label Discrepant and the annual Canary Islands festival Keroxen.
Taking place on 29, 30 and 31 October, a rammed schedule will see performances from more than a dozen acts. They include representatives from the thriving Canarian underground like psych rockers GAF Y La Estrella De La Muerte, experimental guitarist Paul Pèrrim, leftfield pop songwriter Akane and more.
International representation comes from the likes of Japanese turntablist DJ Sniff, making a rare appearance in the...
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Richard Foster considers the life of an artist who died on the day that The Damned's 'New rose' was released, and considers an unusual continuum in weird British culture
Those familiar with the popular British TV series Doctor Who will be aware that the unnamed Timelord protagonist occasionally transforms, 'dying' and reemerging alive once more within seconds, now portrayed by a new actor. This pareidolic process, alongside the sometimes ectoplasmic visual effects found in the programme's opening and closing credits (especially those seen in the mid-1970s) suggests astral travel and spiritual regeneration; new possibilities that nevertheless draw on old hinterlands.
On 22 October 1976, the English watercolour painter Edward Burra died in the Royal East Sussex hospital in Hastings. A happier and...
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Darran Anderson looks at Pulp's (one-time) farewell LP, as fine as any of their others, and asks, why did it fall by the wayside?
In Die Technik des Dramas (1863), Gustav Freytag argued for an ideal five act structure in storytelling. The problem was Freytag, for all his talent and success, was a racist Prussian supremacist and had, to put it mildly, something of a questionable world-view. Another problem was that life, with all its messy tangents and inconvenient loose ends, does not necessarily unfold in five acts.
Though the structure existed in practise before then, it took off after Freytag formalised it, and it's easy to see why; audiences, theatre producers, and political and religious moralists were all flattered by...
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The London experimental folk outliers' triumphant third album is a demonstration of traditional music at its most progressive, outward-looking and migratory
Photo credit: Brad Gilbert
The hammered dulcimer originated in Persia as the santur, perhaps as many as 5,000 years ago. From there it travelled in all directions, adapting and mutating as it went. It moved southwards to India, where it became the santoor, played by ancient Sufi mystics as an accompaniment to hymns, and then moved eastwards via China to become the Korean yanggeum. In Hungary it has grown bigger and turned into the cimbalom, the national instrument. In Spain, it can be found depicted on the relief of a 12th century cathedral. It England it became popular with street performers...
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Reigns
Antigeist
Wessex duo grow into a quartet, get amped, still full of doom
The Antigeist by Reigns
Somerset is a real epicentre of modern druidry and all things occult. The Stanton Drew Stone Circles are there and Glastonbury Tor is there, both generating plenty of neo-pagan energy. It is also the mystical home county of sibling duo Reigns (Roo and Tim Farthing) who since their 2004 debut have consistently welded horror-flavoured storytelling and a trippy electro-folk sound to create a discography that could serve a spiritual companion to Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet
Reigns' signature is mining the darker side of humanity through their work, offering the audience scant relief from these terrifying realities. But whereas the duo worked alone on previous albums,...
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It features archival visual material and original essay from the band's members, in addition to contributions by Debbie Harry, Lorde and others
Talking Heads are publishing a book that will look back over their history and impact on the music world.
Talking Heads: New Feeling will be released to mark the 50th anniversary of the band's debut album, Talking Heads: 77. "For this book, we pulled out handwritten lyrics, original album sketches and private photos, some of which haven't left our archive in over 40 years," the band's Jerry Harrison said.
It also takes in original essays from all four members of the band, plus contributions by Debbie Harry, Lorde, Jeff Bridges and others. Among the visual material featured are behind-the-scenes photos from...
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The band, Whait, will put their first album out in February
Photo by Eleanor Petry
Wendy Eisenberg has surprise released a companion album to their self-titled LP from earlier this year.
Titled Wweennddyy Eeiisseennbbeerrgg, it collects extended live versions of the tracks 'Meaning Business' and 'The Walls' from Eisenberg's 2026 album. They recorded the new versions of the tracks with Mr. Bungle bassist Trevor Dunn, drummer Ryan Sawyer and violinist Mari Rubio, otherwise known as More Eaze.
Speaking about their decision to record and share the expanded takes on these tracks, Eisenberg said: "I want to write songs that feel infinite. I want to write songs that transcend their production, that can weather the changes. It's probably a holdover from my jazz training, the...
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