The Detroit techno producer has died aged 64. In July 1997 Mike Shallcross interviewed Atkins for the cover story of The Wire 161. We have now made that article free to read in the magazine's online library.

From Detroit to Deep Space: Juan Atkins interviewed by Mike Shallcross, The Wire 161, July 1997

As far right ideology and misogyny make gains around the world, metal, a subculture with a troubled relationship to fascism, wonders whether more progressive ideals are still in reach, writes Antonio Poscic in The Wire 513

Metal used to be the music of outsiders. For teenagers who stumbled into it, the subculture offered a place to belong and legitimised intense emotions that had to be suppressed in daily life. Its lyrics and sonic density gave shape to alienation, despair and angst that many struggled to articulate. It offered acceptance for those rejected elsewhere, and an identity chosen rather than imposed. As sociologist Deena Weinstein's research in the 1990s showed, metal circles often acted as scaffolding for adolescent development.

Today, other subcultures have become fragmented by the internet and streaming, but metal remains a counterexample, perhaps precisely because of the strong sense of belonging on which it was built. At the same time, the very closeness and openness to extremes that made the genre a refuge also carry a cost, with the sense of brotherhood and outsiderliness at times tipping into hypermasculinity, sexism, misogyny and, at worst, ties with far right ideologies.

For any metalhead with misgivings about the subculture, the past two decades have brought growing signs of pushback, with countercultural threads rising within the once orthodox environment. Both the Red and Anarchist Black Metal (RABM) movement, born out of the collision of black metal and hardcore and punk, and a wave of under-represented and queer musicians - including black metal duo Ragana, sludge outfit Body Void and avant drone act Divide And Dissolve - subvert negative connotations of the genre, turning its tropes into an experimental language for new stories, reclaiming its obsession with transgression for radical self-empowerment. From a distance, the picture suggests steady progress. Up close, however, the view is different.

"The people welcoming new folks and marginalised groups into metal are new folks and marginalised groups themselves," says Bariann Tuite Smith, founder of the New York label Fiadh Productions. "Artists, supporters and fans who have always been there, just never given a place, and who stepped up to build that place for themselves and others - they exist outside the traditional metal community."

Some 8000 kilometres away in Athens, musician and antifascist Chris Daritsis aka Ayloss shares Tuite Smith's view. "The core of metal culture hasn't changed in a radical way," he argues. "There was an effect of liberatory politics in the mainstream scene and its politics have evolved, but quite often in a 'hiding the rotten stuff beneath the rug' way - metal culture has also found a way to keep some of the problematic stuff that it enjoys, using new methods and rhetoric."

These problematic aspects extend beyond ideology, but most are still related to black metal and its far right undercurrents. Whereas in the past, aligned groups wore their National Socialist black metal (NSBM, aka Nazi black metal) insignia proudly, now they expertly hide them, to the point where it's become a meme to have to check various lists of 'sketch' (ie fascist-leaning) groups and musicians before listening to any new band.

In 2019, the Polish black metal outfit Mgła, whose members have a history of controversial releases and NSBM ties, were allowed to play a sold out show in one of Zagreb's traditionally antifascist clubs in spite of cancellation calls from local activists. Similar confrontations happen worldwide. "Venues themselves haven't taken the proactive step that some promoters have, posting in antifascist groups to ask about bands, talking to other artists before booking," notes Tuite Smith. "Too often it's been left to fans to do that legwork: informing promoters, contacting venues directly, with pretty varying results."

This stems from the professed neutrality of large swathes of the metal scene. "We're constantly banging our heads, not at the presence of the fascists, but at the attitude of the apolitical fans," says Ayloss. "Whether they understand it or not, they protect the fascists themselves. I've seen extreme hostility towards antifascist praxis in the metal scene, meaning that these projects dissolve after most people realise that the cost in terms of cultural capital and mental health is too much."

Several trans musicians I approached asked to remain anonymous, citing the threat that speaking out publicly on these topics can pose to marginalised people, especially during Trump's second term and even within alleged safe spaces dominated by virtue signalling rather than actual work. Online, the situation is worse. "It's really hard out there for a lot of people right now, and if you're isolated and seeking some kind of support on the internet, the algorithm designed to feed you more anti-progressive content is only a click away from a fitness video or edgy meme," says musician Rylan Gleave. "Those are the people we have more of a chance of connecting with in showing them community."

With a background in the alternative chamber-classical sphere, Gleave came into metal fairly late, joining the Glaswegian antifascist black metal band Ashenspire as a vocalist in 2017, then using skeins of doom and extreme metal for his own project All Men Unto Me to interrogate transmasculinity within patriarchal systems.

"There's an important difference between genuinely ideological extremist bands and people who aren't necessarily extremists but use increasingly normalised dogwhistles, sometimes even unwittingly," he adds. "I do think we have a collective responsibility to have difficult conversations that I notice a lot of people still shy away from."

Often, though, inclusivity is less a matter of ideology or cultural hegemony than of stairs and doorways, as Gleave, who is disabled, knows firsthand. "Most DIY venues are up or down a flight of stairs, won't have an accessible bathroom, or won't have step-free access to the stage," he points out. "Either you don't see disabled artists onstage, or you see us compromising on our access needs to be there - physically getting injured - or operating at a huge net loss. Where do those missing people go? Do they revert to bedroom-only projects?"

Ultimately, the metal scene reflects the world around it, with enclaves of progressive thought existing within increasingly hostile surroundings. Pragmatic about the situation, Tuite Smith, Ayloss and Gleave operate under what Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, borrowing from Romain Rolland, called "the pessimism of the intellect, the optimism of the will".

Fuelled by the same appreciation of art and desire for community that originally defined metal, they keep building. "There's huge power in using your platform to find the strange, the marginalised, the experimental, and the effect that can have on those artists looking for a first step," says Gleave.

For Tuite Smith, "We are still looking for joy, and finding it, in small things, in metal, in each other. And recognising that we can find those small joys in this community is a realisation I want to expand."

This essay appears in The Wire 513. Wire subscribers can also read it in our online magazine library.

The surviving members of Faust's original line-up present four perspectives on the krautrock institution's indomitable spirit, writes Abi Bliss in The Wire 513

Faust
Fliegen Lernen
Bureau B CD/DL/LP
Gugaruz
Bureau B CD/DL/LP
MOI
Bureau B CD/DL/LP
Ungebunden
Bureau B CD/DL/LP

At the peak of their success in 1978, the four members of US rock group Kiss all released solo albums on the same day. This move - born as much from hubris as internal rivalry - backfired as sales fell short of the anticipated windfall.

A world in which Faust ever acheived that degree of fame is hard to picture. And yet this handful of simultaneous albums bearing the veteran German group's name is in effect four individual projects, each "curated" - as per the official crediting - by one of the surviving musicians of Faust's initial 1971-74 incarnation (Rudolf Sosna, the originator of such beguiling dream logic melodies as "Jennifer" and "Flashback Caruso", died in 1996, while drummer Arnulf Meifert was ousted after Faust's self-titled debut, purportedly for crimes including keeping his room tidy and practising daily).

Rather than being a four-way clash of egos between Gunther Wüsthoff, Zappi W Diermaier, Hans-Joachim Irmler and Jean-Hervé Péron, these albums offer a temporary syncing of the timelines for a group whose long and frequently fractured history means that any future biopic would require a script somewhere between Rashomon and the "I'm Spartacus!" scene in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus, narrated through heavy clouds of dope smoke.

Emerging in 1971 from the joining of two existing groups, Nukleus and Campylognatus Zitelli, the punchier named Faust formed at the behest of producer and journalist Uwe Nettelbeck, to satisfy Polydor's thirst for an act that would conjure Beatles-esque profits out of West Germany's defiantly countercultural rock scene. Strangely, the hirsute and often naked members of Faust proved as unmouldable and hard to market as many of their peers. Using the advance to set up a home studio in the countryside outside Bremen, months of seclusion and experimentation produced two albums before they were dropped, picked up by Virgin for 1973's cut-price success The Faust Tapes and the less lucrative Faust IV, before being dropped again. An aborted fifth album eventually saw light as 2022's Punkt.

Diermaier, Irmler and Péron revived the group in the 1990s in various incarnations that eventually splintered, resulting in several different versions of Faust touring and recording until the present, apparently without rancour. Interviewed in The Wire 452, Péron said: "There is no animosity. There is no competition… I think Faust is an idea, is a concept, is an approach to music. It is a spirit."

What, then, is the defining spirit of Faust as expressed through these albums? For Wüsthoff, formerly the synth player/saxophonist and absent from reunions until 2022, Fliegen Lernen is an opportunity to reframe the group's 1970s inventions through a 21st century lens, drawing upon archive material to pair signature krautrock sounds with crisp, purposeful electronica in an acknowledgement of Faust's influence upon generations of groups armed with sequencers, not guitars.

Opening with a dusty piano which could have tumbled straight out of The Faust Tapes, "Hörst Du Die Schritte" combines perkiness - handclaps, parping sax - with a sinister undercurrent emanating from monotone chanted vocals and the efficiency with which it ushers the past into a strict 4/4. "Down, Down And Come To Me" wrestles assorted field recordings into a commanding slice of 1980s Cabaret Voltaire-style industrial pop, and "Ganz Gut, Oder?" ends the album with a monomaniacal one-note riff and backbeat pairing reminiscent of Faust's Tony Conrad collaboration Outside The Dream Syndicate. But there's room to breathe between, from the twinkling synths of "Sonntag Nachmittag" to the lonely kosmische vistas of "Sandra Tanzt".

Unsurprisingly, for drummer Diermaier, the spirit of Faust lives on in the groove, and in Gugaruz he's assisted in that pursuit by Schneider TM's Dirk Dresselhaus on bass and Elke Drapatz on electronics. After riffing upon the album title (the Bavarian word for maize) with a flurry of percussive pops and dings, the trio settle into "Big Field", an ode to the hypnotic flatlands of northern Germany offering 15 minutes of steady horizons and slowly unfurling guitar feedback as bass pulses and hi-hats tick by. "Space Agent" contrasts satisfyingly resonant, widely panned toms with accumulating layers of increasingly urgent guitar; "Schleuse" is a rattle around metal railings, punctuated by harbour seagulls: like much of the rest, its playful charm seemingly born from relaxed, openhearted collaboration.

They'd struggle to compete with Jean-Hervé Péron on headcount, however, as MOI - subtitled Maybe Of Interest - boasts around 20 contributors, its name (and official crediting to FaUSt) a riff on collective creativity. In contrast, Hans-Joachim Irmler's Ungebunden (translation: Unbound) finds him solo at the organ. While Péron leans into Faust's reputation for shaking the subconscious with dada-esque collage, Irmler offers four long, mostly improvised pieces that move patiently through cycles of growth and decay, bubbling and distortion, ruin then renewal.

Yet amid the radio snippets, cheeky trumpet lines, bowed cymbals, crashing drum rolls, recited poetry, scurrying piano and anarchic guitar fuzz, Péron surprises with outbreaks of seriousness. "Writings On The Wall" collates graffiti-esque slogans to powerful effect, and the weepy jazz ballad "Du Fehlst Mir" ("I Miss You") is apparently delivered straight. Is the group's spirit encapsulated by either Irmler's Mellotron loops or Péron's couplet "I love that making music/It is just like making shoes/Sometimes they fit the ballet/Sometimes they're for the blues", from "Diabolus In Musica"? If Faust are ultimately about freedom from expectations then the answer is neither, and both.

This review appears in The Wire 513 along with many other reviews of new and recent records, books, films, festivals and more. To read them all, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.

Ludwig Göransson's scores for Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026) and Tenet (2020) trade on diegetic and instrumental ambiguities that intentionally disorient audiences in time and space, writes Philip Brophy in his latest Secret History of Film Music column

Bernard Herrmann's score for Don Chaffey's Jason And The Argonauts (1963) is an archly theatrical extravaganza that musically routes transatlantic pop culture to the Italian peplum genre explosion from the late 1950s. Though this wave of grand gladiatorial epics, produced in Italy and often featuring American beefcake performers as titular heroes, was waning by 1963, Herrmann's triumphant entrance horns, cymbal clashing, galley kettle-drum pounding and multiple cascading harps sound more pompous and less foreboding than his more well known orchestrations. Yet this score captures the plastic veneer across peplum's exaltation of classical architecture and ancient vistas.

Peplum movies constitute one cinematic wave entranced by Roman Imperial glories. From early silent movies like The Last Days Of Pompeii (1908), to the postwar peplum onslaught, battles in massive colosseums, grand edifices, museographic weaponry and period costumery were fetishised as nationalist markers. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (2026) fetishises the abstract notion of heroicism embodied by those peplum men of action. Jason And The Argonauts was based on the third century BCE epic Argonautica. Nolan's The Odyssey is based on Homer's epic poem written in the eighth century BCE, but set four centuries earlier. With so many lines of reference, pulling across centuries of mythmaking, a film maker should be able to make a historical drama without much concern for historical veracity. Nolan's film arguably attempts the opposite, catering more to the fantasy of authenticity. But what about Ludwig Göransson's score?

Like Herrmann's Jason And The Argonauts, Göransson's The Odyssey looks to Ottorino Respighi's I Pini Di Roma (1924), which employed Roman military horns to flavour its sonics with an Italianate aura. (This tone poem sounds remarkably like a contemporary film score.) As such, Herrmann and Göransson each in their own way have incorporated unusual instrumentation and recording techniques to expand the sonic dimension of the orchestra.

This approach yields The Odyssey's best moments: the glowering gongs and tectonic sheets of "Zeus' Law" with its hissing ambience and subliminal psychoacoustics; the enhanced breathiness and distant bowl-ringing of "Penelope" and its deliberate merger with warm synth pads; the liquefied vocality of microtonal choirs and sampled growls in "Agamemnon"; and the atonal miasma of unidentifiable textures combined with synthetic grumbles and screeches in "Cyclops". Audited as a soundtrack release away from the pummelling percussion of the film's innumerable 70 mm battle sequences, Göransson's score is a meld of Fourth World and dark ambient, refreshingly acoustic and absent of hollow orchestral stucco.

The Odyssey's score is built from themes articulated by folk instrumentation: the Greek aulos, a double-pipe operated by a single performer, resulting in harmonised lines; and kithara lyres, with mellow string resonance accentuated by textural plectrum scrapes. Buffeting and buoying their tones are bronze gongs, metal bowls, steel covers, iron balustrades, all struck, hammered, raked and swiped. Research into the philological grammar of Greek melodies was undertaken for the film, but the aural world captured in the studio sessions mostly conveys The Odyssey's musicality.

Worth noting here is the legacy of Italian movies which undertook bipartisan approaches to radical sonics and cultural traditions. Federico Fellini's Satyricon (1969) is based on Petronius's first century satirical novel, but wildly mixes delicate themes by Nino Rota with sourced electroacoustic pieces by Tod Dockstader, Andrew Rudin and İlhan Mimaroğlu - often layering multiple tracks together. Pier Paolo Pasolini's Oedipus Rex (1967) is based on Sophocles's Athenian tragedy from the fifth century BCE, and collages a wide array of Folkways LP tracks of indigenous music from around the globe. Both films steadfastly rejected the musical artifice and the pretensions of peplum productions. Experienced today, these two films still excite with powerful audiovisual charge - something The Odyssey's score inherits.

The Odyssey is Göransson's third score for Nolan, following Oppenheimer (2023) and Tenet (2020). His first Nolan commission most resembles The Odyssey, possibly due to both films trading heavily in the unworldly terror of spatio-temporal dislocation, which drives its heroic characters forward on impossible missions. In The Odyssey, the shifting tempo pulses, clickety-clack framework percussion, rising choral jabbering and militaristic skin pounding of "Troy" encapsulate the Trojan Horse tactic of trickery by highlighting the embodied sensation of biding time within its cramped interior, ready to burst out on cue. Its scenography replays numerous moments in Tenet where the audience is left pondering whether they are inside or outside of the spatio-temporal situations depicted on screen.

The most distinctive features of Tenet's score are its arrangement and production. Matching Tenet's dimensionally warping world of inverted entropy, Göransson's melange of symphonia, electronica and studiophonics signpost how, by the 2010s, anything could be aurally massaged into a film score - and that even Hollywood soundtrack paradigms were being transformed. "Rainy Night In Tallinn" opens with what sounds like an orchestra tuning up. Its aural wall looms large until it is silenced by a low-slung fuzz bass thumbing a single note with a fret trail-off. Cryptic militaristic claps and toms herald a ritual as synths, amped guitar distortion and teeth-grating synth pulsations build in density.

This becomes a main theme in the film. It evokes an industrial band covering a mid-1990s trance anthem like Lunatic Asylum's "The Meltdown" (1993). Similar trance-like rupturing is brought to the fore in "Meeting Neil" where the whole track is laced with FM synthesis grit and forced to endure some noisy tremolo stabbing, as if the score has been chopped into nano-thin slices. A device used in the film at its most rupturing points, it's a sonic equivalent of a projector burning and melting a celluloid frame in the cinema.

Like The Odyssey, the soundtrack for Tenet has been released as a double CD: each movie is long, carrying a numbing bounty of cues, many of which are mini-suites in their own right. In an earlier era of crossover composition for film, Peter Gabriel's Moroccan fusion experiments for Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation Of Christ (1988) were released as two CDs, one of sources alone. Such accreditation is rare in film scoring, as it is an artform predicated on musical derivation. But isn't that what myths are? While ancient plays and classical poems have inspired the story arcs realised in movies low and high, the role of musical accompaniment and narration affords great potential to musicalise a centuries-old soundworld through contemporary idioms and their technological realisation. The twisty forward-backward looping of Tenet complements the essentialist aim to bring The Odyssey forward to a contemporary audience: this is precisely what Göransson has been tasked to deliver.

Nolan's projects have allowed Göransson to extend himself into multiple genres and styles, drawing on his background in various pop idioms (most notably through co-writing and producing five studio albums for Childish Gambino). The subtle adoption of trance and dubstep in Tenet might be modish, but it feels technologically apt. Trance music is but one musical genre of many that luxuriates in a dated soundworld and a never arriving futuristic realm. Maybe that's why Lunatic Asylum's "The Meltdown" constructs its spiralling melody loop from the pompous synth grandeur of Israeli-American Shuki Levy's score to the French-Japanese co-production anime Ulysses 31 - set in the 31st century. Such is the musical entropy inherent in musicalising mythology.

Wire subscribers can read Philip Brophy's original Secret History of Film Music columns from the 1990s online in the digital archive. It was revived in 2025 as an online column: previous instalments published on The Wire website can be read here. Wire readers and print and digital subscribers can also find this essay on page 18 of The Wire 513.

In this extract, taken from the chapter "No EPI, No Nico, No Andy", Richie Unterberger explores the troubled reception of The Velvet Underground & Nico on its release in 1967

As Eric Emerson's frivolous lawsuit played out, The Velvet Underground & Nico continued to be plagued by Verve Records's ineffective promotion. Its infamous "So far underground, you get the bends!" tagline exemplified how little understanding it had of how to market such an unusual yet groundbreaking record.

"What happens when the daddy of Pop Art goes Pop Music?" the same ad asked. "The most underground album of all! It's Andy Warhol's hip new trip to the current subterranean scene. Sorry, no home movies. But the album does feature Andy's Velvet Underground (they play funny instruments). Plus his this year's Pop Girl, Nico (she sings, groovy). Plus an actual Warhol banana on the front cover (don't smoke it… peel it)! The Velvet Underground, produced by Andy Warhol, is now available at record stores across the country. Just bring your own plain brown wrapper."

More aggravating was the continued general lack of radio airplay for the banana album, even on underground stations, in New York and elsewhere. In a 1981 interview with The New Musical Express, Sterling Morrison claimed local radio refused to even run advertisements for the album "because it was about drugs and sex and perversion". In a radio interview promoting his 1976 LP Rock And Roll Heart, Lou Reed told Philadelphia's WMMR that progressive FM stations wouldn't run commercials for the record because of "Heroin". To keep this in perspective, radio ads for such albums weren't as common in 1967 as they'd be within a few years, and it's not even certain Verve made many, or any. The 22 July issue of Record World reported that a radio spot advertising the LP would be available 15 August but if one was made, it still hasn't circulated.

"I remember being probably the only person that had ever played "Heroin" on the radio," Richard Goldstein says. "Every now and then I'd get invited by Murray The K to the studio to play records. I would bring in the most unusual music I could find to play on his show. One night I played "Heroin". And he was completely apoplectic, just completely apoplectic. Especially by the length of the song!" In the UK, Record Retailer moralised that "Heroin" was "distasteful, damaging to the industry's image and should be banned" - though, perversely, it also singled out the LP's least commercial track for praise, advising, "Try "European Son To Delmore Schwartz" - an excellent example of improvisation".

Even WBAI's Bob Fass, later cited by Morrison as the only DJ in New York to give the banana album substantial exposure, was wary of airing "Heroin". As a public radio station that was part of the progressive Pacifica network, WBAI had far less pressure to either be commercial or avoid controversy, but Fass still had reservations. At the time, he explains, he was under the impression the song was "part of something you might call 'heroin chic', which I thought was a very bad thing - making heroin like something attractive and mysterious in a dark corner that people should try to dig into. I was angry about it. I thought, 'Why is this guy romanticising something that's such a plague?' In the right context, I would play it, but after there had been a putdown of heroin. As I listen to it now, it doesn't make heroin sound romantic. It's just a kind of a true depiction of what happens in the body of the addict as they wait for the connection. I think Lou Reed is one of the four or five authentic geniuses on the music scene, and I'm sorry that I didn't listen to his stuff as carefully as I should have."

As Morrison noted, Fass did play other material from the record, and Bob confirms, "I played "All Tomorrow's Parties" a lot, and "Femme Fatale", "I'll Be Your Mirror"." As for Murray The K's violent reaction to the sheer length of "Heroin", Fass rejoins with amusement, "The length was something that I looked for. I wanted music to break that three minute sonnet form."

As for other outlets than Fass or Goldstein's shows, feels Richard, "Given the material on this record, of course they wouldn't play it. It wasn't just because of the contents, but also the musical sophistication, [which] was way beyond anything that pop radio would have countenanced. I don't know if [The Velvets] ever talked to me about that; I don't think they did. I certainly would have told them, 'Yeah, right. It's gonna take a long time before this stuff is playable.'" But there were exceptions, even back in 1967.

"The commercial 'hip station', which was WOR-FM, the first New York FM rock station, never played one Velvet note that I'm aware of," remembers Scott Kempner, later to play guitar in The Dictators and The Del Lords. "However, WFMU, the Upsala College station outta [northern New] Jersey, which still is going loud and proud, played them, or... at least one show did. There was a show called Kokaine Karma, hosted by Dennis Frawley and Bob Rudnick; they loved The Velvets. Frawley and Rudnick played [their first LP] like it was a hit album."

According to Morrison, even Bob Fass stopped playing the album after the group turned down an invite to play a bail fund benefit at Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. The Velvet Underground had played a benefit for WBAI itself at the Cheetah Club in April on the same bill as Tiny Tim, but that didn't grant them a reprieve. "That was how I made a lot of decisions," acknowledges Fass. "If the band wasn't political and they didn't want to protest against the war, I thought they were ripping off the culture. I was very convinced that everything I did had to be either on the side of what I considered to be life or death."

Sterling was still angry about the incident when he was interviewed by Bill Bentley for an Austin Sun story in 1975. "We asked them, 'By the way, who's the benefit for?' They said, 'The people who get busted for grass and acid.' We thought that was kind of curious. We asked them, 'What about the people busted for junk and speed?' They said, 'Oh, no, those are bad drugs.' How idiotic. Bad drugs - all of a sudden there are 'bad drugs'. We told them either they bail everybody out, or we don't play." Although Morrison also told Bentley "we were very much known for playing benefits", and The Velvet Underground had played benefits for the Cinematheque and WBAI, Reed didn't seem eager to be involved with them a couple of years later. "We don't play benefits," he said in a March 1969 interview with Howard Smith of New York radio stations WABC and WPLJ. "I don't believe in benefits, because I don't believe in the people the benefits are for."

Whatever their true stance on the issue, this was apparently one instance in which the band's relatively apolitical stance cost them appreciable media exposure. In his Austin Sun interview, Morrison asserted that after they turned down the WBAI benefit, "The result was that the ban was complete: a total blackout in New York City. Our altruism got in the way of our airplay. Any success in New York was through television [perhaps thinking of their brief clips on CBS and WNET] and newspapers. It had nothing to do with the legitimate outlet, which is radio. The music simply was not heard. The thing I'm most pissed about is that we were banned in New York for three years: 66 to 69, inclusive. Right up front, we were excluded from any FM radio play. AM was already out of the question: no music and no advertising. In our home city, the media capital of Earth, the native sons are banned." As perverse payback, The Velvet Underground refused to play in New York at all for the next three years, with rare exceptions.

Do What You Fear Most: The History Of The Velvet Underground is published by Omnibus Press. Read Byron Coley's review of the book in The Wire 512. Subscribers can also read the review online in the digital library.

New Voices is a new competition for aspiring music critics being launched by The Wire

For more than 40 years, The Wire has been publishing writing by a host of original and influential music critics, including Richard Cook, Val Wilmer, Biba Kopf, Ian Penman, Simon Reynolds, Kodwo Eshun, David Keenan, Mark Fisher, Greg Tate, Frances Morgan, Chal Ravens, and many others. The magazine would not exist without a dynamic set of curious, perceptive thinkers and writers.

But today, new voices in music writing are being stifled by closing publications, the development of AI, and the fragmentation of local scenes, making it harder than ever for critics to be heard above the noise.

Are you an unpublished* writer with ideas about why music, and music criticism, matter - in particular the kind of underground and experimental, uncompromising and provocative music and writing featured in the pages of The Wire? If so, our New Voices competition is a unique opportunity to see your byline in the pages of one of the most renowned and respected music magazines in the world.

To enter, submit two original pieces of writing:
• A review of a recent album, book, festival, gig, film or exhibition featuring the kind of music you might read about in the pages of The Wire (500 words)
• An opinion piece responding to the provocation: "Music criticism is irrelevant in contemporary culture" (500 words)

Submit your entries as two separate text-only files, and send them as attachments*, along with your name, email address and a very brief bio, to newvoices@thewire.co.uk.

Submissions close at midnight GMT on 7 December 2026. All entries will be read by The Wire's editorial staff.

The winner will be announced, and have their opinion piece published in the March 2027 issue of The Wire. The winner will also receive a £250 cash prize and a free annual digital subscription to the magazine. Three runners up will receive a free annual digital subscription to the magazine.

* Terms & conditions:
• Entrants should not have had more than three pieces of music writing published and paid for by a third party publication whether in print or online (your own personal blog, Substack etc don't count).
• Submitted entries must not have been previously published elsewhere.
• The competition is open to entrants of any age.
• Entrants can be based anywhere in the world but should submit their entries in English.
• The competition is free to enter.
• Only one entry per person - do not send additional material.
• Send entries as attachments only, in one of these file formats: .doc, .rtf, or .pdf. Do not send entries as links or Google docs.
• The Wire has no obligation to publish the work of any entrants, including the winner, beyond the winning essay.
• Entries should discuss music that The Wire would typically cover - adventurous, experimental, DIY, independent, etc.
• NB we will not accept entries that have been written, part-written, or polished by AI.

Two newly reissued albums showcase the seismic psychedelia of George Clinton's Funkadelic at its rawest and most disruptive, writes John Morrison in The Wire 512

Funkadelic
Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow
Westbound/Org CD/DL/LP/2xLP/MC
Maggot Brain
Westbound/Org CD/DL/LP/2xLP/MC

Released the summer before Jimi Hendrix tragically passed away in 1970, Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow was not only the follow-up to Funkadelic's promising self-titled debut of the same year; it signalled the arrival of George Clinton's ensemble as the next great voice in Black rock and psychedelia. In his 2014 memoir Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard On You?, Clinton acknowledges this by contrasting the album's release with Hendrix's death, an event that he notes as "the end of an era". During his brief but electrifying career, Hendrix moulded multiple aspects of the Black musical tradition - blues, rock, funk, R&B, jazz - into an electrifying corpus that opened up a new world of possibilities. With Hendrix dead and the psychedelic road map that he laid out for any adventurous soul to follow, Funkadelic went on to emerge as his mightiest descendents.

While Funkadelic were recording Free Your Mind Clinton absorbed and pulled inspiration from underground comics, Black power/radical leftist theory and Erich von Däniken's work theorising that aliens had made contact with and shaped the development of ancient human civilisations. Clinton took all the disparate cultural, historical, political and extraterrestrial influences swirling around in his head and drenched them in acid. The famously LSD soaked sessions produced an album that distilled the political, cultural and philosophical DNA of the 1960s into a new musical vision for the 70s.

Built around Eddie Hazel's gnarly blues and wah-wah drenched guitar, "Funky Dollar Bill" highlights the flipside of the concept of money as freedom explored on "Friday Night, August 14th". With lyrics like "The pusher push, the fixer fix, the judge acquits, the junkie leads his life, for the dollar bill", it's clear that here, money is less a vehicle for freedom than a tool for control. "Eulogy And Light" serves as the perfect album closer, with Clinton praying for strength in the face of temptation and moral degradation. In an innovative display of the band's willingness to experiment with sound and concepts, the music for "Eulogy And Light" is an earlier Funkadelic track called "Open Your Eyes" spun backwards. In doing this, Clinton and crew extract the source song's optimistic heart and repurpose its gospel-inspired tune into something stranger, more twisted.

Free Your Mind opens with the epic ten minute title track. Amid a ghostly mass of distorted guitar, feedback and cosmic synthesizer bleeps, Clinton screams "Free your mind and your ass will follow/The kingdom of heaven is within!". These simple yet spine-tingling chants formed something close to a succinct mission statement. More than just slogans, Clinton was directly addressing the intellectual, physical and spiritual demands of a new musical and ideological path. He has described "Friday Night, August 14th" as a "paycheck and party song" about how a little bit of money can buy a moment of joy and freedom. In that sense, the song feels like the spiritual heir to Louis Jordan's 1949 proto-rock 'n' roll smash "Saturday Night Fish Fry".

By the time Funkadelic entered the United Sound Systems studio in Detroit to record the follow-up to Free Your Mind, the band were at once a formidable live unit and boundless experimenters in the studio. The result of those USS sessions was 1971's Maggot Brain, one of the greatest psychedelic rock albums ever made and the crown jewel of Clinton's extensive body of work. The album opens with a simple and ominous message that is both a continuation of the core theme examined throughout Free Your Mind and a harbinger of the band's future: "I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe/I was not offended/For I knew I had to rise above it all/Or drown in my own shit".

Here the "maggots" are the corrosive forces of ignorance, self-doubt and control that infested Free Your Mind. To all intents and purposes, Maggot Brain is a trip through the other side of enlightenment, witnessed through the prism of life, death and the liberatory potential of madness. Famously, Clinton prompted guitarist Eddie Hazel to imagine that his mother had died before recording Maggot Brain's almost ten minute long title track. Hazel transforms his guitar into a wailing and mourning instrument of grief. Beneath his solo, a dreamy, six note arpeggio acts as the bedrock to one of the greatest guitar performances ever captured on tape.

"Can You Get To That" flips the energy from dark to light with its slick groove and doo-wop harmonies. A bright and joyous song at face value, the lyrics warn that even in death, no one escapes karma. "Hit It And Quit It" is a flamboyant acid rock tune with an odd metre that betrays Funkadelic's debt to both the church and the temple of Jimi Hendrix.

For an outfit that proved so adept at conjuring colourful, funky images of utopia, it's curious that they chose to close out their greatest album with "Wars Of Armageddon". Clocking in at over nine minutes long, the song is a minefield of explosions, screams and fuzzed-out guitars. The chants of "More power to the people/More pussy to the power" offer a reminder that Funkadelic's psychedelic ideals and ambitions never strayed too far from the funky, carnal physicality of life on Earth.

This review appears in The Wire 512 along with many other reviews of new and recent records, books, films, festivals and more. To read them all, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.

Voice and sound theorist Zeynep Bulut talks to Xenia Benivolski about her latest book, which delves into the friction between voices, electromagnetic sound, synthetic speech and listening beyond the demand for fluency

In Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin (Goldsmiths Press, 2025), Zeynep Bulut asks whether a voice could be understood as something co-constructed between bodies, technologies and environments. Drawing on experimental music, psychoanalysis, sound and media art, Bulut proposes the voice as a multisensory interface: a 'skin' that connects us to others while simultaneously maintaining the boundaries between us.

Bulut is an interdisciplinary scholar, voice and sound theorist and musician based at SARC, Queen's University Belfast. Her research is informed by her work as a singer, composer and performer, as well as by other artists, including John Cage, Pauline Oliveros and Christina Kubisch. Here, she discusses the voice as a plastic and distributed medium, and her current work with people living with post-stroke aphasia.

Xenia Benivolski: How did you arrive at the idea of voice as skin?

Zeynep Bulut: The first point of departure was my doctoral research at the University of California, San Diego, where I was looking at the decomposition of verbal language in contemporary vocal and experimental music: the use of phonemes and invented languages, the amplification of bodily sounds, and multisensory explorations of voice that were not necessarily aural or vocal. I wanted to think about voice otherwise - as an expanded and distributed modality, rather than something limited to the vocal cords, verbal language or even the human body.

At the same time, I was making performance works myself. In one piece, Dialogues Between Multiple Soulmates [2006], I sang different phonemes and fragments of melody into plastic bags, sealed them and threw them away. I was interested in the plastic bags as containers for emotive states or vocal moments, but also in how my voice changed the form of the bags. That fed directly into my thinking about voice, plasticity and surface.

Another important point of reference is the psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu's concept of the Skin Ego, a reformulation of the Freudian ego as an interface between the self and the external world. Anzieu describes skin as a formation of sensory envelopes, some of which are primary; for example, one's first experiences of the mother's voice, or bodily sounds. In the book I expand that envelope into an expressive surface. Skin both connects and differentiates; it also marks a boundary. That became the basis for also thinking about voice as skin.

Your own voice has travelled between languages and places. Has theorising it changed how you speak, sing or listen?

It has changed how I think about the voice and how I project my own. My mother tongue is not English, and because I have lived in the US, Berlin, London and Northern Ireland, I am always attentive to changes in the tone, melody and intonation of my speech in English. My voice navigates different accents and language cultures, and it changes with different audiences.

People sometimes ask me, "What is not voice, or what is not skin, for you?" So, I'm not speaking about the voice, but voices in the plural, or a voice in the making. Likewise, I'm interested in surfaces as points of connection and differentiation. As a certified Deep Listening (a methodology developed by Pauline Oliveros) practitioner, I also pay attention to voices emerging within environmental sound. Practice has made those conceptual questions present in my everyday experience.

What happens in the space between two voices? Is friction part of voice making?

Yes. I don't imagine voices or surfaces completely merging into one another. When voice-as-skin and skin-as-voice come together, friction and tension become the point of connection. That tension can be generative without producing complete reconciliation or resolution.

I don't imagine the space between voices as simply dialogic or reciprocal, with two fixed subjects facing one another. It is distributed and mobile, because none of these voices is singular in the first place... We all carry many voices. In participatory artworks, people may make voices together that are simultaneously individualised and anonymous. The encounter doesn't make them one; it makes them more multiple, which has ethical and political implications. If we understand voice as emergent, we can contest the classifications that place voices into fixed categories and attend to voices we might otherwise not notice or recognise. So, depersonalised moments of voicing can open different narratives of empathy and understanding.

Hmm, could you give me an example?

Well, one is Christina Kubisch's Electrical Walks [2004-present]. Her specially developed headphones convert electromagnetic signals in cities into audible sounds. To hear them, you have to move and interact with ATMs, shopping centres and other infrastructural sites, using your body as a kinetic instrument. Kubisch's work is often discussed in terms of infrastructural sound and environmental awareness, but it also allows us to consider how a voice is 'made'. When we try to make speech-like sense from non-speech sounds the city itself becomes expressive.

I also discuss tactile and biosensing musical interfaces by artists such as Atau Tanaka, Marco Donnarumma and Laetitia Sonami, which turn bodily signals into musical material. These works ask how bodies can speak without a given language and where else a voice might be made.

Terms such as "skin", "interface" and "plasticity" also belong to digital technology. What happens when a voice can be selected, worn or externalised?

"Voice skins" or "voice wear" are digital audio and computerised voice technologies developed often in the context of online gaming to let participants choose or change a voice for a character. They present voice as a synthetic construction: something you can wear and change according to how you want to be heard. That has creative possibilities, but also ethical implications. Plasticity is not only constant malleability. Referring to philosopher Catherine Malabou's scholarly work and writings on plasticity, I understand this notion as both the capacity to change and a resistance to change. Voice skin technologies are important to note because they expose how a voice is constructed, while reminding us that voices also carry histories and forms of endurance.

In the book I place these technologies alongside AVATAR therapy which was developed by psychiatrist Julian Leff in 2008, for people experiencing distressing auditory verbal hallucinations. Participants select a face and voice corresponding to the voice they hear, allowing them to visualise, externalise and interact with it. It gives form to a disembodied voice. These examples show how we change with our voices and how our voices change over time, just as our bodies do.

Where is this research taking you now?

My second book develops through research in music, medical humanities and critical disability studies. In my project called Sustainable Speech, I have been working with stroke survivors living with aphasia, as well as charities, support groups and speech and language therapists. Together we explore Pauline Oliveros's Deep Listening meditations and verbal scores from experimental music.

We are trying to create a space for co-learning: to reconsider the pace of listening, auditory thresholds, what counts as communication, and the diverse ways people can make sound or interact. The project asks what we mean by "normal" speech, and why an immediate fix is so often expected. It is an opportunity to revisit the tools and possibilities of communication.

Building A Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin is published by Goldsmiths Press. It is reviewed by Matthew Blackwell in The Wire 512. Pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Subscribers can also read the review and the entire issue online via the digital library.

Cuban drummer Francisco Mela's free jazz odyssey continues on four new releases, writes Daniel Spicer in The Wire 512

Francisco Mela
Carnaval De Oriente
577 CD/DL

Jowee Omicil & Francisco Mela
OM
BasH! Village DL

Rafael Zaldivar
Zaldivar/McBride/Mela: Meeting In New York Vol 1
577 DL

Matthew Putman/Hill Greene/Francisco Mela
Bright Sun Outside
577 CD/DL

Cuban drummer Francisco Mela's route into the mysteries of free jazz has been a circuitous one. He started out as a teenager working in the bands of Latin jazz pianists and fellow countrymen Emiliano Salvador and Gabriel Hernandez before moving to the US at the turn of the millennium and building a reputation as an in-demand straightahead jazz drummer, playing with Joe Lovano and enjoying nearly a decade in pianist McCoy Tyner's trio. Following Tyner's death in 2020 and the forced hiatus of the pandemic, Mela emerged with a new fascination for and commitment to freedom, forging a fruitful partnership with the Brooklyn based 577 label and collaborating with heavy-hitters including William Parker, Cooper-Moore and Matthew Shipp.

His journey is not entirely without precedent. Milford Graves cut his teeth in the early 1960s playing congas and timbales in Latin and Afro-Cuban outfits and led The Milford Graves Latino Quartet, featuring a young pianist by the name of Chick Corea, before a 1962 encounter with the volcanic eruptions of Elvin Jones alongside Tyner in John Coltrane's quartet inspired him to turn to the drum kit and become a key architect of the mid-60s free jazz New Thing, entirely rewiring the possibilities of time and timbre in the process.

In Cuban pianist Rafael Zaldivar's trio, Mela teams up with Christian McBride, who held bass duties in Corea's trio with drummer Brian Blade, as heard on the 2013 live album Trilogy. In fact, on Meeting In New York Vol 1, Zaldivar at times channels a strikingly similar feel to Corea's sophisticated and sentimental tunefulness, embraced by McBride's muscular lyricism. It's a temptation Mela resolutely resists, avoiding Blade's deep swing in favour of a constant flickering fizz of cymbals and snare, dancing playfully around the idea of time. At other moments, Zaldivar summons puckish declamations more akin to Paul Bley, eliciting a brawnier churn from Mela punctuated by sudden gunshot snare cracks while, in a diaphanous free ballad, his subtle brush work shushes and sighs in gaseous textures. Here, McBride - not often heard in a free context - sounds a little out of place, cramming as many notes as possible into solos perhaps more suited to a contemporary post-bop milieu.

There's no such mismatch in the trio with pianist Matthew Putman, where the low end is held down by Hilliard Greene, a bassist with considerable avant garde credentials, having worked with the likes of pianists Don Pullen and Cecil Taylor, and saxophonist Charles Gayle. Bright Sun Outside navigates more familiar free jazz terrain and isn't afraid to ramble. Even some of its fairly brief improvisations, lasting just a few minutes, convey a sense of loose and leisurely meandering, with Putman flicking out spontaneous melodic gambits that seem quite content to never fully commit to a destination - like a succession of half-formed thoughts bubbling up in an unhurried internal monologue.

Mela is happily along for the ride, laying out a rattling commentary dominated by an arrestingly dry snare, each stroke deftly placed with neat precision. When Greene leans into rasping arco shrieks and Putman chops out sudden staccato stabs, Mela flexes his muscles with a more aggressive energy, like fresh flames springing up from glowing embers.

Mela's first solo album Carnaval De Oriente proposes a wholly different mood. Inspired by the sounds of the eponymous street carnival heard in his childhood, he rolls around the drum kit - revealing a loose, earthy sound reminiscent of Graves - adding shakers, cowbell and sundry percussion. All the while, he chirps spontaneous vocal chants and snatches of song that recall percussionist/vocalist Juno Lewis's mythically resonant Afro-Creole vocals on his song "Kulu Sé Mama (Juno Sé Mama)", recorded with John Coltrane in 1965.

On one track, Mela tinkers with rudimentary innocence on a glockenspiel; on another, he picks clumsily at an acoustic guitar. What he lacks in chops, he makes up for with unabashed enthusiasm. Whistling absentmindedly and chatting contentedly to himself, he sounds like he's having a fine time. When the full kit breaks through in a burst of dense polyrhythms, you can pretty much hear the smile on his face.

His concise improvised duets with Canadian-Haitian multi-instrumentalist Jowee Omicil are in a similar vein, as the pair explore the shared musical traditions of Haiti and Cuba. On saxophones and clarinet, Omicil displays some of the loquacious unpredictability of Eric Dolphy, while Mela rolls out a nimble undertow that occasionally comes close to a standard jazz sound, replete with full-bodied rolls and tumbles. Omicil's lip-smacking pocket trumpet works Mela up into a frenzied freakout of ecstatic vocal cries. Intuitive piano splashes invite a thoughtful drizzle of snare and ride. Mela sings with lusty abandon and thwacks out hambone rhythms on his own body.

Again, a palpable sense of spontaneous joy reigns throughout. There's an obvious similarity to Don Cherry's duets with drummer Ed Blackwell, as documented on the twin Mu albums: while reaching back past the dim origins of jazz, Mela and Omicil conduct imaginary Pangaean rituals bursting with the same omnivorous exuberance that colours all of Mela's music.

This review appears in The Wire 512 along with many other reviews of new and recent records, books, films, festivals and more. To read them all, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.

In this latest instalment of the Secret History of Film Music, Philip Brophy considers how Jon Brion's music engenders sympathy for the flawed characters in Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another (2025) and Punch-Drunk Love (2002), and Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird (2017).

As discussed in the previous essay in this series, Jonny Greenwood provides an amazing score for Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another (2025). But two pieces by an earlier composer of Anderson's films bookend the movie: Jon Brion's "Bunker Bumper" and "Global Bully".

In One Battle After Another, they function as quietly majestic statements of the drive and exhaustion which propel the intergenerational tale of social reparation and familial separation. "Bunker Bumper" uncoils as a disjointed bossa nova: a gently struck bass drum marks time for the snare, hi-hats and cymbals, skipping with a detached, dainty air. Horns and strings entwine like a billowing flag in slow motion. Sometimes the horns are silenced as the strings climb high, as if they're searching for something. The music feels absent of harmonic progression; it simply surges, even struggles ahead. It plays near the opening as Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) and their radical group French 75 attack a border internment camp. The music intones a sad, fatalistic comment on the limited impact of such revolutionary zeal despite the commitment of its participants.

The second track "Global Bully" plays at the film's end. Years later, Pat relaxes at home with his young adult daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti), offspring of Pat and the long absent Perfidia. The domestic scene shows Willa reading a letter from her mother. In a voiceover, Perfidia acknowledges her mistake in deserting Willa, and expresses hope they will one day meet again. Over a lilting percussive pattern, more strings and horns are orchestrated, but here they coalesce around a chordal pattern. The drums call to mind the tinklers of North American tribal shell shakers engaged in ceremonial dances; the orchestra feels like a calming eulogy played at a church service. The piece acquiesces to how the feisty past can dissolve into a depleted present. It concludes with a touching embrace between Pat and Willa.

To label the placement of "Global Bully" here as mere closure misses the weight and precision that Brion's music bestows on the scene. Across Anderson's first four films, Brion developed a unique modus operandi of embedding music into movies which, arguably, redefined standard operations of 'scoring' and 'accompaniment'.

These two Brion tracks in One Battle After Another were recorded and produced 23 years earlier, for Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love (2002). That film's sessions saw Brion continually feeding Anderson with ideas, sketches, recordings and even multitrack breakdowns. All were offered not as thorny strictures, but as flexible flotsam to be experimented with, in terms of how their sono-musical character could enhance and shape onscreen characters. How apt that some of these unused tracks surfaced decades later. As Brion has said: "There are lots of [film composers] doing great things, but it comes down to the director's 'follow-through'."

A small suite of prepared piano and percussion ensemble pieces makes up a sizable part of the Punch-Drunk Love score. They sound jittery and clackety, like a wooden digestive system attempting to process parts of a drum kit. They initially read as sound effects more than music - a perceptual doubting, enabled by Gary Rydstrom's deft mix which folds Brion's trap kit into Christopher Scarabosio's sound design (who has handled every Paul Thomas Anderson film since). "Le Petit Chateau" and "Hands And Feet" were based on micro-cassette recordings Brion made of Anderson verbally articulating his ideas for rhythms he wanted to use as timing devices for the film's long tracking shots. The voice of Anderson became the hands of Brion which became the limbs of Barry (Adam Sandler) who discombobulates throughout the movie in arabesques of anxiety.

Upon its release, many assumed the film to be a comedy, thanks to Sandler, but the point was there for an attuned audience: mentally unstable people often appear 'ridiculous', but to laugh at their pained performance is inhumane, not to mention imperceptive.

Brion's music plays two roles here. The first, through its percussive moments, is to sonorise the synaptic hell of Barry's panic attacks, and how desperately out of sync he is with his own body and those around him. The second lies in the sumptuous waltzes ("Punch-Drunk Melody", "Third Floor Hallway", "Blossoms & Blood") which spread the wondrous hope Barry glimpses when he falls in love with Lena (Emily Watson). Irrespective of cliche, the luscious orchestral arrangements welcome the couple into a better, dreamier world.

Brion's music is key in distinguishing Punch-Drunk Love from early 2000s romcom saturation. His arrangements are subtly saccharine, influenced by the lush strings found in rock and pop ballads circa the 1970s, arranged by Van Dyke Parks, Jack Nitzsche and Paul Buckmaster. Their sonority affectionately referenced the easy listening sparkle of 1950/60s hi-fi arrangements by Nelson Riddle and Les Baxter, through to Percy Faith and Paul Mauriat. Brion's encyclopaedic embrace of recorded popular music is felt in his distinctive melodic sensibility: a transatlantic nexus of solo-Beatles songcraft and Laurel Canyon recording. To be clear, the recording studio rules here, not the concert hall. Punch-Drunk Love used vintage microphones for many of its sessions. The film score brims with detail, space and clarity.

Following Punch-Drunk Love, non-mainstream cinema forged a strange meld of nerdy empathy, hipster cynicism and feminist angles in 'relationship dramedies': David O Russell's I Heart Huckabees (2004); Charlie Kaufman's Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004) and Synecdoche, New York (2008); Miranda July's The Future (2011); Judd Apatow's This Is 40 (2012) and Trainwreck (2015); and Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird (2017).

These films cannily merged po-faced ridicule with heartfelt feeling, to varying degrees of success. Yet in all these titles, Brion's music fortifies their narratives with an endearing romantic sensibility earned by their dysfunctional, antisocial and 'spectrum' characters. His Canyon-esque saunter and rich instrumental layering ameliorates any dismissive urges the films' characters elicit.

In Lady Bird, the titular lead (Saoirse Ronan) feels intentionally unlikeable. Equally deliberate is how Brion's score waltzes around Lady Bird's teen sense of independence. The film concludes with Lady Bird finally on her own, enrolled in a New York college. At a public phone, she leaves a message for her mother, admitting the rupturing effects of her teen angst created a wedge between them.

Brion performs the resonant piano theme like a silent movie accompanist: trilling high notes and copying what's happening on screen while allowing it space. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind features similar piano themes played over scenes with onscreen dialogue mixed low. This isn't simply a formal sonic device: it displaces the viewer/auditor from the psychic space of the story - where you identify or read what's happening to characters on screen - and relocates you within the characters' headspace. Positioned this way, the audience can feel a touch exposed, implicated in being present when characters are at their most vulnerable. "Global Bully" fades up in One Battle After Another as we see Lockjaw (Sean Penn) gassed and hear Pat prepare Willa for Perfidia's letter: death and life fused through emotive exhalation.

That seems to be a throughline in the work Brion has provided across the film and music industries. In discussions with Anderson, Brion noted the aim of Punch-Drunk Love was to "feel like a musical, but nobody ever breaks into song". Brion's music - and his tremulous voice which has appeared in songs in many of the films mentioned - is similarly shaped by repression, tension and elation, in a fountain of emotional surges.

Musical theatre sceptics mostly react against the unbridled emotionalism of onscreen characters liberated from their realistic surroundings. Yet this transcendental effect functions perfectly in recorded songs and popular music in general, generating one of music's prime private pleasures. Brion and his collaborators have long embraced how song sonics skilfully embedded in the production of a film score can be exhilaratingly transgressive.

Wire subscribers can read Philip Brophy's original Secret History of Film Music columns from the 1990s online in the digital archive. It was revived in 2025 as an online column: previous instalments published on The Wire website can be read here. Wire readers and print and digital subscribers can also find this essay on page 16 of The Wire 512.

Machine listening is transforming environmental sound into data points that support surveillance infrastructure, changing what it means to hear, argues Stephen Roddy in The Wire 512

On 28 February 2026, Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran was hit by a missile killing over 150 people, most of them children. Initial investigations have suggested that the US was responsible for the attack. While US data mining giant Palantir has not been conclusively linked to the atrocity, the wider US-led bombing campaign has made extensive use of the Palantir-supplied Maven Smart System to coordinate similar attacks.

Maven can combine large volumes of data from radar, satellite, communications and even audio sources before applying machine learning techniques to identify possible military targets. We now live in a world where our homes, schools and workplaces can become clusters of data points.

According to James Parker, academic and Earshot board member (see The Wire 499), machine listening integrates audio and machine learning systems to monitor, analyse, govern and modulate human and nonhuman systems through computational renderings of the soundscape. As these systems proliferate globally, they represent an imperial mode of decision making and environmental governance that is in conflict with the basic tenets of democratic accountability. Who owns and governs these systems? Who or what do they hear, and what remains unheard? Who acts upon the claims these systems make about the world?

Machine listening effectively expands the reach of these systems into the realm of the audible, proliferating throughout contemporary soundscapes: classifying gunshots, indicators of distress or aggression in human voices, and sounds associated with intrusion across borders and within protected spaces. Far from being neutral descriptors of a soundscape, these classifications are political, and operational categories and their detection can trigger responses from security or police forces and mark individuals for further surveillance.

Flock Safety, the surveillance tech company drawing ire for its operation of video and audio detection networks across the US, recently pulled plans to listen for indicators of "human distress" across their audio network due to strong opposition from civil liberties groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Across Europe, comparable systems are already deployed in public spaces, transport lines and security networks in London, Groningen and Plzeň.

In a political moment defined by the convergence of private technological infrastructure with authoritarian state power, ubiquitous machine listening networks increasingly provide companies, states and militaries with acoustic classifications upon which they can act. What becomes of listening in such times?

Almost 50 years ago, composer and writer R Murray Schafer helped to establish the field of acoustic ecology around a central opposition between the lo-fi soundscapes of urban, industrial and mechanised life, in which dense noise acts to mask and corrupt clear and meaningful acoustic signals, and the hi-fi soundscapes he associated with the natural world. One unintended political consequence has been to allow the soundmaking activities of communities, often marginalised by race and class living and working in urban environments, to disappear into noise. This is not helped by the disturbing resonance between his oft-cited claim that "the world suffers from an overpopulation of sounds" and the eugenicist overpopulation tropes circulating throughout Western environmentalist thought of the 1970s.

The troubling concept of nature, as inherited from Schafer and his contemporaries, is usefully dismantled and reconstituted from a field recording perspective in Mark Peter Wright's Listening After Nature, in which he illustrates how nature is constituted by material interrelationships between culture, technology, place and practice. Wright's guiding question, "What am I not hearing?", surfaces the human lives, labour and infrastructural relations that are often concealed in the production of field recordings.

The emerging ubiquity of machine listening further complicates this problem. Decisions are now made and actions taken on the basis of features extracted from audio signals. What cannot be heard, captured and classified is excluded from the systems account of the world and becomes operationally non-existent. Conversely, audio that does not fit the systems' predefined categories for the world can become misclassified; and as the strike on Minab illustrates, misclassification within these systems can have devastating effects.

Is this pattern of low rumbling a harmless passing vehicle or an intrusion? Is that high energy transient a firework or a gunshot? What about this repeating pattern of falling frequencies - is that a barking dog or a human in distress? Classifications like these are bundled with other data like time, location and contextual information before triggering an alert, providing a recommendation or, in some cases, initiating an automated response. The sounds involved need never be listened to by human ears before being converted into operational data to support systems of classification and control.

These questions are explored by Machine Listening, a platform for collaborative research and artistic experimentation, in Environments 12. The project is a speculative extension of a popular series of 11 environmental records released by Irv Teibel between 1969-79. It explores a future Earth in which a developing cybernetic ecology powered by planetary-scale computation has laced microphones and loudspeakers throughout the biosphere, automating the reproduction, synthesis and management of the soundscape. Dynamics of capture, identification, classification and data-driven intervention are stretched almost to breaking point across the 15 short but richly textured sonic works. Human voices vault and bounce in cacophonous chorus alongside their generative clones amid lush field recordings. Organic life and human technology are almost indistinguishable from one another as a planetary machine listening infrastructure feeds the soundscape back to itself in a continuous cycle of replication.

Where Schafer feared technology might mask nature, and Wright showed how it can constitute it, Environments 12 imagines nature to be continuous with data and deeply entangled with the infrastructures that detect and manage it. But the world imagined by the project is already being built.

Listening after Palantir cannot be about a return to some imagined innocence or a retreat into Schafer's idealised nature. Critical listening must instead focus on machine listening itself - exposing the classifications it imposes, the infrastructures in which it is embedded, and the power relations that shape its production and deployment. It must not only ask what the machine cannot hear, but what it has misheard, and who will suffer as a result.

This essay appears in The Wire 512. Wire subscribers can also read it in our online magazine library.

What began as an arts funding protest has grown into a constellation of site-specific performances at this rural Norwegian event, writes Peter Margasak in The Wire 511

Motvind
Various venues, Rollag, Norway

Thanks to limited resources and modest aims, small summer festivals all across Europe adapt a simple formula: programme a couple of touring acts and round things out with local musicians. But in Norway some of the locals are as compelling and strong as the imported headliners. As terrific as sets by Horse Lords, Bitchin Bajas and Separatist Party may be, the rest of the stylistically broad line-up at Motvind festival never feels secondary.

Held in a remote valley a few hours north west of Oslo, the intimately rustic event has morphed from a political protest against the sponsorship of the nearby Kongsberg Jazz Festival by a weapons manufacturer back in 2016 into a celebration of hand-crafted music instilled with a strong improvisational aesthetic, regardless of genre. The organisers don't need to reach far to find musicians embodying this practice, and most of the performers are part of several overlapping communities.

The music unfolds on two nearby stages - a wooden amphitheatre and a tented shelter up the hill - but nothing feels less than intimate. The Sheriffs Of Nothingness - the veteran string duo of violist Ole Henrik Moe and violinist Kari Rønnekleiv - play amid the audience on the amphitheatre stage, where listeners can absorb every microscopic, unamplified sound they produce. The locked in musicians make minimalist sound studies where the grain of every gesture is audible.

Many sets are concerned with sound qua sound, whether the austerity of The Sheriffs or the just intonation chamber jazz of Krise, a quartet led by guitarist Kristian Enkerud Lien, where harmonies generated with keyboardist Anna Ueland and trombonist Emil Bø complement soaring, almost epic compositions given a rickety charm by drummer Bjørn André Syverinson.

Horse Lords deploy the same tuning during their jacked-up set, and when the group need to adjust tunings they test the patient listeners by extending set pieces - a bracing cascade of feedback and sparkling harmonics from guitarist Owen Gardner, a sculptural carpet of swooping 3D synthesis from bassist Max Eilbacher - into epic textural explorations over Sam Haberman's jagged beats. The crowd remain with them all the way.

Oudist Aly Eissa of The Handover plays a riveting solo set blending self-composed material that embraces Arabic classical tradition with several traditional pieces where he reveals that he can sing just as beautifully as he plucks his instrument. The purity and focus of his performance contrasts with the way the astonishing Pakistani vocalist Muslim Shaggan constantly interrupts the flow of his performance by pedantically explaining every symbol, gesture and shape of what follows.

On Sunday afternoon most attendees and performers partake in a soundwalk, traipsing alongside the Numedalslågen river, serenaded by random improvisations along the trail. Crossing over a primitive suspension bridge in groups of five, the audience eventually gather in a nearby park to eat sour porridge and take in a lovely solo performance of traditional Hardanger fiddle music by Johanne Flottorp.

Part of a genuinely engaging, hours-long jam session, the finale comes from the Norwegian quartet Lotus with saxophonist Signe Emmeluth, guitarist Karl Bjorå and drummer Olaf Olsen. When their leader and electric bassist Chris Holm becomes unavailable earlier in the day, double bassist Johannes Elnan not only steps into the breach, but his furious playing transforms the band's highly interactive attack over krautrock grooves into an unstoppable force.

This review appears in The Wire 511 along with many other reviews of new and recent records, books, films, festivals and more. To read them all, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.

In this extract, taken from the chapter "Mystical Warriors", Laurie Osborne aka Appleblim and Sam Shackleton recall the development of their influential Skull Disco label

Appleblim: Shackleton's a unique character. He's extremely well read and speaks at least five languages - but he's also hilarious, one of the funniest people I've ever met. When you get someone's humour and realise that they're also a deep thinker? That's heaven to me. We lived in Stoke Newington in the period that we were going to FWD>> together.

Shackleton: I ended up in London by accident, you see. I was living in Turkey, married to a Hungarian woman, and when that relationship ended, I moved to Leiden, in the Netherlands, with the idea of making quick money in a tulip-packing factory. But when I got there, there was no work for me, so I called a friend in London and told him I had nowhere to stay. I moved over right away, some time between 1999 or 2000, and that turned into a decade in London.

Appleblim: Shackleton was playing at squat parties under the incredible name of Bleach Bastard, in a group called Evil Mastermind with an MC, Vengeance Tenfold.

Shackleton: Vengeance Tenfold was a squatter, so he always knew a place where we could perform. We wanted to be, in essence, a krautrock band with drum machines. We were listening to dancehall, punk and drum 'n' bass, and that want for bass and beat science led to a want for big sound systems, rather than just what was in use at the squat parties.

Appleblim: Shackleton had already been making weird bass music, with a dancehall vibe, and when he went to FWD>>, he basically went, "Oh, I can take what I've already been making, up the tempo and have it fit in with all of this". It was his desire to put out a release in that vein that turned us into Skull Disco. He's from Lancashire and I'm sort of from the Midlands - I was born in Derby, and my Mum's from the North - so we share a love of that self-deprecating Northern humour. Skull Disco is "school disco" in a Northern accent.

We were huge fans of comedians like Chris Morris, Sacha Baron Cohen and Tim Vine, but what really bonded us was a love for heavy, weird bands, like Throbbing Gristle, Crass and The Fall. We read William Burroughs and punk rock fanzines - Shackleton ran a fanzine up North, too - and connected over percussive trance, hardcore dub reggae, ragga and noise music.

Shackleton: When I was 15 or 16 years old, I was putting on bands in my hometown, which is Nelson in Lancashire. I was very DIY. When you come from a small town, especially back then, you had to make your own entertainment, so I got into punk rock. I did run a fanzine - that and the local gigs fed into each other. I'd write about experimental rock bands like Jesus Lizard, Suicide, Nomeansno and Throbbing Gristle.

Appleblim: That's what we, as Skull Disco, had that the London lot didn't have. Their sound was distilled out of garage and drum 'n' bass, and Shackleton liked industrial, Muslimgauze and sacred Indian music. He wasn't a raver. He didn't come from techno and he didn't understand the appeal of house or garage music - but he was into music from around the world that induces a trance state when you're dancing to it, which is what we got at FWD>>.

We'd get home from FWD>>, get on the decks and play King Tubby, Prince Far I and Dillinja, to keep that physical force rolling. The Plastic People sound system was so powerful, so clean, so precise, that when you did start getting this combination of bass and percussion, it was an out of body experience.

Shackleton: Even though Laurie and I weren't squatters, that's where the Skull Disco party roots are, and it was quite a different crowd than the London club scene. The enjoyable thing was just being together; having wild times, if you will. We were always up for the parties - you can read into that what you want - but we were also looking for something different musically. I'm not really interested in melodies, but I also didn't want to make tracks that are purely for chin-strokers. I was never interested in four-to-the-floor music. It never did it for me on any level.

I was always into dub: proper, heaving, big bass; that body music. I wanted beats that were interesting, demanding; not obviously in any formula. It would be wrong to say that the DJs and producers at FWD>> were tapping into the spirit of, say, Throbbing Gristle, but I saw the party as avant garde in its own way. All of the elements I liked existed in one place. Then, instead of working at any bpm - which I do, and have done since - I brought my beats into that FWD>> range of 135-140 bpm. Your body does absorb that bpm as a prototype, unconsciously, when you're on a dancefloor like that.

Appleblim: We're not Jamaican, we're not Rastafarians, but having listened to so much dub, so many soundclashes, that got infused into Skull Disco. We riffed off the idea of the Soundboy being twisted in different ways: Soundboy gets buried, murdered, turned to ash, chopped up and snorted; we commit this Soundboy to the ground! We loved the epicness of reggae with its Biblical references, of Holy Mount Zion and Daniel in the Lion's Den, and used it as a contrast with our dark Northern humour.

Shackleton: There's nothing worthwhile in life that doesn't have humour with it, and the sooner you come to that realisation the sooner you win. That's probably the only bit of wisdom I have. Even Prince Far I himself, the don of dread, could be funny as hell.

Appleblim: Exactly. Within reggae, there's so much humour: in the Yard tapes, where they're calling out what food they like, calling out to each other, telling silly stories amongst that spiritual dread; stuff like the Kingston story of "The baker uses poison flour!" We didn't know exactly what it meant when we heard those songs, but what we did hear were these larger than life characters - and that's what we wanted to tap into with Skull Disco.

Aftershock: The Seismic Impact Of Dubstep is published by Velocity Press. Read Derek Walmsley's review of the book in The Wire 511. Subscribers can also read the review online in the digital library.

Chicago poet and performer Marvin Tate presents vivid vignettes of magic and loss on his elusive new album, writes Mosi Reeves in The Wire 511

Marvin Tate
Controlled Burn
Amalgam DL/LP

Marvin Tate is a linchpin of Chicago's creative arts scene, emerging as a slam poet in the early 1990s and subsequently participating in an array of musical and literary endeavours, from jazz funk ensembles like Uptighty (which included future members of Tortoise) to 2025's avant jazz foray Andreas Røysum Ensemble With Marvin Tate. In a 1998 profile, the alt weekly Chicago Reader described his unusual voice as "high and fast paced with rich undertones, like a Fat Albert cartoon character crossed with Screamin' Jay Hawkins and a little bit of Martin Luther King Jr". Tate himself has cited Gwendolyn Brooks and Amiri Baraka as chief influences. Aficionados of the jazzoetry world may draw comparisons to the ragged blues Melvin Van Peebles once conjured on 1968's Brer Soul.

However, none of that is preparation for Controlled Burn, which matches Tate's springy, salty tenor with shifting backdrops or no music at all. It's a collaboration with instrumentalist and producer LeRoy Bach, who has worked with Tate since their membership of Uptighty. But Controlled Burn is hardly a Black blues meets alt culture mash-up. Bach's arrangements, made with help from drummer Quin Kirchner and flautist Ben LaMar Gay, sit behind Tate as he speaks haltingly yet deliberately. It feels like they are adjusting to his worldview, not the other way around, and the songs they create feel deeply lived in instead of a one-off studio novelty. The resulting pieces may not be as immersive as Tate's work with Andreas Røysum Ensemble, but they draw closer attention to the way he plays with words and persona.

"Baller" appears to be an autobiographical reminiscence of Tate's dead brother. "My brother was a baller, taught me one-on-one, beat me in a foot race in the presence of a gun", he intones. "Damn judge gave him seven… the streets gave him life". As the 28 minute album unfolds, it becomes clear that Tate is writing characters that may or not be inspired by his real life. Many of his pieces take unusual twists and don't adhere to a rhyme pattern.

"Darren" begins as a lament for an old lover and ends with a memory of a conversation he once had: "Hey Darren, you ever waterboarded? How does that feel, Darren?". The number unfolds over a filtered guitar riff as if Tate is talking to someone in a concert hall while a band play onstage. "First You Hear" is swathed in punk noise that evokes the metallic dirges of Black Flag circa My War. Meanwhile, Tate seems to adopt a young man's swagger for "Genius Shit" as he says, "Tragedy starts in the mind first, death is only imminent if all else falls".

"Love Bass (I Was Hoping)" is another cut about romance expired as he rues, "That poly thing never worked out for us/Too many opinions and illogic over practicality". Throughout, Tate finds ways to dramatically shift the meaning of his songs. "She never cared for your race play", he says as he ends "Hold Me". Another example is the final line on "Love Bass (I Was Hoping)" where he asks, "If love is the answer, then why are we still asking the same questions?".

Tate's slipperiness as a narrator is countered by a crusted, raspy tone that can shift from an odd squeal, like when he yelps "Free!" on "Best Side" to the gospel croon he uses for the a cappella track "Robin" as he sings, "I hope you miss me when I'm gone". The halting way he delivers his pieces and the formatting of the songs ensure that much of Controlled Burn is enveloped in silence, allowing the listener to briefly meditate over his verses. Bach, for his part, devises music that enhances Tate's uniqueness as a performer while subtly upending expectations, whether it's the riffing guitar loop of "Darren" or the warm Boards Of Canada-like electronics of "Genius Shit".

Not every gambit works - the vibe-y beat of "Mosh Pit" sounds a bit too much like middling downtempo. But Bach's overall approach ensures that Controlled Burn is intriguingly difficult to categorise.

When encountering Tate's confident, assured delivery, one can't help but wonder why he hasn't received greater attention despite the best efforts of Chicago indie royalty like Joan Of Arc's Tim Kinsella and singer-songwriter Angel Olsen (who released a pretty and sincere homage to him in 2013, Tim Kinsella Sings The Songs Of Marvin Tate By Leroy Bach Featuring Angel Olsen). For certain, Tate's name has begun to pop up outside of the Windy City: he made cameos on the late jazz trumpeter jaimie branch's 2019 album Fly Or Die II: Bird Dogs Of Paradise as well as Corinne Bailey Rae's iconoclastic 2023 effort Black Rainbows. Perhaps Controlled Burn will introduce his work to a much deserved wider audience.

This review appears in The Wire 511 along with many other reviews of new and recent records, books, films, festivals and more. To read them all, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.

Collective listening events respond to a cultural need, but are at risk of co-option by wellness and lifestyle marketeers, argues Derek Walmsley in The Wire 511

"You're in the right place!" smiles the man in the smart shirt and trousers at the velvet rope line. Inside a modest door on a touristy street in London's Soho is a cocktail bar, work space, podcast studio, plus a private cinema which doubles as Polygon Portal, a high spec surround sound listening venue.

The occasion is John Coltrane's centenary, and his Impulse! albums A Love Supreme and John Coltrane And Johnny Hartman are being played for an audience of around 50 people lounging on soft seats and sofas with blindfolds to block out distractions. A ticket costs £25.

These kinds of immersive listening experiences are finding an audience. At Polygon Portal, many of their events - which include classic album sessions, curated playlists accompanied by a short history essay, and "wellbeing" events with some kind of meditation or ritual - are sold out. The vibe in the bar beforehand falls somewhere between the taut anticipation of a classy date and the insider chit-chat behind the counter at a record shop.

Even if you've heard A Love Supreme dozens of times, you pick up something new here. The Polygon set-up takes the original recording and diffuses it across an array of speakers, keeping the stereo separation but allocating frequencies to various cones, tweeters and subwoofers. This particular event does not use surround sound, which might distribute the four instruments of Coltrane's classic quartet to discrete audio sources around the venue. But the distinction between the players is still impressive, seeming to occupy different areas of the room. The rhythm section of Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison in particular comes alive, the vibrations in the air carrying a churning turbulence absent on hi-fi or headphones.

Pitchblack Playback is another listening gathering, with events in cities across several continents. A London event includes a free Joni Mitchell eye mask to help you concentrate on Blue (55th anniversary version) and Court And Spark, and there's even a recorded message from Joni beforehand. There are rules to help everyone get along: no looking at phones, no singing, no latecomers. You commit to listening to each album in its entirety, which strengthens the sense of its structure and logic. Afterwards, my smartphone tells me my heartbeat dropped into a state of deep relaxation over the course of the session.

Listening to albums together in public is nothing new. Recorded Music Societies blossomed in the postwar period in the UK, where church halls or libraries hosted gatherings for people to hear records without needing to own costly equipment, with the addition perhaps of an informative talk. London audiophile venue Spiritland opened a decade ago, and in the years since, other listening bars in the city such as Brilliant Corners, Jazu, One Eighty One and the Listening Room at 180 Studios have all offered music heads a place to bond over records.

Collective listening experiences address a desire that many feel for a sense of community - seen elsewhere in the renewed interest in crafting, workshops and real life social networks - and for discovering culture outside the circles of apps and algorithms. This demand side now meets a supply side where cinemas and other high street spaces are underused in the post-pandemic era, and London residents often have limited space in their own homes. While it might seem odd to spend a chunk of money to hear music you might easily find online, it scratches a particular itch for some.

Immersive listening events often carry a sense of exclusivity. Some sell themselves as part of a digital detox - there are events with guided meditation, yoga, or singing bowls - and while the marketing patter might allude to community and connection, presenting themselves as a sanctuary from the world outside can be read as a kind of snobbery. The idea of getting away from the online world easily blurs into a humblebrag about an enviable alternative lifestyle.

The Japanese idea of the jazz kissa - a cafe with a library-like atmosphere in which to appreciate jazz records in particular - gives an extra vibe of distinction to some listening venues. At a time when these venues sometimes struggle for relevance in Japan in the era of the smartphone, their Western iterations have become suddenly chic and fetishised, providing an aspirational oasis of Eastern calm with ticket prices to match. This kind of branding plays out on Instagram and other social media channels, despite the promise that listening venues constitute a break from online life.

Polygon Portal have ambitious ideas. They plan to parlay the attraction of spatial audio into nightclub, restaurant and even gym destinations. These would no doubt all be beautiful experiences, but the more chic the marketing pitch gets, the more alienating some may find it.

At present, listening events often look backwards. Many of the albums featured in immersive listening sessions crop up as they hit an anniversary, or emerge in a glossy new reissue. While that helps to fill venues with committed fans, it also creates a somewhat predictable merry-go-round of familiar classics. As with any artistic canon, unless it's refreshed, stretched and tested, it feels destined to become stale.

For immersive sound experiences to fulfil their creative potential, they need to be open and accessible, firstly to different audiences, and also to relationships with other bodies. A varied approach to curation would ensure that legacy rock reissues don't dominate the music that's presented. And reaching out to other organisations might make them less exclusive, more connected to culture's grassroots, and give them a broader social mission.

There's a future in which DIY organisations, festivals, collectives, multi-disciplinary bodies and other cultural incubators use collective listening to forge stronger connections between audiences and music. If listeners are revisiting King Crimson or Joni Mitchell, why not the music of Terry Riley, Pharoah Sanders, Julius Eastman, Maryanne Amacher, Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier, or any number of avant garde or experimental touchstones? By exploring music found off the beaten track, these kinds of events could serve to change and refresh canons, and not just replicate them.

This essay appears in The Wire 511. Wire subscribers can also read it in our online magazine library.

In his latest Secret History of Film Music column, Philip Brophy analyses Jonny Greenwood's score for Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another (2025)

It's hard to put your finger on how Jonny Greenwood's commissioned score operates in Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another (2025). Not because the music is vague, indistinct or haphazard, but because it's so deeply embedded in the story's tight dramaturgy. It never feels like it's accompanying anything. The music doesn't come from the movie: it resides within the movie. This is the purported theoretical role of film music - to be wedded to everything on screen - but such audiovisual consummation is mostly over-rationalised while making grand claims of emotional evocation. Greenwood's score pushes against such forced marriage, and his score is a series of miniatures stretched beyond any modest length, temporally extended through hesitancy and separation. Notes more than chords; points more than gestures.

One Battle After Another boasts an impressive ensemble cast, and the film continues Anderson's focus on how actors enable a film to reveal its energies - something he learnt from Orson Welles's adoption of a stock company. This entails theatre mechanisms, especially in pre-production, through chemistry reads, group dynamics and character interplay. Sean Penn likened Anderson's method to "hearing the music of [his] character", when reflecting on how the director wrote the Colonel Lockjaw character. One Battle After Another is a prime example of a film in which a director functions like a conductor, and actors transform themselves into sensing instruments.

This accounts for Greenwood's role in the film's group-oriented staging. He provides Anderson a range of possibilities within which the director finds shape, direction and purpose. It's a type of displaced compositional strategy; a bi-fluxional method, where the composer is imagining what might be the musical environment in the director's mind from which he could then construct a scene. Audited in isolation, the score feels like a mirage of a traditional recital: a largish ensemble, accentuated violin lines, studied percussive patterns, and dexterous piano playing, all ebbing and flowing with impressive dynamic range. While cinema fetishises 'orchestrality' as a cheap sign of performative quality, Greenwood's orchestration is activated by textural exploration - not in expanded or improvisational form, but as semiotic reference. Orchestral grandeur is here demoted to being entrained by the prosaic machinations of human drama and its endless cycle of fight-or-flight pulsation.

The film's early theme "One Battle After Another" is tentatively built from a piano's single note modulating through thrummed chords. Its cautious tone is decimated by a loud and sudden burst of a full string section shadowing the piano chords. This irrational dynamic matches the lo-fi amateur stealth of the terrorist group French 45, as we watch Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) and Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) prepping for their attack on a border detention camp. Yet the music is bereft of dangerous heroics and full of regret, as if it knows what will be the consequences of Perfidia and Pat's actions. I'm reminded of how Charles Ives's The Unanswered Question is a deep well of conflicting emotions through its time-lagged and harmonically-displaced logic, via its wind instruments whose hive mind seems to be sited in another dimension. Greenwood's theme here similarly finishes with trembling notes like waves lapping at an uncertain shoreline.

Like most of the cues throughout One Battle After Another, the opening theme runs across multiple scenes and returns twice more. The result is a score shaped through triaxial statements, with themes versioned up to three times, each sounded to reveal something more about the characters' pressures. (The cues' official titles only match one of their accompanying scenes.) Metallic cymbal tones created by the violins' stacked harmonics ("Baktan Cross 1") sizzle as the terrorist crew creep toward a border crossing station. An orchestral drone swells, combined with passing trucks, dragged chainlink gates and night crickets. In this soundworld, Perfidia first encounters Colonel Lockjaw (Penn). The music seems to sonify their charged environment and the brooding fog of unleashed adrenaline germane to dangerous pursuits. But the music syncs to something more disturbing: Perfidia lectures Lockjaw ("Free borders! Free choice! And free from fear!") while forcing his sexual arousal, mind-fucking his racist supremacist core while getting hot herself.

Later, when Lockjaw discovers that Perfidia has Pat as her boyfriend, a maddening tick-tocking theme is activated ("French 75"). Rendered by a slightly prepared piano tapping a woodpecker waltz with woodblocks simulating a metronome, the notes idly dance up the keys and down again. Infantile, tentative, nervously staccato, it simulates a child's hand - disturbingly so, as the theme trails Lockjaw's shark eyes and craggy mask as he closes in on Perfidia, eventually encountering her in the toilet as she is wiring a bank with explosives. The theme will be repeated again, intensifying the 'pleasure trauma' of Lockjaw's psychosexual rage and Perfidia's orgone accumulation.

The menacingly erotic image of a heavily pregnant Perfidia firing a machine gun, crowning her exposed belly with its magazine and screaming in joy, is accompanied by gunfire that obliterates the soundtrack. It is followed by a gentle baroque theme played on classical guitar ("For Willa") which plays over a montage of Perfidia and Pat's decaying relationship, culminating in her walking out on Pat and their newborn child, Charlene. The guitar feels church-like, but Perfidia is more Tony Montana than Lady Madonna, spitting at Pat, "This is a new consciousness." Tied to a hospital bed after being captured following a botched bank robbery, she faces Lockjaw dangling the prospect of eluding jail time if she rats on members of the French 75. The funereal tonality of "Trust Device" commences, played by ondes Martenot and high strings as she confronts her own will to survive at the expense of her family. The theme continues as Pat prepares to go completely underground with his baby daughter. Both themes are instigated by Perfidia; both perform as a sorrowful 'human Sanctus' - Perfidia's "new consciousness" - as her liberating actions tragically impact others.

But as Pat departs, the music transforms into a warm lilt with light bossa rhythms tapped underneath, "Baby Charlene". Distant hope is implied. It carries over Perfidia being relocated to a witness protection home, implying even hope for her, and symbolically tying mother and daughter together despite their impossible union. Greenwood's cues are not simply emotive. Rather, they are dynamically interrelational, in accordance with the overall group interplay of the ensemble and their characters. Individuals are less activating than their relationships. This characterises how his cues don't evolve as much as they shed their skin. They often devolve through repelled transitions, as if they can't bear their own emotional weight. "Baby Charlene" is skinned to reveal a rising chorale of strings as Lockjaw discovers that Perfidia has escaped. Close in on his weathered scowl as he reads her sarcastic note, "This pussy won't pop for you."

This brings us to the halfway mark of One Battle After Another. The aforementioned 'triaxial' distribution of cues multiple times in different scenes continues, deepening psychic drive and widening emotional composure in all the characters. Notably, the second half of the film shuttles 16 years later to the present, causing the music to resonate with the past. The opening piano theme returns in a deconstructed form as "Perfidia Beverly Hills" when Lockjaw has been accepted into the white supremacist Christmas Adventurers Club. A piano ostinato lumbers while strings rise and twist like a Bartók-ian ecosystem of fungal harmonic growth. Siren-like portamento ascents aerate the strings' harmonic progression, pushing them upwards from an orchestral floor to an ecstatic canopy of upper register climes. It's neither ironic nor cynical; it feels despairing of how nihilistic the control and display of power can be.

Bob receives a phone call as Plan Snap Crackle Pop springs into action, but Bob is high and can't recall the codes and prepared rendezvous points ("I Need The Greeting Code"). Herrmannesque strings wind around him like a stoner smoke haze - just like the tear gas that will engulf him as he crawls through his escape tunnel. Once he surfaces in the woods, a thumping piano cue starts, "Ocean Waves (Pt 1)". It's a very long cue, ratcheting the temporal shrinkage of all Bob must undertake in order to elude Lockjaw's pursuit and reunite with Willa. Itching piano notes percolate as Bob desperately tries to remember the secret codes. They continue over the extended scene of Bob meeting karate sensei Sergio (Benicio del Toro) who will be aiding his flight. The scene flits throughout the labyrinth of Sergio's Sanctuary City multi-floored home as he prepares his multitude of refugees to escape while Bob desperately tries to remember those passwords on his charging cell phone. As an ICE team breaks into the building, toms tap 3/4 time atop the piano pecking and occasional orchestral jitters. It's like the orchestra is being told by the piano to not play. The instrumentation evokes Charles Ives reinterpreting Japanese gagaku court music, here shorn of any exoticist seduction and rendered fretful and agitated.

Tackling Anderson's commissioned scores requires substantial analysis. For now, this essay cannot venture further with One Battle After Another. Elsewhere I've written overly long breakdowns of Jon Brion's score for Magnolia (1999) and Greenwood's score for Inherent Vice (2015). However, next month's essay will consider two uncredited Brion tracks (not on the Nonesuch release) used at formative and conclusive moments in One Battle After Another, and unravel Brion's legacy in Anderson's approach to commissioning music.

Wire subscribers can read Philip Brophy's original Secret History of Film Music columns from the 1990s online in the digital archive. Previous instalments of this column published on The Wire website can be found here.

Discipleship, as practised at Terry Riley's Kirana East, turns the Western paradigm of individual creativity on its head, argues Ryan Meehan

The train had taken me some three hours out of Tokyo to Kobuchizawa, a hamlet in Japan's Southern Alps - a first taste of countryside quiet beyond the reach of the megacities. My contact meets me at the station: Hiromitsu Hirata, who will serve as my translator for the day, having learned English during his time studying music and philosophy in India. He's also the newest of Terry Riley's disciples at Kirana East, the small but vibrant raga school founded by Riley after he relocated to Japan in 2020. Another student and I climb into Hiro's silver van to reach a house beside a meadow. Through a doorway on the garden deck, we enter a sunlit living room brimming with musical instruments and speaker equipment, where a handful of students are already seated around our instructor Sara Miyamoto.

It's only by chance that I'm able to sit in for this introductory class. Now 91, Riley no longer gives interviews; the lessons he teaches are private, and only for the advanced. But as luck would have it, this basic class falls within the window of my visit to Japan, and Miyamoto has given her blessing to join the circle as an observer. With conversation buzzing around me, I shuffle through a packet of instruction materials written by Riley. I first became acquainted with kirana gharana (a signature music style of northern India) while covering a birthday celebration event held by La Monte Young for the late kirana singer Pandit Pran Nath (see The Wire 443), the guru shared by Young and Riley until Nath's death in 1996. I've sought out Kirana East with a degree of confidence in my understanding of its basic premises.

Almost immediately, however, the complications of even this short introduction begin to envelop me in dread. There is the sargam, the Indian equivalent of solfeggio, with its specific proportion of sharps and flats; the gamaks, technical flourishes with which the singer moves between the notes; the all-important alap, the raga's slow introductory motif, which we will be practising as a group. I am not a student of any substance in this music, I say to myself; I'm not even a musician. My trip here has been an imposition, a gesture of real arrogance. In deepening embarrassment, my eyes scan across the page to a phrase underlined in bold: "In practice, you don't have to be too concerned with this." Its placement seems like a pin to pop my ballooning panic, and with my relief comes a convulsion of laughter. When I explain, Miyamoto smiles: "That's so Terry."

Without much ceremony, the lesson gets underway. Miyamoto guides the group through a series of preparatory exercises. Eyes closed, the mind acclimates to stillness, and with each new prompt - about body and mind; awareness of sound, consciousness, and position within the universe - the suggestion that music might be a parallel domain, a constitutive fabric of reality, begins to seem plausible. Miyamoto's prompts (as translated into my ear by Hiro) are not unlike those of an especially attuned yoga class, only instead of the repetitions of bodily poses, we begin cycling through clusters of notes at the foundations of kirana singing. Her voice is crystalline, gliding between pitches with precision, polishing the rough edges I hear in my own. A lesson like this requires a curious mixture of discipline and relaxation: one maintains concentration and control over one's own tone, while at the same time giving oneself over to the larger sonority of the group. It's challenging and meditative and pleasurable, and before I can get my hands around it, it's over.

Miyamoto first heard raga via an Ali Akbar Khan album in the record collection of her family, whose Japanese musical underground ties are extensive. The studio where she teaches, Hoshi To Niji (Star And Rainbow), was founded by her father in the back of his dental practice, and has hosted decades' worth of recordings, the most recent among which are some by Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O'Rourke, as well as her own collaborations with Riley. She began her life as a musician playing bass, and first met Riley during his 2017 trip to Japan for an event programmed by her husband.

"When I saw Terry's concert in Japan, I was so shocked how much information the sound included. Just a single note he played from the melodica brought tears to my eyes." She leapt at the opportunity to take instruction from him. "At the time I didn't have any idea what 'disciple' meant. I was not planning to study raga. I just wanted to keep my life going as a musician."

There's something poetic about the hazard with which Miyamoto found herself embarking on gurukula, the master-disciple relationship that helps to maintain the classical raga tradition. As disciples of Pran Nath, Young and his wife Marian Zazeela were not above tying his shoes if it meant making his life "more beautiful". While the demands of discipleship are unique in each case, the underlying devotion is absolute. It amounts to a sacrifice of a notion of personal freedom in exchange for total access to the wisdom and guidance of a venerated elder. "Being a disciple means totally losing my ego," explains Miyamoto. "I am not the first priority in my life at the moment, and I have to be open for every study from Terry. The outline of myself has totally vanished, and I don't have to think about that."

The intensity of the gurukula relationship can be unnerving to those on the outside of it. In the Western mainstream, musicians are stars; we glorify the autodidacts, the iconoclasts, the rootless young. By contrast, the late composer Michael Harrison sat beside La Monte Young for nearly a decade, adjusting his guru's tuning for the performance of The Well-Tuned Piano, a piece Harrison was only allowed to perform once on his own, and then only in private. Young's closest disciple Jung Hee Choi has described gurukula as "the most demanding long-term art project".

For Hiro, this contrast is a matter of perspective: "We are always educated in modern society as an individual who has the right to choose. We are supposed to have judgement and reasoning. In general, in the Eastern tradition, education is the opposite. When we start, we are blind. We don't have the ability to choose the path we go. That's why we need a guru, the one who removes the darkness and shows the path. Because we are not yet able to judge, we should surrender to someone we think trustworthy."

If discipleship remains niche as a way of life, other aspects of kirana hold unmistakable appeal in the Western avant garde, with figures such as Jon Hassell, Don Cherry and Catherine Hennix all taking instruction from Pran Nath during his lifetime. Perhaps this influence is preparing the ground, in some form or another, for its resurgence.

This essay appears in The Wire 510. Wire subscribers can also read it in our online magazine library.

Giles Bailey investigates the New York experimental theatre company's use of vinyl records in their latest production, Nayatt School Redux

The first time I saw The Wooster Group work with vinyl records was at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in October 2016, where the longstanding New York experimental theatre company were mounting their piece Early Shaker Spirituals. It was a masterful, spare performance where a 1976 LP of the same name by the Sisters Of The Shaker Community in Sabbathday Lake, Maine, is played in its entirety. A performer introduces the record, then places it on a turntable visible to the side of the stage and lowers the needle. Four older women in traditional Shaker attire - Elizabeth LeCompte, Suzzy Roche, Frances McDormand, and Cynthia Hedstrom - then present a series of dances and sing with the unaccompanied voices of the women on the recording. This is punctuated by pauses where liner notes are read and then the record is turned over.

When side two begins, the women are joined by four men in their thirties who dance with them until the album is complete. The work is austere and tender, taking the artefact of the LP and expanding its modest status into a live event. It spins and activates an embodied response to the history of the devout, celibate, primitivist Christian sect that celebrates its magic and its strangeness. The Shaker women's music is a stirring engine for a performance driven by the liveness of a needle as it rides along a microscopic groove, translating its ridges into electrical impulses which are amplified to become sound.

I was aware of this recurring device from reading about early Wooster Group works. The dance piece Hula (1981) uses a similar process with an LP by The Waikiki Hula Boys, this time with performers clad only in grass skirts and leis and marking the work's ending by urinating together. The incarcerated singers documented on the 1965 LP Negro Folklore From Texas State Prisons are channeled through earpieces worn by performers Eric Berryman, Jasper McGruder and Philip Moore in The B-Side (2016). Other albums feature in Get Your Ass In The Water And Swim Like Me (2026) and LSD (…Just The High Points…) (1983), but the work where records spin with the most frequency and complexity is Nayatt School from 1978, recently reanimated by the company in April this year at London's Coronet Theatre as Nayatt School Redux.

Witnessing the piece with its many turntables positioned across the set producing a dynamic collage of sound throughout prompted questions about how a performance like this might make us think about the vinyl LP as more than just a carrier of recorded sound. I was left reflecting on how it might be a special tool for performance-making, introducing new potential for listening as part of a work of theatre.

In Nayatt School Redux, founding member of the group Kate Valk evokes the original production by delivering its opening monologue by her late friend and collaborator Spalding Gray. Newly restored video documentation and an audio recording so poor that voices are little more than suggestions of speech buried in textures of noise and hum play alongside her accounts of how the work came together, experiences of performers and Kate's own journey to becoming part of the ensemble. She explains how Spalding would play extracts from records chosen from his collection as part of this introductory section, driving content together in incongruous combinations. At the heart of the performance is a 1950 cast recording of TS Eliot's The Cocktail Party starring Alec Guinness and Irene Worth, a play from which scenes are later acted out in an unhinged fashion by the Wooster Group cast. This is set against sections from Arch Oboler's Drop Dead! An Exercise In Horror! and eruptions of Cerrone's disco epic "Love In C Minor".

When I spoke with Kate Valk about the process of making Early Shaker Spirituals after the performance in Paris, she explained, "In the early 1980s, our record collection was the ancient equivalent of the internet. We would come together as a group and there might be a text that for one reason or another came to the centre of the group… So we'd have a text and then it would always be like, 'Get the records out!'" She went on to describe how the company's director, Elizabeth LeCompte, would often begin the devising of a new work with an imagined architecture for the space. "Then," she said, "we'd just start jamming: read the text, play the records… It's like every era has its medium and at that time, people were really into vinyl!"

Records are woven through Nayatt School Redux and the act of putting LPs onto turntables is part of the performance. Their materiality is consciously underlined. Much as Kate Valk emphasised when we talked, saying, "The idea of the record - yes, it's the soundtrack, yes, it's the primary source of material, and it's also a visual element and artefact." It leaves the audience with audio to interpret, an image to read and a tangible sense of sound inscribed into an object, drawing attention to how, like the histories being studied in the piece, the records are rarified, special and fragile.

In the closing section of the performance at the Coronet, the frenzy has died down and Kate Valk shares her memory of how Nayatt School ended in its original incarnation with the destruction of the records. She explains how lit matches were thrown at them as they turned, performer Libby Howes reached down her dress to grip a turntable arm and scratch it suggestively against the vinyl, Ron Vawter took off his clothes and attempted to use his penis as a stylus. It sounds like a moment of alarming and transgressive catharsis. As this account is given and Scott Shepherd shuffled to the back of the stage with a record player in his hands and trousers round his ankles in an echo of Spalding Gray back in 1978, I recalled the strict instruction I was given as a child about the care necessary in taking an LP from its sleeve and repeat with second nature today each time I play one. Nayatt School Redux's disobedience, in terms of handling both records and histories, is a prompt to consider why either might be deemed precious. It activates bodies across time and inflects them in different ways with music and sound. For the collective 60 minute duration of the piece, the audience is invited on that journey too.

Leaving the theatre, I couldn't help but think about how histories degrade, skip, or play, with beautiful, momentary clarity. I thought too about how I might come to accept or even cherish accumulated dust in the grooves or the unique smear of fingers for the singular liveness of the resulting pops, crackles and jumps.

A new compilation of mock library music takes inspiration from the half-hidden world of ufology, writes Ken Hollings in The Wire 510

Bibliotek: UFO
Various
Evenings & Weekends DL/LP

Only partially glimpsed and then for the briefest of moments, the UFO is the ultimate hauntological signifier. It has become the emblem for what isn't there, but whose absence exerts an influence far greater than any actual presence. Like one of those glowing lights that appear then move so rapidly out of eyeshot, it creates a common space around us. Everybody's seen an unidentified flying object, it seems, and yet no one has. As we rapidly approach the 80th anniversary of Kenneth Arnold's first sighting of "flying saucers" in 1947, this is a good time to reappraise the relationship between UFOs and mood music - if only because Les Baxter's Music Out Of The Moon was also released for the first time that same year.

Baxter's soothing blend of rich orchestration, wordless choruses and Dr Samuel J Hoffman's theremin would end up being Neil Armstrong's choice of background listening on his way to the Sea of Tranquility aboard Apollo XI in the summer of 1969. This connected the dots and established a pattern. From alien contactee Howard Menger's late 1950s album of harmonious keyboard improvisations, Authentic Music From Another Planet, to Frank Comstock's Project Comstock and Russ Garcia's Fantastica, the discerning earthbound listener has been offered some pretty lush visions of extraterrestrial living. Perhaps a little too lush. Hauntology's lure is characterised more by elusiveness than by any tangible presence, producing material representations of what stubbornly refuses to exist.

The past has always been another dimension, but it still opens onto this one. In November 2018, pilots on commercial flights over Kerry radioed Shannon air traffic control with reports of seeing "very bright" lights "moving so fast". One claimed to have seen "two bright lights that seemed to bank over to the right and climb away at speed". Shannon confirmed that no military exercises were taking place at that time. An official inquiry took four years to decide that the evidence was "inconclusive" while withholding the actual report, which is not that unusual.

Meanwhile, Dublin based label Evenings & Weekends has released its own report. Comprising 14 short tracks produced by a range of different artists, Bibliotek: UFO is the first in a projected series of releases devoted to reimagined forms of library music, cinematic easy listening and reverse engineered futurism. Its individual contributors remain as bemused and mystified by the wayward points of light seen in the skies as those wild-eyed observers from almost eight decades ago. Nothing remains more mid-century modern than a good UFO sighting. After all, Kenneth Arnold was a pilot too.

It's consequently no surprise to discover that this compilation contains flashes of an imagined past, fleetingly glimpsed and partially recorded. But if you love mysteries - which is to say, things that remain just outside your grasp - then this collection is for you. Remember, however, that the solution to any mystery can never prove more interesting than the mystery itself. When you get right down to it, whoever heard of an Identified Flying Object? It inevitably turns into something else: something already known. To keep the listener guessing, artists' names and track titles listed on Bibliotek: UFO are interchangeable both with one another and within each other, constituting between them what appears to be a seamless formation of reflective surfaces - or a conspiracy set in motion by a single mind. It's all fairly even and harmonious, each bright light and matchless velocity being just different enough from the next to keep you listening. The discreet electronic loops, beats and melodies remain constant throughout; but, as with many a UFO sighting, there are few surprises after the initial gasp of wonder.

Even so, a few alien anomalies have managed to slip through. The rolling synthesizer lines of Übung's "First Contact" come at you through a dry mist of off-channel interference, while slurred liquid voices bring some genuinely asemic intensity to Demon Isle Trio's "BPS". Snatches of pilots offering mystifying descriptions of their encounters with UFOs animate the heavy doom-laden chording of Jung Dumb 1's "Visitation", setting the scene for the twinkling cosmic jingles that make up Oddfillips' "Floating In Space".

Quite often the pairing of tracks works very well, adding a little more edge and contrast to the overall soundscape. For example, the neatly manicured thrash of "The Chase" by Dog Of The Night derives added impetus from coming right after Rainwater Cats' "Speed", a track containing a lengthy monologue describing a series of alien abductions. Evidence suggests that this latter contribution may have been lifted from some recent comedy drama - certainly a line comparing an alien spacecraft's interior to "the toilets you find in a fancy restaurant" sounds like it came straight from the scriptwriters' table. Either way, the last line is a doozie. "Local Inhabitants" by Psalmanazar and Güggeli's "Flying Saucers" feel like individual continuations of the same melodious reverberations.

This general lack of roughness and discord has proved a drawback in previously remembered versions of the future, which tend to come out a lot smoother than they should have been. Library music collections in the past contained some wilder, more eclectic moments of discordance, ugliness and menace. Not all mood music suits every mood. But with UFO sightings on the rise again and the Pentagon releasing thousands of never before seen documents and videos, you could do a lot worse than taking Bibliotek: UFO to a safe outdoor location anytime you feel like watching the skies.

This review appears in The Wire 510 along with many other reviews of new and recent records, books, films, festivals and more. To read them all, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.