To complement his interview in The Wire 507, US bassist and composer Jair-Rohm Parker Wells creates an exclusive Wire mix

Jair-Rohm (pronounced Jerome) Parker Wells invites listeners to think about the double bass – traditionally assigned a supporting role – as a main character.

Alone and with a pool of collaborators that includes saxophonist Daniel Carter, guitarists Eugene Chadbourne, Michael Gregory Jackson and Reeves Gabrels, composer/electronic musician Bob Ostertag, guitarist and producer Robert Musso, among others, his music blends deep bass, post-jazz improvisation, ambient soundscapes and cutting edge technology.

Here, he compiles an exclusive Wire mix of his influences, collaborators and own music.

Tracklist:

Jair-Rohm Parker Wells “Beneath The Canopy, A Stream”
Grateful Dead “Born Cross-Eyed”
Arnold Schoenberg Notturno For Strings And Harp (1895-96)
Joni Mitchell “A Case Of You”
Karlheinz Stockhausen “Studio No. 2”
Jair-Rohm Parker Wells “Buoyance Of Light”
Anton Webern Passacaglia For Large Orchestra, Op 1
Eberhard Weber “Street Scenes”
Annea Lockwood “Tiger Balm”
Eugene Chadbourne & Jair-Rohm Parker Wells “Remembering Ale Sordi”

In his latest Secret History Of Film Music column, Philip Brophy considers the sound of masculine sensitivity through the scores of Bryce Dessner

When people cry at the movies, it’s usually the music that induces the tears. The magic of music is that it can irrationally, apolitically and even randomly upset you. It can act as a triggering mechanism, artfully deployed to exploit our sentimentality. Some moviegoers pride themselves on always being in control of what they deem good in art, but everyone can be manipulated by music. Personally, I’m comfortable with music overriding my rational control. It’s what allows me to rail against default humanist tacks in film scoring, and also to accept that some composers and directors can collaborate to produce humanist sentiments without being cloying.

That’s a lengthy preamble to contextualise the scores of Bryce Dessner, best known as the guitarist from The National. Importing his band’s shimmering ‘wall-of-indie’ guitar sound, Dresser produces languorous scores shaped by open ended passages of harmonious strumming. The National’s loping Knopfleresque sonics are not my preference, but Dresser’s aesthetic has been clearly and successfully incorporated into a number of independent films.

Mike Mills’s C’mon C’mon (2021) is one. The score’s instrumental aura evokes an Elizabethan broken consort: harmonium, recorders, audible breathing and pumping, spiced with occasional whammy pedal pitch jumps drenched in reverb. Its drone based ambience evokes an acoustic rendering of Brian Eno’s Another Green World, without drum machines or percolating rhythms. The result is an Appalachian Zamfir, conjuring stillness and soft tension. This mirrors the uneasy reservation radio journalist Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) holds as he is forced to look after his pre-teen nephew Jesse (Woody Norman). The multi-tracked voices and delays (“Who’s Taking Care Of Jesse?”; “The Orphan”) matches the emotional layering which almost suffocates Johnny as he attempts to figure out Jesse’s autistic behaviour, yet the warmth of the music maintains a felt connection to Johnny’s efforts.

Things get decidedly mushy in We Live In Time (2024), a tragic love story involving a wedding, children and ovarian cancer. It’s a tearjerker that hardly requires music to pull the strings. However Dessner’s plaintive guitar suite strikes an elegiac balance with the script’s overdetermined beats of pathos. OK, to be frank, Dessner’s score here does resemble music currently piped on airplanes before take off or through phones on hold. Orchestral Muzak ® died a long time ago, to be replaced by the spirit of humble arthouse harmoniousness. We Live In Time falls in line with this death erotic of beautiful melodies: the unabashedly romantic tenor of chugging cellos, uppity drums and twangy guitars.

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Bardo, A False Chronicle Of A Handful Of Truths (2022) bears a score by Dessner co-composed with Iñárritu himself. A visually opulent tale of Silverio (Daniel Giménez Cacho), an aged ‘docufiction’ filmmaker returning to Mexico to receive a national cultural honour, the film hovers next to his encounters with Mexican residents who discourse on politics and poetics through their terse dressing down of his return. Like most of Iñárritu’s movies, Bardo explores the human condition while muddying the straits between fantasy and reality. He did so superbly in Birdman (2014), with its drum score by Antonio Sanchez; here the results are bloated and clichéd – though that might be intentional.

In a self-mocking tone, Dessner and Iñárritu’s score features brass band tracks which reference the pomp and pretension of Mexican military music. Numerous historical epoch films from Mexico and Italy have presented Mexican brass ensembles – from the glisteningly professional to the grimly depleted – as a malfunctioning façade of imperial dreams courted by successive Mexican regimes shape-shifting from colony to empire to republic to revolution to federation. Bardo’s ironic brassiness recalls David Byrne’s score for The Knee Plays (1984) and Goran Bregovic’s music for the 1990s films of Emir Kusturica.

The rest of Bardo’s score mimics Morricone at his Cinecitta best. “Mateo’s Freedom” overflows with a religiosity not unlike Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In America (1984): thick with strings, flutes and muted trombones that breathe, sigh, soar and cascade. “Liminal” is Morricone trembling at his own mortality: high violin vibrato crying like a gypsy caravan at a funeral. “Dreaming Of A Dream” sounds two- and three-note lines, uttered as discrete phrases, leaving silences within which a dark resonance rings like a liturgical response deep underground. It’s uplifting and grounding at the same time. Dessner’s touch seems to diffuse Bardo’s self-centred heroics, especially so in “Silverio Last Train” and “Bardo Finale”.

Dessner’s most recent score for Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams (2025) pushes his chordal passages into chamber music forms. The film traces the hard life of logger Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) working in the 1910s for the Great Northern Railway. The score’s cues crank the trilling pianos, and cycle the strings on a sugary high. Elsewhere, tracks like “Placing Stones” return to the familiar psychoacoustics of an upright piano doodled with the sustain pedal on, recorded in an old school room, transporting listeners to an imagined childhood at school. That sounds clichéd, but Dessner’s music ennobles the sad plight of Grainier. Taken together, these films recoup masculinity through music. They both feature central male characters who, despite their aspirations, are fragile and insecure, continually falling prey to adverse elements shifting around them.

Literature and theatre has tackled gendered heroics with greater nuance than the younger medium of film. Films tend to inflate heroics through narrative condensation, visceral thrills, fetishised cinematography, and musical slathering. Indeed, film music’s endless French horning of male heroes might have developed through a need to compensate for the vapidity of film scripts, which attempt to deepen a hero’s journey and end up flattening it for blunt audience identification. Arthouse movies which seek to redress the imbalance caused by idolising the male hero often use a similar ‘musical lathering’ to Hollywood spectacles, only they replace grand orchestras with humble ensembles, European classicism with American stylistics, and belted dynamics with massaged touches.

I’m being critical here of the lumpen application of (at its worst) U2-ish Americanazak in scores for indie movies, not of Dessner’s contribution. What is it about ‘strummery’ indie rock that jangles the jollies of filmmakers in love with honouring the fragility of life? Ragnar Kjartansson’s ‘performative installation’ at MoMA PSI in New York in 2013 engaged The National to perform “Sorrow” for six hours continuously. The nine LP limited edition has been uploaded to YouTube: it gives new meaning to the term ‘wallowing’.

Ugo Rondinone’s It’s Late… (1999-2000) is a celebrated six-channel video installation projected around the walls of a room bathed in light from a blue Perspex ceiling. But nowhere do museum catalogues declare the source of the work: sections from Fassbinder’s Gods Of The Plague (1970), accompanied by (if memory serves me correctly) a very long and softly jangling track unreleased by Tindersticks, possibly titled “Happy Hour”. Here the emotional faucet was wedged open in the name of contemporary art, pouring a 4AD/Lynchian sound into the glowing blue room while Harry Baer’s louche photographic stud wanders empty urban environments.

The legacy of reverberant jangly guitars is often used like flock wallpaper to overwhelm the listener with signified emotional weight. Overly sensitive film music can help to tag a film’s independent spirit and its artistic aspirations, but can just as easily deflate it. Bryce Dresser’s scores notably escape this emotional pitfall and still bring on the tears.

The story of Yoko Ono’s life and work provides a lens for examining the catalytic avant garde art movements of the mid-20th century, writes Mark Webber in The Wire 507

Love Magic Power Danger Bliss: Yoko Ono And The Avant-Garde Diaspora
Paul Morley
Faber Hbk 496 pp

The last time I saw Paul Morley in person, at an event for his recent book Far Above The World, I mischievously (or misguidedly) asked if the world needed another book about David Bowie. It was more a witless conversation opener than a provocation, because I love Bowie as much as Morley does, but he graciously took the prompt and ran with it.

Now he’s written about one of the most widely known but underappreciated and misunderstood contemporary artists. You might wonder if another book about Yoko Ono is necessary, but Love Magic Power Danger Bliss isn’t only about her. Biographical details are threaded through the text, but this is more a creation myth around the fermentation of avant garde/conceptual/minimalist art that blossomed mainly in the US, particularly New York, as the 1950s became the 60s.

A foundational moment for this milieu was the concert series organised by La Monte Young in Ono’s Chambers Street loft from December 1960 to the following June. The list of participants is a roll call of those who have since become recognised as some of the most original and influential artists, composers and performers of the last century: in addition to co-conspirators Young and Ono, Richard Maxfield, Terry Jennings, David Tudor, Jackson Mac Low, Bob Morris, Henry Flynt, Simone Forti, Dick Higgins, and Ono’s then-husband Toshi Ichiyanagi. This coterie was later immortalised in Young’s book An Anthology of chance operations, concept art anti-art indeterminacy improvisation meaningless work natural disasters plans of action stories diagrams music poetry essays dance constructions mathematics compositions. The concert series was the zero point of a rich seam of creativity that was echoed and amplified by Fluxus, the Judson Dance Theater, happenings, intermedia and expanded cinema.

These events, promoted with the epigram “The Purpose Of This Series Is Not Entertainment”, were the first to take experimental music out of the uptown concert halls (where early pioneers like Cage still had to prove themselves) and resituate it downtown in the kinds of alternative spaces that we romantically associate such endeavours with, an ideal continued today by the likes of London’s Cafe Oto. Such buildings in Lower Manhattan were then accessible to penniless artists but are now the penthouse playgrounds of the super-rich – an outcome that was possibly not the intention of Fluxus leader George Maciunas, who was the first to convert Soho’s all but abandoned factories into live-work units.

Details of what actually occurred during these evening concerts are still murky, so for me this was the most necessary part of the book. Most participants are no longer with us, and it’s unclear if Morley spoke to any of the survivors. All we are left with are the names, lists of works which may or may not have been presented, scant memories, and a few enigmatic photos by Minoru Niizuma. Like one of the instructional art pieces of this vintage, a black and white photo leaves plenty of space that can be filled by our imaginations. Sometimes this is for the best: a myth can often be more stimulating than actuality.

Before we arrive at the loft, Morley traces the genesis of the avant garde in 19th century France (the humorously captioned monochromes by Alphonse Allais were new to me). Breezing through dada, all roads inevitably lead to Duchamp and Cage, mentors and exemplars who inhabit some of the book’s most engaging passages. Glimpses of Ono’s early life – the foundational experiences of growing up in war torn Japan, retreating into fantasy as a coping mechanism, then studying philosophy and phenomenology – offer clues as to the origins of her dreamlike, text-based artworks. Following the loft concerts, Ono’s conceptual and performance works flowed in earnest, further encouraged by the evolution of Fluxus, eventually taking her to London.

Having cultivated a strong, uncompromising character, Ono was always willing to appear foolish in order to make a point. She established herself as a compelling, original artist, but she was also – whether by luck or design – a champion networker, managing to associate with important figures at just the right time. Cage, Young and Maciunas were part of a trajectory that ultimately led her to Beatle John, found up a ladder in the Indica Gallery, squinting through a magnifying glass at the word “Yes”. It’s not an easy task to tell the Yoko Ono story without addressing her symbiotic relationship with John Lennon, but she was already an artist of significance before they met, and he only makes an appearance in the final few pages. For what happened next, I’m not sure the world needs another book.

This review appears in The Wire 507 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.

Adam Bohman has been operating on the outer fringes of experimental music for over 40 years; here are some examples of his visual art

Since the mid-1970s, UK musician Adam Bohman has used pencils, pastels, crayons and ink and repurposed card to create playful and surreal artworks.

“I worked in an office for a long time so I used to do some work on collages during lunch breaks and slack times using office materials,” he told Daniel Spicer in 2014 in The Wire 368. “I like different types of pens like biros and felt tip and indelible marker and fluorescent marker pens. And, of course, there’s all the different types of paper you can use.”

For many years, his artwork was mainly visible in the concert posters and flyers he would produce advertising lowkey improv gigs around London. But now, Otohon, Cafe Oto’s in-house publisher, has compiled just some of the thousands of paintings, drawings and collages he has produced over the last 40 years into a new monograph. Here is a gallery of some of them.

Adam Bohman: Drawings, Collages, Paintings is published by Otohon. Adam Bohman's residency at London's Cafe Oto runs between 21-23 April. Read his Epiphanies column, and Clive Bell’s review of the book, in The Wire 507. Subscribers can read both pieces online via the digital library.

In October 2025, The Arcade Orchestra formed to play a tribute concert for New Zealand musician Dean Roberts, who died in 2024

Dean Roberts (24 March 1975–10 August 2024) was a New Zealand musician and composer who worked with electroacoustic music, minimalism, free improvisation, song cycles and rock. During the mid-1990s he was a member of the trio Thela with Rosy Parlane and Dion Workman, then recorded three albums under the name White Winged Moth, followed by a series of releases under his own name for labels such as Mille Plateaux, Ritornell and Kranky. Along with Martin Brandlmayr and Werner Dafeldecker, Roberts was a member of the trio Autistic Daughters. Roberts died on 10 August 2024, at the age of 49.

In October 2025, the Arcade Orchestra formed at KM28 in Berlin to pay tribute to him. This is the recording of that performance.

Tracklist

Dean Roberts “Kompakt Arcade”
Adrián de Alfonso “Remeje”
Dean Roberts “Bird In The Curtain”
Dean Roberts “Letter To Monday”
Dean Roberts “Not Fire”

The Arcade Orchestra is Adrian Alfonso, Andrea Belfi, Margareth Kammerer, Elisabetta Porcinai, Emanuele Porcinai, Stefano Pilia and Valerio Tricoli.

A statement by the Orchestra reads: “Is there a right way to remember someone? Probably not. Like the filming of a written story, it will necessarily betray the collection of images, sounds, impressions, projections that we created for ourselves. After Dean Roberts’s passing, we felt the need to come together, to commemorate him as a friend and as an artist, to perform his music to celebrate him. Here's the recording of that evening in Berlin. We wish Dean was there. Maybe he was.”

Dean Roberts was interviewed by Jon Dale in The Wire 291. Digital subscribers can read that interview in the digital archive here.

Listen to the music we played to the Can keyboardist during his Invisible Jukebox interview in The Wire 507

The 9 April edition of The Wire’s weekly radio show on Resonance FM and Resonance Extra featured tracks by Sunn O))), Eek-A-Mouse + Sly & Robbie, Kaloja, Shewolff and more

Tracklist

The Lord
“Old Growth”
From Forest Nocturne
(Southern Lord)

Stephen O'Malley
“Phase I (Excerpt)”
From Spheres Collapser
(XKatedral/La Becque Editions)

Sunn O)))
“Does Anyone Hear Like Venom?”
From Sunn O)))
(Sub Pop)

Eek-A-Mouse + Sly & Robbie
“Creeper (I Want To Know)”
From I Want To Know
(VP)

Kaloja
“Spectral Spring”
From A Body Of Water
(Artetetra)

Shewolff
“The Day The Whole World Ends”
From We're All Gonna Fukking Die
(Dying Victims/De Pankraker)

Jake Muir
“Anima”
From Pareidolia
(enmossed)

Squeeze
“The Place We Call Mars”
From Trixies
(BMG)

808 State vs Humanoid
“Optica”
From In Place Of Language
(Detuned)

mother
“Sublingual”
From A Simple Procedure
(Delusional)

They Might Be Giants
“Overnight Sensation (Hit Record)”
From The World Is To Dig
(Idlewild)

Tachyon Spill
“Tachyon Band Eight”
From Tachyon Band
(American Tapes)

Kristen Gallerneaux
“Every Day”
From Life Day
(Shadow World)

Earth x Black Noi$e
“Ouroboros Is Broken (Black Noi$e Inversion)”
From Geometry Of Murder: The Extra Capsular Extraction Inversions
(Fire)

Adventures In Sound And Music broadcasts at 9pm every Thursday on Resonance 104.4FM and Resonance Extra. Explore past shows in our On Air archive.

To accompany his article on Hive Mind The Wire 507, Daniel Spicer compiles an annotated playlist of tracks from the Brighton based label

Since 2017, Brighton based label Hive Mind has released a diverse selection of sounds from the global underground. Founded and singlehandedly curated by Marc Teare, it presents music and sound art from around the world, offering up surprising discoveries that, at first glance, have little in common save for a wayward insistence on avoiding the obvious. The label’s website explains its mission with succinct accuracy: “Reflecting a deep antipathy towards both national lines and traditional ideas of musical genres, our releases don’t fit neatly into existing categories and are here to celebrate the timeless human drive towards creativity.”

Maalem Mahmoud Gania
“Sadati Houma El Bouhala”
From Colours Of The Night (2017)

The album that started it all off. Teare has been visiting Morocco since 2003, developing a deep love and understanding of various strains of North African trance folk music. Colours Of The Night presented the last recordings made by the late Maalem – an honorific simply meaning ‘Master’ – Mahmoud Gania, one of Morocco’s most revered players of Gnawa. Sticking close to the source of this ancient musical and spiritual tradition, the urgent chattering of iron qraqab castanets drives forward Gania’s hypnotic guembri vamps and languid vocal lines answered by a call and response choir. This music could be centuries old.

Idjah Hadidjah & Jugala Jaipongan
“Hiji Catecan”
From Jaipongan Music Of West Java (2020)

Jaipongan music was invented by Indonesian composer and choreographer Gugum Gumbira in the early 1970s in response to the government’s 1961 ban on rock and roll and call for a revival of indigenous arts. Jaipongan melded elements of the ketuk-tilu tradition – complex hand drum patterns and plaintive melodies played on the bowed rebab – with the melodious chimes of gamelan. Recorded in the famed Jugala studios in Bandung, West Java in 2007, this album features bewitching and timeless vocals by Idjah Hadijah, one of the original voices to define the genre.

Yara Asmar
“sleeping in church – tape 1 – on a warm day I turned to tell you something but there was nothing there”
From Home Recordings 2018-2021 (2022)

Yara Asmar’s first of three albums for Hive Mind invited the listener into the strange and beguiling inner world of the 25 year old Beirut based multi-instrumentalist, video artist and puppeteer. Recorded at home using cassettes and a mobile phone, Asmar’s dream-like missives are performed on piano, metallophone, synth, a Hohner Marchesa accordion discovered in her grandmother’s attic and various music boxes and toy pianos. They’re mixed with field recordings of hymns sung in churches around Lebanon, reassembled into waltzes. It’s a disarmingly melancholy and poignant universe in which to immerse oneself.

Herandu
“Ocher Red”
From Ocher Red (2024)

Every now and then Hive Mind unleashes an album almost designed to encourage puzzlement. Ocher Red, the debut from Herandu, is just such a release. Herandu is the duo of Evgeny and Mikhail Gavrilov from Novosibirsk, Siberia. They’ve played together and separately since childhood, but this 2022 session recorded in St Petersburg birthed a new sound, brewing up lush textures using keyboards, guitars, basses, flutes – plus pal Vladimir Luchansky on sax – all underpinned by satisfyingly propulsive funk and jungle rhythms. Teare’s blurb says “Metalheadz meets Weather Report out on the Siberian steppes”, and he’s not wrong.

Wolfgang Perez
“Tristeza”
From Só Ouço (2025)

In 2022, German-Spanish singer/guitarist Wolfgang Perez began a creative residency in Rio de Janeiro. What began as a university exchange to study composition turned into a deep 18 month immersion in the city’s vibrant pulsations. Só Ouço is the result of that experience, an album that brilliantly taps into the subversive spirit of classic 1970s Música Popular Brasileira by the likes of Tom Zé and Gilberto Gil, but with a contemporary experimental edge that stops it from falling into mere pastiche. “Tristeza”, recorded with a 12-piece Brazilian ensemble including sumptuous brass and woodwinds, is a woozy delight.

F. Ampism
“Lunar Mansions”
From The Vertical Luminous (2025)

F. Ampism is the mysterious nom de guerre of Brighton based sonic and visual artist Paul Wilson. He’s played with gonzo free jazz/noise outfit Bolide (which, full disclosure, I’ve played in too) and has forged strong links with like-minded Finnish experimentalists Jan Anderzén and Jani Hirvonen. His latest solo release, The Vertical Luminous, consolidates his meticulous approach to electroacoustic collage, folding in synth experiments, fleeting flutes and whistles, found sounds and other less identifiable ingredients. The results are gloriously psychedelic, with tracks like “Lunar Mansions” sounding like a lava lamp gradually overheating and achieving sentience in the process.

Carol Maia & Jeremy Gustin
“it’s nice to see a lake in your eyes”
From it’s nice to see a lake in your eyes (2026)

Another suis generis headscratcher to find a natural home at Hive Mind is the intercontinental file-swapping collaboration between Brooklyn based percussionist Jeremy Gustin and Rio-based singer Carol Maia. With help from key players in their respective hometown scenes, they’ve crafted a suite of gently luminous experimental pop songs that sound like they’ve been beamed in from a distant planet where the local musicians were trying to emulate earth music but came up with their own wonkily off-kilter version instead. Tantalising in its just out of reach near-familiarity, it suggests a welcoming alternate reality.

The few remaining jukeboxes in London’s pubs and bars salvage a mode of music consumption from the junkyards of history, argues Deborah Nash in The Wire 507

“‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St Clement’s, You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St Martin’s!’ It was curious, but when you said it to yourself you had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the bells of a lost London that still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten…”

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four the novel’s protagonist Winston Smith strays into the backstreet neighbourhood of the Proles, where he encounters the owner of a junkshop who recites this nursery rhyme to him. The junkshop is crammed with dusty treasures spilling out in disordered heaps, among them a glass paperweight containing a piece of pink coral. Fascinated by the uselessness of this object, Winston buys it.

Today, turning off Oxford Street in central London into the alleyway of Hanway Street, I escape the flashing neon windows of department stores to arrive at Bradley’s Spanish Bar which, like Orwell’s junkshop, houses its own object of curiosity from bygone times: a 1970s coin-operated NSM Prestige II jukebox. Barely audible above the crowded colliding conversations, the jukebox is playing Peter Sarstedt’s “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)”.

Bradley’s, the site of a former wine merchant, predates its jukebox by about a decade, but the place looks Victorian, somewhere you might hold a séance, with its tasselled bell lampshades, arabesque-patterned wallpaper, red velvet banquette and assorted memorabilia that includes a framed photograph of the Hanway Club’s pipe-smoking president William Bradley. There is also a bar downstairs, but it is on the ground floor that the ‘jukies’ arrive to feed their coins into the machine on a Saturday night.

“I’ve learned way more about jukeboxes and urinals than I ever thought I would,” Bradley’s manager Jan de Vries tells me. If the machine fails to engage, he can fix it most of the time, otherwise he Zoom calls an engineer in Yorkshire. Since the 1960s, there have been several jukeboxes here and they are so embedded in the bar’s history and identity that one appears in Bradley’s logo.

Before 5pm on Mondays to Fridays the music is free. At the time of my visit it’s much later, so I push my pound coin into the slot to net three songs from the 160 available. The 80 7"s are lined up vertically in a rack, and I watch the direction of travel through the machine’s large sloping concave window: the mechanical carriage slides across to select my record and bring it into contact with the stylus, then plays it upright. This is unexpected, as is the song that materialises, which is not the Blondie track I had picked.

Bradley’s has 20,000 singles, mostly kept in a warehouse, with some 2000 on site. “We change about 20 records every six to eight weeks or so… to keep customers and especially the staff sane,” says de Vries. “If you put in The Smiths, The Clash, artists like Queen, you know it’s going to be overplayed, so we try not to let them stay in there for too long.” But the process of going through boxes of vinyl, making the selection, cleaning the records, and printing and cutting out the labels, is time consuming.

“It’s nice to watch them,” says Margaret Webb of Jukebox London, who has a collection of 1950s and early 60s jukeboxes, objects of American exported glamour in their heyday. “They’re more fun if they have ‘visible play’,” she says, referring to machines where you can see the 45 playing. “If you only have 25 cents, you can discuss with your friend which song to choose. You don’t want to repeat what some guy has been playing all day long.”

Webb argues that when jukeboxes became closed and functional boxes like cigarette vending machines, they lost visual interest as well as value. We are in a room with ten different models, ranging in price from £6500 to £22,000, depending on quality, sound, size and how they have been conserved. Every day, she plays them. “They need exercise,” she explains. “They’re mechanical, and if they don’t get played, they seize up.”

No chance of slacking for Bradley’s jukebox. “In general, the jukebox is as busy as we are,” says de Vries. “It has to go at full speed like everyone else.” While I’m there, more hipsters pile in from the rain. “My dad used to come here with Simon Le Bon,” recollects someone at the bar. It is an anecdote that indicates the squeeze on this ‘in between’ place, straddling the West End and Fitzrovia, once home to secondhand record shops for those working in music and media. Their gradual erasure coincided with the construction of the Elizabeth Line, which saw the demolition of The Astoria venue, now replaced by the Outernet’s advert flashing, brain washing cubicles on Tottenham Court Road.

Many bars and pubs around London had – until fairly recently – a working jukebox. I visited six and, with one exception (King Charles I on Northdown Street), they had all been replaced by gambling machines and football screens.

The jukebox can never be a prosthesis – an extension of self – in the way a pen, phone, bike or car might be. In Nineteen Eighty-Four Winston’s glass paperweight is smashed by the Thought Police, and his yearnings for a different life lead to his ruin. In the present time it can sometimes feel as if the progress clock is running backwards towards ideas I thought long since expunged. We will, however, continue to time travel through old junkshops and pubs like Bradley’s, with the slow, imperfect and easy charm of its jukebox that offers something human-scaled and mercurial, something repaired rather than replaced.

At St Pancras station, I’m making my way across the concourse when I’m stopped in my tracks. There stands a Rocket jukebox on free play. I choose David Bowie and Queen’s “Under Pressure” from the menu and press the buttons. The machine lights up and tells me it is playing, but no sound emits from its speakers. Another juke bites the dust? 

This essay appears in The Wire 507. Pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the essay in our online magazine library.

Publishing an independent music magazine is tougher than ever. We need your continuing support

In May 2025, The Wire put out an urgent call for support, citing rising costs and changes to the music and media landscapes as increasing threats to the magazine’s ongoing existence. Many of you heeded the call, by buying a subscription or a copy of the magazine, or by making a donation.

The response was overwhelming, and gave us the necessary resources, financial and spiritual, to press on with publishing the magazine’s 500th issue in October, and move into the new year with renewed energy – we have just published issue 507 of the magazine, a special issue with two alternate covers featuring artwork by Savage Pencil.

But a year on from that call out, the climate for publishing an independent monthly music magazine is more harsh than ever. Print, postage and distribution costs have all increased again, magazine outlets on the high street are closing, and there is an ongoing cost of living crisis to which The Wire is not immune.

In short, we need your helping hands once again, to give us the extra resources to keep on publishing the magazine. So we have decided to make our call for support an annual event, our equivalent to other independent music organisations' yearly fundraisers.

So this month, please consider taking out a print subscription or a digital subscription. Or pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop today. Or make a donation to our publishing fund.

For more than 40 years, The Wire has remained a unique and respected publication, 100 per cent independent and uncompromising, a forum for underground musicians and writers, and a trusted filter for readers to get to grips with all the creative music out there.

With the support of our extended community of subscribers and readers, The Wire will continue to survive and thrive. We look forward to you joining us on that journey.

Thank you.

All at The Wire

Volume 50 of The Wire’s subscriber only download compilation is a bumper edition featuring 27 tracks by ans m, E The Artist, Isabelle Duthoite, Girl Pusher, Jay Mitta, Kareem Samara, Only Now and more

Take out a print or digital subscription to The Wire to stream and download every edition of Below The Radar

The 2 April edition of The Wire’s weekly radio show on Resonance FM and Resonance Extra featured tracks by badbluebirdz, Lao Dan Chicago Quartet, Albert Ayler Quintet, Bettina Koster and more

Tracklist

badbluebirdz
“Spring Time Again”
From Huài niǎo xiān fēi/The bad bird flies first
(Bandcamp)

Alice Kemp
“Corpse Garden Practices”
From 9 Dreams In Erotic Mourning
(Helen Scarsdale)

Lao Dan Chicago Quartet
“Wandering Donkey”
From Klotski
(Trost)

Black Nile
“Skyrim”
From Indigo Garden
(MASS MoCA)

Albert Ayler Quintet
“Truth Is Marching In”
From Copenhagen, Bordeaux 1966 & Newport 1967 Live First Release
(thingamajig)

Ayman Fanous
“Duo With Joe McPhee – 2”
From Brooklyn Stories 1–5
(Infrequent Seams)

Popol Wu & Nassai
“惡魔之聲”(“Voice Of The Devil”)
From 壞天使！惡魔之聲 /Blue Angel! Anger Demon
(Bandcamp)

Joanna Duda
“Colubus”
From Regina Silva
(Pointless Geometry)

Mania D
“Herzschlag/Kinderfunk”
From Mania D EP
(Monogam)

Malaria!
“How Do You Like My New Dog?”
From Compiled 2.0/1981–84 Full Emotion
(Moabit Musik)

Malaria!
“Von Hinten”
From Cheerio
(Moabit Musik)

Bettina Koster
“Sad Song”
From Kolonel Silver Top
(Pale Music)

Lucy Liyou
“Babygirl”
From MR COBRA
(Bandcamp)

Dobrawa Czocher
“Phoenix”
From State Of Matter
(130701)

Moebius & Neumeier
“Saurus”
From Live In Japan
(Suezan Studio)

Noveller
“The Girl Who Was Death” (featuring Iggy Pop)
From I Am The Weather
(Experimentia)

Margareth Kammerer
“Abschied”
From The Garden
(Ftarri Uta)

Adventures In Sound And Music broadcasts at 9pm every Thursday on Resonance 104.4FM and Resonance Extra. Explore past shows in our On Air archive.

Stream a selection of tracks from releases we listened to during the making of our May 2026 issue

The full chart:

American Sharks
Not Dead Yet
(Permanent Teeth)

Marisa Anderson
The Anthology Of UnAmerican Folk Music
(Thrill Jockey)

ANSIEDAD1000
Abizzmo
(Hakuna Kulala)

Art Ensemble Of Chicago
People In Sorrow
(Play Loud!)

Steve Austin
Marked Cards & Loaded Dice
(SuperNova)

Betamax vs Sylvia Hallett
Betamax vs Sylvia Hallett
(Picot)

Xu Cheng
Poems Without Words
(Dusty Ballz)

Egg Meat
The Most Pathetic Poem Is Small People On Fire
(Mutualism)

otay:onii
Love Is In The Shit
(Pelagic)

Master’s Ashes
How The Mighty Have Fallen
(Time To Kill)

My Cat Is An Alien
IN∞FI∞NI∞TO
(Opax Private Press/Elliptical Noise)

upsammy & Valentina Magaletti
Seismo
(Pan)

Waltz Time
Happy Hometown 2026.02.09 @ Guangzhou Wuting
(Friends Music/YouTube)

Dagmar Zuniga
in filth your mystery is kingdom/far smile peasant in yellow music
(AD 93)

J Zunz
Obsidiana
(Rocket)

The 26 March edition of The Wire’s weekly radio show on Resonance FM and Resonance Extra featured tracks by HYPER GAL, Masayo Koketsu & Nava Dunkelman, ANSIEDAD1000, EXIT ELECTRONICS and more

Tracklist:

EDU & JUDGITZU
“Edu & Judgitzu” (Excerpt)
From Nuku
(Nyege Nyege)

HYPER GAL
“HAZY”
From Our Hyper
(SKiN GRAFT)

Masayo Koketsu & Nava Dunkelman
“初雷–hatsurai”
From Veins Of Rain
(Relative Pitch)

Alvarezz
“No More (ft Beto Urrutia)”
From Desire Path / Exit Wound
(Multibody)

Egg Meat
“$$ ABOMUNUS CRAXIOMS $$”
From The most Pathetic poem is small people on fire
(Mutualism)

ANSIEDAD1000
“MAGIA DORADA”
From Abizzmo
(Hakuna Kulala)

EXIT ELECTRONICS
“SHARP MOUTHS”
From I’M YOUR BEGGAR
(AVALANCHE)

tripes
“warblyyy”
From sega tron
(Paradoxe Club)

33 featuring Astrid Sonne
“New ADHD”
From Tripolar
(Haunter)

Ponyclub Tartiflette
“UpTightSick”
From Ponyclub Tartiflette
(Bagdaddy)

Miguel Mendez
“Palindrome”
From The Summer When Everything Sucked
(DeathBomb Arc)

upsammy & Valentina Magaletti
“Superimposed”
From Seismo
(PAN)

Lackey
“Bam Bam”
From 10 Big Ones
(Slouch)

Sun God
“On The Bridge”
(B Rec)

Dhangsha
“Sacred Rage”
From Insurrection Manual
(Brachliegen)

Kareem Samara
“The Sun Likes You”
From Below The Radar 50

Ans M
“cou”
From Below The Radar 50

John Tilbury
“Palais De Mari Composed By Morton Feldman”
From Palais De Mari Composed By Morton Feldman Performed By John Tilbury
(true blanking)

Adventures In Sound And Music broadcasts at 9pm every Thursday on Resonance 104.4FM and Resonance Extra. Explore past shows in our On Air archive.

In his latest Secret History of Film Music column, Philip Brophy considers Daniel Lopatin's score for Uncut Gems (2019) and its context within an aesthetic of ‘bling’

The Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems (2019) opens in 2010 in Ethiopia, where low paid diamond miners toil, harvesting what will be the bling tokens for an affluent culture many miles away. The soundtrack quakes with deep drones like synthetic shōmyō baritone chanting by Buddhist monks foretelling the fatal consequences of unchecked greed and ignorant hubris. The scene recalls a similarly ominous moment at the opening of The Exorcist (1973) when a stone talismanic statue is uncovered by archaeologists in northern Iraq. The devil in Uncut Gems will be revealed to be Man himself. I’m employing pompous terms here, because the thrust of Uncut Gems – indeed, of the Safdies’ films in general – is to build grand statements from little people. It’s a knowing tactic skilfully deployed. It also contextualises how composer Daniel Lopatin creates his scores for their films. (Only Uncut Gems is discussed here; Marty Supreme is reviewed in The Wire.)

When a miner finds the lodestone gem which will be the mystical harbinger of the film’s events, the camera zooms in and seamlessly enters a digitally constructed interiority of microcosmic splendour, revealing a glinting rainbow unlocked by the rock’s Obsidian iridescence. The viewer becomes lost in this cosmos of beauty, oblivious to its dangerous undertow. The image morphs into a colonoscopy endoscope monitor, gleaming with the viscosity of moist canals to note a small polyp – a discovery of a different type of ‘uncut gem’. From the caves of Ethiopia to the colon of Howard Ratner (Adam Sander), Uncut Gems frames its cosmological energies around a figurative everyman whose journey will now be undertaken.

As Howie charges down a street in Manhattan’s Diamond District, barking on his cell phone, the deep droning of the ‘gemoscope’ opening forms itself musically into the main theme of the film, “The Ballad Of Howie Bling”. This track runs for eight and a half minutes, entirely unchanged and unedited over Howie’s daily business, carrying through to the end of the title credits. The music is a fantastical ceremony of engorged synth pads, trumpeting brassy lines and choral praises-on-high. It feels ironically forced due to the predominance of digital and physically-modelled synthesis, but it simultaneously elicits a strange empathy in its mix of gloss and gloom. Real voices, choirs, saxes and drums dance with the synthesizers to further create a mirage of musicality.

This speedy montage follows Howie into a security heavy upstairs jewellery store where he deals with customers, clerks and stand-over thugs; returns onto the street with more phone haranguing; into a restaurant to place a bet with his bookmaker; and segues into his apartment where he has secretly installed his mistress. The momentum is non-stop (as it will be for the duration of the film) as we encounter around 20 characters and streams of multi-levelled dialogue. Its loquacious orchestration is clearly indebted to Scorsese’s compressed verbiage in films like Goodfellas (1990), which was one of the first films to use multitracked digital editing of dialogue, narration and songs to structurally erase gaps and silences to compress its drama.

The difference in Uncut Gems is how Lopatin’s single track plays across this manic network of interactions. Normatively, film music somehow strikes up a relationship with its concurring images, through reinforcement or counterpart. “The Ballad Of Howie Bling” is a rarity in existing emotionally outside the charged drama of its characters, implying a meta level at which the music’s commentary resides. Upon encountering this on first viewing, the music almost feels intrusive. Lopatin’s piece is shaped by dynamic peaks and troughs – far from any pastoral evenness typical of subservient cues – and the Safdies have even chosen to ride the track’s volume, sometimes competing with the yelling of characters. Psychoacoustically, the music almost repels the viewer, driving a wedge between the story and the audience. This well describes the character of Howie.

Lopatin is not engaged in mere vintage aesthetics here. Uncut Gems’ tonalities, waveforms and harmonics recall an LP probably not in many Wire readers’ collections: The Official Music Of The XXIIIrd Olympiad Los Angeles 1984 (1984), which features instrumental tracks by Toto, Quincy Jones, Bill Conti, Herbie Hancock and Philip Glass. I could be wrong, but I don’t think there’s any ‘real’ instruments on any of their tracks – which is perverse, allowing a type of ‘digital steroids’ in composing music meant to reflect the glory attained by human bodies pushing beyond their natural thresholds.

Howie’s main customers are African-American star athletes of Olympian stature, who – like the rap and hiphop stars of the film’s era – are attracted to the bling-bling aesthetics and currency which typified ostentatious displays of attainment, be they physical, financial or musical. At one point, Howie’s recruiter of Black celebrities, Demany (LaKeith Stanfield), points out to real life basketball legend Kevin Garnett that Howie is the one who started bling-bling by furnishing music video producers with his outrageous jewellery.

Hype Williams’s Belly (1998) is, I believe, the first film to critique the deadly allure of bling. Well known for directing the amazing ‘meta-bling’ music videos for pretty much every hiphop and R&B star from the 1990s, Williams's excursion into narrative filmmaking makes an ‘anti-bling’ statement against the ‘affluenza’ trappings which seduce hustlers into upscaling their criminal enterprises. The film is largely bereft of hiphop beats and swagger, and instead concentrates on the existential moments of inactivity which contour the lives of those desperate to get rich quick or die doing so.

Uncut Gems looks at bling through a Jewish prism, with Sandler performing a disturbing impersonation of a man who comes in his pants at the prospect of making big bucks in a single high stakes gamble. In this light, Lopatin’s digitally glinting music parodies and extends the type of tacky library music playing non-stop during late night jewellery shows on home shopping channels. The effect and purpose is not for laughs: rather, it points to the semiotics of inflated grandeur with which digital synthesizers were initially marketed: as wondrous machines for bringing heightened realism, advanced sensorialism, and quality production, all via a single keyboard. Lopatin’s music unfolds from a position of heightened awareness of this situation and its legacies in the history of music technologies.

As Oneohtrix Point Never, Lopatin has been signed to Warp since 2013. The Warp aesthetic has for decades been built into an ever expanding pyramidal pleasure of the grid. Many original and successive waves of IDM performers have hammered their compositions by proffering a post-techno sensibility which rejects the ruthless simplicity of limited cycling patterns. In place, they tender a garden of synthetic delights where sounds are choreographed by every imaginable rupture and displacement, creating rhythms and harmonies that seemingly eschew hyper-quantisation and extoll beat fracturing and melodic tessellation (though all remain tethered to DAW time-line and track-lay grids). I often imagine this as the dimensional inverse of brutish sub genres like ghetto house, which fixate on the impossibility of transcendence while amazingly achieving it through sonic hallucinations of development. ‘Intelligent’ dance music progresses by implying it is always moving ahead in challenging ways. I’m a big fan of the Warp aesthetic and all its key artists, but I remain sceptical of how progressive and ‘intelligent’ its practices claim or suggest.

Daniel Lopatin’s scores to my ear feel more connected to the ugly step sister of IDM: progressive rock, and its royalty of keyboardists. Specifically, the morphological continuation of the form beyond those originators – from the tackiness of home shopping channels and the 1984 Olympics, to exhilaratingly pompous records like Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s Ecophony Rinne (1986), the precursor to the score for Otomo Katsuhiro’s Akira (1988). These florid connections might sound off topic, but they surface from the churning musicological whirlpool of readings which arise from Lopatin’s expansive score. Rather than enhance or describe emotional, psychological states, his tracks for Uncut Gems agglomerate a stubborn atmosphere which hangs over Howie no matter where he goes and what he does. From the infinite wealth forged from centuries of archaeological pressures and random geological interactions (of his treasured black opal, Howie says, “You can see the whole universe in there”), to the equally aleatory disposition of a human body whose death has been designed at its genetic birth, Lopatin’s music spins glistening threads of a tragic desire to be rich and successful.

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.

To accompany his article on Drowned By Locals in The Wire 506, Miloš Hroch compiles an annotated playlist of tracks from the Jordan based label

Though Drowned By Locals gives the impression of being an industrial noise label, with graphics full of razorblades, their output is more eclectic than that. The Amman based label serves weirdness of all kinds and geographies, spanning provocative punk pastiche by DIY legend Jean-Louis Costes to industrial techno by Richie Culver, to anti-colonial power electronic by HULUBALANG and apocalyptic dancehall of firstlin3. Drowned By Locals have recently celebrated five years of existence, in which they’ve stirred the waters of global underground.

Before founding Drowned By Local under a military curfew during the pandemic, the label’s curator, Laith Demashqieh, had been organising shows in Amman, bringing in artists like Drew McDowell and Hiro Kone, but he grew tired of being afraid of crackdowns and moral panics. “Drowned By Locals reflects a feeling of suffocation by proximity – by social pressure, familiarity, and consensus, as well as a general scepticism toward authority,” Demashqieh explains of the label’s name. Today is label operated from Jordan with nodes in the Netherlands and distributed with the help of befriended labels such as Industrial Coast. Drowned By Locals’ mission is, according to their motto, to give “voice and face to the marginalised brutes, misfits, savages but delicate at heart.” Demashqieh elaborates: “I like to avoid the term ‘outsider artist’ and prefer the term ‘su’luk’ instead – the pre-Islamic Arabian poet cast out of their tribe, living on the margins and turning exile into authorship.”

Costes
“bedouin rock”
From Bad Trip In Petra (2020)

The first release on Drowned By Locals came about as a coincidence. Demashqieh was preparing a radio show and asked French DIY provocateur Jean-Louis Costes for some music, giving him complete freedom. What he received was a 90 minute, 19 track conceptual work which Costes described as the story of a naïve French tourist’s imagined trip to Jordan. Bad Trip In Petra is a punk-ish stand-up patchwork of spoken word and samples of stereotypical Arab melodies but mainly parodying Costes’ French native’s Western gaze.

Cheb Terro vs Dj Die Soon
“Underplanet”
From CHEB TERRO VS DJ DIE SOON (2022)

Although Drowned by Locals is not bound by territorial boundaries, it counts several local or regional artists on its books, whether the Jordanian producer DJ Gawad or Tunisian MC Cheb Terro. The latter was among the first artists to find common ground with the label, and his music has now been released posthumously. Cheb Terro and Demashqieh developed a close friendship over long video calls while working on the record, which is powered by abrasive beats by DJ Die Soon. “During that period, he was preoccupied with death; it ran through the lyrics across the album, including a track titled “Underplanet”, which referred to a kind of parallel realm he often spoke about.”

firstlin3 & signal 0
“got a friend at last / codeine (feat adios adios)”
From ⛧PARANOIA STAR⛧ (2023)

⛧PARANOIA STAR⛧ sounds like a millennial panic attack, with feverish and eclectic productions, but adds considerable dose of saccharine to the Drowned By Locals catalogue. Madrid producer firstlin3 assembled collaborators from Spain, Portugal, Egypt, and the UK and overdosed their vocals with Auto-Tune across 13 tracks, which mesh melancholic hedonism of dancehall with happy hardcore and cloudrap. But some tracks carry the sense of paranoia, like “got a friend at last / codeine” with its oversaturated vocals. Firstlin3 describes the mixtape as “a spell, a joke and a fucking earthquake tearing through the doomed megalopolis”.

HULUBALANG
“Cerca”
From Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal (2023)

The thread of resistance against colonisers runs through their log. Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal by Hulubulang, which is a side project of Kasimyn from Gabber Modus Operandi, is a perfect example. The album’s title roughly translates as “synthetic feeling for anonymous sacrifices” and is inspired by documents of Dutch colonial rule unearthed from Indonesian war archives. It sounds like power electronics turned into desolate club music, with rhythm patterns drawn from traditional Indonesian music. But these tracks carry the historical baggage, as in “Cerca” haunted by suffocated screams buried under ballistic snares.

Quiet Husband
“Subutex”
From Religious Equipment (2024)

Hull born multimedia artist Richie Culver, according to Drowned by Locals’ curator, is “an archetype of the perfect DBL comrade”. Culver’s collaboration with the Amman based label began with the release of his 2023 album Alive In The Living Room, a claustrophobic noise album inspired by his lifelong struggle with sleep paralysis. 2024’s Religious Equipment under the Quiet Husband moniker, which is a stomping industrial techno record, was appropriately described by Misha Farrant (The Wire 497) as a record that “wouldn’t be out of place on the soundtrack of Harmony Korine’s Gummo.”

Saint Abdullah & Eomac
“Overexposure will kill a pornstar”
From Light meteors crashing around you will not confuse you (2024)

Saint Abdullah, Iranian-Canadian siblings Mohammed and Mehdi Mehrabani-Yeganeh, and Irish producer Ian McDonnel, aka Eomac, recorded their album during the first weeks of streamed genocide in Gaza. Light meteors crashing around you will not confuse you is assembled from Iranian revolutionary chants, samples of Islamic melodies, blitzes of noise, and rusty hiphop beats that sound like Muslimgauze landing a release on Stones Throw. In tracks like “Overexposure will kill a pornstar”, samples are mutated to the extreme, with an effect bordering on psychic warfare.

Kinlaw & Franco Franco
“Crocs on the plough”
From Faith Elsewhere (2025)

Disciples of Bristol’s Avon Terror Corps, who include producer Kinlaw, MC Franco Franco or vocalist Dali de Saint Paul, have become constants in the DBL’s catalogue and regularly feature on each other’s records. The follow up to Kinlaw’s hard-hitting 2023 album WELD, Faith Elsewhere is a joint record with MC Franco Franco (as profiled in The Wire 501): it paints a techno-feudalist picture of the near future and wrestles with surveillance capitalism. It switches between industrial rap and melancholic mode, as in “Crocs on the plough”, where Franco’s crooning rap in Italian is paired with Kinlaw’s hydraulic-metallic beat.

Otro
“The Star”
From Peanut Ballads For A Lone Star (2026)

Otro is a shapeshifting project of Valencia’s Aaron Morris, whose output ranges from early deconstructed club sounds to ambient to lo-fi guitar. Otro’s collection, Peanut Ballads For A Lone Star, best encapsulates romanticism and “delicateness of heart” of Drowned By Locals. It’s made of once-shelved guitar sketches, somewhere between Spanish folk forms, cosmic americana and hypnagogic pop, originally written for “a cursed film” in one night. “The Star” vaguely echoes Scott Walker in the late 1960s.

Read Miloš Hroch’s full Unlimited Editions column on Drowned By Locals in The Wire 506. Wire subscribers can also read the article online via the digital magazine library.

The 19 March edition of The Wire’s weekly radio show on Resonance FM and Resonance Extra featured tracks by Tara Clerkin Trio, Wendy Eisenberg, Carlos Giffoni, Zeal Minus and more

Tracklist

Carlos Giffoni featuring Mabe Fratti
“Dermis”
From Pendulum
(Room 40)

Alex Zhang Hungtai
“Mazil”
From Dras
(Shelter Press)

Natacha Atlas & Samy Bishai
“Somoud”
(Airfono)

The Sleeves
“Procedure”
From The Sleeves
(12XU)

Tara Clerkin Trio
“Somewhere Good”
From Somewhere Good
(World Of Echo)

Wendy Eisenberg
“Meaning Business”
From Wendy Eisenberg
(Joyful Noise)

Vasco Trilla featuring Martin Küchen & Alex Zethson
“A Topographical Vessel”
From Up North
(Creative Sources)

Red Largo
“Trip To The Valley”
From Hotel Neuf
(Madame Vega's Boudoir)

Jean Derome & Somebody Special
“Fall”
From Le Sourire
(Ambiances Magnétiques)

Hans Reichel
“An Old Friend Passes By Again”
From Dalbergia Retusa
(Black Truffle)

Shuta Hasunuma & Keiji Haino
“Number”
From UTA
(Temporal Drift)

LINTD
“Funeral Rites On Planet Saturn”
From Funeral Rites On Planet Saturn
(RTZ)

Zeal Minus
“Ting Ropey”
From All 4 Nothing
(esc.rec)

MATA
“Enlarge Your Panic”
From Dreaming Is A Combination Of Juxtaposed Images And Sensations Resulting From Predictive Calculation
(CAER)

KADAPAT & Nova Ruth featuring Siko Setyanto
“Luna”
From Ocean Cage
(SVBKVLT)

upsammy & Valentina Magaletti
“Collide”
From Seismo
(PAN)

Oxbow & Peter Brötzmann
“Angel”
From An Eternal Reminder Of Not Today / Live At Moers
(trost)

Adventures In Sound And Music broadcasts at 9pm every Thursday on Resonance 104.4FM and Resonance Extra. Explore past shows in our On Air archive.

To accompany his Primer on Augustus Pablo in The Wire 506, Derek Walmsley compiles a selection of the Jamaican melodica wizard's lesser known cuts

The famous address 135 Orange Street has been cropping up on Jamaican record labels for well over half a century, and the number of records that can be traced back to the Rockers International record store – at the time of writing, there is still a premises at that location – is impossible to count. It’s testament to the formidable legacy of Augustus Pablo, the producer and multi-instrumentalist who ran the Rockers operation from the early 1970s all the way up to his death in 1999, continuing today in the hands of son Addis Pablo and daughter Isis Swaby. Pablo was one of the crucial innovators in dub and roots reggae as a whole, and like the Orange Street address, his personnel credit appears on a regular basis, sometimes when you least expect it.

The Wire 506 contains a user’s guide to Augustus Pablo’s extensive discography, spanning classic projects like the groundbreaking dub LP King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown, his instrumental contributions for producers including Lee Perry, Keith Hudson and Yabby You, and his close collaborations with artists such as Hugh Mundell. But Pablo pressed up so many 7"s, and passed through so many casual studio dates, that any survey of his discography will leave out some of his strangest sides. So this extra playlist collects a number of his cuts that remain obscure, overshadowed, eccentric, or simply unknown.

Norris Reid
“Black Force”
Rockers International 1979

Pablo’s most famous work remains his mid-1970s classic King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown, the landmark collaboration with the legendary Osbourne Ruddock that helped define and stake out a new market for dub music in Jamaica and beyond. Its heavyweight title track – a version to Jacob Miller’s “Baby Love You So” – was so heavy, with such an identifiable piano intro, that he seemed wary of returning to it, but he made a rare exception several years later for this track with Norris Reid, with the appropriately militant roots statement “Black Force”.

Sista Frica
“One In The Spirit”
Rockers International 1978

Pablo made fairly few collaborations with female vocalists, but this adaption of a Christian hymn is a statement in simplicity. “One In The Spirit” was the only song Sister Frica ever released, but was repressed several times, and a slow phase effect running throughout makes this serene, questing song sound like it is just drifting on the wind.

Augustus Pablo
“Kid Ralph”
Panther 1973

In the early part of his career, Pablo took on sideman gigs for a huge variety of producers. Sometimes, the logic of the market called for the odd gimmick to score a hit, such as a cover version or familiar riff. While Pablo was scathing about such commercial novelties later – “They want you to play nursery rhymes or some fuckery,” he later said in interview – his melodica playing on this version of The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” is so gentle that it barely matters.

Youth Dellinger
“Down Town Rock”
Rockers International 1973

The first of Pablo’s own productions started trickling out on the Rockers label, named after the sound system he ran with his brother Garth, around 1973. They struck lucky with the young deejay Dillinger, here going by Youth Dellinger. The instrumental used for the track is a version of the classic Studio One “Swing Easy” riddim – namechecked by Dellinger on the intro – which was a firm Pablo favourite that he returned to numerous times, most memorably for Hugh Mundell’s “Feeling Alright Girl”.

Augustus Pablo
“Sahara Rock”
Burke’s Records mid-1970s

Pablo had a limited number of big hits in Jamaica, but his growing reputation elsewhere bolstered his independence, and he made a few important journeys overseas. One trip to New York was memorialised in a famous set of Ted Bafaloukos photos on the excellent Born To Dub You set, perhaps taken around the same time this mysterious melodica instrumental, released on New York label Burke’s, was laid down.

Augustus Pablo & The Revolutionaries
“Spirit Of Umoja”
DEB 1978

By the late 1970s Pablo was maintaining his own label, projects and stable of vocalists, which makes the occasional times that he sat in for other producers all the more exciting. “Spirit Of Umoja” is another song on the irrepressible “Swing Easy” riddim, impossibly lush with comet tails of echo, plus producer Dennis Brown’s own peerless vocals wrapping up this long discomix number.

Earl Sixteen
“Changing World”
Rockers International 1979

Earl Sixteen was one of a number of roots vocalists that Pablo worked with closely, although as with several of them, the results sometimes took a while to emerge. “Changing World” was released in 1979 in the middle of a Pablo purple patch, but the two took until the mid-1990s to release an album together. It’s roots music in a deeply resonant, reflective mode.

Sister Jam
“A Man Like You”
Rockers International 1979

Pablo was an early adopter of studio technology, from drum machines to string synthesizers. This uptempo jam arranged and produced by Pablo features not only his own melodica and glockenspiel but some sort of squelchily-filtered electronic keyboard, all dancing around each other with amazing elegance.

Icho Candy
“Babylon”
Rockers International 1987

Pablo’s productions in the dancehall era were inconsistent, but when he hit the kind of minor key groove he favoured, he could create heavyweight steppers tracks that rivalled Jah Shaka. On “Babylon” Pablo worked with a traditional rhythm section, but the lean, urgent vocal from Icho Candy brings its own kind of pressure.

Asher & Trimble
“Humble Yourself”
Rockers International 1979

One of the rarer Rockers 45s, “Humble Yourself” is from an era when Pablo’s artistic and commercial star was at its zenith. Duo Asher & Trimble broke apart before they could follow up this lone single. Its atmosphere of muted devotion is complemented by Pablo’s contemplative and painterly production aesthetic.

The Slickers
“Give Us A Break”
From Breakthrough
Tad’s Records 1979

Breakthrough is one of the more mysterious records from the classic period of roots reggae. The Slickers had been riding high in the early 70s with “Johnny Too Bad”, their famous contribution to the soundtrack to The Harder They Come, but they failed to release a solid album to capitalise on their success, and their group name was even mistaken for releases actually by The Pioneers. Pablo is credited with keyboards and arrangements on Breakthrough, which emerged several years too late in 1979, but the presence of phase effects across the album suggest this might be the product of a little known session with Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry.

Augustus Pablo
“Kushites Dub”
Rockers International 1995

Pablo remained prolific into the 90s, despite dealing with chronic health problems. Given the right mood and material, he could still lay down a crucial rhythm track: “Kushites Dub” is a standard minor chord steppers theme, but the low end of the digital keyboard gives it real stealth.

Blacka T
“Ethiopian Calling”
Rockers International 1990

The flipside, “Ammagiddeon Dub”, was one of Pablo’s toughest tracks of the digital era, but this deejay side, voiced by Blacka T, is a one verse dancehall monster.

Richie Mac
“Jah Solid Rock I Stand”
Onlyroots 2024, rec late 1990s

At the time of his death, Pablo had been working on an album project with Richard McDonald, aka Richie Mac. Like many of Pablo’s vocalists, he had a storied past, as a former member of the longrunning vocal group The Chosen Few, but had not managed to put a steady run of releases together in the years that followed. “Jah Solid Rock I Stand” is a reflective, autumnal hued roots song that benefits from Mac’s warm baritone.

US poet Clark Coolidge speaks to Joel Lewis about the new publication of Rock Notes, originally conceived in 1966 with fellow poet Tom Clark – a collection of riffs and musings on the burgeoning rock music of the era

Clark Coolidge, considered one of America’s most experimental, ‘out there’ poets, is also a man firmly ensconced in the second half of the 20th century. He uses a landline telephone, does not text or email, and relies on a trusty typewriter to type a continuous geyser of prose and poetry.

A native New Englander, he now resides in Petaluma, a small city 30 miles north of San Francisco. His influences range from Samuel Beckett to Jack Kerouac, and are informed by interests in art, geology (in his youth he was a spelunker), and jazz and classical music. Coolidge is a classically trained percussionist and played drums with composer Alvin Curran at bar mitzvah gigs. His frequent bass partner in Providence jazz clubs was Buell Neidlinger. Coolidge’s fling in the world of psychedelic rock was a San Francisco band called Serpent Power, which released their eponymous album in 1967.

I’m calling the poet to discuss his old/new book Rock Notes, a 55 year old manuscript written in collaboration with fellow poet Tom Clark. A legendary phantom text among the writers of the New York School of Poetry (Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery are the poets most associated with it), Lithic Press have published the typescript itself, complete with corrections and write-overs and topped off with a blurb from Thurston Moore.

I ask Coolidge about the genesis of this book. “I think it probably started when I first made contact with Tom Clark. He was in England at graduate school and he asked me to be in a magazine he was starting. We somehow began talking about rock music and he subsequently sent me 45s by The Cream and Jimi Hendrix Experience, both groups being unknown to me. When I moved to San Francisco to join the Serpent Power, I became part of the early San Francisco psychedelic scene and mailed Tom LPs by Big Brother And The Holding Company, with Janis Joplin, and The Great Society, with Grace Slick.”

I ask Coolidge when he and Clark (who died in 2018) decided to embark on the Rock Notes project. “Well, Tom Clark did do a mimeo’d chapbook called Neil Young, consisting entirely of repurposed Neil Young lyrics. And there was a one-shot magazine by Clark and the poet Lewis Warsh called Sugar Mountain after a Young song. And I had a work called Rock Notes, more about rocks and geology, but the form that work took – a sort of collage stye – suggested the form for our collaborative Rock Notes. I moved to Massachusetts and Clark came back to the US and our project was all done through the mail, mailing manuscripts, exchanging letters, sending each other tapes and vinyl.”

Did Coolidge and Clark have any publishing expectations for the manuscripts or was it just a writing experiment? “Tom and I had a sort of high idea that we had written a publishable commercial book,” he replies, tossing in a chuckle. “In those days there was kind of a big hippie rock audience and we thought our book would be something you’d have on your cable spool table [the hippie answer to a coffee table] and when you’d put on some records, you could open the book, read a few passages and listen to an LP.”

I wonder if he and Clark submitted the manuscript anywhere. “The small presses we approached balked at the cost of publishing such a large book – most poetry books clocked in at 80 or so, ours was 361 pages long,” he replies. “Rolling Stone magazine published a two page spread from Rock Notes, but their publishing arm, Straight Arrow Press, was uninterested in the project.” Coolidge and Clark even tried submitting the book to the major commercial press Random House. “Their first take on the book was noting that all our song quotations and pull quotes from books and magazines would need to get permissions, as well as being renumerated,” Coolidge recalls, “and that was as far as that conversation went.”

Were there any further attempts to publish the manuscript before Lithic Press stepped up? “The end of the Rock Notes project sort of ended our relationship,” Coolidge states. “No big blow up, we were just moving on with our lives. We were both married with young children and we were on opposite coasts. Clark also was trying to make a living as a writer, so he moved into books about baseball, as well as writing reviews, biographies and teaching.”

I note that both he and Clark were much older than the typical fan following the music they were writing about. I wonder if he was a rock and roll fan back in high school (Coolidge was born in 1939)? Did he grease his hair into a pompadour back then? “Oh, no,” Clark responds with a laugh. “I was really a jazz snob. My buddy in high school was the future composer, Alvin Curran. We used to get together and play early Brew Moore 10"s and Gerry Mulligan quartets. We also played a lot of gigs, mostly dances for teenagers, so we played a primitive kind of rock and roll – but it was just a job. I did secretly listen to this R&B radio station in Providence but didn’t talk about it with my fellow jazz snob friends.”

What did Coolidge find of interest in this new iteration of rock music? “Well, I wanted to find a way to keep playing drums – jazz work was drying up by the mid-60s,” he answers. “My friend, the poet David Meltzer, offered me a job in his band Serpent Power and he had just got a contract with Vanguard Records. When I moved to San Francisco, I was interested in that there were so many musical influences coming into the bands one heard in the clubs and ballrooms. Plus, a lot of the drummers I was meeting were trained as jazz drummers – like Spencer Dryden of Jefferson Airplane.”

I ask Coolidge if he felt the audiences were experiencing this music as a leap forward from what was going on in 1965–66. “I’m sure there were people in the audience who were sensing something new was brewing and noticed all these different musical strands – jazz, blues, contemporary classical music and especially what now is called roots music – that made up this new music,” he states, then adds,” though I think a lot of the audience was too stoned to notice these sources and were mostly interested in dancing and hopping around.”

What most fascinates me about Rock Notes is the interplay of quotes by folks like Jean Luc-Godard, Max Neuhaus, Wittgenstein and Carl Andre playing against quotes by Pete Townsend, Eric Clapton and other period rock luminaries. “That’s interesting,” replies Clark, “because the structure of the book is made to be wide open. That set-up gave us permission to make those connections – you know, everything from the music to whatever else we were interested in.”

As we wrap up our conversation, he points out a big, but somewhat cloaked, inspiration for Rock Notes. “Tom and I were big fans of a kind of gonzo rock criticism, writers like Lester Bangs, R Meltzer and Paul Williams. Rock criticism itself only began a few years back. These gonzo writers were inspired by the New Journalism of the period and the freedom of the underground rock scene. I remember reading a Meltzer review of a new Cream album titled “Saucers Sighted In Virginia”, and the review was all about the professional wrestling scene! Nothing to do with rock and roll at all! It seemed all about the totally wild assed freedom that I loved!”

You can read Joel Lewis’s review of Rock Notes in The Wire 506. 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.

Jo Hutton remembers the French composer and electronic music pioneer who died in February aged 94

I am sitting in a large room at the 2018 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Bozzini Quartet are playing Occam Delta XV by Éliane Radigue. Sound emerges from the players’ strings as invisible gossamer threads, almost inaudible at first, interweaving in the air around the audience, who are seated around the players.

The minimalism is entrancing; you can’t help but concentrate very intensely on the emerging textures between the players. I have seen and heard Radigue’s music in churches, and in small and large venues, and it always has the effect of focussing the listener completely. Wire writer Louise Gray, who has written extensively on Radigue, speaks for many in Radigue’s audiences as she explains, “It was Éliane who taught me how to really listen to music, its shapes and space. Éliane profoundly reshaped our sonic world.”

Radigue began composing in the 1950s. From a non musical family, she attracted the attention of a local music teacher who gave her piano lessons as a child. She later learnt harp at Nice conservatory, always interested in the slow adagio movements of the classical repertoire. The French sculptor Arman and teenage Radigue fell in love, and they had their first child in 1951. They moved to Nice, near the airport, where the multi-frequency sound of planes flying overhead was her first inspiration for music comprised of super-extended detuned complex waveforms.

In 1955, Radigue encountered Pierre Schaeffer in Paris, who invited her to join the Groupe des Recherches Musicales (GRM) studios as tape assistant. She learnt tape cutting, ‘mixage et montage’ (mixing and editing) techniques, and embraced Schaeffer’s and Pierre Henry’s new philosophy of electroacoustic sound – creating music from any sound recording of urban or natural environments, alongside early experiments in multi-loudspeaker spatialisation techniques. Radigue was, however, fixed on a type of music that proved anathema to Schaeffer’s ‘TARTYP’ (‘Tableau Récapitulatif de la Typologie’) theory of music. The GRM sound at the time was busy, multi-sourced, exotically manipulated. The sound Radigue sought was one of absolute stillness.

Radigue and Arman moved briefly to New York in 1963 where Radigue found herself at the heart of a scene of artists, musicians and conceptualists, including Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Steve Reich, and James Tenney, whom she described as her mentor. Influenced by their minimalist, just intonation and feedback experiments with sustained multi-layered textures, Radigue returned to France in 1967 and accepted a position as composing assistant to Pierre Henry in his new APSOME studio. She worked on his seminal Apocalypse De Jean (1968). Henry gave Radigue two Tolana tape machines with which to work from home. These gave way to Radigue’s home studio and a series of tape feedback works which she called Sound Propositions. These experiments in sound, feedback and spatialisation included Vice Versa (1970) for two tape machines operated by audience members, and two works for gallery exhibition, Usral (1969-70) and OMNHT (1970), where three long, slowed down tape loops of slightly different lengths gradually desynchronised over time, constantly evolving for the duration of the exhibition.

Radigue returned to New York in 1970 on a composer residency at Morton Subotnick’s NYU electronic studios. Tired of the unpredictability of tape feedback, she sought pure electronic sound sources. She struggled to navigate the Buchla synthesiser, the patch cords of which she likened to composing with spaghetti. Nonetheless, a first pure electronic Buchla composition emerged in 1971, Chryp-tus. That same year she bought an ARP2500 synthesizer with its innovative pin matrix replacing patch cords, and returned to France with it, deliberately leaving behind its conventional keyboard so as not to be distracted by Western harmony. Thus began a long period of focus on extended works for keyboard free ARP.

A 2012 IMA Portrait documentary film on Radigue reveals her delicate haptics in operating the ARP controls with infinitesimal lightness of touch and slow changes to the sound. The very long form works that she composed with the ARP include 7th Birth (1971), performed with Philip Glass’s PA equipment, Les Chants De Milarepa (1983), and her Trilogie De La Mort (1986-1993), all underpinned by Radigue’s developing interest in Buddhism, in particular the Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book Of The Dead).

I was privileged to be among an ever growing number of musicians, journalists and scholars invited into Radigue’s home to explore and discuss her music, a group which expanded with her extraordinary generosity over many years. She called the musicians who accepted the exceptional virtuosic challenge of sustaining single notes steadily for extended periods, her ‘chevaliers’.

They include Charles Curtis, Rhodri Davies, Carol Robinson, Julia Eckhardt, Dominic Lash, and violinist Angharad Davies, who told me, “Working with Éliane was a real lesson on how to slow down and allow each string to speak with as little intervention from me as possible. Every performance of her pieces is so specific to place, circumstance and acoustics.”

Radigue invented a way of composing that, in place of a written score, conjured a visual image which was rigorously interpreted by her musicians through intense disciplined rehearsal with the composer. Filmmaker Aura Satz observes, “Her living scores continue to live not only in the people she worked with but in all of us who were touched by her music.”

Radigue is a pioneer of electronic music, especially for her singular way of composing for the ARP. But it is perhaps for her later acoustic works, for strings, harp, solo cello, woodwind, brass, and electric guitar, that she has become most well known. The most recent Occam Ocean series of 25 different compositions since 2011 is based around the philosophical principle of Occam’s Razor that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest number of elements.

Louise Gray identifies Radigue’s music as an experience not just of listening to but of profound inter-listening within, in which composer, musicians and audience play an equal role. Radigue was an artist, composer, sound designer, who relentlessly pursued her own style, never wavering from her dedicated exploration of the fine balance between sound and silence. Her legacy is as far-reaching, inclusive and ethereal as her music.

Éliane Radigue’s music has been covered extensively in The Wire over the years. In particular she was interviewed at length in issue 260 and again in the Invisible Jukebox feature in issue 312, on both occasions by Dan Warburton, while in issue 456 Julian Cowley contributed an extended Primer guide to her recordings. Wire subscribers can read these articles and others in our online archive.

The 12 March edition of The Wire’s weekly radio show on Resonance FM and Resonance Extra featured tracks by Jessica Ekomane, Machinefabriek, OHYUNG, Eva Novoa and more

Tracklist

Jessica Ekomane
“First Light”
from XKatedral Anthology Series II
(XKatedral)

Machinefabriek
“Lijnverkenning 1”
from Lijnverkenning
(quiet details)

Brion Gysin
“The Door”
from Dreamachine
(Wewantsounds)

The Odes
“Déjeuner Sous L'Herbe”
from Déjeuner Sous L'Herbe
(Not Applicable)

Gloved Hands
“Secrets About Me”
from Tempers
(Phantom Limb)

Marnie Weber
“In The Meadow”
from Returning Home: The Music Of Marnie Weber
(Phantom Limb)

KINACT
“Femme Electronique”
from Kinshasa In Action
(Nyege Nyege Tapes)

Water Is The Sun
“landscape is body is light / tremors of a miracle”
from Ritual Fever
(Trome/Tocco Magico)

Jake Muir
“Cathedral Of Decay”
from Pareidolia
(enmossed)

OHYUNG
“all dolls go to heaven”
from IOWA
(Bandcamp)

TRAS
“Sit Stand Play Dead”
from ZCAJK
(Edelfaul)

Celliacus
“Pornophony”
from Celliacus
(Ramble Records)

Ayman Fanous
“Duo With Joe McPhee - 1”
from Brooklyn Stories
(Infrequent Seams)

Eva Novoa
“Left Behind”
from Solo (I)
(577)

Listen to the music we played to Yellow Swans during their Invisible Jukebox interview in The Wire 506

Each month in the magazine we play an artist or group a series of tracks which they are asked to comment on – with no prior knowledge of what they are about to hear.

In The Wire 506 it is the turn of psychedelic noise duo Yellow Swans.

Here you can listen to a mix of the tracks our correspondent Ilia Rogatchevski played to the duo during the interview, which is published in full in The Wire 506. To find out what they said about them, subscribers can read the interview in our online magazine library here. Or you can buy a copy of the magazine in our online shop.

But first, a brief biography of our subjects:

Yellow Swans are a psychedelic noise duo comprising Pete Swanson and Gabriel Saloman Mindel. Originally formed in 2001 in Portland, Oregon, the group drew their influences from hardcore punk and DIY ethics of anarchist communities of the Pacific North West. During their initial seven year run, Yellow Swans released four studio albums and countless CD-Rs and cassettes, often produced in small numbers and distributed via mail order through their Collective Jyrk label. Swanson and Mindel toured extensively, building a reputation as a relentlessly hardworking unit who nurtured and connected networks of likeminded artists.

Their live shows evolved from many hours spent improvising together, with Mindel’s processed guitar locking into Swanson’s tape loops and tabletop electronics. Their final studio album Going Places (2010), released after the duo disbanded, was edited from recordings that pivoted away from catharsis to explore more ambient textures. Yellow Swans reformed in 2023, releasing their archive on Bandcamp and playing a handful of shows. Their recent tape series Out Of Practice I–IV documents this era of the band and showcases tentative steps towards new material.

The jukebox was conducted remotely with Yellow Swans dialling in from Paris, where they were working on a multichannel commission for the Présences électronique festival.

Tracklist (with time stamps):

The Third Bardo (00:00)
“I’m Five Years Ahead Of My Time”
From Lose Your Mind (Sundazed) 2000, rec 1967

Masonna (02:16)
“Chapter 1-7”
From Ejaculation Generater (Alchemy) 1996

Milan Knížák (08:26)
“Composition N3”
From Broken Music (Multhipla) 1979

Prince (12:52)
“1999”
From 1999 (Warner Bros) 1982

Wolf Eyes (19:12)
“With Spykes 5”
From Wolf Eyes w/ Spykes (Hanson) 2000

Christina Carter (34:22)
“School Song/Desire To Play And Play”
From Bastard Wing (Eclipse Records) 2003

Raven Chacon (42:21)
“This Is Where We Went/Were”
From Overheard Songs (Innova) 2006

Devendra Banhart (46:54)
“Support Our Troops”
From Remixed & Covered (Kill Rock Stars) 2007

Metalux & John Wiese (49:27)
“Exoteric/1”
From Exoteric (Load) 2004

Evicshen (51:44)
“Bolete”
From Hair Birth (American Dreams) 2020

Stream a selection of tracks from releases we listened to during the making of our April 2026 issue

The full chart:

33
Tripolar
(Haunter Records)

BEAM SPLITTER
Dedicated Play – Live At Morphine Raum
(Tripticks Tapes)

The Black Warhols
Famous For Fifteen Minutes
(Pure Sonik)

Various
Gaza Is The Moral Compass
(Beacon Sound)

Mammal Machine
“Mitsugi”
(Captain Trip/yumihara1.bandcamp.com)

Eve Maret
Diamond Cutter
(Bandcamp)

Melechesh
Sentinels Of Shamash
(Reigning Phoenix)

DJ N***a Fox
Chá Preto
(Principe)

Eva Novoa
Solo (I)
(577)

OXBOW & Peter Brötzmann
An Eternal Reminder Of Not Today – Live At Moers
(Trost)

Praed
Al Wahem
(Ruptured/Annihaya)

Puppet
My Freezing Frozen Spirit
(Badhead)

Scobe Collective
In The Back Of Your Car
(World Confused)

Seppuku Pistols
In London Paper Dress Vintage, Hackney Central, August 6th, 2024
(Tang Deng Co)

Unidad Ideológica
Choque Asimétrico
(La Vida Es Un Mus Discos)

Various
Gaza Is The Moral Compass
(Beacon Sound)

London’s Metropolitan Police persecutes UK rap while using it for self-promotion, argues Hugh Morris in The Wire 506

2025 was the year that the world woke up to the UK’s underground rap scene, and at the centre of it all was EsDeeKid, a masked rapper from Liverpool. With fellow breakout stars Fakemink and Rico Ace, EsDeeKid released arguably last summer’s biggest hit, the swaggering “LV Sandals”. He now has around 20 million Spotify streams per month, and has reportedly signed a huge record deal with Capitol Records, following in the footsteps of fellow UK rapper Central Cee.

Unlike Central Cee, the success of EsDeeKid is yet to translate into a smoothing out of his sound. The “OK” tag heard throughout EsDeeKid’s debut record Rebel comes from producer Wraith9, whose clattering, blown-out beats tie the project to a more recognisable North West underground. The tag crops up on tracks by rapper and dancer Blackhaine, while Rainy Miller mixed and mastered Wraith9’s own album Designer, an undersung release from 2025 that adds weight and complexity to cloudrap delivery.

Past the foregrounded accent trickery – listen for the virtuosic “ex” verse on “Dirty” – and the specific Liverpudlian callbacks – Bourbon rhymes with Jürgen – EsDeeKid’s Rebel is a particularly debauched version of a thematically common rap album: fast cars, girls, drugs, evading the police in fast cars to sell drugs and get girls. Whatever! But it did make hearing EsDeeKid on a recent video posted to TikTok by London’s Metropolitan Police feel a little odd.

Throughout the winter of 2025, the UK public were subjected to yet another of Timothée Chalamet’s agonisingly sculpted press tours, ahead of the film Marty Supreme. After rumours that felt like a cunningly crafted industry set-up – is Chalamet actually EsDeeKid? I couldn’t care less, and yet here I am, discussing it – Chalamet made an embarrassing guest appearance on EsDeeKid’s “4 Raws” (sample lyrics from the Wonka star: “Got model bitches in Peckham/I’m Ryan Reynolds in Wrexham”. Or “I’m having fun, just sexting/My dick is young and restless”.)

And, because everyone – whether they’re a 16 year old content creator or an “institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic” police force, as the Casey report concluded – must jump on digital trends, the Metropolitan Police added EsDeeKid’s “Phantom” to accompanied flashily cut shots of coppers catching baddies. “Not the Met making edits to EsDeeKid,” the ultra-arch caption read, followed by the monkey covering eyes emoji and the side-eye emoji – an actual message posted by the actual police force of our actual capital city.

When I asked the Met Police about the use of EsDeeKid’s music, they said that the video “complements, rather than replaces, our traditional engagement methods, helping us to build trust and confidence in our work and inspire the police officers of the future”. It’s by far the Met’s most popular upload, with over three million views at time of writing, and seems part of a wider, meme-ier and crueller digital strategy. In another Instagram clip, footage of a police chase is supercut with graphics from Mario Kart; a countdown begins, the officer releases their ‘blue shell’ and the rider promptly crashes their scooter. This is justice in 2026: sub-You’ve Been Framed! ragebait, cheered on by gullible gremlins in the comments section.

Aside from the deep unseriousness of the Met’s new form of communication, and the reputational blow it’s no doubt done to EsDeeKid (who wants to work with a rapper co-signed by the Met?), the clip obscures the rather more antagonistic relationship with rap that the UK police force – and the criminal justice system more broadly – has established over the past decades.

As Erik Nielson and Andrea L Dennis outlined in Rap On Trial: Race, Lyrics, And Guilt In America, their exhaustive 2019 book on rap and the American criminal justice system, there’s a strong historical precedent of rap being wielded against Black and Latino men, stretching back to the style’s early days. Where rap being used on trial has high profile US critics such as Jay-Z and Kelly Rowland, the same can’t be said for the UK, despite numerous studies showing a similar pattern.

Prosecuting Rap, an online resource organised by the University of Manchester, looked at cases where rap videos and lyrics were used as prosecuting evidence. Between 2020–23, they found 68 such cases, with a total of 252 charging individuals. 84 per cent of defendants in these cases were of ethnic minority backgrounds, and 82 per cent of defendants were aged 24 or younger.

The report drew out the use of rap as a way of tying together Joint Enterprise prosecutions, a controversial doctrine which allows individuals to be convicted for crimes they did not personally commit, if they are deemed to have assisted or encouraged the principal offender. A 2025 report by the UK legal reform charity Appeal laid out the “excessive use of charging powers” regarding joint enterprise; they are currently campaigning for a narrowing of the law.

One such case, highlighted by Guardian journalist David Conn, was the conviction under joint enterprise of three young Black men – Durrell Goodall, Reano Walters and Trey Wilson – for murder in 2017. During the trial, Greater Manchester police and the Crown Prosecution Service showed a rap video as evidence that they were members of a gang called Active Only. The judge, Sir Peter Openshaw, directed the jury that they could infer gang “membership or allegiance” if a defendant had the rap video on their mobile phone (in November, the Criminal Cases Review Commission referred this particular case to the Court of Appeal).

56 per cent of cases Prosecuting Rap examined were in London, a city where the stigmatisation of rap by law enforcement is well documented. In 2019, the Met launched Project Alpha, a Home Office backed project examining serious gang violence. But a key part of this strategy has been the monitoring and removal of drill videos from YouTube. Along with its use in trials, there has also been a wider penalisation of these forms of creative expression by authorities – who now seek to reap the reputational benefits associated with them.

Campaigners like Art Not Evidence continue to make the case that rap should be nowhere near criminal trials, and their proposed bill – Criminal Evidence (Creative and Artistic Expression) – has some support in Parliament. But progress is slow. While the CPS continues to use rap as evidence, there’s no way the Met can clout-chase itself back to respectability.

This essay appears in The Wire 506. Pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the essay in our online magazine library.

The 5 March edition of The Wire’s weekly radio show on Resonance FM and Resonance Extra featured an exclusive guest mix by Mary Ocher, plus tracks by Toni Geitani, Junior Delgado, BCUC and more

To accompany their interview in The Wire 505, Lisbon based DJ Firmeza, DJ Danifox and DJ N***a Fox, aka O Ghettão, curate an exclusive mix of unreleased material

In the 2000s, many Angolans fled civil war to Lisbon, and counterculture thrived in the 1990s social housing project Quinta do Mocho. Kuduro united the people living in this neighbourhood ghettoised by the Portuguese government. DJ Marfox merged the form’s staggering percussion with other fast folk music like Cape Verde's funaná, and bass-heavy styles like dubstep and grime: batida was (re)born. Though Marfox was based in Quinta do Mocho, his heritage lies in São Tomé e Príncipe. From 2005, he and his group DJs Di Guetto showed others across Lisbon’s suburbs how to bring their own flavours and make batida that was Angolan at heart but universal in form.

Thanks to them, batida has grown with each new generation of producers. DJs Firmeza, Danifox and N***a Fox (O Ghettão) are Marfox’s disciples (the fox suffixes paying homage to his influence).

Here, O Ghettão create an exclusive Wire mix of unreleased material.

Tracklist [with timestamp]

“Anão” [00:00]
“Firmão” [03:50]
“Maluco tá bom” [09:50]
“Não é de Vinte” [12:30]
“Subida” [18:50]
“Saído do ghettão” [29:40]
“Afinal a vida é assim” [37:00]

Read Joseph Francis’s full interview with O Ghettão in The Wire 505. Pick up a copy in the online shop. Subscribers can read the full article in the digital archive here.

The 26 February edition of The Wire’s weekly radio show on Resonance FM and Resonance Extra featured music by Carl Stone & Asuna, Butter Swamp, Still House Plants, Enno Velthuys and Éliane Radigue

Carl Stone & Asuna
“A Salsa Nocturne”
From Imu Plastos
(Room 40)

Meitei
“Shin-Oiran II”
From Agate
(Kitchen.Label)

Memorials
“Cut Glass Hammer”
From All Clouds Bring Not Rain
(Fire)

Butter Swamp
“the attack of nikki the cat”
From Curiosity Killed The Butter Swamp
(Bandcamp)

Bonner Kramer/Thurston Moore
“Urn Burial”
From They Came Like Swallows
(Silver Current)

Kinact
“Cercle De Tambour Kinact”
From Kinshasha In Action
(Nyege Nyege Tapes)

Still House Plants
“The House Sound Of Chicago”
From Still House Plants
(bison)

Enno Velthuys
“Thin Air”
From Music From The Other Side Of The Fence
(Stroom)

Elucid & Sebb Bash featuring Mattie
“First Light”
From I Guess You Had 2 Be There
(Backwoodz Studioz)

Silvia Tarozzi
“Distratta (reprise)”
From Lucciole
(Unseen Worlds)

Duvall Timothy & CJ Mirra
“Journey To Lagos”
From My Father’s Shadow (OST)
(Bandcamp)

Elko Blijweert & Anla Courtis
“BA (Buenos Antwerp)”
From Buenos Antwerp
(Ultra Eczema)

Laibach featuring Wiyaala
“Allgorhythm”
From MUSICK
(Mute)

Cowboy Builder
“Eyes Like Saucers Spying On Us”
From The Name Of The Demon Is…Cowboy Builder
(Bandcamp)

Joachim Nordwall& Aaron Turner
“Regulator”
From Malign Seedsr
(Ash International)

Éliane Radigue
“Stress Osaka”
From Feedback Works 1969-1970
(Ina grm)

Adventures In Sound And Music broadcasts at 9pm every Thursday on Resonance 104.4FM and Resonance Extra. Explore past shows in our On Air archive.

In his latest Secret History of Film Music column, Philip Brophy considers scores by Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, who creates an aesthetic of decay for a Black context

Jóhann Jóhannsson’s short video End Of Summer (2014) is freighted with emotion, affect and loss. It captures his short time spent on the South Georgia island and the Antarctic Peninsula, shot on the last roll of decaying Super 8 stock. The edited footage is accompanied by a five part suite, composed and performed by Jóhannsson with Hildur Guðnadóttir and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe.

Most readers should be familiar, if not numbed by, the ‘distressed aesthetics’ of corrupting film stock, malfunctioning lens, and unstable processing. The project can be historically traced to Stan Brakhage’s pure abstraction of natural phenomena. His stylistics have been influential on a billion music videos and LP covers since: languorous, sensual, distressed, textural, layered, blurred, fawning, evocative, meditative, elegiac. More recently, they resurfaced in Bill Morrison’s Decasia (2002) with its deteriorated nitrate stock of forgotten silent movie fragments. The popularity of this emotional gamut in audiovision for audiences is not being judged here, but it’s surprising how little critical focus is directed at the legacies, implications and semiotics of such an approach to sensorial image degradation, and (more the focus here) on the artistically corrosive music that synchs to this artistic practice.

End Of Summer features falsetto voices, bowed cello, feedback tones, synth drones and various electronics, blending and melting into each other's timbres. Robert Lowe is involved in “Part 1” and “Part 3”, the latter with multi-tracked harmonic lines utilising nasal intonations to accent frequencies in waves of filtered resonance. It’s reminiscent of Julia Heyward’s ethnographic kit of extended vocal techniques. The difference, though, is the Nordic aura of quasi-liturgical ‘chorality’, evoking a Lutheran congregation observing, remembering or mourning.

This aural imaging of landscape consciousness is philosophically tied to Romanticism and its enthral to the sublime in nature (Jóhannsson claims the film attempts to not romanticise nature; I beg to differ). But in End Of Summer’s reveries, it pinpoints the popularity of non-secular ‘spirit’ music born from Christian and Orthodox church liturgies – meaning non-believers can vibe to the music’s transcendent qualities without having to approve of its ideological underpinning (Enlightenment colonisation through conversion practices).

This type of churchy vocal/organ/strings music is dialled in whenever notions of spirits, souls and the departed are signposted in either a music composition, its record cover, or that music’s incorporation into a film score. The ironically outstanding exception to this rule: Jóhannsson’s rumbling chordal symphonies, sonofying the collapse of humanist awe in the face of non-human presence in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016). His opulent score features contributions by Guðnadóttir and Lowe.

Here’s the rub: End Of Summer’s modest score is delicate, accomplished and affecting, no doubt. But it is also trope-bound, through its manipulative emotional triggering. Taken as base experience, it links to something like Tangerine Dream’s “Birth Of Liquid Pleiades” from their LP Zeit (1972), and later impressionistic pastorales like Gavin Bryars’s The Sinking Of The Titanic (1975) and Brian Eno’s “Prophecy Theme” for David Lynch’s Dune (1984).

More contemporaneously, it links to Michael Gordon’s score for Decasia (2002) and William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops (2002) – two works about loss to the point of fetishisation. (Less known is Brian Eno’s “Deep Blue Day”, with Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno, from Apollo Atmospheres And Soundtracks (1983) which offensively accompanies a giant projection of the Nagasaki atomic mushroom cloud in the National WWII Museum in New Orleans.) This all constitutes less a grouping a more a continual flow of output by artists and audiences attracted to the sad aestheticism of feeling sensitivity towards mortality in its many guises.

Robert Lowe’s score to Yance Ford’s documentary Power (2024) gravitates not towards depressing states, but to realms where despair is about to overwhelm hope. Power reads well on paper: a worthy investigation of how the formation of US policing shaped the overreach of police within national, federal and state operations. The focus, inevitably and rightly so, is on the systemic racism which undergirds the will to control African-Americans. But the audiovisual meld in Power is passive-aggressive in the persuasion of its central thesis. Comprised mostly of talking head comments by impressively articulate historians and political scientists, the editing of found footage elsewhere feels overstated, and Lowe’s music (which sounds great on record) is continually buried to a murmur in the aisle at the back of this politicised church of reparation. His sustained humming of voice and unknowable instruments functions like a gridlocked threnody for the ongoing harassment of Black people by the police.

Spike Lee’s When The Levees Broke (2005) uses pre-existing pieces and newly commissioned compositions by Terrence Blanchard. When his music is married to Lee’s masterful collage of news footage, user HandyCam and studio interviews, the effect maximises the scale and scope of his interrogation of what caused Hurricane Katrina to be so devastating to the predominantly Black communities of New Orleans’s lower wards. It also intensifies the trauma by amplifying the smallest emotional details of suffering by the exhausted civvies, zeroing in on their personal predicament rather than grandstanding their plight as ‘universal suffering’.

Filmmakers and composers too easily fall into troughs where they think they must force their hand-wringing in order to alert audiences of wrongdoing in the world. In the process, they can end up caricaturing the human stories they claim they are bringing to the screen. The power of music is often forgotten by those wishing to use it for such purposes.

Blanchard, of course, draws on blues traditions, and uses jazz idioms to assemble sophisticated orchestrations. He harks back to the difficult feats achieved by Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Quincy Jones. Lowe operates in a comparatively underground realm, where extant music forms are avoided in order to explore alternative sonics. Across his many records Lowe has developed a strange, post-Berberian, Black metal noise-making hybrid. Aspects of this he brings to the nuanced score he delivered for Nia DaCosta’s Candyman (2021). The film is a fascinatingly irritating textbook example of wokeness: entirely welcomed, even though it falls over its feet in trying to maintain its critical composure within its hysterical audiovisuality. The idea of Black radical noisician Lowe undoing the white privileged genius of Phillip Glass by creating a new score to DaCosta’s retake on the original 1994 film by Bernard Rose is an exciting one. Of course, no one will admit that was part of the project, but the new Candyman clearly trades in racial reparation within the symbolic codes of the horror genre.

The original film’s central character is a white anthropologist (played by Virginia Madsen), researching urban legends in Chicago’s Cabrini Green housing projects and the area’s consequential gentrification. The ‘retake’ picks up after further gentrification has ensued, and instates hero Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a contemporary artist pressured into trading in identity politics in order to move up the power pyramid of contemporary art curation and exhibition. Frankly, every person depicted in the film is deplorable in their hipster hustling, modish uppitiness and sardonic acceptance of aspirational side effects. Regardless, the film bears many a stylish and inventive moment, and Lowe’s music makes important contributions to them.

After a prelude set in 1977 where a young boy is attacked by an incarnation of Candyman in the laundry room of the projects, his off-screen scream floats across the grounds, cueing the camera to tilt to the blue sky. In the overhead void, skyscrapers from the present day appear, floating past like levitating sky castles – the result of tracking shots looking up at their fog covered tops as they pass, but with the footage reframed upside-down. Over this title sequence, evidencing the extent of corporate investment and commercial gentrification in contemporary Chicago, Lowe’s most memorable theme “The Sweet” plays. A digital keyboard with a trumpet tone stumbles over itself playing an ostinato with breakages and miscalculations. Wordless falsetto chants swell while deep tones cluster underneath. The piece playfully renders a lo-fi amateur attempt at the minimalist grandeur Phillip Glass composed for Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982). A memorable scene in that film is a series of helicopter tracking shots over and across the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects in St Louis, Missouri, which were demolished in 1975. At that historical moment, the modern programme for equitable housing gave way to the commercial programme of economic gentrification – a key theme that DaCosta’s film tackles.

Lowe’s score, however, feels more connected to the lost soul of Candyman and his lineage of martyred Black men in US history. “The Sweet” returns when, after being told Candyman’s story, Anthony commences a new painting. It kindles something in his dark imagination, as if Candyman is beckoning him. Perhaps the most startling moment sonically is when Anthony – by this stage a meltdown of psychosis – is hiding from everyone, to be finally found by his girlfriend Brianna, only to have the police barge in and shoot him. Prior to the shooting, distant sirens grow in intensity until the police cars arrive; bashing into the derelict space, an unseen officer yells “Put your hands up!”

Three shots are fired: all sound is reconfigured into a submerged miasma of death. A crackling overlay of indiscernible babbles simulating the cacophony of short wave radio commands blasted hysterically into the midst of a heated conflict – the same audio often heard on countless bodycam and smart phone captures of pre-textual stops which lead to shots fired. It’s like Andrew’s spirit now floats into a cloud of conjoined cries of anguish. Soft chords played on an electric piano do little to mollify the injustice. Anthony is a victim not of paranormal cursing, but of being a node caught in the crosshairs of aspiration and gentrification – not just economically, but spiritually and psychologically. The churchy drones (intentionally or not) loop back to the sadness of lost beautiful landscapes, which post-Decasia point to a stubborn sticking point: gentrification creates the space for appreciating ‘distressed aesthetics’.

Whenever Candyman is set in the white corridors of contemporary art’s white cubes, it feels like one is watching some modish relationship drama playing at the Tribeca Film Festival. When scenes occur in the Black zones of Cabrini Green’s derelict enclaves, it feels like one is watching The Wire (2002-2008). But in these latter spaces of graffiti-covered walls and vandalised abodes, it is Robert Lowe’s music that wrenches the audiovisualisation from ethnographic woke aspirationalism (beloved by white cubes and its cultural networks) and rips open a transhistorical portal into an auralisation of the endless reincarnation of horror peculiar to the US.

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.

To complement their cover feature in The Wire 505, Will Brooks and Mike Manteca aka dälek curate a special Wire mix, while Joseph Stannard shares additional quotes from his interview with the New Jersey duo

Joseph Stannard: Tell me about the impact of the pandemic on dälek and the resulting Meditations series of releases.

Will Brooks: Me, Mike and Joshua Booth were in the midst of working on a new dälek album when it hit. When everything shut down, it all ground to a halt… All the plans for a new album, all the touring plans we had were gone. The uncertainty, the isolation, all the death… such a bizarre time to think back on. I found myself jumping on Twitch to DJ off of my iPad from my apartment pretty regularly. One of those Twitch sessions ended up being a live beatmaking session. That became Meditations No 1.

I put it out on Bandcamp and was amazed how it resonated with heads. I think as an artist I was desperate to create, and heads were hungry to hear new things, and to connect on a human level. The Meditations became like a ritual, and they became more elaborate. I would write, record, mix, and release a Meditations volume once a month. Not only did it help me psychologically, but financially dälek fans really held me down during those times. It was very cathartic to create and release so much music during those uncertain times. What started as a beat making session became these raw, unfiltered albums of the moment. There are some fully fleshed out joints with vocals on them too, and other just out there experimentations. I really enjoyed creating those joints. They are very special to me. The process of those records really impacted what was to become Precipice. When we reconvened, we scrapped the pre-pandemic album, because the world had changed. We had changed. The music needed to reflect that change and the Meditations series was part of that growth and change.

You've mentioned that dälek is like therapy for you; have you ever undergone therapy? If so, how does it compare to the catharsis provided by the music? If not, why not?

WB: I haven’t, I’m not opposed to it but I haven’t. I don’t know how it would compare, but this music is what has helped me be a pretty well adjusted person in my regular life.

How do you go about blending the beats, textures and vocals that go into a dälek track?

WB: Mike and I spend a lot of time on the mix of all the elements. It really is about finding that right balance to let everything occupy the space it needs to shine.

Mike Manteca: Once we have the basic idea in front of us we just tag team, one of us sits, starts sculpting and directing and then the other will jump up hearing something, take over and guide it from there, it’s very seamless actually. Will sculpts the vocals and once those tracks have been recorded we just go back to the tag teaming. Sometimes one of us has just spent too much time at the desk and needs to tap out and the other will take over.

What tends to be ‘live’ (aside from vocals) and what's programmed?

WB: The core of the tracks tend to be programmed but we are both adding layers of sonics live. I’m using an SP404mkii and and iPad running Samplr.

MM: We both do live electronics and sample manipulation. I have sounds that I have created and use as my source material to perform and manipulate further live. Last year I started bringing the guitar back into my setup and I hadn’t done that with dälek since the early-mid-2000s. I use it in a much more deliberate way now and the way we approached writing the new record was with the knowledge that I wanted to add more guitar to the live shows and be able to use it in a way that it can enhance not just add. Even when the music is sparse it is still dense so finding the moments of ‘attack’ are key.

Is it a challenge to get the balance between these inputs just right?

MM: I don’t think so, everything really comes down to [the fact that] we trust each other, we don’t have to say anything out loud and we are able to sync up sonically on the same wave, so the balance is natural.

The title of the new album Brilliance Of A Falling Moon is borrowed from Erik Larson’s novel In The Garden Of Beasts. Are there other authors who have exerted an influence – however great or slight, overt or subtle – on dälek's art?

WB: Amiri Baraka, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jack Kerouac, Howard Zinn, Lou Reed

MM: There are no specific authors that have influenced my work with dälek; it's just a lifetime of exposure that has had an influence. Actually if I really think about what stirred my creative juices from early on and ultimately steered me into the worlds I live in now it would be Maurice Sendak and Isaac Asimov.

Tracklist

John Morrison “Creepin' With Thom & Tariq”
House Shoes “Castles (The Sky Is Ours) “
Ka “Cold Facts”
Armand Hammer/billy woods/Elucid “Empire BLVD”
Sean Price “Boom Bye Yeah”
ANGUISH “Gut Feeling”
MF Doom “Doomsday”
Boogie Down Productions “Poetry”
The Labteks “Radio Waves”
iconAclass “Dutch (You Caught Up)”
Faust “BBC 1.3.73”
Napszyklat “Kulture Schock featuring dälek/iconAclass”
Black Thought “Twofifteen”
billy woods & Moor Mother “Furies”
Carl Gari featuring dälek “Poison Shyness (Anti-Social)”
Fatboi Sharif & Roper Williams “Cinnamon”
Vacuum “Resonate Deadverse (dälek remix)”
dälek & Goth-Trad “Skin No Longer Scars”
dälek & The Bug “Fractured”
Steven Wilson “Get All You Deserve (dälek mix)”
MOPCUT featuring dälek “Where To Begin”
edan “Fumbling Over Words That Rhyme”
Cannibal Ox “Iron Galaxy’
Scotty Hard featuring High Priest & Sayyid “Bubble In The Haze”
Hprizm “I’ll Find You”
dälek & Charles Hayward “Breathe Slow”
SUUNS “Look No Further”
Suicide “Cheree”
Lorelle Meets The Obsolete “Dos Noches (Deadverse Remix by dälek)”
Holy Scum “Trying In Hell”
Belong “Come See”
All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors “Nice Soup”

The 19 February edition of The Wire’s weekly radio show on Resonance FM and Resonance Extra featured music by The Brides Of Funkenstein, Kavari, K Alexi, The Poor Luckies and more

Tracklist

melondruie
“Obscured From View”
From Despair
(Cruel Nature)

The Brides Of Funkenstein
“Party Up In Here”
From Never Buy Texas From A Cowboy
(Ace)

Master's Ashes
“Defiant Disorder”
From How The Mighty Have Fallen
(Time To Kill)

I Know I'm An Alien
“The Algorithm Thinks You're A Dork”
From Be Lazy, Be Revolutionary
(Bandcamp)

dälek
“Better Than”
From Brilliance Of A Falling Moon
(Ipecac)

Lividus
“Amphisbaena”
From Scarabaeus
(Nameless Grave)

K Alexi
“Protect And Survive”
From Warehouse Trax
(Dark Entries)

Hildur Guðnadóttir
“All The Jimmys”
From 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
(Milan)

The Poor Luckies
“Running The Street”
From Wrong Way
(Bandcamp)

Clock DVA
“North Loop”
From Thirst
(Mute)

KAVARI
“Iron Veins”
From Plague Music
(XL)

Leila Bordreuil & Kali Malone
“Intersecting Planes II”
From Music For Intersecting Planes
(Ideologic Organ)

E The Artist
“Mantras”
From Six
(Nyahh)

Eve Maret
“Break The Chain”
From Diamond Cutter
(Bandcamp)

Walter Willy
“O Gnomo”
From Cinturões De Van Halen
(Chupa Manga)

KA Posse
“Midnite Madness”
From Strikes Again
(Dark Entries)

Dry Socket
“Rigged Survival”
From Self Defence Techniques
(Get Better)

Spider Taylor
“Tech”
From Surge Studio Music
(Dark Entries)

Knocked Loose featuring Denzel Curry
“Hive Mind”
From Hive Mind
(Pure Noise)

Boobs of DOOM
“Hallow Menhir/2: Shahid Blues”
From 032: A Spectrum Of Mind-Forged Manacles
(Bandcamp)

Adventures In Sound And Music broadcasts at 9pm every Thursday on Resonance 104.4FM and Resonance Extra. Explore past shows in our On Air archive.

To accompany his report on Computer Students in The Wire 505, Louis Pattison explores a playlist of releases from the Italy based label

Computer Students house their vinyl records in heat-sealed aluminium pouches of the sort that NASA uses to package an astronaut’s lunch. But there’s more to the label than its ambitious production values. On the contrary, Computer Students’ stark industrial design and laser focus on a particular strain of heavyweight, rhythmically complex avant-rock is giving the genre a sense of conceptual rigour it hasn’t seen in years.

Located in Pescara, Italy, but with nodes in Amsterdam and New York City, Computer Students came into being in 2018 as a successor to founder Julien Fernandez’s previous label, Africantape. As well as new releases from groups like Big’n and New Brutalism, the label also pursues extravagantly produced, expanded “excavations” of lost or overlooked albums by underground rock groups like Cheval de Frise and Drose. The unifying factor is a fastidious attention to detail and a raw, in-the-room recording fidelity that Fernandez says is intended to make each release feel “engineered as much as designed”.

Chat Pile & Hayden Pedigo
“Behold A Pale Horse”
From In The Earth Again (2025)

The breakout Oklahoma noise-rock group Chat Pile were in the ascendant when Fernandez reached out to them in 2022. But it turned out that bassist Stin was already aware of Computer Students, and with the blessing of their label, The Flenser, they hit on the idea of doing something a little different. That turned out to be a collaborative record with another Oklahoma musician, the fingerstyle guitarist Hayden Pedigo. “The pairing felt unexpectedly perfect,” says Fernandez, and the resulting In The Earth again feels distinct from either party’s extant music. Take a song like “Behold A Pale Horse” – equal parts bucolic prettiness and toxic oil slick.

Cheval de Frise
“Songe de perte de dents”
From Fresques sur les parois secrètes du crâne (reissued 2023, originally released 2003)

The Bordeaux duo Cheval de Frise were one of a spree of two-piece groups – see also Lightning Bolt and Pink And Brown – that emerged at the dawn of the century. But Cheval de Frise’s quicksmart blend of electroacoustic guitar shred and scattershot drum improv still sounds fresh 20 years on – see this highlight of the duo’s 2023 swansong. Computer Students’ reissues of the group’s two albums expanded them with new artwork and photography. “Julien has an extraordinary eye for detail, and he showed great perseverance in pursuing the most beautiful result possible,” says guitarist Thomas Bonvalet.

Big’n
“South Of Loathsome”
From End Comes Too Soon (2024)

The influence of the late musician and recording engineer Steve Albini casts a long shadow across Computer Students – some of the label’s albums were recorded by him, more still were put to tape at his Chicago studio Electrical Audio. One such album is End Comes Too Soon, the first full-length in 28 years by Albini’s old Chicago noise-rock hombres Big’n, which landed on Computer Students in 2024. Listen to “South Of Loathsome”, and you hear a take on rock music of the sort that Albini particularly prized – tightly wound, full of emotion, and conducted with a controlled brutality.

C’Mon Tigre
“Fédération Tunisienne de Football”
From C'mon Tigre (reissued in 2025, originally released 2014)

The Italian duo C’Mon Tigre are seasoned collaborators with a global purview, having worked with names as scattered as Arto Lindsay, Seun Kuti and the Brazilian vocalist Xênia França. TEN is an expanded version of the duo’s self-titled debut, originally released on Fernandez’s label Africantape in 2014. The root sound is a curious avant rock that opens up to reveal all sorts of influences – Afrobeat, tropicalia, soul, and on “Fédération Tunisienne de Football”, the horn-powered African jazz of figures like Mulatu Astatke.

Drose
“The Unravelling”
From Boy Man Machine (reissued 2019, originally released 2016)

One of Computer Students’ most ambitious releases to date is their expanded reissue of Boy Man Machine, a 2016 record by Columbus, Ohio noise-rockers Drose. Frontman Dustin Rose composed and recorded the album – a concept piece following the story of a boy’s metamorphosis into a machine – while designing and building a race car at the Center for Automotive Research in Columbus. Recording sessions took place in a hidden subsurface room in the facility, and on tracks like “An Idol”, you can hear the hiss of pneumatic systems and robotic welding: a literal industrial rock.

Chevreuil
“Tartarus”
From Stadium (2026)

Computer Students’ first release of 2026 marks the return of Fernandez’s band Chevreuil following a 15 year absence. Live, the pair – Fernandez on drums, Tony Chauvin on guitar – seek a physical-spatial quality, surrounding themselves with four amplifiers to create a quadrophonic soundfield. “When Tony and I reconnected, the plan was modest – maybe record a 7" or a short EP,” says Fernandez. But things quickly spiralled, and before they knew it, they had a sprawling double album, inspired by magnetism, radioactivity and the music of the spheres. “Tartarus” is both an album highlight, and emblematic of the duo’s approach – a rhythmically oblique art rock with a groove that seems trapped in a perpetual cycle of decomposition and recomposition.

The latest album from UK ensemble Hen Ogledd is a striking invocation of the mythic and mundane, writes Abi Bliss in The Wire 505

Hen Ogledd
Discombobulated
Domino CD/DL/LP

One of the more unexpected musical evolutions in recent years has been that of Hen Ogledd from the group’s origins as a side project for harpist Rhodri Davies and singer-guitarist Richard Dawson. The knotty, writhing improvisations of the pair’s 2013 album Dawson-Davies: Hen Ogledd were like wrestling a piglet in a barbed wire jacket, but with the addition of multi-instrumentalists Dawn Bothwell and Sally Pilkington, by the time of 2018’s Mogic, Hen Ogledd had become a bold, poppy but still defiantly experimental quartet. With Dawson now on bass, Davies’s electrified strings remained a bubbling, gravelly sonic wellspring around which their musical horizons expanded.

Veering between crisply crafted songs such as “Problem Child” and looser-limbed jams, with lyrics tackling human connection in the digital age, Mogic was inspired but scrappy, as colourfully creative yet jokily deflecting as the appliqué capes each member sported in its videos. If anything, its 2020 sequel Free Humans was too consistent, leaning heavily on neon electropop to tackle the frailties of the heart across a timespan ranging from medieval gossip to future space exploration. But with Discombobulated, Hen Ogledd have grown to fully inhabit their costumes, Sun Ra Arkestra style, with the greatest musical and lyrical realisation yet of their diverse strengths.

Hen Ogledd is Welsh for Old North, and refers to an early medieval region spanning the north of Wales, northern England and southern Scotland. At the fringes of Roman influence and where Brythonic languages – forebears of Welsh, Cornish and Breton – were spoken, the area includes the birthplaces of all four members, highlighting a kinship between parts of the UK often overlooked in Londoncentric narratives. Invoking both the mythic and the mundane, Discombobulated draws upon landscape, folklore, popular dissent and individual struggles, enriched by major contributions from saxophonist Faye MacCalman and trumpeter Nate Wooley, and by passing appearances (ranging from vocal non sequiturs to field recordings) from numerous friends and family members.

After one child recounts a dreamlike vignette of sound-collecting fishermen on opener “Nell’s Prologue”, “Scales Will Fall” raises the protest flag, its call for youth to overturn the institutions of corporate greed delivered in emphatic spoken word by Bothwell, rousingly backed with brassy synth lines, Will Guthrie’s economical yet persuasive drumming and a massed chorus singing “The fire in your soul is only fool’s gold”. The rallying procession is tempered by a melancholy that finds voice in Wooley’s lyrical solo, with a world-weary majesty that wouldn’t be out of place on Super Furry Animals’ downbeat 2000 masterpiece Mwng. Similarly, the Davies-sung “Dead In A Post-Truth World” addresses the far right voices that the BBC’s Newsnight programme is all too fond of platforming – “Mae gamwn ar y teledu/Mae’n amser mynd i’r gwely” (“When gammon is on the TV/It’s time to go to bed”) – its fragmented harmonies, wah-wah harp, twisting sax and fidgeting snares providing a counterpoint of complexity to easy answers.

Elsewhere, the natural world is a place of both wonder and loss. Framed by watery organ chords and what might be a rattling film projector, “Clara” starts with Bothwell’s lilting lullaby of horseriding but stumbles into degraded, polluted landscapes. Davies and his children sing “Land Of The Dead”, a Welsh translation of an enigmatic Dawson lyric in which the veils between nighttime countryside and eldritch realms dissolve more with each verse.

Time itself rejects a linear path in “Amser A Ddengys” (“Time Will Tell”), the line “Dyna oedd ddoe a dyma yw heddiw” (“That was yesterday and this is today”) delivered simultaneously with the song’s other three lines by an a cappella choir of Davies. And in “Clear Pools”, the cycles signify rebirth and renewal, as initial chaos gives way to clean harp chords, MacCalman’s warm, nurturing tones and soft, enveloping textures that wax and wane around the vocals over nearly 20 minutes. But a hot disco can be as transcendent as a cold pond, and the driving “End Of The Rhythm” best encapsulates the album’s mood of battered but persisting hope, trumpet, harp and sax lines all yearning for a better tomorrow as Pilkington celebrates “A dancing, contagion/Releasing, rampaging/Our bodies, in union/Spontaneous, communion”.

This review appears in The Wire 505 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.

The 12 February edition of The Wire’s weekly radio show on Resonance FM and Resonance Extra featured music by Carlos Giffoni, Maggie Nicols, Sheng Jie & Shenggy, Seppuku Pistols and many more

Tracklist

Carlos Giffoni featuring Lea Bertucci
“Dos”
From Pendulum
(Room40)

Mammal Machine
“Fledermäuse Auf Der Autobahn”
From “Mitsugi” – Esoteric Rituals
(Captain Trip)

Puppet
“I’ll Be”
From My Freezing Frozen Spirit
(Badhead)

MoE & Ikuro Takahashi featuring Martín Escalante
“Kiss”
From Jeg kommer ikke til å si det til noen
(UFO CREAtions)

Maggie Nicols/Robert Mitchell/Alya Al Sultani
“Let The Light In”
From Immersion
(Discus Music)

Sheng Jie & Shenggy
”II”
From Horses
(Shanavlab)

Leaflight: John Butcher/Ute Wassermann/Martin Blume
“5th Call”
From Close Calls
(FMR)

Mary Ocher
“The Dance”
From Weimar
(Underground Institute)

Gary Lucas with FeiFei Yang & Jason Candler
“Old Dreams”
From The Edge Of Heaven Vol 2
(garylucas.com)

Katsuya Nonaka
“Tamuke”
From Connecting Iki
(ato.archives)

Seppuku Pistols
“Ookami Naruto And I Wanna Be Your Dog (Stooges Cover)”
from Seppuku Pistols In London: Paper Dress Vintage 2024
(Tang Deng Co)

Seppuku Pistols
“Ookami Kagura”
From Paris L’Alimentation Générale Vendredi 24 Janvier 2025
(Tang Deng Co)

Scenic
“Raintree Road”
From Various, The Well
(Independent Project)

Woo
“The English Style Of Rowing”
From Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong
(Independent Project)

Foetus
”Many Versions Of Me”
From HALT
(Ectopic Ents)

Adventures In Sound And Music broadcasts at 9pm every Thursday on Resonance 104.4FM and Resonance Extra. Explore past shows in our On Air archive.

In the introduction to her collection of writings on Tom Wilson, Anaïs Ngbanzo gives an overview of the influential producer's life

It was December 2004 and I was watching Bob Dylan get into heated conversations with journalists during his 1965 British tour in Dont Look Back. Halfway through DA Pennebaker’s film, when Dylan sits at the piano and starts playing an early version of “I’ll Keep It With Mine”, the camera lingers on a man seated next to him, eyes closed, deeply listening. This was the first time I saw Tom Wilson. Over the following years it occurred to me that the photographs of Dylan’s 1965 recording sessions, and those of Nico promoting Chelsea Girl at ABC studios, and the one of Frank Zappa standing in a bright studio during the recording of We’re Only In It For The Money have one thing in common: Wilson is there. I started researching Wilson.

Thomas Blanchard Wilson, Jr was born in 1931. He grew up in Waco, Texas with a librarian mother and a father in the insurance business. He attended Moore High School, where he played saxophone in the school band. He later played trombone and took cello classes for a couple of years – the only formal musical training he ever had. His music-related childhood memories would involve his father conducting a choir at the Texas state centennial celebrations of 1936 and the jam sessions held on Saturday afternoons at his grandfather’s carpet cleaning business. A year after enrolling at Fisk University in Nashville he had to take two years out getting tuberculosis treatment, but then, in 1951, he went further north to study economics at Harvard.

In Cambridge, Wilson became committed to university radio station WHRB – broadcasting classical and popular recordings. He later said: “I owe everything accomplished in the recording field to highly informal but inspirational training as a member of WHRB.” The Harvard archives also show his membership in its most active political club: the Young Republicans. “For some, being a Young Republican was a full-time job, an exercise in wardheeling,” explained an alumni report. “For others, the club was an easy-going, semi-social organisation, which provided interesting speakers and dances.”

In early 1953, Wilson founded the Harvard New Jazz Society. The club was to create “an atmosphere here at Harvard that will foster an appreciation of the idiom,” as he told the Harvard Crimson, extending an invitation to “all interested in jazz and its recognition as an indigenous art form.” With its informal performance and lectures, the New Jazz Society received national publicity and established jazz among the more entrenched musical forms at Harvard. Wilson graduated in May 1954.

That summer he took a job at the Stop & Shop supermarket chain as assistant buyer, languishing at its South Boston headquarters for a few months. Although only 24 years old, he already had strong connections with gifted musicians of the Boston area jazz scenes and a plan to record them. In a 1956 interview for Metronome, Wilson recalled sitting in a friend’s living room talking about trends in music when he said, “If I had a thousand dollars I’d prove something.” The girlfriend (as yet unidentified) of fellow Harvard graduate Charles Henri La Munière, having command of an annuity, offered Wilson $940 that day to start cutting records. As a result he started his label Transition Records in Cambridge in March 1955. That same year he married Beverly J King; they would welcome their first child, Thomas Blanchard III, in 1956.

Herb Pomeroy’s Jazz In A Stable is the first Transition record, and Donald Byrd was the first artist to be signed. Recordings were made in various locations – and through his lasting relationship with the university, Wilson was able to use WHRB’s engineering staff and a completely renovated studio there known as “studio B.” With the assistance of Harvard students and alumni A Ledyard Smith, Stephen A Greyser, Edward H Rathbun and Dean Gitter, Transition swiftly came to prominence in jazz recordings – collaborating with John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Art Blakey, Horace Silver, and Cecil Taylor. Yet it continued to operate from Wilson’s living room and it was losing money: Wilson had to moonlight as membership secretary in the Waltham Boys’ Club during 1957–58 to make ends meet. Transition Records folded in the summer of 1958. The Wilson family moved to New York shortly after the birth of their second child, Darien Wilson, that September.

Upon arrival in the city, Wilson started a career in A&R (artists and repertoire) for indie and major labels, taking a job at United Artists until February 1960. Later that year he founded Communicating Arts Corporation, which produced jazz radio programmes on the New York metropolitan area classical station WNCN-FM, while doubling as jazz A&R director at Savoy Records and as executive assistant to Malcolm E Peabody, Jr, director of the New York State Commission for Human Rights. In 1962 he joined Audio Fidelity Records as associate recording director.

A pivotal encounter occurred in mid 1962: Goddard Lieberson, a former A&R man now heading CBS-Columbia Group, heard Wilson speak before a meeting of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Lieberson, under whose leadership the CBS music division had become the world’s leading recording company, was impressed enough to hire him on the spot. Wilson’s role as staff producer at Columbia from 1963 to 1965 would be a significant moment of his career – getting press attention as “the man who produced some of Dylan’s hits” and who made a success out of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sound Of Silence.”

In November 1965 he joined MGM Records as East Coast recording director, recording The Animals and signing The Velvet Underground, Nico, and The Mothers Of Invention. The vice president of the label, a Wilson admirer, entrusted him with a radio interview program called The Music Factory, sponsored by Verve/MGM and syndicated to college stations across the country.

This was the last role Wilson took at a record company before creating the Wilson Organisation in 1968 with a handful of partners, leasing its services to Motown Records. Subsidiary firms included Terrible Tunes and Maudlin Melodies (publishing), Reluctant Management (talent direction), and Rasputin, Gunga Din, and Lamumba Productions (independent recording production). “You know why I went independent?” he told writer Ann Geracimos in 1968 for a New York Times cover story. “Because I got tired of making money for a millionaire who didn’t even bother to send me a Christmas card. I discovered if you are honest, you get a lot further. A guy’s not going to respect you if you don’t fight for what you think you are worth.

In 1976 Wilson told writer Michael Watts for Melody Maker that he and his business partner Larry Fallon had written a rhythm and blues opera, Mind Flyers Of Gondwana, that wove together Plato’s allegory of Atlantis with African American history. The idea was that Johnny Nash would play the lead; other names mentioned were Gladys Knight (as a queen), Labelle, Gil Scott-Heron, Melba Moore and Minnie Riperton. The Righteous Brothers were to play Mason and Dixon, and it was hoped that Bob Marley would record a reggae soundtrack. They were trying to get Stanley Kubrick interested in a film version. But the project never saw the light. Wilson, who had a history of heart trouble, died at home in Los Angeles, California on 6 September 1978. He was 47 years old.

Working on this book, the first devoted to Wilson, I wondered what he would have made of it. Geracimos writes in her article, “A Record Producer Is A Psychoanalyst With Rhythm”, that:

“Although extreme frankness is one of his strong characteristics, he is reluctant to talk about some of his extra-curricular activities (any drug-taking experiences, for example), because of what people back in Waco might think. ‘Just don’t say anything that might hurt my family,’ he says. [...] The pressures of the profession evidently lead him to seek diversion in a number of unorthodox ways. Rock ’n’ roll music, of course, is not all sound. It refers to a certain style as well, which Wilson, in trying to court extremes and the happy middle simultaneously, represents perfectly. The public side of Wilson is responsible and pragmatic.”

This is an edited extract from the introduction of Everybody’s Head Is Open To Sound: Writings On Tom Wilson, edited by Anaïs Ngbanzo and published by Éditions 1989.

You can read Francis Gooding’s review of the book in The Wire 505. 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.

Music can act on listeners in ways that Western modes of engagement and criticism overlook or erase, argues Moravian composer and vocalist Julia Úlehla in The Wire 505

I’ve just given a keynote presentation at Lines of Flight: Improvisation, Hope and Refuge, a conference hosted by the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. I’d been invited to talk about my performance research with Dálava, a cross-genre project that is influenced by animist, Slavic cosmology and a land-based folk song tradition that has been in my family for generations. After the presentation a woman approaches me. “There’s something I need to tell you. A spirit entered my body while you were singing and has a message for you.” She delivers the message and hugs me warmly. Once delivered, her demeanour transforms, as if a weight lifts. She promptly and politely says goodbye.

As this encounter suggests, singing is a devotional practice for me, one that connects me to my ancestors and other spirits, and affords an animist experience of reality. Music born of traditional and spiritual practice is increasingly visible in experimental and underground circles. But music of this kind is often at odds with the patriarchal colonial bias that constrains how music is written about and studied. Listeners, practitioners, teachers and writers need to find ways to move beyond this bias and avoid the harms of misrecognition, desacralisation, instrumentalisation, commodification and extraction.

The musical history of Canada, the nation state in which I live, is built on the extraction of Indigenous song and culture and erasure of Indigenous peoples and lifeways. In current music writing about artists who are women and people of colour, exotification, mischaracterisation and assumptions based on gender, race and ethnicity are common. In a letter in The Wire 424 in which she corrected inaccuracies arising from false assumptions based on her ethnic and racial identity, Amirtha Kidambi notes, “this kind of mischaracterisation and looseness with facts is much more common in stories about women and people of colour... we rarely get to dictate even the facts of our own stories, in the way many of our white male colleagues do, and are narrativised time and time again, in inaccurate and uncomfortable ways…”

Throughout my career I’ve seen women, queer, trans and racialised colleagues who work with voice prefer to situate themselves inside movement, dance, theatre or performance art milieus because of the patriarchal, colonial bias in music. During my PhD in ethnomusicology, I researched folk songs from Slovácko, a rural region at the western edge of the Carpathian mountains. In this tradition – which has been sung by generations of my family members – ancestor and other spirits, mountains, rivers, wind, weather, humans, animals and plants are understood as agentive, alive and interrelated. My advisor told me to keep my body, my family and my creative practice out of my research, adding that I should maintain a scholarly distance and satisfy his appetite for facts. He asked me to take spirit out of my writing, warning that it would unpalatable for colleagues.

These statements suggest that knowledge cannot arise in the body, and that one’s family lineages and exploratory musical practices are not viable fields for research. Gatekeepers have appetites that can only be satisfied by facts obtained through the perceptions of an unaffected, distant observer. Spirits are the stuff of an (often feminised or racialised) Other’s belief, fantasy or psychosis. To present them as part of a valid epistemological and ontological field invites ridicule.

I’ll give a few examples of what people thinking outside this dominant ideology have told me that they perceive when listening. Neither platitudes nor praise, these comments open imaginative space for what language about music is, or could be. The encounters they describe bridge across alterity without collapsing difference, foregrounding embodied experience, spiritual encounter and collaborative wondering. These exchanges include modes of listening and giving language to musical experience that avoid reification and instead open towards relationship.

A young woman came up to me after a performance and told me that she “grew up inside a Hindu household where music, devotion and the domestic were inextricably linked”. She continued, “The performance felt like being home. Your music lives in the heart. Depending on the relationship a person has to their own heart influences how they will hear you.”

What if the way we respond to music has more to do with emotional flows and blockages than aesthetic preferences? What would happen if we knew we might be having our hearts worked on when we listened to music, or conversely, when we performed for someone, we might be engaging with their hearts? What does that do to accountability? Would we consent to that? What are we turning away from if we never think about it?

A Syilx woman told me that she palpably felt and saw the land that the folk songs I sing come from and was moved by how beautiful the land was. What if certain songs are inseparable from the lands they grew from, as though the songs themselves contained the land, or could bring the spirit of the land to them? In this diasporic world, what are we asking genus loci to do when we bring them across the world? What are the consequences when songs from faraway lands appear upon stolen, occupied, Indigenous land, and how is each context different? Are we, for example, introducing lands or ancestors to one another in generative ways? Who determines that? Or enacting another form of settler colonialism in the spirit world?

A Serbian woman told me that the performance allowed her to experience “the existential liberation of Slavic melancholy”. She said, “If you travel down to the very bottom of suffering, on the other side lies freedom.” What if songs are medicine, capable of bringing healing to suffering? What if we knew that when we gather to listen to music or perform for others, we could travel to the bottom of suffering and pass through it together?

And as the opening story reveals, song is a powerful way of communing with ancestors and other spirits. What if we went to concerts knowing that our ancestors were gathered in the room with us? What might we want to do together? Do we have issues to heal or celebrate within our lineages, or among those gathered? Do we know how to do this safely and responsibly, and are we all at equal risk?

These exchanges centre ways of knowing and listening that many academicised modes of engagement find hard to tolerate. Yet, many of us have had experiences like these through music; many of us long for them. Music helps us learn how to love, how to honour the land that sustains us, how to heal, how to grieve, how to visit with the dead, how to experience hierophany. No one is authority in these layered entanglements – not the musicians, not the audience, not the unseen. These relational encounters invite everyone to participate but don’t work according to logics of control or distance. You have to let yourself be taken by something bigger. Can music criticism disarm itself enough to make space for this?

Julia Úlehla is a Moravian composer and vocalist. This essay appears in The Wire 505.

Pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the essay in our online magazine library.

Stream a selection of tracks from releases we listened to during the making of our March 2026 issue

The full chart:

Boobs Of Doom
032: A Spectrum Of Mind-Forged Manacles
(Bandcamp)

Christina Kubisch
TUNING
(Faitiche)

Circle X
Prehistory
(Drag City)

David/David
Blame Haro
(577)

Famous Actors From Out Of Town
FA3574
(Richmond Relics)

heavensouls x stickerbush aka sidepieces
darklight
(Bandcamp)

John T Gast
Infant
(5 Gate Temple)

JeGong
Gomi Kuzu Can
(Pelagic)

Kavari
Plague Music
(XL)

MATA
Dreaming is a combination of juxtaposed images and sensations resulting from predictive calculations
(Bandcamp)

Sheng Jie & Shenggy
Horses
(Bandcamp)

Tanya Tagaq
“Fuck War”
(Six Shooter)

The Dengie Hundred with Gemma Blackshaw
Songs For Isserley
(Somewhere Press)

Woo
Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong
(Independent Project)

Void
Live – 1982
(Outer Battery)

After ten years the European SHAPE+ project has concluded. This is the final collection of new electronic and experimental music by artists associated with the project compiled and annotated by SHAPE+ for The Wire

Like all releases in the Below The Radar series, this edition can be downloaded by both print and digital subscribers to The Wire.

The 5 February edition of The Wire’s weekly radio show on Resonance FM and Resonance Extra featured music by Hen Ogledd, Kareem Samara, Unidad Ideológica, Laurel Halo and many more

Full tracklist

Hen Ogledd
“Clara”
From Discombobulated
(Domino)

Kareem Samara
“There Is A Hunger Strike In UK Prisons”
From Gaza Is The Moral Compass
(Beacon Sound)

Unidad Ideológica
“Choque Asímetrico”
From Choque Asimétrico
(La Vida Es Un Mus Discos)

New Age Doom featuring H.R.
“Radio On”
From Angels Against Angels
(We Are Busy Bodies)

The Brackish
“Welter”
From Pack It In My Leige
(Pig)

Shane Parish
“Eggshell”
From Autechre Guitar
(Palilalia)

Sary Moussa
“Felicity”
From Gaza Is The Moral Compass
(Beacon Sound)

Proc Fiskal
“Addictionz”
From Exchequer
(Hyperdub)

David/David
“Osem”
From Blame Haro
(577)

Wrens
“Charlie Parker”
From Half Of What You See
(Out Of Your Head)

Tanya Tagaq
“Foxtrot”
From Saputjiji
(Six Shooter)

Praed
“Al Hathayan”
From Al Wahem
(Ruptured/Annihaya)

Tamer Nafar
“Nana feat Sammy Shiblaq”
From In The Name Of The Father, The Imam & John Lennon
(Levantine Music/Empire Records)

Tashi Dorji
“Burn The Throne”
From Low Clouds Hang, This Land Is On Fire
(Drag City)

Elliott Sharp
“Goshozyg 1”
From Goshozyg
(Zoar)

bIG*fLAME
“Sink (Get Out Of The Ghetto Blues Part 1) (session)”
From Peel Sessions 84-86
(Precious)

Gezan
“Live”
From I ai ORIJINAL SOUNDTRACK
(十三月)

Charanjit Singh
“Raga Bhairav”
From Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat
(Light In The Attic)

Laurel Halo
“Sunlight Zone”
From Midnight Zone OST
(Awe)

Adventures In Sound And Music broadcasts at 9pm every Thursday on Resonance 104.4FM and Resonance Extra. Explore past shows in our On Air archive.

Listen to the music we played to Daniel Blumberg during his Invisible Jukebox interview in The Wire 505

Each month in the magazine we play an artist or group a series of tracks which they are asked to comment on – with no prior knowledge of what they are about to hear.

In The Wire 505 it is the turn of composer and artist Daniel Blumberg.

Here you can listen to a mix of the tracks our correspondent Claire Biddles played to Blumberg during the interview, which is published in full in The Wire 505. To find out what they said about them, subscribers can read the interview in our online magazine library here. Or you can buy a copy of the magazine in our online shop.

But first, a brief biography of our subject:

Daniel Blumberg is an artist from London working across song, improvisation, film composition and drawing. After spending his teenage years playing in guitar bands, he found an antidote to his musical frustration in the world of improvised music, and in the mid-2010s became heavily involved in the community around Cafe Oto, which remains his artistic home. Across various configurations, his regular collaborators include saxophonist Seymour Wright, vocalist Elvin Brandhi, and violinist Billy Steiger. His three solo albums – Minus (2018), On&On (2020) and Gut (2023) – are sometimes beautiful, sometimes tense meetings of emotive songwriting and improvised performance.

In film, Blumberg works primarily with the writer-producer team of Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet, who take turns directing projects. In 2020, he composed his first feature score for Fastvold’s The World To Come. This was followed by his 2024 score for Corbet’s The Brutalist – featuring the likes of saxophonist Evan Parker and pianist John Tilbury – which won an Academy Award. Equally epic in scope is Blumberg’s soundtrack for Fastvold’s 2025 film The Testament Of Ann Lee, an avant garde musical using the hymns of the Shaker Christian sect as its starting point. Over 100 singers can be heard in the film, including lead actor Amanda Seyfried, improvising vocalist Maggie Nicols, Low’s Alan Sparhawk and Blumberg’s sister and close collaborator, Ilana. In 2025 he also composed scores for Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary Sotto Le Nuvole (Below The Clouds), featuring underwater recordings of saxophonists Seymour Wright and John Butcher.

A graduate of the Royal Drawing School, Blumberg is also a prolific visual artist, with his first solo exhibition opening this March at Galerie Balice Hertling in Paris. Working in silverpoint, his drawings reveal sparse environments populated by beguiling humanoid figures. Across all mediums, Blumberg’s work maintains a distinct sense of vulnerable physicality – weather-beaten but curious and defiant.

The Jukebox was conducted online, with Daniel Blumberg at home in London.

Tracklist (with time stamps):

Michel Legrand & Corinne Marchand (00:00)
“Sans Toi”
From Cléo From 5 To 7 OST
(Philips) 1962

Yeah You (02:25)
“Myopia”
From HELPING ART IS NOT
(Bandcamp) 2014

Billy Steiger (6:26)
“'''' ”
From Loud Object
(Otoroku) 2022

Scott Walker (20:20)
“Darkness”
From Plague Songs (4AD) 2006

Daniel Lopatin (24:05)
"Marty’s Dream”
From Marty Supreme OST
(A24) 2025

Pamela Z (25:12)
“Badagada”
From Echolocation (Freedom To Spend) 2021, rec 1988

David Sylvian (28:54)
“Random Acts Of Senseless Violence”
From Manofon
(SamadhiSound) 2009

Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross/Alan Sparhawk/ BJ Burton (36:01)
“Vaster Than Empires”
From Queer OST
(Milan) 2024

Soul-Junk (39:54)
“Mark 7:6-9”
From 1950
(Holy Kiss Rex) 1994

The 29 January edition of The Wire’s weekly radio show on Resonance FM and Resonance Extra featured music by Jawnino & SURF GANG, John T Gast, Tanat Teeradakorn, OHYUNG, Alan Vega and more

Tracklist

Jawnino & SURF GANG
“bored of the uk”
From amnesia
(Surf Gang)

heavensouls x stickerbush aka sidepeices
“in my zone”
From darklight
(Bandcamp)

Jaydawn & Wukir Suryadi
“Silop Goblog Anjing Loba Waduk (Dumbf**k Liar Cops)”
From Pucung, Pangkur Jeung Hujan Bedog
(WV Sorcerer Productions)

Shadow Wizard Money Gang
“HYPER-TEMPO ANNIHILATION”
From MAXIMUM SONISTIC ASSAULT
(Soundcloud)

L
“Log Lear”
From My Sister’s Baby
(GLARC)

Henry Cyer
“Age Of Decay”
From Roots Of Empathy
(The Hotel)

John T Gast
“Voices”
From Infant
(5 GATE TEMPLE)

escha
“Phidian Drape”
From Eschatology
(Bandcamp)

Only Now
“Compromised Parasites”
From Timeslave III
(Bandcamp)

SISSY MISFIT
“GIRL IN BED”
From SISSY FXXXCKING MISFIT
(Holy Misfit)

Tanat Teeradakorn
“CLUBPARASITE MEGA-MIXXX [BONUS TRACK]”
From NATIONAL OPERA COMPLEX
(CHINABOT)

Steve Hubback & Peter Brötzmann
“Treforest 82”
From Treforest 82
(FMR Records)

OHYUNG
“id rather be a ghost (medium. Remix)”
From YYYYAAOMMMMM (You Are Always On My Mind NYC Club Edits)
(Bandcamp)

Alan Vega
“Love Cry”
From Alan Vega
(Sacred Bones Records)

extrema ratio
“the anatomy of cruelty”
From Vexata quaestio
(Bandcamp)

FRANKIE & Kelman Duran
“GRAYT”
From McArthur
(Kuboraum Editions)

KINACT
“Cercle de Tambour Kinact”
From Kinshasa In Action
(Nyege Nyege)

jb glazer
“burn out slow goodbye”
From Angel Repost
(glint music)

Adventures In Sound And Music broadcasts at 9pm every Thursday on Resonance 104.4FM and Resonance Extra. Explore past shows in our On Air archive.

As AI use spreads further into the creative industries, platforms like Bandcamp must be bold in their efforts to sort the good faith from the bad, argues Erick Bradshaw

Since its founding in 2008, Bandcamp has become an invaluable resource for musicians, from bedroom producers to pop stars, as a host for the streaming and buying of their work. With artists and labels selling a wide range of physical products in addition to every major digital format, Bandcamp is the closest thing to a globe-spanning independent record store. In 2022, founder Ethan Diamond sold Bandcamp to Epic Games, who then sold it to music licensing company Songtradr the following year. Despite these corporate turnovers, the site has not changed much: the Covid-era artist-benefiting Bandcamp Fridays still occur regularly and editorial wing Bandcamp Daily publishes new features, lists and scene guides every weekday. (Full disclosure: I am a Bandcamp Daily contributor.)

While it may be a closed environment, these elements contribute to a healthy ecosystem for artists and fans alike. When fraudulent goods are introduced, it is tantamount to an attack on the entire business model, a threat to the wellbeing of the marketplace. Such doubt becomes a poison, a virus. AI-generated music is that poison. Spotify has been plagued by an influx of AI-generated music that is streamed by bot farms to generate royalties for the perpetrator. This act of “polluting the algorithm” degrades the experience for everyone and funnels money away from where it is most needed.

In a post published on 13 January, entitled “Keeping Bandcamp Human”, the company stated that “musicians are more than mere producers of sound. They are vital members of our communities, our culture, and our social fabric. Bandcamp was built to connect artists and their fans, and to make it easy for fans to support artists equitably so that they can keep making music.” This was the argument at the centre of the platform’s decision to prohibit music generated wholly or in substantial part by AI, which has been met with some resistance by those for whom AI is an integral part of their practice.

Process music, systems music, cybernetic music, player pianos, samplers, emulators, AutoTune, advanced software plug-ins – algorithms have been part of music creation for decades. Parameters are established, instructions are given and music is produced. But imagine doing that on a near-infinite basis and seeding it through every platform on the planet, like a digital kudzu vine. “Make any song you can imagine” promises the company motto of AI-powered music generation platform Suno. At what point did we decide that music made, or at the very least, shaped by humans was not enough?

There are tried and tested ways of making songs in real time without the need for AI. Songs, especially those written by bands or collaborations between individuals, are formed in the heat of the moment, through jamming or working on variations of a theme as a song is hammered into place. This is also true with electronic instruments: sometimes the twist of a knob can radically alter the trajectory of a song. Free improv, the most blatantly “organic” music, is almost completely based upon these principles. The physical space, the smell in the room, the hand slipping from sweat – all of these things make the music live in the present, sound waves moving through the air at that particular moment. Why waste your time creating something, spending time working on it, making mistakes, learning from those mistakes, using those mistakes, turning the mistake into the essence of the work itself, if you can rely on the likes of Suno? Unless, of course, you are invested in the messy business of being a human.

Parsing the meaning and intent from AI proselytizers can be difficult, but, much like the software systems themselves, they use this to their advantage. This is why making a straightforward counterargument is sometimes the best thing to do: just cut through the bullshit. Is it worth the ravaging of our physical world and psychic landscape to satisfy the tech classes’ lust for co-opting the imaginations of their customers? It’s a perverse bargain, and the only people who benefit are a tiny cabal of so-called angel investors. It may seem grandiose to say that the “training” of LLMs over the last decade amounts to nothing less than the intellectual theft of the entire human race, but why not lay it out in such explicit terms?

The use of generative AI in the arts is a hammer in search of a nail. Does the songwriting industry need to be “disrupted”? Do people need to write songs in the style of Max Martin, Linda Perry or Jack Antonoff? At some point, a vibe coder will hit Send on a prompt that will contain references, perhaps even finely-tuned preferences, to emulate The Shaggs, US Maple, Arthur Doyle, Yoko Ono or Ghédalia Tazartès. The question remains: Why? It doesn’t negate the inherent value of the thing, but it does open up Pandora’s box, and lets the curses stream forth.

It is possible to be sympathetic to forms of generative art and still decry their effect on the creative ecosystem. Generative AI’s ability to create infinite reproductions of material fuels the transformation of art into content, and while some may quibble that generative AI features already exist in music making, for instance in software plug-ins, surely it’s necessary to draw a line in the sand, even if that line risks excluding the few instances of genuinely creative uses of AI.

Will errors be made in the scrubbing of AI-generated music from Bandcamp? Most likely, but this is an e-commerce site, not air traffic control or heart surgery. Moreover, this music will continue to exist, whether on YouTube or Spotify, platforms that have long shed any pretence of prioritising artists over profit. Bandcamp must protect itself from chicanery.

Watch exclusive footage of Saul Williams performing with Carlos Niño & Friends, featuring Surya Botofasina, recorded at Le Guess Who? in November 2025

This concert film of Saul Williams with Carlos Niño & Friends, featuring Surya Botofasina, was recorded live at Le Guess Who? in Utrecht in November 2025. The performance was curated by Lonnie Holley, following the release of Saul Williams meets Carlos Niño & Friends’ self-titled album via International Anthem.

Le Guess Who? 2025 is reviewed in the forthcoming March issue of The Wire. Pick up your copy from 3 February by visiting the online shop.

In the first essay of a short series exploring Bandcamp’s ban on AI-generated music, Vicki Bennett argues that the platform’s decision rests on the belief in a stable binary between computer and human made music

On 13 January 2026, Bandcamp published “Keeping Bandcamp Human”, declaring that “music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp”, alongside a strict prohibition on AI-enabled impersonation of other artists or styles. The post invites users to report releases that appear to rely heavily on generative tools, and it explicitly reserves the right to remove music “on suspicion of being AI-generated”.

It frames the stakes in language that is hard to argue with: music as “human cultural dialogue”, musicians as “vital members of our communities… our culture… our social fabric”. The intention reads as protective: a platform built on direct artist support resisting an industrial shift in which generative systems turn music into an infinitely scalable by-product.

But the policy hinges on a category that cannot sit still: “AI music.”

“AI” currently operates as a single alarm word for a sprawling range of tools, techniques, and infrastructures. Bandcamp’s policy phrase – “wholly or in substantial part” – leans on exactly this flattening, implying a measurable cut-off point. Yet contemporary music-making already runs through predictive and algorithmic processes – pitch correction, time-stretching, transient detection, beat mapping, generative “assist” features buried inside plug-ins, to name a few. Some of these are marketed as AI today; many will become ordinary defaults tomorrow.

The result is a verification fantasy: the belief that a stable binary can be policed in sound; that an audible threshold exists for “synthetic” or “other”. It promises certainty at a moment where certainty is eroding elsewhere too – images, voices, provenance, identity, authorship. It also underestimates how frequently practice collaborates with systems: tools, interfaces, archives, defaults and so on. Music reaches listeners through networks before it reaches them through ears, and those networks are already doing editorial work.

Bandcamp’s policy is responding to a genuine structural threat: volume. Automated production changes the ratio of noise to signal. An already difficult discovery environment gets overwhelmed. Public hostility toward what is surfacing in feeds sits inside this dynamic, and it is understandable. Yet what most people encounter as “AI aesthetics” arrives pre-edited, boosted by ranking systems and controversy. The fear is real; the surface it attaches to is already curated. Bandcamp is trying to resist becoming a landfill.

The popular caricature of generative music imagines a one-way transaction: input a prompt, receive a track, publish it. That behaviour exists, and it has consequences. Yet another relationship exists too: immersive, dialogic use where the system becomes a site for discovery rather than a shortcut to a predetermined end. Bandcamp’s policy language does not distinguish between these modes; it relies on a broad label and a suspicion threshold.

Generative music has existed for a long time – and not only in the contemporary sense of “model output.” Long before large-scale machine learning, artists worked with systems that generate: rule-based procedures, chance operations, constrained scores, stochastic logics, feedback structures, and mechanical or computer-assisted processes. “Generation” reads as a recurring method for distributing agency across humans, tools, rules, and time.

Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies For Player Piano are canonical precisely because they make a non-human musical capacity audible: tempo ratios and so on that bodies cannot reliably execute held in place by a mechanised system that does not “interpret”. In White-Smith Music Publishing Co v Apollo Co (1908), the US Supreme Court held that music rolls for player piano were not “copies” of sheet music under the law at the time, in part because they were not intelligible to humans as notation. The ruling was later superseded, yet the impulse is instructive: authorship gets tethered to human legibility until technology breaks the tether. This is where the AI debate loses grip. It assumes automation erases authorship.

The more useful question is simpler: what is the role of the author under these conditions? Authorship cannot be considered merely writing, composing, playing any more: the actual practice of making shifts toward interaction, recombination, and editorial agency. The author’s presence shows up in how a system is framed and interfered with: what is fed in, what is refused, and so on. In that sense, authorship becomes legible through constraint design and editorial decision making.

Moreover, the “humanity” of the author does not disappear when sound is synthesised or interfered with. It is disclosed through the interference itself: through the deliberate destabilising of sources, the creation of density, the building of “audio mulch” where recognition becomes unstable. That compositional stance sits uneasily with a suspicion-based regime that treats ambiguity as evidence. A policy that encourages judgement-by-vibe pushes complex work towards safer surfaces.

So, what is done with what is present, and with what consequences? A genuine public need exists – protection from impersonation and spam – and Bandcamp’s prohibition on impersonation speaks directly to that need. But the broader prohibition targets a moving label and risks producing an optics economy where surface signals are designed to avoid suspicion.

Likewise, the discourse around exploitation needs refinement. Artists are being scraped and stolen from; this is real. But the temptation is to treat it as unprecedented and to call the entire field “the same”. What about sampling and collage, which have lived inside those tensions for a long time? A platform policy anchored to a broad label cannot resolve that deeper political economy, and it may distract from where power is actually concentrating. So the question returns, sharpened: who benefits when the category “AI music” becomes the organising principle?

Bandcamp’s cultural value has never been limited to commerce. For many, it is still the only workable route for sales and finding the appropriate networks. It functions as an informal archive of tags, micro-genres, and unclassifiable edges: the long tunnel of browsing, the rooms inside rooms, the productive disorientation of finding something you didn't know existed. A suspicion-driven policy makes that ecology more fragile by treating complex processes as a moderation problem rather than as a musical method.

The current moment is already a collision point: economic decisions, artistic freedom, quality, taste, and infrastructural control pressing into the same narrow space. Bandcamp’s attempt makes that collision visible. The next step requires definitions that track behaviour rather than vibes, and governance that can resist flooding without shrinking the field of permissible experimentation. Otherwise, the platform preserves “human creativity” as a slogan while narrowing the conditions under which complex, process-driven work can survive.

Tool use will evolve fast. Model output will be run through “human filters”; many artists will train models on their own archives, treating the model as an extension of an already established editing practice. Authorship will not disappear in these workflows. It will become harder to locate through surface cues, and more important to understand through process. The responsibility now is to keep editing, with our eyes and ears wide open.

The 22 January edition of The Wire’s weekly radio show on Resonance FM and Resonance Extra featured music by Jessica Williams, Yellow Swans, RP Boo, Kavari and more

Tracklist

Jessica Williams
“Portrait Of Picasso II”
From Blue Abstraction: Prepared Piano Project 1985–1987
(Pre Echo Press)

Tara Cunningham & Caius Williams
“Without”
From Engine Songs
(Infant Tree)

dälek
"Better Than”
From Brilliance Of A Falling Moon
(Ipecac)

Marsh Crane
“She Fine”
From Know What I Mean
(Ghost Reporter)

Kavari
“Iron Veins”
From Plague Music
(XL)

Yellow Swans
“Untitled” (2)
From Mort Aux Vaches
(Collective Jyrk)

Felinto
“FESTA PUNK"
From Festa Punk
(Bokeh Versions)

Yapping Portal
“Flipper Department Urge ! Halogen Reef Bureaucracy”
From blue fifty-six
(Blue Tapes)

excel dj
"piano oo oo”
From piano oo oo / dreaming edit
(glint)

Maria BC
“Marathon”
From Marathon
(Sacred Bones Records)

Stein/Crispell/Smith/Shead
“Bone Eaten Up By Breathing”
From Live At The Hungry Brain
(Trost)

Kim Gordon
“Not Today”
From PLAY ME
(Matador)

Susanna Ferrar
“Shenandoah”
From A Boy Leaves Home
(ScatterArchive)

Los Sara Fontán
“Megalodon 2”
From Consuelo
(Aloud Music)

RP Boo
“All Over”
From Established!
(Planet Mu)

Adventures In Sound And Music broadcasts at 9pm every Thursday on Resonance 104.4FM and Resonance Extra. Explore past shows in our On Air archive.

To complement her interview in The Wire 503/504, Irish composer and filmmaker Hilary Woods curates an exclusive Wire mix

For Hilary Woods, it begins with the body: “The only bit of geographical space we all inhabit,” as she puts it. After two instrumental albums, Night CRIÚ, her third for Sacred Bones, marks what press materials announce as a “return to voice", but for the Irish composer and film maker, it represents something more fundamental – a re-entry into the most intimate territory available to her. “I think every time I sit down to write anything is a re-entry into something,” she reflects during her conversation with Leah Kardos in The Wire 503/504. “And I'm interested in what the memories and things of the body hold.”

Here, she curates an exclusive Wire mix that draws together her own work with music by collaborators and influences.

Tracklist

Dean Hurley “Low Sustained Mystery”
Hilary Woods “Endgames”
Lasse Marhaug “Context”
Jo Berger Myhre/Erlend Viken/Thomas Stønen “Gråura”
Hilary Woods “Offerings”
Jun Miyake “Flesh For Eve”
Gabriel Ferrandini “Crying Game”
Lisa O'Neill “Blackbird”
De Danann “Master Crowley’s”
Hilary Woods “Brightly”
Oliver Turvey “Brass Tav And 30 Erosions 2”
Sibylle Baier “Tonight”
Hilary Woods “Where The Bough Is Broken”
Sean O Conghaile “Caoineadh”
Thought Gang “Woodcutters From Fiery Ships”
The Palestrina Choir “Don Oiche Úd I mBeithil”
Jóhann Jóhannsson “One Is True”
The Caretaker “Moments Of Sufficient Lucidity”
Hilary Woods “Kith”
Can “Vitamin C”
Francois Hardy “Voilà”
Dean Hurley “Slow One Chord Blues”
Hilary Woods “Voce”
Hilary Woods “Faults”

Hilary Woods is interviewed by Leah Kardos in The Wire 503/504. Pick up a copy of the issue in our online shop. Subscribers can also read the full interview in the digital library.

Philip Brophy analyses Colin Stetson’s use of the saxophone’s physical dimensions to evoke the disturbed voices and bodies of Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) and Hereditary (2018)

As with all post-2010 franchise reboots, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) spins itself dizzy with reflexive stylistics, revisionist story lines and ideological closure. Musician and composer Colin Stetson’s distinctly live improvisations of acoustic and processed brass and woodwinds are exploited for sensational affect. When Leatherface first dons his freshly dead mother’s peeled face, Stetson deploys a growl deep from the bowl of what sounds like his baritone sax (“Sunflowers”, the opening track on the LP release).

Part death metal aping, part psychotic impression, it highlights a key aspect of all monster figurations: the sound of their voice. Much of Stetson’s cues for Texas Chainsaw Massacre combine vague vocal tones with breathy sustains, each overlaid with overtones and submerged in reverberant fog. In violent outbursts like “Sledgehammer”, the score feels cognisant of Tobe Hooper and Wayne Bell’s ‘meat industry metalzak’ for the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Stetson carves, sculpts and moulds his compound acoustics with greater turmoil.

Stetson thematically has directed his instrumental performances across the well known New History Warfare volumes (2007, 2011, 2013). He needn’t have pointed out these pieces are recorded live and unedited: they throb with his circular breathing, muscular lungs, and immersion in the swirling sonorum he expels from his mouth. In an unlikely musical merger of Philip Glass arpeggios, ‘acoustic acid’ pulsations and inchoate metal vocalisations, the trilogy swells with a surprisingly emotional undertow. Like much of Stetson’s work, New History Warfare is emotionally hot and performatively anguished. Most ‘dark industrial’ work in this terrain I find highly affected and closer to cabaret than anything else, but Stetson’s grounding in the visceral dynamics of his physical instrumentation colours his compositions and recordings with convincing appeal.

I wonder how many filmmakers have temped their films during editing with tracks by Colin Stetson? His records supply emotional outbursts of debilitating affect which many a director might seek as an appropriate tenor for their hand-wringing tales of woe (a trope too many horror and sci-fi movies embrace). And here’s the rub: Stetson’s music alone conjures these ecstatic states of demolition and destitution, but when combined with visuals intent on evoking identical feelings in a viewing audience, the resulting audiovision can become overbearing, muddled and unintentionally caricatured.

I wonder how many directors realised this, and resolved to pull back the soundtrack to soften its bombast? The contrast between experiencing Stetson’s score in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and auditing it in isolation on record is stark. This is a generalisation, but the more sonically adventurous a score, the more likely a movie tends to limit its organic energy, as if the music is an untamed entity to be collared. The LP is like a portrait of Leatherface: traumatised, trapped and taunted as if caged in a hellish unending franchise of horror replications.

Three other Stetson scores perform identically: Color Out Of Space (2019), Uzumaki (2024) and Hold Your Breath (2024). Their music alone conveys far more than their accompanying films. Hold Your Breath is an especially lost chance to highlight Stetson’s voice, considering it focuses on a Creepy Pasta-style ‘Grey Man’ whose lore has psychologically infected a woman and daughter struggling to keep their Dust Bowl ranch going during the 1930s climate devastation. The film abounds with some great sound design and voice editing which foregrounds the palpable psychoacoustics of diseased lungs and vocal deterioration. But Stetson’s metallic human tones and breathy granularity are plastered almost indiscriminately, like the showy CGI dirt storm clouds and artsy defocused cinematography.

To play devil’s advocate: is the problem that Stetson’s emotionally ‘hot’ music is a liability due to his inability to rein it in and properly service the film’s narrative? Man, that’s such a conservative view, which cinema continually upholds. A director not the composer is the one tasked with resolving and incorporating such intense energies (visually, performatively, sonically); they can experiment with pushing things or choose to pull back. Stetson’s first major score commission for Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018) clarifies the benefits in perceptively handling powerful music like Stetson’s within a film’s narrative world.

Hereditary is as showy with its aesthetic gambles as the other films mentioned here. The opening camera creep into a model of a family house raises a reference flag to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), whose overhead camera tracks Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) roaming the snowed-in hedge maze: the optics are of an animatronic doll in a diorama. His positioning throughout the film had repeatedly alluded to his withering self being a figurine sinking into a dimension governed by ghostly usurpation. Hereditary’s story layers this theme onto the dysfunctional family’s teenage son, Peter (Alex Wolff). But relevant here is how Stetson’s music accompanies that dollhouse opening. A spindly melody from his bass clarinet symbolically traces the claustrophobic contours of the dollhouse bedroom.

Something else floats in the background here and elsewhere in the film: distant harmonics, resonant notes and whirring altissomo squeaks, like chamber music being played in the distance. This vague wallpaper of domesticity – classical, mannered, cultured – is not film music in the normative sense. Rather, it scores how music indifferently occupies familial space, simultaneously placating and irritating a family group (convened with frailty by artist mom Annie – Toni Collette – and psychologist dad, Steve – Gabriel Byrne). Their interactions for the first half of the film are disturbingly devoid of connection; the indistinct musical smearing connotes the absence of emotion. This application of Stetson’s pre-storm calm (beautifully apparent on his 2016 release, Sorrow: A Reimagining of Gorecki’s 3rd Symphony) is cogently mixed into the film’s deliberately empty atmospheres of the deadening household and its dark wooden interiors. The sound of the outside world rarely enters, leaving the household devoid of ‘live’ acoustics bar the muted taps of a ticking clock. This allows the music to similarly signify that all human progress is halted – and for sudden noises to aggressively startle.

The first sign of the domain’s incursion by malevolent spirits occurs when young Charlie (Milly Shapiro) spies laser-like shimmers of blue light swimming across her bedroom (“Charlie”). Stetson layers the earlier snarling bass clarinet line atop a high-pitched bass pulse and multiple bell-ringing drones. Timbres morph as various elements cycle hurriedly and rise in volume before fading away. The impact is as full as any Hollywood orchestral bombast, but the detailing is crisp and lean, not thick and bloated. Film music orchestrations carry on the questionable tradition of being blasted in sound stage hangars; Stetson’s scores are always studiophonic. The Hereditary score is a dark doppelgänger of symphonic grandeur, as Stetson employs his wind instruments to perform like soaring strings, gulping cellos and haunting plucks. It’s a masterful move, using the vulgarity of saxophones – bass, baritone, contrabass – to simulate the symphonia of a traditional orchestra.

In the memorable scene where Charlie suffers anaphylactic shock as Peter desperately drives her to hospital, her breath is mixed like a guttural vocal track atop Stetson’s backing. His sound palette accentuates the mechanics of breath in relation to his instrumental arsenal. Multitracked clicks, taps, spits, coughs and blows rattle and excite Stetson’s instruments, as if they are fretfully possessed by sonic poltergeists. That Stetson’s unique percussiveness and its rippling noisescapes are welcomed onto Hereditary’s soundtrack is a testament to Aster’s grasp of the film score’s outer limits of sonority. In fact, one can interpret Peter as a human who is slowly transformed into a vessel: the music blows and hums through his hollowed being just like Stetson’s aural imaging of Peter. The film’s closing theme (“Reborn”) uses Stetson’s technique of emotive deconstruction from Sorrow, here applied to the euphoric moments of something like Strauss’s Alpine Symphony (1915). The impact is like feeling the full spectrum of emotions occurring simultaneously. Post-human transcendence breathed onto the soundtrack.

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.

Leisha Thomas – aka Alpha Maid – compiles an annotated playlist that charts her work alongside and within the South London scene that also includes Mica Levi and Coby Sey

Leisha Thomas’s first Alpha Maid EP Spy was released in 2019 by the London collective CURL. After graduating from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2014, Thomas began playing with fellow music graduate Ben Vince, who introduced her to the collective, which also included Mica Levi, Coby Sey and Brother May. “It felt nice to find some weirdos to be around after finishing uni, you know?” she tells Claire Biddles in The Wire 502. Her next EP CHUCKLE was released in 2021 by fellow London label-cum-collective CANVAS, founded by Olan Monk and Lugh O'Neill. Her latest release, Is this a queue, was released on AD 93 at the end of 2025.

CURL
“1st Memory (excerpt)”

This is a release from a show where George Finlay Ramsay and I were guests on a CURL live show with Brother May, Coby Sey and Mica Levi. We went on to do quite a few shows in this formation over a couple of years but this was an early one – though I’m not sure for certain where or the year. It remains a really sweet memory.

Spresso/Alpha Maid/Mica Levi
“plasticine”
From Spresso
Self-released (2023)

This track is from the Spresso self-titled EP, which was before we decided to name the band Spresso. Writing this EP happened at the same time as Mica and I became standalone friends so in particular it's a special record to me for that. The lyrics are loosely based around acknowledging overwhelm but also not being that bothered and accepting a flop. Adding the shaker was swag.

Alpha Maid featuring Coby Sey & Ben Vince
“Palimpsest”
From Is this a queue
AD 93 (2025)

The instrumental for “Palimpsest” came about when me and Ben Vince met up for a jam in the peak of one of the Covid grips after not seeing each other for a while. The tightening and the squeeze and ‘clinging on’ came out in our playing – it was very cathartic to play music with Ben at this time. The drum beat came after, so you can imagine how the jam sounded without. It took some detachment from that initial state we were in to finish off the track. Coby's vocals gave it a fresh energy but he was able to relate it back to the original essence.

Alpha Maid
“Strut In Straddle”
From Is this a queue
AD 93 (2025)

This track uses a chopped up recording of a van for the bass sounds. This van drives past my flat pretty often, and has one of loudest sound systems I’ve heard in a vehicle. You can hear it approaching from a while away, and when it drives past I always admire how someone is even inside.

Coby Sey
“Onus”
From Conduit
AD 93 (2022)

This is from Coby Sey’s debut album Conduit, and one of my favourites to play live within Coby's live formation. “Onus” displays so well a sincerity and awareness in his lyricism that open the music to a wider conversation and connect it to the big picture. Signature textures by Coby during the outro take the listener somewhere else entirely.

Alpha Maid's Is this is a queue was number 30 in The Wire's 2025 Top 50 Releases of the Year chart. The full chart appears in issue 503/504. Pick up a copy of the issue in the online shop. Subscribers can read the chart in the digital archive.

The 15 January edition of The Wire’s weekly radio show on Resonance FM and Resonance Extra featured music by Christina Kubisch, Klein, Magda Drozd and many more

Full tracklist

Camila Nebbia/Gonçalo Almeida/Sylvain Darrifourq
“19:45”
from Hypomaniac
(defkaz)

Christina Kubisch
“Gaming In Silence (2024)”
from TUNING
(Faitiche)

Agnes Haus
“Sacrifice”
from Inexorable Ascent
(Nite Hive)

Klein
“it is what it is in d minor”
from sleep with a cane
(Parkwuud Entertainment)

Magda Drozd
“Eclipse”
from Divided By Dusk
(Präsens Editionen)

Scanner
“Start Moment”
from Forces, Reactions, Deflections
(Quiet Details)

Seekersinternational
“Kali/Killa’ and ‘NeverMine”
from TheWhereBetweenYou&Me
(Bokeh Versions)

Los Thuthanaka
“Huayño “Phuju””
from Los Thuthanaka
(Bandcamp)

Nina Garcia
“Live excerpt from eavesdrop festival, 2024”
from Various, eavesdrop festival 2024
(Karlrecords)

Split Apex
“Peninsula”
from Thoughts In 3D
(ever/never)

Michaela Melián
“Nordwest Passage”
from music for a while
(a-Musik)

Adventures In Sound And Music broadcasts at 9pm every Thursday on Resonance 104.4FM and Resonance Extra. Explore past shows in our On Air archive.

In The Wire 503/504, Seymour Wright appraises the hardcore saxophony of French musician Jean-Luc Guionnet

Jean-Luc Guionnet
Per Sona
Empty Editions DL/LP
L’Épaisseur De L’Air Live
Potlatch CD/DL

French multi-instrumentalist, composer, philosopher and visual artist Jean-Luc Guionnet has been a globally influential figure for several generations of creative peers. He is also one of the great living saxophonists, with an alto voice that uniquely consolidates strands of the instrument’s sonic and conceptual history into something powerfully distinct, rigorous, instantly recognisable and future-fit.

In 2021, after 30 odd years of solo performance, he released his first full-length alto saxophone solo recording on Los Angeles label Thin Wrist. Recorded in a semi-open barn in 2018 in Brittany, L’Épaisseur De L’Air (The Thickness Of The Air) was concerned fundamentally with the texture, materiality and ideas of saxophone, sound and space. Here, four years on, are two more solo alto recordings. Though not officially released as a pair, they appeared almost simultaneously. One offers two live realisations of the L’Épaisseur De L’Air material on the French label Potlatch, the other private studio recordings made in Hong Kong and released via Empty Editions.

These sets consolidate Guionnet’s voice in documentary form, containing years of situated work. Here, it’s possible to hear his playing as the kernel/nexus of a sort of Francophone school of saxophone innovators that includes Daunik Lazro, Christine Abdelnour, Stéphanes Rives, Bertrand Denzler, Patrick Martins, Pierre Borel and Pierre-Antoine Badaroux. It is also possible to find traces of other alto techniques: the M-Base ways of Steve Coleman and Gary Thomas, the lyrical power of Arthur Blythe, the whimper-gnash of Anthony Braxton’s Composition 99G, Arthur Jones’s Scorpio.

A consistent ambiguity and variety of scale twists, inflates and crushes complex sonic details, dense knots, abrupt nothingnesses across the two discs. Both recordings document astonishingly visceral and cerebral instrument technique, into which musical/philosophical traditions are tied very tight: the saxophone stuff, plus for example study with Iannis Xenakis, workshops with Don Cherry, deep engagement with philosophy (a dialogue with tools in the ideas of Gilbert Simondon in particular feels at the tip of saxophone-homunculic fingers and tongue), mark-making and lines – are all in here, bound up with haptic ways of getting at, and beyond, the saxophone as technology, or back, via bagpipes and other ancient breathed-into, manually worked tools of transformation.

Dedicated to Miguel Garcia, L’Épaisseur De L’Air Live includes two longish in concert solos recorded in Montreuil, in the eastern suburbs of Paris – the first in summer 2024, the second in winter 2023. The alto saxophone fizzes, furry, flinty, furied, fuzzy, hard and soft, large and small sounds accruing and decaying in and out of phase with the force and stress Guionnet applies. The Parisian ghost fuel of the saxophone – from Adolphe Sax’s speculative patent to Lester Young’s memory palace (and absinthe) – are part of the air through which he forces his ideas, via the horn, into the ears of his listeners.

The longer first piece evolves episodically, in slabs, trickles and eruptions/implosions of ideas as sound that grow, decay and grow again as mouldy blooms, alto alliums of bulbous, pungent forces that sizzle and linger. The heavy, hot sonic reactions that begin the second shorter piece collapse into a long dusty tail of embers. The liveness is salient – we can hear the rooms, the other people there, making and listening, the world in this music.

Per Sona presents 11 exquisite studio solos recorded in Hong Kong, all of them short – between 90 seconds and seven minutes, almost miniature études. These are close, detailed recordings of close, detailed sounds: pied sounds that contain pockets and layers of different types of sonic activity, in different places in the saxophone, mouth and ear at once. Rippling sounds made up of multiple bits emerge out of simultaneous interactions and qualities of the saxophone qua machine. The first piece is a series of giant ascending blocks of complex sonic chunks; the second a cloud-cypselae, blown almost ney-like across reed/mouthpiece tip; the third a columella of growl about which the piece spirals. Sounds of skeleton-feathered lichens ripple in the final track’s nutty sonic butter – halfway in, a gargle ends with spat-breath of husk.

In accompanying notes, Guionnet writes, tellingly, of the saxophone, “It was invented; invent music for it in return; always remember that when it falls, its fall does not sound like a saxophone. If it happened to fall, it makes the muffled sound of a ductile metal sheet, or of a bad hardware shop; its body is not sonorous – in which it is a machine; virtually, see by playing it the three dimensions of the metamorphoses of the air column, under the influence of the action; an unstable regime once grasped, maintain it by going with the wave.” This gives a sense of the intellectual and physical stuff of the work at play here. “By whom sounds what?” he concludes, “Through what sounds who? Person/per-sonare or this mask which carries in my place a mask that does not belong to me… nor to it.” Per Sona is an amplifier, definer and representer of character, identity.

Utterly hardcore and grown up in its humble enquiry and challenge, this is essential 21st century saxophony.

This review appears in The Wire 503/504 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 an extract from his new book, co-authored with Kennedy Block, Josh MacPhee outlines the role of workers' songs and the making of records in supporting labour movements in the US

If producing a record is a tactic, and winning a strike is the goal, then what is the strategy? From studying these records, it’s clear that the hopes for them are sometimes singular, other times multiple, often overlapping, and almost always clearly understood and articulated by the workers and unions.The records more often than not speak for themselves when you listen to them, but as most are quite hard to find, or in languages many of us don’t speak, it’s worth trying to lay out some of the intentions for the vinyl here.

There are two dominant reasons these records are produced: first, to raise public awareness of a strike, and second, to raise money to support the strike (and the strikers, who are by definition out of work and not being paid) – this latter reason is particularly acute for the wildcat strikes, where workers are not getting any support from an official union strike fund. That said, there are plethora of other intentions you can find for these records: to document a struggle after the fact, ie, a “proof of existence”; to build capacity amongst the workers and their supporters – for example, learning how to work together, organising and accomplishing increasingly complex projects, etc; as an extension of this, to build confidence amongst workers by creating “permanent” documents of their struggle; to use as a tool to connect to other workers, often in different industries but facing similar macro economic pressures; and to reach audiences that might not read a pamphlet or a long-format political treatise, but are more than happy to pick up a record they might enjoy.

A handful of records even come out of the practice of militant research, developed by the Facing Reality group in Detroit in the 1940s and 50s, then lifted up and expanded on by autonomous Marxists in Italy in the 1960s. The idea is simple: rather than prioritising academic pursuits by outsiders, workers know their workplaces best, and can participate in the study of their own struggles, and learn from similar studies by workers in other struggles.

While the music and production of these records is surprisingly eclectic, there are some things most have in common. As we’ll see, if workers’ action produces a record, it is almost always a 7″ single, either because the strike committee doesn’t have the resources to produce something of a larger scope, or simply because most strikes don’t last long enough to collect material to fill a full LP. The length of a 7″ single is roughly a third of an LP, and its packaging half the size and a fraction of the cost, and thus demands fewer resources to produce. In the pop music market, many singles were released in blank white sleeves, or with “company” sleeves that advertised the record label rather than the specific release. You’ll find few of these here. Even if the format was small in stature, it was taken full advantage of. Almost all strike records came in picture sleeves, and many in gatefold sleeves – a double wide cover folded in half, giving the workers/union/solidarity committee twice the space to share information about the strike. In addition, it was not uncommon for the records to have additional information slotted into the sleeves: lyric sheets for sing-alongs, petitions to sign, even some oversized posters which could be hung up in apartments, or brought out to a picket line.

These documents are likely as illustrative of a particular struggle as any union newspaper or pamphlet, and sadly haven’t been given their due importance in research on worker organisation. That said, this publication is at best a cursory overview of the field, a road-map to where we might look and dig deeper in the future. I’m interested in the use of vinyl records as a form of agitprop – as can be exhaustively seen in my previously produced An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels. The effects of my fetish for vinyl shouldn’t be understated. Beginning in the late 1970s, and gaining serious steam by mid 1980s, the cassette became a much cheaper and more versatile tool for political organising.

If we had included cassettes and CDs here, the size of this book might have doubled, at least. Both formats are much easier to produce than vinyl, and much cheaper, especially in smaller runs. There are likely many, many homemade cassettes created by workers’ strike committees that weren’t distributed beyond the picket line. I’ve been able to find a half dozen without really spending much time looking. But what little research I’ve done has made it clear that a focus on cassettes and CDs is really another project altogether, and I stand by the decision to use vinyl as a curatorial tool here. Ideally someone else will pick up the thread and follow up with a deep dive into worker-produced cassettes and CDs. But for me, and in this book, the vinyl record functions as both a marker of financial investment and a commitment to mass distribution.

Co-editor Kennedy Block and I propose there are several ways to read this book. To look at any particular entry drops you into a specific strike, more than likely a fight that has been forgotten, at least by those who weren’t active participants. Like the records themselves, the entries are modest time capsules, historical markers of punctuated class struggle. But when taken together, they tell a larger story, one of an arc of global conflict, of the gains of workers in the 1960s and 70s, and the re-entrenchment of capital in the ’80s. We see fights for wages, shorter hours, and even worker ownership and control eclipsed by increasingly immiserated demands for factories not to shutter and pits not to close.

It’s a little brutal to listen to – in recorded real time – utopia slide into desperation, to see how neoliberalism stomped on the neck of hope for meaningful and fulfilling work, replacing it with a panicked need of workers to keep a roof over their heads. It is likely no coincidence that the tectonic shifts towards neoliberalism in workers’ perceptions of what their struggles could accomplish appear to run parallel to another big shift, this one sonic. The earliest records you’ll find in this book tend towards sounding like direct decendents of old left workers’ choruses with their martial songs and anthems (a couple even include a version of “l’Internationale”). Over the course of the 1970s we see a shift towards the inclusion of more pop idioms into the music, first in the form of folk, and then rock, reggae, and finally hiphop (or at least pop rap). While on the surface this may seem a natural progression, it exposes a much deeper and more complex process at work.

While the labour music of the 19th and early 20th century might not be the most exciting to our contemporary ears, it developed out of generations of working class organisation, both in the workplace but also the community. Songs such as “l’Internationale” and “The Red Flag” weren’t just sung on picket lines, but in union halls, at pubs, worker’s funerals, and solidarity marches. As there was little class mobility in the world, children would learn the songs from their parents, and in turn pass them down to their kids. So the shift towards pop music (primarily Anglophone pop) was not simply a stylistic one, but a shift in relationship to the songs themselves. Labour songs are a social form, to be performed and listened to in a community context. Pop music is a commodity, to be sold to individuals, who develop personal relationships to the music.

This is likely why some of the later records come off as strange, or even worse, completely corny. The records fail musically, as well as fail to give voice to any sense of a coherent working class. And this was one of the projects of neoliberalism, the bio-political replacement of any sense of collective working class identity with the atomised consciousness of individual consumers. We’re not labour historians, but hope something can be learned from the stories these records tell us.

The last 15 years have seen a huge upswing in militant labour organising in the United States, from the Republic Windows and Doors occupation in Chicago in 2008 to the huge gains made by domestic workers across the country (such as the rise of Domestic Workers United and their successful fight to pass a New York State Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2010), to the increasingly successful campaigns to organise workplaces like Starbucks (Starbucks Workers United) and Amazon (Amazon Labor Union, affiliated with the Teamsters). Music and audio documentation haven’t been a memorable part of these struggles so far, but in the social media-dominated attention economy we live in, it doesn’t take much to imagine how music could play a larger role in publicising worker action and encouraging broad support. But even if we set aside these larger promotional concerns for a moment, the records in this book exude the sheer joy of workers singing and marching together, fusing solidarity, and taking their lives into their own hands.

This is an edited extract from the introduction of Strike While the Needle Is Hot: A Discography of Workers' Revolt by Josh MacPhee & Kennedy Block, published by Common Notions Press.

You can read Dave Mandl’s review of the book in The Wire 503/504. 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.

To make sense of ongoing tech revolutions, a new generation of musicians is making music that metabolises electronic processes through analogue forms, argues Ryan Meehan

The progressive music scene turns to the future in a foul mood. It was detectable in the air last October, as the audience gathered for the first of the evening’s two sold out Autechre shows at Brooklyn Steel in north Williamsburg. Here, in the omphalos of the newly-minted Commie Corridor was a display of cultural force every bit as robust as the political one which had recently vaulted socialist Zohran Mamdani to the Democratic nomination (and, in short order, the mayoralty). So why, then, as the Rochdale duo took the stage in their preferred semi-darkness, was the atmosphere cut with an unmistakable current of dread? Perhaps it was the uneasy stagecraft of the Gaza truce, still fresh, or the unreconstructed decorum of post-pandemic concertgoers unable to handle their doses (and sometimes their bodily functions). Perhaps it was a suggestion hardwired into the music itself that, outside these walls, there was a vision of the future taking hold (remember the Artificial Intelligence series?) for which we weren’t entirely prepared.

Futurists though they remain, the future Autechre first portended is now largely history. Cloned sheep, Clippy the Microsoft assistant, and the like. Their vanguardist rhythms, swinging like sonic battering rams in 4-D, recede into the foundations of the world to come. Instead, as we attain the quarter century, artists are staking out a vital new position within the looming crisis of the digital as it develops in the here and now.

This tendency takes for granted the dynamic and space-bending possibilities of electronic composition, and accepts them not as grounds for abandoning the field, but as a sporting challenge to their own analogue rhythms. At a time when complex computers and their pitchmen lay claim to as much of communicative life as they can, this metabolic tendency in music emerges as one possible response – not theoretical, but organic; not doctrinaire, but instinctively oppositional. If the metabolic coheres as a specific answer, perhaps it’s to the question as to why the world has got so weird lately, and what of that weirdness plays back to us in our music.

Weirdness, of course, can be a source of delight. In 2025, few bands were as weirdly delightful onstage as Fievel Is Glauque, the jazz-pop ensemble shifting around the duo of American keyboardist Zach Philips and Belgian vocalist Ma Clément.

The rare progressive band whose precision feels spontaneous and vice versa, FIG’s baroque, fleetfooted compositions hit like bursts of sunshine in a funhouse mirror. Core to their sound is a downright algebraic approach to rhythm, massaged across the instrumentation generally, though special plaudits go to recurring bassist Logan Kane and many-handed drummer Gaspard Sicx.

Another provisional quality of metabolism: though its freneticism can seem to dialogue with digitality, the music itself is produced primarily by hand. This isn’t mainly a declaration of Luddism (though maybe it is also that) so much as a reclamation of terrain by enfleshed bodies in the production of what makes those bodies move. Nor is it an aesthetic of purity. Fievel’s last album, Rong Weicknes (2024), was recorded “live in triplicate”, its final tracks spliced together from overlapping takes à la Teo Macero. That the band commits to re-confecting this sound live (and live previews of new material place their upcoming album high among the most anticipated of 2026) emphasises a concern with human, rather than machine potential. With the serene bounce of a surrealist tour guide, Clément sings faster than you can think, her poetry the kind a computer could only spit out by mistake.

In metabolic songcraft, the glitch, long a point of fascination in digital aesthetics, migrates to a motif of human breakdown under the pressures of the mediated grid.

On the left, attention has turned increasingly to passages in Marx regarding capital’s potential to develop beyond the resource capacities of earth – what proponents of degrowth call the metabolic rift. In the last decade, art’s attempts to encompass climate change as a subject have found themselves stranded – often frustratingly so – in the passive, the local, and the melancholically topical. A crop of new artists on London’s AD 93 label has obvious recent antecedents – the fetid Zappa splatter of Geordie Greep’s projects, the high watermarks of Tom Skinner’s influence within The Smile – but at its most caustic, this pod-born sound suggests an aesthetic rift to measure up to the deep-tissue wrenching of the planetary one underway.

Brooklyn band YHWH Nailgun is the label’s latest rising star, porting their youthful current into sludgy contortions that bring to mind images of ceremonial emetics. And while their mixture of propulsive rhythms (courtesy of the reabsorbed kitsch of Sam Pickard’s rototoms) and effects-bent melodies recall Braxton-era Battles to this elder millennial ear, that band’s use of digital instruments had the flavour of liberation. The Nailgun, by contrast, sound penned in – all but strangled by the imminent cyborg dawn.

For my money, though, the most promising of this corridor of metabolists are Still House Plants, whose incantatory vocal lines and decaying guitar riffs tilt just off-axis over beats whose cracked precision would sound looped if you couldn’t see David Kennedy playing them up close and personal.

Irregular tempos and faltering structures seemed designed in advance to resist algorithmic training. As climate politics endures historic setbacks in the West, nascent popular outrage at the AI data centre boom’s resource intensity (alongside outcries against music’s unique role within the data regime) may provide a previously listless creative counterforce with a potent new metaphor for attack.

Some warriors in this emergent battle are happier than others. A founder of Darkside, one of metabolism’s most direct precursors, guitarist Dave Harrington applies the intricate compositional style he first refined beside Nicolas Jaar’s minimal post-dub atmospherics to his second band’s cheekily analogue arrangement.

Taper’s Choice styles itself as a supergroup (just about all of its elements of style are overtly over-styled) looking to supercharge the high-participation jam scene from its progressive fringe. Last year, the ensemble – which includes Real Estate bassist Alex Bleeker, Arc Iris keyboardist Zach Tenorio Miller, and Vampire Weekend drummer Chris Tomson – released their first proper studio album, after a compilation of songs (‘concrèted’, one imagines, in a method not dissimilar to Fievel’s) and a string of – what else? – live tapes. A mixture of balloon bounce and rapid-eye flutter, Prog Hat holds an affinity for the gentle dislocation of 70s jazz fusion. Is it a stretch to compare its supple geometry and bold colour to that other, utopian metabolism, of Tange and Kurokawa? Harrington conducts the marathon-like “Dave Test” with an eye for microstructure, all thrashed into shape by Tomson’s relentless stamina. If Taper’s swings, it’s at a rate your feet must first calculate to catch up to.

Which returns us to Autechre, and the ambiguous future of the human-technology interface, in which music is both figure and ground. A surging appetite for vanguardist rhythms perhaps only awaits the breaking of a figurative dam, the blowing of a metaphorical pipeline, that the metabolic turn can provide. For this generation, it may be that the pessimism of the intellect is a precondition for a renewal of the optimism of the will. Time and again, where democracy elevates a new political regime, its success can depend on the rise of a cultural one in tandem. Will metabolism play such a role? Predictions are a parlour game, but those that clamour for shibboleths of a “left with no future” will at the very least have to dance to the reality shifting beneath our feet, and contend with the eternal truth of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park – that life finds a way.

To accompany his report on Warm Winters Ltd in The Wire 503/504, Antonio Poscic explores a playlist of releases from the Bratislava based label

Befitting its name, Bratislava based label Warm Winters Ltd is dedicated to cosy and introspective music. Although the label’s releases occupy stylistically diverse forms – from lithe ambient and sunken drones to colourful experimental pop – they are all brought together by a characteristic tenderness that founder Adam Badí Donoval hopes can “help awaken a certain sensitivity in the listeners”.

Donoval established Warm Winters Ltd in 2019, while he was still living in London, as a successor to his previous tape labels, with the idea of running the financial and operational aspects in a “little bit more intentional” way. Donoval relocated to Bratislava soon after, but the ethos of the label has remained unchanged and its output consistent, bolstered by the camaraderie in the local scene and connections with kindred organisations like Mappa from southern Slovakia and Warsaw’s Mondoj.

Despite Warm Winters Ltd’s interest in championing Central and Eastern European artists as well as cultivating long-lasting relationships with musicians, its releases are refreshingly free of rote gestures or elements that, as Donoval says, would sound “exotic... how the Western world perceives Eastern Europe to be”. Instead, they speak a protean language that carries warmth.

Raft Of Trash
“Ozo’s Zone”
From Likeness On The Edge Of Town (2020)

Recorded back when we still associated ‘generative music’ with something other than AI slop, Andrew PM Hunt (aka Dialect) and JC Leisure’s second album as Raft Of Trash, Likeness On The Edge Of Town, collected MIDI data generated while playing the city building video game SimCity 3000 and assembled it into a fascinating abstract world. Here, environmentally conscious spoken word passages inspired by Fluxus artist Alison Knowles guide us through a soundscape of oblique yet exquisite synthesised sounds, field recordings and live guitar, revealing an alien, irresistible vista. Listen closely to the pair’s later solo releases, JC Leisure’s A Courtyard! (2023) and Hunt’s Atlas Of Green (2024), and you might still hear fragments of sounds and sci-fi atmospheres that escaped from “Ozo’s Zone”.

Asemix
“Rehearsal Earthquake”
From Asemix (2021)

The debut collaboration between US musicians Mari Maurice (aka more eaze) and Nick Zanca (aka Mister Lies) is built on continuously shifting expectations and silences stitched together by dreamlike electronics and abstract effects. Meanwhile, passing sensations of shared resonance and glee in the music are spiced up with fragments of worry and weariness. “Rehearsal Earthquake”, in particular, showcases how the pair deploy an arsenal of sound collage and electroacoustic techniques to achieve volatile moods, the noise of EBow-ed guitars quivering alongside wildly modulating frequencies. It’s like tuning in to an alien hits-only radio station.

Tomáš Niesner
“Pod Lipami”
From Bečvou (2022)

Tomáš Niesner’s Bečvou is named after the Czech river Bečva, which in September 2020 suffered a massive loss of wildlife following chemical leaks. Yet, the manifest melancholy that haunts the Czech sound artist and guitarist’s music is not stuck in pathos. Instead, it brims with lyrical agency. As on most cuts on the album, fingerpicked guitar towers over the sonic makeup of the fragile “Pod Lipami”. Yet, its presence here transcends that of a traditional lead instrument. For Niesner, the guitar is a centre of gravity around which he stratifies field recordings collected during a 100km journey along the river, modular synthesizer drones and electronic accents. As he shadows gentle melodies with the gurgle of streaming water and saturating textures, a sort of elusive psychogeography takes form, drawing us in.

Martyna Basta
“Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering”
From Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering (2023)

Opening the title track of Polish composer and musician Martyna Basta’s album Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering, a guitar that sounds like a piano articulates a soft phrase, shudders and disappears. The phrase repeats, disturbing the oily black silence like a prayer in an empty church. A fragmented, half-remembered conversation flocks to it hungrily, as a moth would to an open flame. The voices of a man and a child circle each other, trapped in a moment cursed to echo itself, while slushing and crackling effects deepen around them. The memory comes apart. The song ends.

HMOT featuring Adela Mede
“Qom”
From There Will Come Gentle Rain (2024)

On There Will Come Gentle Rain, Basel based musician and researcher Stas Shärifullá (alias HMOT) embodies the investigation of sonic traditions and their relationship with collective memory in original music of his own, refracting folklore through a contemporary lens. Slovak-Hungarian musician Adela Mede joins Shärifullá on the haunting “Qom”. Her lyrics, which “draw parallels between Hungarian and Turkic languages”, begin as a hum and grow into a compelling invocation whose presence fills the stage, pressed against a sparse background of breathy woodwinds and elastic twangs, at once mysterious and revealing.

Marta Forsberg
“Flowers”
From Archaeology Of Intimacy (2025)

Speaking about his friendship with Polish-Swedish composer Marta Forsberg, Donoval reveals how, “if the collaboration makes sense and if everyone has enjoyed it”, the label can often feel like a network that encourages artists to return. It helps that each of Forsberg’s five releases for Warm Winters Ltd has nourished its own distinctive sound, with this latest album expanding her delicate ambient minimalism and inquisitive compositions towards simpler yet increasingly luminous forms. “Flowers” provides a striking demonstration of Forsberg’s refined pop elegance, with burbling electronics, grumbling pads and a simple rising melody that play counterpoint to the wonder of her silky vocal lines: “Can you smell the sounds?”

Ani Zakareishvili
“Artificial me, artificial you, artificial us”
From Neither in the sky nor on the ground (2025)

With Neither in the sky nor on the ground, Tbilisi based DJ and producer Ani Zakareishvili evaporates her dancefloor sensibilities and mutedly melodic instincts (heard on 2022’s Fallin) into trembling, nebulous music. Originally envisioned as a theatrical live set for Georgia’s TKESHI Festival, the music is stripped down but never bare, filled with rhythmic shapes and synth loops that exist on the outskirts of unravelled (rather than just deconstructed) club music and industrialised, dubby ambient. One of the album’s highlights, “Artificial me, artificial you, artificial us”, is thrust into being by a sequence of subterranean detonations, then enveloped by ruffling textures and slow melodies as it gains composure and a steadier cadence – marching decisively into a post-apocalyptic future.

Read Antonio Poscic’s full Unlimited Editions report on Warm Winters Ltd in The Wire 503/504. Wire subscribers can also read the article online via the digital magazine library.

Far beyond novelty or experiment, 2025 was the year that crossover projects rejected genre labels for endless sonic possibilities, writes Stewart Smith in The Wire 503/504

From Chris Williams and Lester St Louis in the US, to Pat Thomas and XT in the UK, improvised music is plugging in, literally and figuratively, to electronic currents from the club to conservatory. Cross-genre experiments have been happening for decades, but this is something new, going beyond fusion or hybridity. We’re seeing musicians with knowledge of multiple idioms taking real risks by exploding hierarchies between genres, performing in different spaces and correcting imperialist narratives.

In January 2025, I was blown away by Ambrose Akinmusire’s Honey From A Winter Stone. I’d dug the trumpeter-composer’s 2018 album Origami Harvest, where his jazz ensemble played off Kool AD’s rhymes and Mivos Quartet’s strings, but this was on another level. Its constituent elements – Akinmusire’s exploratory trumpet, vocalist Kokayi’s freewheeling reflections on Black male identity, Sam Harris’s elegant piano, chiquitamagic’s synth colours and grooves, Justin Brown’s intricate drumming, Mivos’s new music textures – are fully integrated into a visionary whole.

Akinmusire’s masterpiece is part of a wider conversation. A key question for jazz artists engaging with hiphop is how to maintain the spontaneity of improvised music within the recursive structure of the beat. Yet as hiphop has got noisier and more psychedelic, the possibilities for improvisors have opened right up. Embracing this are WRENS, the quartet of Ryan Easter on trumpet and vocals, Elias Stemeseder on synths and una corda piano, Lester St Louis on cello and electronics, and Jason Nazary on drums and synths. Their album Half Of What You See moves freely from deconstructed rhythms and percolating funk to beatless atmospherics, as acoustic extended techniques meld seamlessly with woozy electronics. As on Nazary’s 2021 album Spring Collection, or his collaborations with Saint Abdullah, the line between live playing, processing and production is deliciously blurred.

St Louis is one half of a formidable partnership with trumpeter Chris Williams. Stark Phenomena, their debut as HxH, is a beautifully realised journey into post-rave electroacoustic music, combining the timbral exploration of free improvisation with luminous synths, humid reverb and grainy static. The pair also have production credits on Pink Siifu’s BLACK’!ANTIQUE, bringing the trippy haze of HxH to the beatless coda of “(8)”. Williams has contributed to several of the rapper’s projects, but his role goes way beyond that of guest jazzer to reflect the interdisciplinary practice of HxH, his solo release Odu: Vibration II, and the Brooklyn supergroup History Dog.

The latter unit’s bassist Luke Stewart is also a member of Irreversible Entanglements, who have been central to this international community. Moor Mother might be their most prominent member, but saxophonist/synth player Keir Neuringer dropped one of the year’s finest albums in The Burning Bright Light, a collaboration between his group Dromedaries and writer/artist/activist Alex Smith aka Alexoteric. Informed by cyber/solarpunk and Black queer culture, Smith brings an Auto-Tuned lyricism to wild cosmic jazz.

Moor Mother’s 2020 collaboration with billy woods was a key marker in the ongoing conversation between improvised music, underground hiphop, electronics and noise. She also worked with Austrian drummer-producer Lukas Koenig, appearing on his 2023 album 1 Above Minus Underground alongside Nappy Nina, MC dälek, Elvin Brandhi and Chris Pitsiokos. Moor Mother and dälek contributed to RYOK, by Koenig, Audrey Chen and Julien Desprez’s synapse-frying trio Mopcut.

Together with Peter Kutin, Koenig and Brandhi form PLF, whose Skreamerz splices mutant strains of trap, noise, punk and improvisation. Brandhi is part of an outward looking wing of UK experimentalists dissolving the barriers between improvisation, noise and electronic music. Brilliant pianist Pat Thomas is also an inspired electronic musician, from his ‘klangfarbenmelodie in the dancehall’ junglism of the 1990s, to his recent scatterArchive albums using IRCAM TimeStretch software. On Reality Is Not A Theory, his duo album with Mark Fell, he situates piano within his collaborator’s teeming percussive timbres, showing a masterful understanding of electroacoustic textures, from King Tubby to Stockhausen.

Thomas’s [Ahmed] bandmate Seymour Wright is also pushing things forward with projects, including XT, his electroacoustic duo with drummer Paul Abbott. On 2023’s Deorlaf X, they incorporated Chicago house into free improvisation, while 2024’s YESYESPEAKERSYES saw them collaborate with Kavain Wayne Space, aka RP Boo. Last year’s album with sound artist Anne Gillis moves away from club forms, yet it continues their interest in “potential” sounds. There’s deep respect for tradition, but that focus on sound, rather than genre, is what makes this new music so exciting. The possibilities are endless.

This essay appears in The Wire 503/504 along with many more critical reflections on 2025. To read them, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.

In The Wire 503/504, Xenia Benivolski writes that as the speed of events and information flows increases, drone based slowness offers another mode of perception

The prehistory of drone music begins with the recognition of sound as a temporal event. In ritual, chant and natural acoustics, drones mark ambience and continuity. Ancient instruments such as horns and bells produce extended vibrations that transform time into a perceptual field, and this stretching of temporal experience is as much social as musical. These instruments and others have proliferated into the rhythms of the human world. Each moment of sustain provides a window into what infinity might be, and in a sense, a base note to reality.

Sometimes this moment takes shape in literal ways: for me it’s taking hangover naps at La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House while seeking refuge from the scorching sun of Lower Manhattan. Or on a plane, sitting with your ear pressed against the window, listening to its engines, feeling like a flimsy little speck in a big loud universe. Almost always, a drone bumps against some sort of border between an inside and an outside that you have to mentally overcome in order to allow your mind to touch the humming current and fill in the blanks. Maryanne Amacher defined this by treating the listener’s perception as the compositional site, the “third ear”, where the active listener is an experimenter. You could say the same about Pauline Oliveros and many others of that generation who worked with extended improvisation and deep listening where the politics of sustained listening resist the fragmentation of sound and experience.

Information, true and false, is manufactured at neck-breaking speed. As one advert blends into another, a horrifying news story is blocked by a pop-up, and on top of it an online digital productivity ad. We ignore the noise, but it doesn’t disappear. It fades into the background with all the other noises, the ones we’ve already put away. Works that feature wind, children and rivers are all over my devices, in my ears, as if trying to reassemble the texture of physical reality as opposed to the frantic haptic continuum that haunts us.

Catherine Christer Hennix, Cosey Fanni Tutti and other composers who populate my playlist link tone to perception. Suddenly it seems that time doesn’t advance. It pools in certain scenarios, drains in others. So lately I’ve been gravitating towards artists and composers who sustain sound. Listening to the long notes in Sarah Davachi’s music brings a memory: I’m doing the dishes while looking out of the window in the spring. The eye follows a mundane scene while the mind syncs with the slow modulation of tone, and the distinction between environment and composition fades. In such moments, time seems to stretch to stillness.

A contemporary turn in music to a sort of slowness is audible in the works of Davachi, Lucy Railton, Catherine Lamb, Lawrence English, and Kali Malone and Drew McDowall’s recent Magnetism. The drone absorbs noise without cancelling it, integrating ambient sound, interference and nuance. Composition collapses into impossible chaos, then the chaos flattens into a note, perhaps a single drone: some form of reality.

In the mid-20th century, drones re-emerged as part of a broader response to industrial acceleration and the politics of perception. After the Second World War, sound artists and composers used duration to counter the compression that characterised mass communication and the automated society. The same continuous tone that evokes meditation has its evil twin in the endless hum of drones in Gaza, the mechanical resonance of generators in Beirut, and the punishing dial tone of tinnitus.

Modernity has introduced new forms of sustained sound. Jordan Tannahill’s novel The Listeners describes a mysterious hum that binds together a group of strangers who cannot identify its source. It’s difficult to identify the source of the hum, because every environment hums, so the phenomenon becomes a form of communion. Hydrofields, electrical lines and data servers that sustain daily life produce an uninterrupted haptic soundscape, an endless clang. To hear them is to hear an index of the present.

It’s been said that time slows down when you experience a life changing event; the moment is fractal, both compressed and suspended into infinity. Perhaps the base frequency of the world is modulating, and in the process, reshaping continuity itself.

This essay appears in The Wire 503/504 along with many more critical reflections on 2025. To read them, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.

Traditional instruments, folk cultures and mythic ideas of futurity offer slip roads exiting AI’s highway to a hollow future, argues Daryl Worthington in The Wire 503/504

“This system will take your ancestral traditions and twist ’em indigenous”, raps billy woods on “Make No Mistake” from Golliwog. Raising questions about where the boundaries of tradition are drawn, that line seems to get longer through repeat listens.

Time doesn’t move sequentially on Golliwog. The record opens with a back-spinning sample, swiftly followed by an incessant tick-tock. The tracks feel time-dilated, with warm soul, jazz and R&B instrumentation hitting disturbed beats as woods seemingly folds eras into each other. Across the album, deep histories of colonialism are meshed with their contemporary ramifications. Meanwhile, gruesome and supernatural imagery shares ground with 1990s horrorcore groups such as Geto Boys or Gravediggaz, but with woods the gap between allegory and reality is less clearly demarcated, reinforcing the sense that he is threading linkages forwards and back through history.

The nonlinear temporalities Golliwog inhabits resonate with other corners of underground music in 2025. Refugees Of The Symbolic Network by Egypt born, London based artist Cerpintxt takes works by Arabic poets – Palestinian Izz al-Din Manasirah and Assyrian Iraqi Sargon Boulus – and deconstructs them through effects and cut-up techniques. A small ensemble improvise through the distorted texts, all broadcast through a simulation of the reverb in the King’s Chamber of the Giza pyramid. Cerpintxt’s music evokes a garbled lament linking past to present against systems that exclude.

Where Cerpintxt and woods make era-spanning palimpsests mapping oppressive systems, others have found euphoric possibilities when the past leaks into the present. Many of the songs on Beirut based sextet SANAM’s Sametou Sawtan see vocalist Sandy Chamoun borrow texts, including two from 12th century Iranian poet and mathematician Omar Khayyam. They are sung over radiant music propelled by guitars, synths, buzuq and drums. Like woods and Cerpintxt, SANAM’s music sits far outside the recycled aesthetics of folk revivalism.

On the Chinabot album 〽 Japanese producer KASAI builds from the tradition of minyo. He writes songs that celebrate his day jobs – care worker and garbage collector – and criticise financial capitalism’s failings. Influenced by singeli and awa odori dance troupe Kokesaku, the album’s jubilantly off-kilter production reinforces KASAI’s handling of minyo as ongoing rather than timestamped.

All these artists’ works are more nuanced than simply updating old idioms or adding a folky veneer to new ones. They don’t separate traditional and contemporary, instead stressing that tradition doesn’t mean relics, but continuities where the present co-exists with the past.

Rasheedah Phillips’s 2025 book Dismantling The Master’s Clock dissects “western temporal norms which privilege progress and futurity”, arguing these were a tool of European colonialism. For Phillips, founder of the interdisciplinary practice Black Quantum Futurism with Camae Ayewa/Moor Mother, the arrow of time that can’t reverse course “locks us into the present”.

By exploring conceptions of space-time in African societies and quantum physics, Phillips shows that less rigid, nonlinear understandings of time exist, and can be emancipatory. Her focus is on Black communities and the specific oppression they face under current regimes. But Phillips offers a guide to think more broadly beyond linear history.

Binarising traditional and contemporary perpetuates a linear idea of time marching along a single line of progress. Contemporary music utilising older instruments or idioms isn’t new or unusual, and when it’s anachronistic it only reinforces the idea of a linear history. Cerpintxt, KASAI, SANAM and woods don’t deal in anachronisms but continuums – they signal the ongoing evolution of traditions as opposed to ruptures, a present evolving from the past rather than then and now as discreet entities.

Nonlinear timelines are reflected in Brìghde Chaimbeul’s Sunwise. Her music’s focus is the Highland small pipes. Close your eyes, and the blankets of luminous drones and repeating melodic phrases almost evoke pads and arpeggiators in synth music. Chaimbeul brings the lineage she’s working with into a wider dialogue, showing it’s more than a local anomaly. It’s both a precursor and contemporary to the stories of minimalism and drone.

Elsewhere, Sheffield based Emergence Collective deploy an array of early music instruments. Their minimalist, pattern based music is built from an improvisation practice that strives to be accessible by bypassing virtuosity and learnt repertoires. Their music exists within multiple traditions, but there’s a sense they’re striving to democratise the means of production. The result on Swimming In The Early Hours is a constantly evolving music that breaks the notion that traditional means unchanging.

Similarly forward-facing temporal distortions occur in Weston Olencki’s Broadsides. One of the most startling sees banjo fed through machine learning algorithms, extending bluegrass standards out into mesmerizing permutating patterns. As Olencki explained in The Wire 500, they’re trying to break the banjo free from the colonialist histories embedded in it “to see if there’s a futurism to this thing”.

At a moment when we’re facing the AI revolution, music that destabilises ideas of linear progress provides a useful counter. These artists are far from retreating from the present, but their work makes the future look a lot less straightforward. Instead of single lanes hurtling towards a fixed horizon they present roundabouts with multiple exits. At a time when progress points to AI slop, music that complicates forward motion is vital.

This essay appears in The Wire 503/504 along with many more critical reflections on 2025. To read them, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.

London’s extensive railway infrastructure is both a refuge for DIY nightlife and under threat from gentrification, writes Deborah Nash in The Wire 503/504

London can be as fluid as the River Thames in its restless movement of traffic and people, its soaring constructions and expanding demolitions. Beneath this charged surface, writes Laura Grace Ford in her zine collection Savage Messiah, “You can hear deserted places, feel the tendrils creeping out across the abandoned caverns, the derelict bunkers and broken terraces….” These spaces are reshaped by music, and among them you will find the tapped energy of the Victorian railway arch, of which there are many, both sides of the river.

Acting as a brake in the ceaseless ebb and flow of commerce, the archways on these transit routes come with a readymade darkness and genuinely shadowy ambience, sending out siren calls to the experimental and the underground, and they are still – more than 150 years after their fabrication – places where interesting things happen.

At Elephant & Castle station on Elephant Road, South East London, is a string of graffitied arches that are home to small businesses like TR Autos. Occupying arches four and five is Corsica Studios, founded by Amanda Moss and Adrian Jones, who moved the club here in 2002 after losing their premises in Corsica Street, North London, from which the venue draws its name. “This is the third arch I’ve worked in, in my 20 years of night club management,” Corsica venue manager Jamie Shearer tells me. “It feels underground, dingy, off the grid.” “It feels like you’re in a basement, even though you’re not in a basement,” adds Laura Krull, who has worked at the club for four years.

We are standing in the main studio, where the walls are pitch-black panelling and plasterboard; there’s a heavy duty pipe running through and a loaded lighting rig; behind me is a bar and a smaller dancefloor next door, with the green room upstairs. Shearer says that Jones and Moss would be amazed if they had known Corsica Studios would last 23 years in this location. The club has an impressive rollcall of acts absorbed into the fabric of its walls. “One time, Faust put a smoke bomb on the stage and the whole place had to be evacuated, mid-gig,” Shearer recalls. Faust, none the wiser, continued performing through the smoke. “The whole point is escapism,” concludes Shearer.

All this is set to change in March, when Corsica Studios closes to accommodate the surrounding developments already underway in Elephant & Castle. The strip of arches run as a distinctive, archaic seam through Elephant Road (now Elephant Central) but they are described by architectural firm Allies and Morrison, involved in the redevelopment of the area, as an “impermeable eastern perimeter to the site”. Their masterplan is to open up the “Piccadilly of the South” to a “colony of shops, restaurants and cafes” with some “affordable” housing included in the residential developments. The Corsica Studios website is at pains to shift perceptions away from assumptions of all-out commercial pressure. “Nothing lasts forever,” the statement begins, but it is difficult to be optimistic amid such blandification and identikit constructions, found everywhere. The anodyne is taking over. Where will the wildness go?

Not so far away, down a similar side street that straddles Loughborough Junction station, there is a long line of buddleia-crowned railway arches mostly given over to motor repairs, but also housing the performance venue Spanners. Intimate in scale, almost chapel-like, it is a shallow arch painted bright yellow on the outside that can pack in a crowd, with the concomitant ease of transport links that such locations provide, even as it retains a rough, independent, truly hidden quality other arches lack.

Many small venues were shaped by the rise of the superclubs of the previous century, sometimes becoming one themselves. The long established gay nightclub Heaven is one of these – it has been unfolding itself beneath Charing Cross railway station since 1979. Changing ownership has done little to dent the club’s loud, proud, rainbow-hued identity, and even the souvenir shop next to its archway entrance, selling London totes and tacky shades, seems just another extension of Heaven’s camp spirit. “That club was brilliant,” recalls Leigh Bowery’s collaborator and widow Nicola Rainbird, who frequented Heaven in the 1980s. “All those lasers – which are like all the sequins in the world!”

With its similarly impressive lighting rig playing over exposed brickwork and a 1000 capacity is The Steel Yard, a tidy polished set of three arches on a lane leading to the river, skirting Cannon Street railway bridge, itself built on the site of a tenth century steelyard in the City, London’s oldest quarter. “We’re open to everything,” says Charlie from the events team. “It’s a question of what can fill the space. To get the right sort of atmosphere, you really need 700 people.”

“Edginess, no-frills, chic industrial”: these words monetise the viaduct arch as a place to snack on counterculture, but they can also warp the setting, turning it into corporate event hires or tourism. The Leake Street graffiti tunnel beneath Waterloo station is a noisy palimpsest of layered words and images. Set in the arches and sharing the tunnel is The Vaults, an immersive theatre company. “We want talented artists from every vocation to… make stuff that is challenging, accessible and imaginative,” proclaims the venue’s website. “We are unparalleled, we are unexpected and we are under your feet.” But this venue-landlord’s decision to change the use of its tunnels in 2024, leading to the demise of the well-regarded Vault festival, London’s premier fringe theatre outlet, seems at odds with its mission statement. The graffiti overload, the loud, in your face edginess suddenly feels fake. It makes me want to run under a railway bridge and scream like Sally Bowles.

This essay appears in The Wire 503/504 along with many more critical reflections on 2025. To read them, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.

In The Wire 503/504, Lucy Thraves argues that luxury labels and conglomerates are keen to purchase some avant garde glory, but at a cost to experimental music and the ecosystem that supports it

In March 2025, the UK experimental music scene was pleasantly surprised when London venue Cafe Oto got a mention at the Oscars. Daniel Blumberg, who won an Oscar for the score for The Brutalist, used his acceptance speech to pay tribute to the East London venue and its community of “hard working, radical musicians, who’ve been making uncompromising music for many years” (the soundtrack features the likes of Seymour Wright, Evan Parker and Steve Noble). Six months later, the composer walked the runway for designer label Miu Miu, prompting fashion magazine A2Z to praise him for “[infusing] the runway with introspection and avant garde energy”.

Whatever avant garde energy is, high fashion wants it. The last few years have seen a growing number of designer brands working with experimental music or musicians. In 2022, radio platform NTS partnered with designer denim brand Diesel to launch TRACKS, a series of parties, events and discussions that would allow Diesel to harness NTS’s community-making infrastructure and leftfield musical nous. In April this year, Berlin label Pan, who have released the likes of Beatrice Dillon, Iggor Cavalera and Slikback, teamed up with Nike – a company recently valued at $31 billion – to launch a new trainer. Cellist Oliver Coates and former Wire cover star Arca scored a Dior show in 2022. Another former Wire cover star, Dean Blunt, soundtracked Burberry’s 2024 show.

Obviously fashion and pop music go hand in hand, enjoying a nearly symbiotic relationship as cultural expressions. But a burgeoning relationship between high fashion and experimental music is troubling, most obviously because the economic and social forces underpinning the two are so drastically imbalanced. What could multibillion dollar companies possibly want with precarious, awkward, typically anti-capitalist music cultures? Unless it’s… precisely those qualities.

High fashion understands that ‘avant garde energy’, which we presumably should understand to mean a combination of cool, authentic and novel, is born from an ethics of anti-commercialism and political integrity. In creative scenes more broadly, artists’ ability to protest, propose counter ideologies and offer ways of thinking and being outside of the dominant culture is always in tension with the economic demands of their self-reproduction, meaning that pockets of radical culture are increasingly hard won, and appear increasingly rare in their commitment to independence and integrity.

Naturally, a company that exists to sell wildly expensive shoes, coats or bags cannot truly claim such integrity for itself, but that doesn’t stop it from trying. As part of capitalism’s ever intensifying search for new ways to sell and people to sell to, the marketeers of luxury are attempting to metabolise dwindling scenes of real creativity in their pursuit of the niche and cutting edge – without contributing anything meaningful to the landscapes that give rise to these cultures in the first place.

Some might argue that commercial partnerships of any kind work by bestowing exposure on the scenes they exploit. But is this true? Shortly after the Oscars mention, a Cafe Oto staff member mentioned to a Wire colleague that the rush of exposure had done nothing for ticket sales: it’s not obvious that interest translates into material gains. Nor is it obvious that any resulting engagement would be useful. If the people buying the Pan x Nike trainer are turned on to the label’s output, will they come to that culture with an attitude that goes beyond acquiring a certain musical taste in the same way that you might acquire a new coat? This is not to denigrate the buyers themselves, but to criticise the ways that capitalism forces us to behave, turning us not into listeners, but into consumers.

By accepting these parasitic partnerships, radical cultures risk letting themselves get caught up in a logic of elitism: luxury taste for luxury clothes. And as the desire for luxury creeps further into the domain of ordinary life via social media campaigns and endorsements by supposedly relatable celebrities and influencers, it’s not hard to see how the avant garde could be co-opted to support the toxic ideology at the heart of high fashion: that an individual’s expensive taste and purchasing power makes them better than everyone else.

However it chooses to present itself, high fashion peddles commodity fetishism, while experimentalism peddles the opposite, producing nothing easily captured, understood, replicated or marketed. It relies on engaged and passionate people working together in spite of economic and social conditions that are often hostile to their own reproduction. So it may look and feel good when it gets to strut down the catwalk – but it should keep in mind what it stands to lose.

This essay appears in The Wire 503/504 along with many more critical reflections on 2025. To read them, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.

In his latest Secret History of Film Music column, Philip Brophy explores how the signifiers of Black musics in Swarm are fragmented to indicate its main character’s psychosis

What does it mean to compose music today? Is composed music a creative act or a procedural action? An original expression or a contextual response? A conceptual performance or an industrial gameplay? And if it is one or the other, how do we perceive it as positive or negative? I’m perennially excited by these notions – especially when a film score sends my head spinning into their interrogative possibilities. Michael Uzowuru’s score for the Prime mini-series Swarm (2023) spun my head considerably.

The premise is stark. Dre (Dominque Fishback) is a rabid fan of Ni’jah (a twisted simulacrum of Beyoncé and her Beyhive fanbase). She embarks on a killing spree, targeting people on social media who hate on Ni’jah. Graphically unsettling and tonally diffuse, Dre’s picaresque journey turns Dante’s Inferno upside down and pumps it full of Black aspirationalism to exploding point. Created by Donald Glover and Janine Nabers (whose previous series Atlanta is a meltdown of Samuel Beckett, Melvin Van Peebles and OutKast), Swarm pulls an even tighter focus on the sociocultural complexities of Black music, here pivoting from the hemmed-in machismo of trap and rap to the goddess hysteria of R&B and pop.

Ni’jah’s songs are sung and written by Kirby Lauryen, with selected co-writing and production spread between Glover and Uzowuru, among others. Childish Gambino touches are evident, and all tracks are skilled parodies of digital soul, gushing with stacked harmonies. “Something Like That” collapses digital simulations of vocal cooing with gospel-tinged organs and percussive thrumming a la Kate Bush’s ethnographic backings. Kirby’s AutoTuned lines layer female and male tones in a heady pansexual mix. “Agatha” harks back to seminal Timbaland productions for the late Aaliyah, awash in slurred breathiness and lo-fi Ngoni licks. “Big World” fuses microhouse and elegant sophistico vocals. The bouncy Vocoder jaunt of “Adventure” conjures a trappy limo party as remembered by college grads. “Hahaha” and “Sticky” are pumped with multi-genre crosswired stylistics, making both hard to characterise.

Scattered across the series’s seven episodes in disruptive edits and interrupted passages, these songs point to the magical breath of Ni’jah, who has the mystical power of a Black diva to excite her ‘swarm’ of fans. But unlike (for example) the soaring positivity of Hollywood’s flirtations with Black goddess music – from The Bodyguard (1992) to Glitter (2001) to Sparkle (2012) to Trap (2024) – Swarm posits Ni’jah’s songs as a type of ‘broken’ soul music. The polyglottic gumbo of ballads and anthems for Ni’jah do not shy away from how the spiritual Beyoncés and heartache Kanyes of the world produce music that is stylistically fractured, compositionally kaleidoscopic, digitally processed and authorially aggregate. ‘Broken’ soul describes equally this technological shift, its marketplace redefinition, and the psycho-therapeutic aspect of how fandom now links to these mystical figures with impossibly affective voices.

At the core of Swarm’s broken world is the psychotic character Dre. Dominique Fishback’s stellar performance (maddeningly numb and unpredictable) breaks the series’s narrative momentum continually, pushing the shared notion of ‘serial’ story and ‘serial’ killer into hitherto unexplored territory. Uzowuru’s score is a selective rearrangement and reconstitution of the sonic shards of Ni’jah’s songs. Sometimes they seem to be literal fragments from the songs, but mostly they are echoes of recognisably similar elements: single sounds from drum machines, single chords from digital keyboards, processed textures of clipped vocal utterances. An aural ouroboros is formed: the score comes from the songs which are studio-composed from the type of sonics of the score. This acousmatic mirage evokes the bond between Ni’jah and Dre – who in the first episode makes it clear: “Ni’jah knows what we’re thinking and she gives it a name.”

With this declaration, Dre is defending Ni’jah to the sleazy boyfriend of her tweenhood friend, Marissa, with whom she now shares an apartment. Dre’s announcement triggers an ungainly sound: a badly sampled vinyl scratch of an indiscernible source. This squawk is a sonicon for Dre’s cracked personality. Like Grand Mixer DXT’s trademark scratch of the Vocodered “fresh”, it is her call sign. Uzowuru uses it to forecast Dre’s loss of control and unmitigated rage; it will progressively increase in presence and density in the score as the story lurches into widening expanses of psychotic violence. (To my mind it also recalls the pitch-wheel bending of Major Lazer’s “Pon de Floor”, the basis of Beyoncé’s “Run The World (Girls)”.)

When Marissa decides to shift out of their apartment and live with her boyfriend, Dre’s world falls apart. The squawk sample increasingly and erratically haunts the soundtrack, variously merged with kalimbas, cellos, noise drones and symphonies of swarming bees. All of Uzowuru’s ‘cues’ are tied to Dre. Accordingly, they are weird sonic collages desperately trying to pass themselves off as ‘music’, just as Dre masks as sane, always hiding her murderous bent behind inscrutable logic and motives. In fact, each episode takes place in a different time in a different state, presenting their chapters as spatio-temporal ruptures in Dre’s life as she obsessively tracks Ni’jah’s tour schedule in the deluded belief that one day she and Ni’jah will be besties. Dre’s outward appearance, her living conditions, her employment situation all make her nearly unrecognisable in each episode. Uzowuru’s score placement is moulded by these ruptures.

In a radical move that these days seems far more commonplace in television than cinema, Swarm is a meta-textual labyrinth engineered less by plot and character and more by chance and psychosis. Squiggles, not arcs; lesions, not persons. Episode 6, “Fallin’ Through The Cracks”, is a sharp send up of long-running tabloid true crime shows like The First 48 and Snapped. It has no tonal connection with the series, and uses none of the actors, nor any of Uzowuru’s music. Episode 5, “Girl, Bye”, paints an unexpected and unsettling portrait of Dre’s childhood and her relationship to Marissa. A single cue by Uzowuru is sounded right near the end of the mostly silent episode. All the other episodes possess their own equilibrium of song tracks, music cues, and sono-musical collages. The viewer/auditor is refused any thematic musical flow to aid in riding the emotional tides and sociopathic waves of Dre.

The final episode, “Only God Makes Happy Endings”, devolves into the ecstatic, sensual world of Ni’jah’s music, shifting from her disembodied voice to her performative body, when Dre finally gets up close to her idol. Weirdly – magically, even – Uzowuru’s music becomes the world of Ni’jah as embodied within Dre’s schismatic and dissociative headspace. From awkward squawks of scratched audio to the glistening symphony of ‘devangelical’ music, Swarm’s soundtrack stitches together the titbits megastar divas disseminate to their swooning fans: ‘broken’ soul for Dre’s broken mind.

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.

The music industry's uptake of AI complicates the boundaries between listener, artist and music in troubling new ways, argues DeForrest Brown, Jr

Automating ourselves out of existence is trending.

Our habit of referring to music as an aesthetic object has guided a widespread shift in the way we experience a musician’s workflow as recorded audio. The conversation around – as opposed to resistance against – music streaming services largely focuses on the accessibility and fungibility of music that far exceeds the capacity of our collective attention spans. Without much headroom, sound circulates as editable waveforms in a loop that does not require interpretation or participation. This de-centering of the musician’s workflow enables large streaming catalogues to be animated by AI-enabled virtual instruments and protocols that subvert authorship – partially to the comfort of the listener, who is no longer burdened by the intentions or emotions of any given song or album’s author. In this sense, platforms such as Spotify, TikTok, and AI-generated music systems act as quasi-sovereign actors, shaping which cultural narratives circulate and which are excluded, functioning as vectors of soft power across global audiences.

The automation of music did not begin with artificial intelligence or streaming, but with a quiet social agreement that sound could be managed like inventory. In 1998, in the beginning pages of More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures In Sonic Fiction, Kodwo Eshun outlined a transatlantic logistics and distribution system of physical music and ephemeral culture. “As a US or Euro import, a test pressing, a white label DJ promo, a double pack, a triple pack or a 10", the single is the rare object that everyone wants, that most people never get to see,” he wrote. “The 12" is the hardback of music, the ltd-edn run of 2000 copies that sells out in three days, never to be seen again.” Eshun’s description of a pre-internet network of music circulating among DJs, journalists, and eventually the consumer, resembles that of book publications where reissues in different formats determine the overall availability of music in the public sphere.

Much thought has been put into unlocking the algorithmic function of Spotify’s ‘black box’ that begets both curated and assembly line-like ‘playlists’ that replaced, or for now, operate in parallel with weekly album releases. Much less thought has been put into why we create music within this specific age of post-internet, end-stage capitalism where music has been normalised into sono-semiotic databases.

In reality, sound is not measured in decibels or beats per minute, but is instead experienced in real time as an unfiltered acoustic phenomenon. Songwriting marshals sounds in a supposedly organised fashion that leads the mind along a linear path within a specific span of time. Within that time, a song could technically do or be anything within the limits of what has been recorded, mixed and mastered in the moments prior to reaching a listener’s ears. And yet, much music adheres to a standard of chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus among other logical variations.

Spending time with music and its surrounding mediasphere, I began to notice a pattern in the way music is being released and consumed: a quasi-reciprocal choreography between artists (creator) and audience (consumer). This customisable relationship of give-and-receive operates in an ambient commons that in many ways resembles and represents the tastes and imaginations of everyday society. Loops of attention and algorithmic recommendation function as a form of soft power, subtly dictating what is culturally legible, while the infrastructure of streaming itself – code, metadata, and interface design – acts as governance, shaping behaviour and influence beyond explicit human intervention.

In January 2023 an online publication titled “After the Creative Economy” by Yancey Strickler, co-founder of Metalabel and former CEO of Kickstarter, critiqued the revenue-focused ecosystem defining the “creative economy”, where attention online is monetised rather than cultivated. He reproached the way in which digital music distribution has been entirely geared around revenue with less focus on the process of creation. Digital music distribution, he argued, prioritises commodification over creation: “Everyone treated music as this infinite resource to be endlessly commoditised and sold, but nobody thought about the conditions of the musicians who made it, where new music came from, or how it was meant to be financed.” What we’ve seen of the creative economy has in many ways illustrated cultural dependence on corporate-controlled platforms: artists and audiences alike become enmeshed in systems whose governance is algorithmic and opaque, while the infrastructure of distribution itself posits a governing architecture that subtly choreographs participation, labour and value.

Imagining a music industry without people has been a recurring thought of mine since the emergence of vaporwave, a digital-native non-genre that metabolised nostalgia for late 1990s and early 2000s retail, pop and cyber culture. Vaporwave did not produce new music per se, but instead reimagined existing commercial audio production and consumption, accelerating them into sample packs of metamodernist aesthetics to vibe to. Pre-digital generations tend to be nostalgic for iconic, socially shared moments in music history, while post-digital generations desire playback as affirmation of music’s aesthetic potential for the future.

This future-oriented nostalgia has reshaped music distribution: ‘old music’ from pre-file sharing eras now outsells new music, signalling a potential post-internet scarcity of music that has not already been archived within the circulatory system of physical recording formats – or, further still, a scarcity of collective memory not indexed by platforms. For example, Oneohtrix Point Never’s Tranquilizer salvaged digitised sample CDs of 1990s commercial muzak, while the sibling duo Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton’s Los Thuthanaka infused self-released, unmastered CD-Rs with ancestral wisdom and ceremonial textures, actively resisting algorithmically curated flows rather than supplying them.

Instrumentalising artificial intelligence has become a nonspherical approach to culture production and distribution in the absence of object-permanence in an online marketplace. Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst have used their own online ecosystem of the Interdependence podcast as well as two major art exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery in London and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin as a way to organise and publicly build a ledger of the ever-changing landscape of AI specific technology and its effects on musical expression.

For more than a decade, the two have advocated for the use of laptops and other computerised instruments to be considered legitimate modes of creative cultural production while also using the podcast industry, art world and speculative economics to demonstrate the potential benefits of advanced technology and other vapourware in their prototype stages. “AI is a deceptive, over-abused term. Collective Intelligence (CI) is more useful,” Herndon suggested in a tweet later quoted by Jacobin: “It’s often just us (our labour/data), in aggregate, harnessed to produce value by a few, who maybe have an easier time acting with impunity because we are distracted by fairytales about sentient robots.” The article goes on to explore another observation of Herndon’s in which AI music is described as an evolution of audio samples that should be imagined as a “recording technology 2.0”.

Inside the digital audio workstation (DAW), the logic of a recording technology 2.0 intensifies. Suno, an emerging generative AI platform designed to create music from text prompts, entered a landmark partnership with Warner Music Group. This acquisition addressed prior copyright disputes while also establishing a framework for fully licensed AI music models similar to a previous deal WMG made with the personalised soundscape app Endel in 2019. A recording music 2.0 might allow users to describe genre, tempo, mood and instrumentation without real world acoustic resonance into fully realised tracks or stems based on legal intellectual property and behavioural metadata that can then be mixed, edited and exported in standard audio formats compatible with DAWs and DJ software for further processing and analysis.

The CDJ as a prosumer player device could potentially standardise workflow into a “prosumptive listening”, in which Suno and AlphaTheta facilitate a parallel domain of performance, where authorship dissolves into prompts, skill into compatibility, and listening into metrics. As of 18 December, Universal Music Group entered into a partnership with cloud-based music creation platform Splice, to offer prosumers AI-powered virtual instruments and workflows trained on UMG’s entire catalogue of over seven million recordings and compositions. With minimal human input, this potential experimentation with platform convergence places a new emphasis on how intellectual properties might be distributed and valued between creator and consumer, if at all.

Music has always been haunted by the tension between creation, distribution and consumption. From Kodwo Eshun’s rare vinyl to Spotify’s algorithmic playlists to AI generated tracks, the evolution of music reflects shifts in cultural and economic priorities. The question is not whether automation will replace human creativity, but how we choose to participate in a culture industry that increasingly blurs the lines between audience, creator and product.

You can read more critical reflections on the state of underground music in 2025 in The Wire 503/504. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.

From the mainstream to the margins, bands were once again in decline in 2025, writes Antonio Poscic

For several years, the supposed death of the band has been cropping up in state-of-the-nation style music discourse. The obvious culprit? Financial hurdles of the sort that even successful bands can no longer overcome. This autumn, Garbage vocalist Shirley Manson launched a diatribe against the unsustainable realities of touring. Meanwhile, UK post-punk four piece Dry Cleaning were forced to postpone their US concerts due to “increasingly hostile economic forces”.

Ignoring the rockist winds that circulate the topic alongside the alleged downfall of guitar music, the cultural decline that band-made music suffered in the mainstream is clear by looking at the 2025 streaming charts. Here, groups are few and far between, relegated to the lower tiers, while higher placed entries are either legacy acts (The Rolling Stones, Coldplay) or K-pop groups.

Around them is a sea of solo projects, across genres from hiphop, to electronic music, to bro country, for which musicians are often motivated to present as cultural icons and social media influencers. Going at it solo, it would seem, is both more profitable and better suited to social currents. However, blaming harsh economic environments alone can obscure the nuances of the situation.

In a 2012 letter announcing the dissolution of his Chicago Tentet, Peter Brötzmann lambasted “the everlasting critical economic situation, actually with no expectation for better times”, musing on how “the financial situation forms and builds sometimes the music”. He closes the announcement with a dejected rhetorical question: “Who can afford to travel with a quintet nowadays?” Surveying the landscape of experimental music 13 years after Brötzmann’s letter, the sobering answer is, not that many. For the 2025 edition of The Hague festival Rewire, one of experimental music’s flagship European festivals, only a fraction of the immense lineup was occupied by bands, even with the definition of the term stretched to its extremes. Further out, the pattern repeats at Utrecht’s Le Guess Who? and Kraków’s Unsound.

Meanwhile, outside the big names (eg Jazzfest Berlin), free jazz and improvisation focused events across Europe are forced to balance their rosters by relying on ad hoc groups. Even avant rock and more audacious metal festivals, such as Roadburn in Tilburg, whose bread and butter are bands, have begun to rely on solo projects.

But, in the same letter, Brötzmann pointed out an overlooked tendency working against experimental bands: the rote and patterns that settle in over time. “Hanging together for such a long time – with just a couple of small changes – automatically brings a lot of routine,” he writes, “for my taste it is better to stop on the peak and look around than gliding down in the mediocre fields of ‘nothing more to say’ bands.” Does the dissolution of the band prompt greater creativity among its ex-members?

If economic challenges brought the band down to its knees, technology gave it a hard kick. Home studio hardware and software, digital workstations and programming languages free artists from the power dynamics and creative restrictions characteristic of bands. Some of the essays in Routledge’s 2024 volume The Ontology Of Music Groups make the case that intra-group relationships can stifle innovation and creativity, and point out that social structures that emerge in a band are often patriarchal in nature, and eventually collapse under the prevailing influence of its most prominent members.

Bedroom pop and black metal led the way, showing the potential for one person, DIY projects to result in a myriad of stylistic permutations, while being conducive to unorthodox experiments and accessible to more marginalised people. Furthermore, the solo practitioner need not pay for prohibitively expensive rehearsal spaces, and much could be achieved even during Covid lockdowns, using the internet as a tool for dissemination. Comparing The Wire’s 2025 Releases of the Year chart with those from 2020, 2015 and 2010 shows the decline in the representation of bands in the latest lists, especially when excluding long-established groups like Stereolab, Tortoise and The Necks.

In theory, the current hyper-local music landscape, shaped by the financial and administrative difficulties associated with touring and encompassing everything from rap micro-scenes in various US cities to sound art communities in Eastern Europe, could present ideal conditions for the formation of bands. But local showcases for up and coming musicians that are open to outfits from the region and beyond, such as Zavod Zavod Za Eksperimentalni Zvuk’s Čuješ?! Drugačije in Zagreb, tend to feature very few.

Much of the music performed on the night of Čuješ?! Drugačije’s 2025 edition fits the ‘this could have been a band’ category – we hear vague avant, prog and post-rock forms meshed with abstract electronics – but the bill shows exclusively solo acts and duos, and is staged in a small and cosy art gallery, not a traditional concert venue. Between sets, the musicians connect and exchange ideas. You can almost sense a network of kindred projects, each of them with its own story, becoming a surrogate for the camaraderie and collectivism found in bands – without any of the compromises?

There is a hint of what a post-band world might look like in the still-emerging fad of cloud rock that, given the current rate of change, might already be over. Amorphous and difficult to define, this variant of alternative rock occupies a hazy dimension between shoegaze, dream pop, post-rock, hiphop and post-internet niches. Artists such as ML Buch, James K, ssaliva and Tom Boogizm’s Rat Heart belong to this particular music, definable through mood rather than style, gesturing broadly towards a rock aesthetic while expanding the vernacular beyond the traditional band.

Reflecting on the success that the likes of Geese and caroline have enjoyed throughout 2025 in their particular niches, it’s obvious that the demand for band music still exists. And if we recognise the millions of Spotify plays attracted by the AI slop of Velvet Sundown as a pilot project, then we can expect the industry to increasingly rely on technofeudalism’s latest force-fed solution for all problems, generative AI, to flood the supply side. In fact, the unscrupulous types found in the tech industry are already hard at work, drafting licensing agreements with the global music brands like Warner, Universal and Sony that would allow them to use generative AI to create all the band music they could ever want while bypassing all the annoying needs of human beings that the form entails.

The music business has never been particularly fair or caring towards artists, but the AI-fuelled divide feels deeper and harsher than ever before. In an optimistic scenario, this moment could mark a turning point, one in which musicians return to bands out of spite, repurposing the basic human connections that exist within a group into acts of revolt. Unmediated by technology, the band becomes a symbol of everything that AI isn’t: creative, messy and human.

You can read more critical reflections on the state of underground music in 2025 in The Wire 503/504. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.

DIY online radio stations allow humanity and personality to surface in a tide of soulless and reductive algorithmic playlists, argues Paul Rekret in The Wire 503/504

For all their horrors, the Covid years were oddly good for radio. With gigs shuttered and the usual circuits of nightlife abruptly choked off, artists and audiences moved online in search of somewhere to gather. Live sets were broadcast from bedrooms, performances surfaced from empty venues, local scenes tried to keep themselves going through the ether.

DIY online stations didn’t suddenly emerge during the pandemic. The 2010s had their benchmarks: Amsterdam’s Red Light Radio (now gone), London’s NTS (long since outgrown its Dalston cubbyhole), and New York’s The Lot (still recognisable from its early days). But around the lockdowns of 2020–21, dozens of small stations appeared or flourished and have carried on since, from Clyde Built Radio in Glasgow to Budapest’s Radio Lahmacun or Seoul Community Radio, forming a loose but persistent network through which underground music continues to circulate.

They survive through volunteer labour and improvised arrangements: intermittent broadcasts, borrowed rooms, a corner of a cafe or a market stall. The remit is whatever sits outside the cleansed margins of the dominant culture, “music misfits, amateurs, and seasoned DJs”, as Clyde Built Radio puts it. A minor infrastructure, but one in which local underground cultures quietly persist.

Meanwhile, music is drawn ever deeper into platform capitalism’s limitless digestive system, in which everything is processed into frictionless, mildly flavoured playlists; musical wallpaper, as one description has it, but with the walls closing in. Enough has been written about what this has meant for artists and listeners: the recursive shaping of taste, incomes collapsing, the sorting and harvesting of data through interfaces increasingly less like portals and more like chutes.

What these small stations offer isn’t only the presence of a human voice rather than an algorithmic proxy – “no playlists, no ads, just the people”, to borrow Bristol based Noods Radio’s phrasing. Again and again, producers and hosts describe the space itself as crucial: the low-level drift of people coming and going, an unexpected conversation with someone finishing a set, the idle time before another begins. In the context of ever more solitary, smooth and inward online music consumption, such spaces become an increasingly important wayward impulse, even if a fragile one, that keeps slipping out of the platform’s prescribed channels.

The boundary between mainstream and alternative cultures, however it’s understood, has thinned further as more of social life is subsumed into the circuits of a few monopolistic tech firms. Bandcamp’s sale to Epic Games in 2022, absorbed with barely a ripple, made this plain. Stations depend on the very machinery that might one day render them obsolete: social media’s opaque visibility regimes, cloud platforms whose terms shift without warning, digital archives whose survival hinges on conditions no one local can influence.

All of which places today’s DIY stations in a longer, bittersweet lineage: the recurring struggle between autonomous cultural practices and the forces that seek to regiment, rationalise and monetise them. The ham radio enthusiasts forced off the dial by regulators in the 1920s; the format-radio monocultures that smothered unaffiliated broadcasters in mid-century America; the stifling of freeform FM by the 1970s; the pirates that threaded across Europe, moving through whatever cracks regulators and the police had not yet sealed. The antagonists have changed, but the basic plot remains.

Economic survival, always precarious, has become still more so. Running costs accumulate, revenue rarely does. Many stations endure only through their attachment to other small institutions, cafes, bars, art spaces, themselves little more secure. EHFM is entwined with Ground Floor cafe in Edinburgh; Noods operates from Mickey Zoggs; Slack’s is woven into the Lubber Fiend venue in Newcastle. In the wider context of rising rents and dwindling jobs, none of this is guaranteed. Yet the sheer abundance of such stations, and the social worlds that gather around them, should give one pause. With so many alternatives already in existence, the idea of paying for yet another streaming subscription seems rather perverse.

This essay appears in The Wire 503/504 along with many more critical reflections on 2025. To read them, pick up a copy of the magazine in our online shop. Wire subscribers can also read the issue in our online magazine library.

The 18 December edition of The Wire’s weekly radio show on Resonance FM and Resonance Extra featured music from The Wire's Top 50 Releases of the Year, including Natural Information Society, DJ Haram and Valentina Magaletti & YPY

The Wire’s Releases of the Year chart for 2025 was compiled from the individual votes of the magazine’s staff and contributors – here are those votes in full

Yewande Adeniran
Dean Blunt & Elias Rønnenfelt tears on his rings and chains (World Music)
T5UMUT5UMU Phantom (Bandcamp)
Deftones private music (Reprise)
Dansa Flustra EP (LUCKYME)
Alpha Maid Is this a queue (AD 93)
Lila Tirando A Violeta Dream Of Snakes (Unguarded)
Pearson Sound Zoomies (Timedance)
georg-i Rebuild (Subglow)
ABADIR Kitbashing (SVBKVLT)
Slikback Attrition (Planet Mu)

Vanessa Ague
Amina Claudine Myers Solace Of The Mind (Red Hook)
Titanic Hagen (Unheard Of Hope)
Los Thuthanaka Los Thuthanaka (Self-released)
Water Damage Instruments (12XU)
Ellen Arkbro Nightclouds (Blank Forms)
Raven Chacon Voiceless Mass (New World)
Catherine Lamb x Ghost Ensemble interius/exterius (Greyfade)
Orcutt/Shelley/Miller Orcutt/Shelley/Miller (Silver Current)
Ellen Fullman & The Living Earth Show Elemental View (Room40)
Rafael Toral Traveling Light (Drag City)

Tayyab Amin
Dijon Baby (R&R/Warner)
Jim Legxacy Black British Music (XL)
Oklou choke enough (True Panther)
Panda Bear Sinister Grift (Domino)
Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali At The Feet Of The Beloved (Real World)
aya hexed! (Hyperdub)
Oren Ambarchi/Johan Berthling/Andreas Werliin Ghosted III (Drag City)
Ava Mendoza/gabby fluke-mogul/Carolina Pérez Mama Killa (Burning Ambulance)
Satoko Fujii This is It! Message (Libra)
Chuck Roth watergh0st songs (Palilalia)

Steve Barker
Bhajan Bhoy Summer In St Mary’s (Wormer Bros)
Various Elders Of The Begena: The Harp Of David In Ethiopia (Death Is Not The End)
Life Masks Ornaments & Amulets (105recs)
Ryuuta Takaki Jewels (Kitchen Label)
Pastor Chris Congregation West Virginia Snake Handler Revival: “They Shall Take Up Serpents” (Sublime Frequencies)
Valentina Magaletti & YPY Kansai Bruises (AD 93)
Terry Riley In C (60th Birthday Full Moon Celebration At Kiyomizu-Dera Temple) (Disk Sibasi)
William Basinski & Richard Chartier Aurora Terminalis (Line)
MadTeo Misto Atmospherico E Ad Azione Diretta (Unsure)
The Dwarfs Of East Agouza Sasquatch Landslide (Constellation)

Mike Barnes
Hedvig Mollestad Trio Bees In The Bonnet (Rune Grammofon)
Tim Hill Leviathan Whispers (Buried Treasure)
North Sea Radio Orchestra Special Powers (Believer’s Roast)
Cardiacs LSD (Alphabet Business Concern)
Lea Bertucci The Oracle (Cibachrome Editions)
Richard Dawson End Of The Middle (Weird World)
Kev Hopper XiX (Dimple Discs)
Sheldon Agwu Kintsugi (Sanctum)
Crayola Lectern Disasternoon (Onomatopoiea)
Near Jazz Experience Tritone (Dimple Discs)

Robert Barry
elijah jamal asani ,,, as long as i long to memorise your sky ,,, (AKP Recordings)
Bb Trickz 80’z (Sony Spain)
Stereolab Instant Holograms On Metal Film (Duophonic UHF Disks)
Eiko Ishibashi Antigone (Drag City)
PinkPantheress Fancy That (Warner)
Smerz Big City Life (Escho)
Rafael Toral Traveling Light (Drag City)
Gelli Haha Switcheroo (Innovative Leisure)
Giuseppe Ielasi & Jack Sheen The Vestiga (Black Truffle)
[Ahmed] [Sama'a] (Audition) (Otoroku)

Clive Bell
Bitchin Bajas Inland See (Drag City)
Nicolas Gombert & James Weeks GOMBERT (Another Timbre)
Philip Jeck rpm (Touch Tone)
Betamax Crumbs (Bandcamp)
Klinck Trio My Hair Is Everywhere (Viernulvier)
Katsuya Nonaka Connecting Iki (Ato Archives)
Kev Hopper XiX (Dimple Discs)
Pierre Bastien & Louis Laurain C(or)N(e)T (Rose Hill)
Lea Bertucci The Oracle (Cibachrome Editions)
Cosmic Ear Traces (We Jazz)

Xenia Benivolski
aya hexed! (Hyperdub)
Cosey Fanni Tutti 2t2 (Conspiracy International)
Rainy Miller Joseph, What Have You Done? (Fixed Abode)
CxBxT After (Constructive)
Nourished By Time The Passionate Ones (XL)
Eiko Ishibashi Antigone (Drag City)
Crystabel Efemena Riley Live At Ormside (Infant Tree)
MK Velsorf & Aase Nielsen Opening Night (Awe)
Lyra Pramuk Hymnal (7K!)
Lucy Railton Veil (Ideologic Organ)

Emily Bick
OvO Gemma (Artoffact)
Masma Dream World Please Come To Me (Valley Of Search)
Alpha Maid Is this a queue? (AD 93)
aya hexed! (Hyperdub)
Backxwash Only Dust Remains (Ugly Hag)
Crystabel Efemena Riley Live At Ormside (Infant Tree)
feeo Goodness (AD 93)
Meredith Monk Cellular Songs (ECM)
Pamela Z Simultaneous (Other Minds)
Ellen Fullman & The Living Earth Show Elemental View (Room40)

Claire Biddles
Backxwash Only Dust Remains (Ugly Hag)
Daniel Blumberg The Brutalist (OST) (Milan)
Lucrecia Dalt A Danger To Ourselves (Rvng Intl.)
Kelly Moran Don’t Trust Mirrors (Warp)
claire rousay a little death (Thrill Jockey)
Shabason/Krgovich/Tenniscoats Wao (Western Vinyl)
Alpha Maid Is this a queue (AD 93)
Joanne Robertson Blurrr (AD 93)
Jennifer Walton Daughters (Local Action)
feeo Goodness (AD 93)

DeForrest Brown Jr
Los Thuthanaka Los Thuthanaka (Self-released)
Autechre AE_2022 (Warp)
Mark Fell & Pat Thomas Reality Is Not A Theory (Black Truffle)
Whatever The Weather II (Ghostly International)
Kara-Lis Coverdale From Where You Came/A Series Of Actions In A
Sphere Of Forever/Changes In Air (Smalltown Supersound)
NZO Come Alive (DDS)
Yungwebster II (Sferic)
Rroxymore Juggling Duality (7K!)
xin APPX:XIN01 Wasted (Appendix.files)
Oli XL Lick the Lens – Pt 1 (Warp)

Raymond Cummings
Kevin Drumm Neither Here Nor There (VAAGNER)
Sam Prekop Open Close (Thrill Jockey)
Tortoise Touch (International Anthem)
Vanessa Rossetto Pictures Of The Warm South (Erstwhile)
Various Save The Waves: People For Public Media (PBS Benefit Compilation) (Bandcamp)
The Necks Disquiet (Northern Spy)
Dave Shuford & Pat Murano Sing And Play For The Guru (Daksina)
Primitive Isolation Tactics All Pressures Past (New Forces)
Organs Obsolete Void User (Bandcamp)
Clipse Let God Sort ’Em Out (Roc Nation)

Jon Dale
Fortunato Durutti Marinetti Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter (Quindi)
Ingrid Caven Heidschi Bumbeidschi, 16 Moments De Ma Vie (Tricatel)
Engelhardt/Seef/Davis abceefd (Haaki)
HiTech HONEYPAQQ Vol 1 (Loma Vista)
Stereolab Instant Holograms On Metal Film (Duophonic UHF Disks)
U.e. Hometown Girl (28912)
Juana Molina Doga (Sonamos)

Dickon Edwards
Kae Tempest Self Titled (Island)
Sparks Mad! (Transgressive)
Mozart Estate Tower Block In A Jam Jar (West Midlands)
Lambrini Girls Who Let The Dogs Out (City Slang)
Dale Cornish Altruism (The Death Of Rave)
aya hexed! (Hyperdub)
John Francis Quest For Fame – Gone Mad (Intense)
Column258 Interloper: The Workshop Sessions Vol 1 (Property Of The Lost)
Peggy Seeger Teleology (Red Grape)
Edwyn Collins Nation Shall Speak Until Nation (AED)

Phil England
Anna Högberg Attack! Ensamseglaren (Fönstret)
Mark Stewart The Fateful Symmetry (Mute)
Damon Locks List Of Demands (International Anthem)
Quade The Foel Tower (AD 93)
Sopa Boba That Moment (Sub Rosa)
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy featuring John Anderson The Purple Bird (Domino)
Black Eyes Hostile Design (Dischord)
Public Enemy Black Sky Over The Projects: Apartment 2025 (Bandcamp)
Maurice Louca Barĩy (Fera) برٌِي (Simsara)
Ambrose Akinmusire Honey From A Winter Stone (Nonesuch)
Tom Skinner Kaleidoscope Visions (Brownswood/International Anthem)

Misha Farrant
aya hexed! (Hyperdub)
OHYUNG You Are Always On My Mind (Phantom Limb)
Everything is Psychedelic The Beautiful Malaise (Everything is Perfect/Live From The Clinic)
S280F (Bandcamp)
Moesha 13 Jazz Club (Hakuna Kualala)
Girlpusher gatekeep, gaslight, girlpusher (Bandcamp)
Kilbourne If Not To Give A Fantasy (Hammerhead)
Abdullah Miniawy Peacock Dreams أَحْلَامُ الطَّاوُوسِ (PPL Songs/Aghani El Khalq أغاني الخلق)
Biollante J’Espère que tu danseras quelque part (Redux) (Atypeek)
M.I.C Dr Yakub’s Laboratory (AP Life)

Tim Fish
billy woods Golliwog (Backwoodz Studioz)
Open Mike Eagle Neighborhood Gods Unlimited (Auto Reverse)
Doseone & Steel Tipped Dove All Portrait, No Chorus (Backwoodz Studioz)
DJ Haram Beside Myself (Hyperdub)
ShrapKnel & Ohbliv Armature (Fused Arrow)
Little Simz Lotus (AWAL)
Baxter Dury Allbarone (Heavenly)
klwn cat & Mourning Run Smilodon (Pros N Cons)
andrew Warm Weapons In Easy Reach (Fused Arrow)
Fatboi Sharif & Driveby Let Me Out (Deathbomb Arc)

Joe Francis
Oklou choke enough (True Panther Sounds)
XEXA Kissom (Principe)
DJ Haram Beside Myself (Hyperdub)
Los Thuthanaka Los Thuthanaka (Self-released)
James K Friend (AD 93)
Blacksea Não Maya Despertar (Principe)
Blawan SickElixir (XL)
Slikback Attrition (Planet Mu)
Nick Leon A Tropical Entropy (TraTraTrax)
Le Diouck Grace Joke (PAN)

Phil Freeman
Isaiah Collier/William Parker/William Hooker The Ancients (Eremite)
Castrator Coronation Of The Grotesque (Dark Descent)
Neptunian Maximalism Le Sacre Du Soleil Invaincu (I, Voidhanger)
Masma Dream World Please Come To Me (Valley Of Search)
James Brandon Lewis Quartet Abstraction Is Deliverance (Intakt)
Ensemble Nist-Nah Spilla (Black Truffle)
Kamasi Washington Lazarus (Milan)
Matthew Shipp The Cosmic Piano (Cantaloupe Music)
Ancient Death Ego Dissolution (Profound Lore)
Abhorrent Expanse Enter The Misanthropocene (Amalgam)

Noel Gardner
Sublux Disorder In The Machinery (Disforia)
Lavinia Blackwall The Making (The Barne Society)
The Tubs Cotton Crown (Trouble In Mind)
Traidora Una Mujer Trans Sin País (La Vida Es Un Mus)
The Necks Disquiet (Northern Spy)
Sami Galbi Ylh Bye Bye (Bongo Joe)
Sally Potter Anatomy (Bella Union)
Faten Kanaan Diary Of A Candle (Fire)
Haram Why Does Paradise Begin In Hell (Toxic State)
Sopraterra Seven Dances To Embrace The Hollow (Präsens Editionen/La Becque Editions)

Daniel Glassman
Slikback Attrition (Planet Mu)
Los Thuthanaka Los Thuthanaka (Self-released)
billy woods Golliwog (Backwoodz Studioz)
Oren Ambarchi/Johan Berthling/Andreas Werliin Ghosted III (Drag City)
Eliana Glass E (Shelter Press)
Rafael Toral Traveling Light (Drag City)
Valentina Magaletti & YPY Kansai Bruises (AD 93)
Kara-Lis Coverdale A Series Of Actions In A Sphere Of Forever (Smalltown Supersound)
Nourished By Time The Passionate Ones (XL)
Makaya McCraven Off The Record (International Anthem)

Francis Gooding
Cerys Hafana Angel (tak:til)
Mulatu Astatke Mulatu Plays Mulatu (Strut)
billy woods Golliwog (Backwoodz)
Brighde Chaimbeul Sunwise (Glitterbeat)
Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force Khadim (Ndagga)
Dr Madala Kunene & Sibusile Xaba KwaNtu (New Soil)
Jay Electronica A Written Testimony: Leaflets (Roc Nation)
Natural Information Society Perseverance Flow (Eremite)
Various Tsapiky! Modern Music From Southwest Madagascar (Sublime Frequencies)
Roc Marciano & DJ Premier The Coldest Profession (TTT)

Kurt Gottschalk
Anna Thorvaldsdottir Ubique (Sono Luminus)
Wet Ink Ensemble Action, Choice, Thought (Carrier)
Henry Threadgill Listen Ship (Pi Recordings)
Raed Yassin Phantom Orchestra (Morphine)
Mike Cooper When A Screaming Comes Across The Sky (Room40)
clipping Dead Channel Sky (Sub Pop)
Public Enemy Black Sky Over The Projects: Apartment 2025 (MVD)
The New Eves The New Eve Is Rising (Transgressive)
Damon Locks List Of Demands (International Anthem)
Lonny Holley Tonky (Jagjaguwar)

Louise Gray
Éliane Radigue/Rhodri Davies Asymptote Versatile (1963-64) (Amgen)
Beatrice Dillon Seven Reorganisations (HI)
Annea Lockwood On Fractured Ground/Skin Resonance (Black Truffle)
Diamanda Galás De-Formation: Second Piano Variations (Intravenal Sound Operations)
Blixa Bargeld & Nikko Weidemann Blixa Bargeld Sings David Bowie (Bandcamp)
Lucy Railton Blue Veil (Ideologic Organ)
Mari Boine Alva (Norse)
Ailie Ormston Frames That Lean, Pictures That Roam (Akashic)
Cosey Fanni Tutti 2t2 (Conspiracy International)
The Great Learning Orchestra Selected Recordings From Grapefruit By Yoko Ono (Karl)

George Grella
Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble Let The Spirit Out, Live At “Mu” London (Spiritmuse)
Sophie Dunér & Steve Beck Stockhausen Tierkreis (Urlicht Audiovisual)
Ambrose Akinmusire Honey From A Winter Stone (Nonesuch)
The Necks Disquiet (Northern Spy)
Daan Vandewalle Frederic Rzewski: The Road (Passacaille)
Emilio Galante-Tonino Miano Totemgani (Self-released)
Boreal Path Boreal Covenant (Self-released)
Circuit des Yeux Halo On The Inside (Matador)
Bill Brennan & Andy McNeill Dreaming In Gamelan (Self-released)
James McVinnie Dreamcatcher (Pentatone)

James Hadfield
caroline caroline 2 (Rough Trade)
Eiko Ishibashi Antigone (Drag City)
Vanessa Rossetto Pictures Of The Warm South (Erstwhile)
Konrad Sprenger Set (Black Truffle)
Cosmic Ear TRACES (We Jazz)
Miłosz Kędra their internal diapasons (Pointless Geometry)
John Also Bennett Στoν Eλaιώνa/Ston Elaióna (Shelter Press)
KAKUHAN & Adam Golebiewski Repercussions (Unsound)
Robert Turman A Day In The Life (Hanson)
Zosha Warpeha & Mariel Terán Orbweaver (Outside Time)

Andy Hamilton
Sylvie Courvoisier & Wadada Leo Smith Angel Falls (Intakt)
Jeong Lim Yang Synchronicity (Sunnyside)
Hugues Dufourt L'Origine Du Monde (Metier)
Ches Smith Clone Row (Otherly Love)
Raven Chacon Voiceless Mass (New World)
Kjetil Mulelid Trio And Now (Grappa)
The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters (Corbett vs Dempsey)
Tuomo & Markus, Verneri Pohjola Music For Roads (Grandpop)
Luigi Nono & Omaggio A Luigi Nono (Mode)
Wadada Leo Smith & Vijay Iyer Defiant Life (ECM)

Tony Herrington
petals & rachel kay we dropped the sky ^ while you were sleeping (Bandcamp)
Elaine Mitchener/petals/Neil Charles Elaine Mitchener/petals/Neil Charles (GRAIN)
Audrey Chen/Philipp Eden/Joaquin Ortega Live In Zagreb (scatterArchive)
Larry Stabbins & Mark Sanders Cup & Ring (Discus)
Pat Thomas Sufi Woman (scatterArchive)
Bios Contrast & Nilotpal Das SSAC42 (Infinite Machine)
SAROST Aurora (Jazz In Britain/Jazz Now)
Roscoe Mitchell One Head Four People (Hive Mind)
Rex Casswell Blood From A Stone (scatterArchive)
Paul Dunmall Away With Troubles And Anxieties! (Discus)

Miloš Hroch
Jules Reidy Ghost/Spirit (Thrill Jockey)
Nina Garcia Bye Bye Bird (Ideologic Organ)
Gnäw II (Stoned To Death)
Black Eyes Hostile Design (Dischord)
Los Thuthanaka Los Thuthanaka (Self-released)
Cerys Hafana Angel (tak:til)
Frederikke Hoffmeier (Puce Mary) The Girl With The Needle OST (OONA)
caroline caroline 2 (Rough Trade)
DJ Haram Beside Myself (Hyperdub)
Sofie Birch & Antonina Nowacka Hiareth (Unsound)

Jo Hutton
Maggie Nicols & Geoff Eales Beautiful Love (33 Jazz)
Mari Boine Alva (Norse)
aya hexed! (Hyperdub)
Lucy Railton Blue Veil (Ideologic Organ)
Elaine Mitchener & Theodora Laird Duo (GRAIN)
John Butcher & Angharad Davies Two Seasons (Weight Of Wax)
Lucrecia Dalt A Danger To Ourselves (RVNG Intl)
Nurru Wäna Hand To Earth (Room40)
Charlemagne Palestine & Seppe Gebruers Beyondddddd The Notessssss (Konnekt)
Jacob Kirkegaard Snowblind (The Helen Scarsdale Agency)

Joshua Minsoo Kim
Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force Khadim (Ndagga)
Oklou choke enough (True Panther Sounds)
Los Thuthanaka Los Thuthanaka (Self-released)
Vanessa Rossetto Pictures Of The Warm South (Erstwhile)
Sean McCann The Leopard (Recital)
Sun Yizhou Missing (Sub Jam)
caroline caroline 2 (Rough Trade)
Tara Cunningham Almost – Not Exactly (Nonclassical)
Eliana Glass E (Shelter Press)
Kory Reeder & Apartment House Homestead (Another Timbre)

Biba Kopf
Noor Zehra Kazim The Sound Of Sagar Veena (Old Heaven Books)
Pat Thomas The Bliss Of Bliss (Konnekt)
Sophie Agnel & John Butcher RARE (Les Disques VICTO)
Sylvie Courvoisier & Wadada Leo Smith Angel Falls (Intakt)
IZ Memory (Old Heaven Books)
Ikuro Takahashi far from songs, to the place where I can't even remember (UFO CREAtions)
Raphael Rogiński & Ružičnjak Tajni Bura (Instant Classic)
Neil Charles Dark Days (Jazz In Britain)
Tim Hodgkinson & Atsuko Kamura Haiku In The Wide World (ReR Megacorp)
Sir Richard Bishop Hillbilly Ragas(Drag City)

Steph Kretowitcz
Good Sad Happy Bad All Kinds Of Days (Textile)
Great Area Good Coding (Relaxin)
J Tripp HYLIC (Sagome)
Los Thuthanaka Los Thuthanaka (Self-released)
Vanligt Folk Dischorealism (Ideal)
Joanne Robertson Blurrr (AD 93)
Helen Island Silence Is Priceless (Knekelhuis)
Dale Cornish Altruism (The Death Of Rave)
Hesaitix Noctian Airgap (PAN)
Smerz Big City Life (Escho)

Anla Li
PRAED Orchestra! The Dictionary Of Lost Meanings (Discrepant)
Chicago Underground Duo Hyperglyph (International Anthem)
Rivet aka Grovskopa Peck Glamour (Editions Mego)
Oren Ambarchi/Johan Berthling/Andreas Werliin Ghosted III (Drag City)
Blawan SickElixir (XL)
Polygonia Dream Horizons (Dekmantel)
Iva Bittová Songs Of Tomorrow (Old Heaven Books)
Masaaki Takano Shizukutachi (Art Into Life)
aya hexed! (Hyperdub)
Shropshire Number Stations Recordings Of Covert Shortwave Radio Stations (Shropshire & Mid-Wales) (Death Is Not The End)

Dave Mandl
Stereolab Instant Holograms On Metal Film (Duophonic UHF Disks)
Mary Halvorson About Ghosts (Nonesuch)
Fievel Is Glauque Rong Weicknes (Fat Possum)
Ches Smith Clone Row (Otherly Love)
Viv Corringham Soundwalkscapes (Volume 2) (Flaming Pines)
Pierre Bastien & Lous Laurain C(or)N(e)T (Rose Hill)
Jeffrey Alexander & The Heavy Lidders Synchronous Orbit (Feeding Tube)
Melvin Gibbs Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2 (Hausu Mountain)
Soft Ffog Focus (Is It Jazz?)
Rob Mazurek & Exploding Star Orchestra Live At The Adler Planetarium (International Anthem)

Peter Margasak
Natural Information Society Perserverance Flow (Eremite)
Anna Högberg Attack! Ensamseglaren (Fönstret)
Chiyoko Szlavnics Memory Spaces (Neu)
Jeong Lim Yang Synchronicity (Sunnyside)
Evan Parker & Bill Nace Branches (Otoroku/Open Mouth)
The Necks Disquiet (Northern Spy)
Ensemble Nist-Nah Spilla (Black Truffle)
Richard Dawson End Of The Middle (Weird World)
Quinie Forefow, Mind Me (Upset The Rhythm)
Maurice Louca Barĩy (Fera) برٌِي (Simsara)

Ryan Meehan
Cory Hanson I Love People (Drag City)
Water From Your Eyes It’s A Beautiful Place (Matador)
Florry Sounds Like… (Dear Life)
Andy Boay You Took That Walk For The Two Of Us (Does Are)
Horsegirl Phonetics On & On (Matador)
The Tubs Cotton Crown (Trouble In Mind)
Cate Le Bon Michaelangelo Dying (Mexican Summer)
Ex Void In Love Again (Tapete)
Natural Information Society & Bitchin Bajas Totality (Drag City)
Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band New Threats For The Soul (Tough Love/Sophomore Lounge)

Bill Meyer
Damon Locks List Of Demands (International Anthem)
Natural Information Society & Bitchin Bajas Totality (Drag City)
The Ex If Your Mirror Breaks (Ex)
C Joynes & Mike Gangloff Tom Winter, Tom Spring (VHF)
Sophie Agnel Song (Relative Pitch)
[Ahmed] [Sama’a] (Audition) (Otoroku)
DŽukljev/Weber/Griener Industriesalon (Trouble In The East)
Michael Hurley Broken Homes And Gardens (No Quarter)
Peter Brötzmann/Jason Adasiewicz/Steve Noble/John Edwards The Quartet (Otoroku)
Isaiah Collier/William Parker/William Hooker The Ancients (Eremite)

JR Moores
Richard Dawson End Of The Middle (Weird World)
Kinski Stumbledown Terrace (Comedy Minus One)
Mclusky The World Is Still Here And So Are We (Ipecac)
Melvins Thunderball (Ipecac)
Tortoise Touch (International Anthem)
Hedvig Mollestad Trio Bees In The Bonnet (Rune Grammofon)
Backxwash Only Dust Remains (Ugly Hag)
Sumac & Moor Mother The Film (Thrill Jockey)
Mary Halvorson About Ghosts (Nonesuch)
Kuunatic Wheels Of Ömon (Glitterbeat)

Joe Muggs
Sherelle With A Vengeance (Method 808)
The Bug vs Ghost Dubs Implosion (Pressure)
DJ Haram Beside Myself (Hyperdub)
Lila Tirando A Violeta Dream Of Snakes (Unguarded)
Tony Njoku ALL OUR KNIVES ARE ALWAYS SHARP (Studio Njoku)
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith GUSH (Nettwerk)
Black Sites R4 (Tresor)
Wevie Stonder Sure Beats Living (Skam)
Surgeon Shell-Wave (Tresor)
rRoxymore Juggling Dualities (!K7)

Daniel Neofetou
YT OI! (Self-released)
Jung An Tagen Revenge Of The Speaker People (Editions Mego)
Mariam Rezaei Fractured (Heat Crimes)
Rada XO (Self-released)
Jim Legxacy Black British Music (XL Recordings)
Two Weeks Showing Cause (No Rent)
Lise Barkas & Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy Choisir D'épaule (Hideous Replica)
DJ Scotch Egg Scotch Sambal (YES NO WAVE MUSIC)
Kieran Daly My Own Private “Synthesis By Finite Juxtaposed Elements” (Madacy Jazz)
Moses Brown Stone Upon Stone (Post Present Medium)

Louis Pattison
Ben LaMar Gay Yowsers (International Anthem)
Black Eyes Hostile Design (Dischord)
Elkotsh rhlt jdi (Heat Crimes)
Tortoise Touch (International Anthem)
Kim Hiorthoy Ghost Note (Blickwinkel)
Jerskin Fendrix Once Upon A Time... In Shropshire (Self-released)
Abhorrent Expanse Enter The Misanthropocene (Amalgam)
Blod Den Oändliga Historien (Discreet)
Daniel Bachman Moving Through Light (Self-released)
These New Puritans Crooked Wing (Domino)

Olena Pohonchenkova
Ethel Cain Perverts/Willoughby Tucker, I Will Always Love You (Daughters Of Cain)
John Glacier Like A Ribbon (Young)
Purelink Faith (Peak Oil)
Smerz Big City Life (Escho)
Erika de Casier Lifetime (Independent Jeep Music)
Mythologen Eurovision (YEAR001)
Romance Love Is Colder Than Death (Ecstatic)
Heinali & Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko Гільдеґарда (Unsound)
The Necks Disquiet (Northern Spy)

Antonio Poscic
Blawan SickElixir (Ternesc/XL)
Nina Garcia Bye Bye Bird (Ideologic Organ)
aya hexed! (Hyperdub)
Han-earl Park/Lara Jones/Pat Thomas Juno 3: Proxemics (Buster And Friends)
Fred Moten & Brandon López Revision (TAO Forms)
Giant Claw Decadent Stress Chamber (Orange Milk)
Hieroglyphic Being Dance Music 4 Bad People (Smalltown Supersound)
Sherelle With A Vengeance (Method 808)
Marja Ahti Touch This Fragrant Surface Of Earth (Fönstret)
Kinlaw & Franco Franco Faith Elsewhere (Drowned By Locals)

Emily Pothast
Masma Dream World Please Come To Me (Valley of Search)
Quinton Barnes Black Noise (Watch That Ends The Night)
Various Lider Mit Palestine: New Yiddish Songs Of Grief, Fury, And Love (Bandcamp)
SML How You Been (International Anthem)
Peaces Peaces (Land And Sea)
S’hells Gate S’hells Gate (Cone Shape Top)
Raica The Absence Of Being (Quiet Details)
Forest Floor Hungers Haunt The All Consuming (Anxiety Blanket)
Patricia Wolf HRAFNAMYND (Balmat)
Phipps Pt. Songs We No Longer Sing (Seeland)

Edwin Pouncey
Michael Hurley Broken Homes And Gardens (No Quarter)
Earth WEM Dominator (Fire)
Pissgrave Malignant Worthlessness (Profound Lore)
Stephen O’Malley But Remember What You Have Had (Ideologic Organ)
Bill Nace & Evan Parker Branches (Otoroku/Open Mouth)
Joachim Nordwall & Aaron Turner Malign Seeds (Ash International/SFI)
Caspar Brötzmann Massaker It’s A Love Song (Exile On Mainstream)
Kali Malone & Drew McDowall Magnetism (Ideologic Organ)
SunnO))) Eternity’s Pillars (Sub Pop)
Fuckwolf Boone (Agitated)

John Quin
Panda Bear Sinister Grift (Domino)
Robert Foster Strawberries (Tapete)
Barker Stochastic Drift (Smalltown Supersound)
Tortoise Touch (International Anthem/Nonesuch)
Eiko Ishibashi & Jim O’Rourke Pareidolia (Drag City)
DJ Koze Music Can Hear Us (Pampa)
Djrum Under Tangled Silence (Houndstooth)
Oren Ambarchi/Johan Berthling/Andreas Werliin Ghosted III (Drag City)
Khotin Peace Portal (Khotin Industries)
Sam Prekop Open Close (Thrill Jockey)

Chal Ravens
Smerz Big City Life (Escho)
aya hexed! (Hyperdub)
Water From Your Eyes It’s A Beautiful Place (Matador)
Tracey Tracey (AD 93)
The Necks Disquiet (Northern Spy)
Horse Vision Another Life (Scenic Route)
Heinali & Andriana-Yaroslava Saienko Hildegard (Unsound)
Anthony Naples Scanners (ANS)
Oklou choke enough (True Panther Sounds)
Davis Galvin Prism (Music To Watch Seeds Grow By)

Mosi Reeves
billy woods Golliwog (Backwoodz Studioz)
Blood Orange Essex Honey (Domino)
Earl Sweatshirt Live Laugh Love (Tan Cressida/Warner)
Anthony Naples Scanners (ANS)
Kirby Miss Black America (Self-released)
Rochelle Jordan Through The Wall (Empire)
PinkPantheress Fancy That (Warner)
Playboi Carti Music (AWGE/Interscope)
Fatboi Sharif & Driveby Let Me Out (Deathbomb Arc)
Open Mike Eagle Neighborhood Gods Unlimited (Auto Reverse)

Paul Rekret
MIKE Showbiz! (10k)
Earl Sweatshirt Live Laugh Love (Warner)
Unspecified Enemies Romance In The Age Of Adaptive Feedback (Numbers)
Fred Moten & Brandon Lopez Revision (TAO Forms)
caroline caroline 2 (Rough Trade)
Joy Guidry Five Prayers (Jaid)
Joanne Robertson Blurrr (AD 93)
Che Rest In Bass (10k)
Boldy James Token Of Appreciation (New 11)
Milkweed Remscéla (Self-released)

Simon Reynolds
Position Normal Modern And Unique 2 (Position Normal)
Lily Allen West End Girl (BMG)
Teresa Winter Birthmark, Guest, A.Childs (Do You Have Peace?)
Deer Park Terra Infirma (Deleted)
Mk.gee Two Star & The Dream Police (R&R)
Bassvictim Basspunk 2 (Bassvictim)
Bird Of Peace Orchestra Bird Of Peace Orchestra (Do You Have Peace?)
Richard Dawson End Of The Middle (Domino)
Mozart Estate Tower Block In A Jam Jar (Cherry Red)
Geese Getting Killed (Partisan)

Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Timothy McCormack mine but for its sublimation (Another Timbre)
Klein sleep with a cane (Parkwuud Entertainment)
Leo Chadburn Sleep In The Shadow Of The Alternator (Library Of Nothing)
Marco Fusi & Evan Johnson Dust Book (Another Timbre)
Vijay Iyer & Wadada Leo Smith Defiant Life (ECM)
Cheryl Duvall & Linda Catlin Smith The Plains (Redshift)
Kieran Hebden & William Tyler 41 Longfield Street Late 80s (Eat Your Own Ears)
Ash Fure Animal (Smalltown Supersound)
Hannah Kendall Shouting Forever Into The Receiver (NMC)
Ellen Fullman Elemental View (Room40)

Claire Sawers
The Hidden Cameras Bronto (EvilEvil)
Cosey Fanni Tutti 2t2 (Conspiracy International)
Yara Asmar everyone I love is sleeping and I love them so so much (Hive Mind)
Valentina Goncharova Campanelli (Hidden Harmony)
Auntie Flo Birds of Paradise (A State Of Flow)
Kali Malone & Drew McDowall Magnetism (Ideologic Organ)
Various vari/ations: Ode To Oram (Nonclassical)

Dave Segal
HAYWARDxDÄLEK HAYWARDxDÄLEK (Relapse)
SML How You Been (International Anthem)
Glyders Forever (Drag City)
Mondo Lava Utero Dei (Hausu Mountain)
Natural Yogurt Band & The Oracle Nebulous (BMM)
Ale Hop & Titi Bakorta Mapambazuko (Nyege Nyege Tapes)
Valentina Magaletti & YPY Kansai Bruises (AD 93)
Wet Tuna Free Folk Red Hots (Self-released)
The Bug Vs Ghost Dubs Implosion (Pressure)
Melvin Gibbs Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2 (Hausu Mountain)
Gwenifer Raymond Last Night I Heard The Dog Star Bark (We Are Busy Bodies)

Stewart Smith
Ambrose Akinmusire Honey From A Winter Stone (Nonesuch)
billy woods Golliwog (Backwoodz Studios)
Sophie Agnel Learning (Otoroku)
Henry Threadgill Listen Ship (Pi Recordings)
[Ahmed] [Sama’a] (Audition) (Otoroku)
Ben LaMar Gay Yowzers (International Anthem)
Webber/Morris Big Band Unseparate (Out Of Your Heads)
Rafael Toral Traveling Light (Drag City)
Wrens Half Of What You See (Out Of Your Heads)
The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters The Sleep Of Reason Produces Monsters (Corbett vs Dempsey)

Rosie Esther Solomon
aya hexed! (Hyperdub)
Lido Pimienta La Belleza (Anti-)
Cerys Hafana Angel (tak:til)
Ujif_notfound Postril (I Shall Sing Until My Land Is Free)
An Abstract Illusion The Sleeping City (Willow Tip)
Laurel Premo Laments (Self-released)
Rafiq Bhatia Environments (Anti-)
VESCH Passport (Incompetence)
Park Jiha All Living Things (Glitterbeat)
Holden & Zimpel The Universe Will Take Care Of You (Border Community)

Daniel Spicer
Sudeshna Bhattacharya & Mosin Khan Kawa Mohini (Motvind)
Oiro Pena Béke (Ultraääni)
Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali At The Feet Of The Beloved (Real World)
Natural Information Society Perseverance Flow (Eremite)
The Necks Disquiet (Northern Spy)
Cosmic Ear TRACES (WeJazz)
Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons Live In Philadelphia (Ars Nova Workshop)
Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble Let The Spirit Out: Live At “mu” London (Spiritmuse)
Dun-Dun Band Pita Parka Pt II: Nim Egduf (We Are Busy Bodies)
Zoh Amba Sun (Smalltown Supersound)

Richard Stacey
Everything Is Psychedelic The Beautiful Malaise (Everything Is Perfect/Live At The Clinic)
Terra Slim & Doe Diggla Return To Sender (Bandcamp)
Cappo Houses (Plague)
Afrosurrealist Buy British (Affrosurrealist)
AJ Tracey Don't Die Before You're Dead (Revenge)
Wretch 32 Home? (AWAL)
Melvin Gibbs Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2 (Hausu Mountain)
Farma G To Kill A Butterfly (High Focus)
M.I.C Dr Yakub’s Laboratory (AP Life)
Infinity Knives & Brian Ennals A City Drowned In God's Black Tears (Phantom Limb)

Joseph Stannard
aya hexed! (Hyperdub)
DJ Haram Beside Myself (Hyperdub)
Eska The Ordinary Life Of A Magic Woman (Earthling)
Abhorrent Expanse Enter The Misanthropocene (Amalgam)
Ujif_notfound Postulate (I Shall Sing Until My Land Is Free)
HAYWARDxDÄLEK HAYWARDxDÄLEK (Relapse)
Authentically Plastic Rococo Ruine (Hakuna Kulala)
Melvin Gibbs Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2 (Hausu Mountain)
Princess Nokia Girls (Artist House)
Fatboi Sharif Goth Girl On The Enterprise (Bandcamp)

Kevin Stewart-Panko
Pelican Flickering Resonance (Run For Cover)
The Young Gods Appear Disappear (Two Gentlemen)
Arabrot Rite Of Dionysus (Dalapop)
Swans Birthing (Mute/Young God)
Koenjihyakkei Live At Club Goodman (Skin Graft)
Krokofant 6 (Karisma)
Mary Ann Hawkins Helsinki Surf City (Svart)
Imperial Triumphant Goldstar (Century Media)
Death SS The Entity (Lucifer Rising)
Melvins Thunderball (Ipecac)

Lucy Thraves
Eiko Ishibashi Antigone (Drag City)
aya hexed! (Hyperdub)
Al Karpenter Greatest Heads (Hegoa/Night School)
Meredith Monk Cellular Songs (ECM)
feeo Goodness (AD 93)
Nadah El Shazly Laini Tani (One Little Independent)
Various Only Sounds That Tremble Through Us | فقط أصوات
ترتعش في أجسادنا (Bilna'es بالناقص)
Stereolab Instant Holograms On Metal Film (Warp)
Los Thuthanaka Los Thuthanaka (Self-released)
billy woods Golliwog (Backwoodz Studioz)

Spenser Tomson
Wevie Stonder Sure Beats Living (Skam)
Nad Spiro Limbo Channel (Rose Hill)
claire rousay a little death (Thrill Jockey)
Cate Le Bon Michelangelo Dying (Mexican Summer)
Mun Sing Frolic EP (Illegal Data)
Home Secretary Things (Chocolate Monk)
Claire M Singer Gleann Ciùin (Touch)
Gonçalo F Cardoso Impressões De Várias Ilhas (Macaronésia) (Discrepant)
Me, Claudius Hush, Suzanne (Artsy)
Labyrinthe Des Esprits The Cosmic Hunt (Spirit Duplicator)

Rob Turner
Dora Bleu/Periklis Tsoukalas/Cedrik Fermont The Dream Border (Syrphe)
Vanessa Rossetto Pictures Of The Warm South (Erstwhile)
Limpe Fuchs & Mark Fell Dessogia/Queetch/Fauch (Black Truffle)
feeo Goodness (AD 93)
Ludwig Berger Crying Glacier (Forms Of Minutiae)
billy woods Golliwog (Backwoodz Studioz)
aya hexed! (Hyperdub)
Che Rest In Bass (10k)
Abhorrent Expanse Enter The Misanthropocene (Amalgam)
Daniel Bachman As Time Draws Near (Bandcamp)

Derek Walmsley
Gajek Cutting Together Apart (Stroom)
Eduardo Manso WOW (QTV Selo)
Ø Sysivalo (Sähkö)
Ale Hop & Titi Bakorta Mapambazuko (Nyege Nyege Tapes)
Joy Guidry Five Prayers (Jaid)
Okkyung Lee just like any other day: background music for your mundane activities (Shelter Press)
Ori Barel Bronze, Beige, Morse (Unseen Worlds)
Mark Fell Psychic Resynthesis (Frozen Reeds)
Joseba Irazoki Gitarra Onomatopeikoa II (Hegoa)
Richard Hronský Pohreb (Mappa)

Marc Weidenbaum
Jan Bang & Arve Henriksen After The Wildfire (Punkt Editions)
Barker Stochastic Drift (Smalltown Supersound)
Sofie Birch & Antonina Nowacka Hiraeth (Unsound)
Ellen Fullman & The Living Earth Show Elemental View (Room40)
Tim Hecker Shards (Kranky)
Eiko Ishibashi & Jim O'Rourke Pareidolia (Drag City)
Lorelei Ensemble Scott Ordway: North Woods (New Focus)
Loscil Lake Fire (Kranky)
Kali Malone & Drew McDowall Magnetism (Ideologic Organ)
Cole Pulice Land's End Eternal (Leaving)

Shane Woolman
Nadah El Shazly Laini Tani (One Little Independent)
Eska The Ordinary Life Of A Magic Woman (Earthling)
Various Road Fever: New Generation Carnival Riddims From St Lucia And Dominica (Soundway)
aya hexed! (Hyperdub)
Sanam Sametou Sawtan (Constellation)
Grup Ses & Gökalp K Grup Ses & Gökalp K (Souk)
Fadi Tabbal I recognize you from my sketches (Ruptured)
DJ DIESOON My Brothel The Wind (Drowned By Locals)
Everything Is Psychedelic The Beautiful Malaise (Everything Is Perfect/Live At The Clinic)
My Jazzy Child Extracøntinent (Akuphone)

Daryl Worthington
KASAI 〽 (Chinabot)
Weston Olencki Broadsides (Outside Time)
billy woods Golliwog (Backwoodz Studios)
Ursula Sereghy Cordial (Mondoj)
Kuntari Lahar (Artetetra)
Crystabel Efemena Riley Live At Ormside (Infant Tree)
Brìghde Chaimbeul Sunwise (Glitterbeat)
Jung An Tagen Revenge Of The Speaker People (Editions Mego)
Zhang Meng Noising Sheng (Dusty Ballz)
en creux circumference (Brachliegen Tapes)

The full annotated 2025 Releases of the Year chart is featured in The Wire 503/504. Listen to a playlist of tracks from the chart here.

Listen to a selection of tracks from our Top 50 Releases of the Year, as voted for by The Wire’s team of staff and contributors. You can read more about the albums featured in our chart, as well as those featured in the Top 50 Archive Releases of the Year, in The Wire 503/504

The full chart:

1
aya
hexed!
(Hyperdub)

2
billy woods
GOLLIWOG
(Backwoodz Studios)

3
Los Thuthanaka
Los Thuthanaka
(Self-released)

4
The Necks
Disquiet
(Northern Spy)

5
DJ Haram
Beside Myself
(Hyperdub)

6
Eiko Ishibashi
Antigone
(Drag City)

7
Oklou
choke enough
(True Panther Sounds)

8
Vanessa Rossetto
Pictures Of The Warm South
(Erstwhile)

9
Stereolab
Instant Holograms On Metal Film
(Duophonic UHF Disks)

10
Tortoise
Touch
(International Anthem)

11
caroline
caroline 2
(Rough Trade)

12
Smerz
Big City Life
(Escho)

13
Richard Dawson
End Of The Middle
(Weird World)

14
Oren Ambarchi/Johan Berthling/Andreas Werliin
Ghosted III
(Drag City)

15
feeo
Goodness
(AD 93)

16
Abhorrent Expanse
Enter The Misanthropocene
(Amalgam)

17
Rafael Toral
Travelling Light
(Drag City)

18
Melvin Gibbs
Amasia: Anamibia Sessions 2
(Hausu Mountain)

19
Ellen Fullman & The Living Earth Show
Elemental View
(Room40)

20
Masma Dream World
Please Come To Me
(Valley Of Search)

21
Cerys Hafana
Angel
(tak:til)

22
Damon Locks
List Of Demands
(International Anthem)

23
Natural Information Society
Perseverance Flow
(Eremite)

24
Backxwash
Only Dust Remains
(Ugly Hag)

25
Blawan
SlickElixir
(XL Recordings)

26
Everything Is Psychedelic
The Beautiful Malaise
(Everything Is Perfect/Live At The Clinic)

27
Ambrose Akinmusire
Honey From A Winter Stone
(Nonesuch)

28
Black Eyes
Hostile Design
(Dischord)

29
Slikback
Attrition
(Planet Mu)

30
Alpha Maid
Is this a queue
(AD 93)

31
Cosey Fanni Tutti
2t2
(Conspiracy International)

32
Lucy Railton
Blue Veil
(Ideologic Organ)

33
Valentina Magaletti & YPY
Kansai Bruises
(AD 93)

34
Crystabel Efemena Riley
Live At Ormside
(Infant Tree)

35
[Ahmed]
[Sama’a] (Audition)
(OTOROKU)

36
Cosmic Ear
TRACES
(We Jazz)

37
Joanne Robertson
Blurrr
(AD 93)

38
Kali Malone & Drew McDowall
Magnetism
(Ideologic Organ)

39
Lea Bertucci
The Oracle
(Self-released)

40
Mary Halvorson
About Ghosts
(Nonesuch)

41
Sylvie Courvoisier & Wadada Leo Smith
Angel Falls
(Intakt)

42
Panda Bear
Sinister Gift
(Domino)

43
Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force with Mbene Diatta Seck
Khadim
(Ndagga)

44
Ben LaMar Gay
Yowzers
(International Anthem)

45
Hedvig Mollestad Trio
Bees In The Bonnet
(Rune Grammafon)

46
Nadah El Shazly
Laini Tani
(One Little Independent)

47
HAYWARDxDÄLEK
HAYWARDxDÄLEK
(Relapse)

48
Anna Högberg Attack
Ensamseglaren
(Fönstret)

49
Michael Hurley
Broken Homes And Gardens
(No Quarter)

50
Nina Garcia
Bye Bye Bird
(Ideologic Organ)

This chart is featured in The Wire 503/504, where readers can also find Columnists’ Charts, Archive Releases of the Year, Critics’ Reflections, and much more.

Please note that due to licensing restrictions we are unable to stream tracks from some of the entries in our Top 50.

The 11 December edition of The Wire’s weekly radio show on Resonance FM and Resonance Extra featured music by Martin Dupont, Brandy Dalton, Lolina, Los Thuthanaka and more

Tracklist

Martin Dupont
“Hot Paradox”
From Hot Paradox
(Minimal Wave)

Brandy Dalton
“Swelled”
From Fallen Angel
(Dark Entries)

Lolina
“gg (NEW YORK remix)”
From gg ep
(Relaxin)

Ragger
“Peacherine Rag”
From Euphonic Sounds
(Hausu Mountain)

Tanat Teeradakorn
“Act 4 – Puer Muan Chon [For The Masses]”
From National Opera Complex
(Chinabot)

Pascal Comelade
“The Blank Invasion Of Schizophonics Bikinis”
From Improperis (Compositions Et Enregistrements Magnétiques 1984-2024)
(Because)

Noah Creshevsky
“Tomomi Adachi Redux I”
From Hyperrealist Music 2011-2015
(EM)

RRR Band
“Rock For Birds”
From RRR Band
(Petty Bunco)

PAL
“One Starry Night”
From Christmas Majic 2
(Bandcamp)

Memotone
“Don’t Mind”
From Smallest Things
(World Of Echo)

Julinko
“Skin Dress”
From Naebula
(Maple Death)

VAZZ
“Bend Sinister”
From Bend Sinister
(STROOM)

Flippeur
“Pacman”
From Elastique
(Howlin Banana)

Period Bomb
“Macho Bird”
From Metro Subterranean Vol 2
(Dark Entries)

@xcrswx
“NPC”
From Moodboard
(Feedback Moves)

Yee House
“Build Your Own Libraries”
From DUNNO Electronics EP
(Bandcamp)

Severed Heads
“Pilot In Hell”
From Focus. A Midlife Crisis Compilation
(Sevcom)

Sound Effects
“Nothing Happens Next”
From No Songs Yet
(Trashtronix)

Los Thuthanaka
“Caporal “Apnaqkaya Titi””
From Los Thuthanaka
(Bandcamp)

Sean James O’Brien
“Sleigh Ride”
From Synthwave Christmas
(Bandcamp)

Mustapha Skandrani
“Mode: Sika + Improvisations”
From Istikhbars And Improvisations
(EM)

Hamid Drake & Pat Thomas
“Stay Safe”
From A Mountain Sees A Mountain
(Old Heaven Books)

Adventures In Sound And Music broadcasts at 9pm every Thursday on Resonance 104.4FM and Resonance Extra. Explore past shows in our On Air archive.

Seth Wheeler curates a playlist of tracks connected to the anarcho-punk archive in London’s MayDay Rooms

Crass
“Shaved Women”
From Best Before 1984
(Crass Records)

Crass’s early releases crystallised the fierce DIY politics that defined them. Their 1978 debut The Feeding Of The 5000 ignited censorship battles and pushed them to found Crass Records for total autonomy. Their first single on their own label, the Reality Asylum/Shaved Women double A-side, triggered a police obscenity investigation while introducing their radical “pay no more than…” pricing. Produced by Penny Rimbaud, “Shaved Women” turns field recordings of clattering train carriages into a propulsive rhythmic engine, mirrored by a thudding bassline and jagged angler guitar riffs. Eve Libertine’s howling vocals phase in and out – returning with force by the end of the track. If you had only ever heard punk described this is how you would imagine it sounded. Still as ferocious and as raw as when it was first released.

Action Frogs
“Drumming Up Hope (Ferret Skank)”
From Bullshit Detector One
(Crass Records)

The Bullshit Detector compilations, the majority of which were made up of home recorded tracks sent into Crass by young fans, were pivotal in establishing the early anarcho-punk scene and its DIY sensibilities. Many of the acts featured on the three Bullshit releases would go on to become stalwarts of the anarcho milieu (Alternative, Amebix and Napalm Death to name but a few); others, like The Action Frogs, would never be heard of again. Pushing the boundaries of amateurism to new heights, The Action Frogs’ drummer, who sounds like they are playing two upturned plastic buckets, struggles to keep up with the simple guitar chords that repeat and go nowhere for the duration of the track’s giggly one minute, four seconds. Certainly recorded in a teenager’s bedroom, The Action Frogs sound like The Shaggs, minus the overbearing parent. A wonderful piece of youthful enthusiasm that speaks to the power of DIY culture to embolden creative expression, regardless of musical virtue.

The Mob
“No Doves Fly Here”
(Crass Records)

An early Crass Records release, Somerset trio The Mob deliver a goth-tinged slice of space-rock melancholy. “No Doves Fly Here” is an anti-war lament steeped in Cold War dread, with Mark Mob’s haunted vocals hanging over a Hawkwind-esque synth atmosphere filled with crashing guitars. The West Country’s answer to Joy Division, staring down nuclear annihilation.

Chumbawamba
“Revolution”
From Cease & Resist: Sonic Subversion & Anarcho Punk In The UK 1979–86
(Optimo Music)

While inspired by Crass’s DIY anarchism, many second and third wave anarcho acts ditched Crass’s pacifism for a more combative class politics. At the centre of this shift stood Chumbawamba. “Revolution” also marks an early shift in Chumbawamba’s sound: a driving rhythm section, shared vocals, and pointed political polemics that foreshadow the band’s later output. A stonking piece of sonic propaganda.

Dunstan Bruce
“Fucking Expensive”
From Fucking Expensive EP
(Heavy Medication)

Dunstan Bruce (formerly Chumbawamba's frontman) and now frontman of the agit-power-pop trio Interrobang‽, remains committed ‘to the trouble’. This track, a piece of simple electronic pop, part synth strings and plodding house bassline is turned into a questioning critique of the values we attach to things and ideologies through Bruce’s half spoken vocal. This should have been a huge pop hit.

Passion Killers
“Start Again”
From They Kill Our Passion With Their Hate And Wars
(Sealed Records)

Remastered from early demo tapes and released in 2025 on Sealed Records, this is the first LP by Passion Killers, the proto-Chumbawamba act featured on the Bullshit Detector series. Less than two minutes of bubble gum pop fury, this track is a powerful blast of 77-style punk whose grumbling rumbling bass is central to the track’s magic.

Read Seth Wheeler’s feature on the anarcho-punk archive at the MayDay Rooms here. A version of the essay appears in The Wire 503/4. Wire subscribers can also read it in our online magazine library.

Listen to the music we played to Ikonika during their Invisible Jukebox interview in The Wire 503/4

Each month in the magazine we play an artist or group a series of tracks which they are asked to comment on – with no prior knowledge of what they are about to hear.

In The Wire 503/4 it is the turn of Sara Chen, aka Hyperdub mainstay Ikonika.

Here you can listen to a mix of the tracks our correspondent April Clare Welsh played to Ikonika during the interview, which is published in full in The Wire 503/4. To find out what they said about them, subscribers can read the interview in our online magazine library here. Or you can buy a copy of the magazine in our online shop.

But first, a brief biography of our subject:

Born in West London, Ikonika began learning the drums aged 11 and played in metal and hardcore bands during their teens before making the leap to electronic production in the mid-2000s. With two older sisters, they grew up surrounded by garage, R&B and pirate radio, and eventually began making beats on Fruity Loops/FL Studio in their bedroom before finding a home at Hyperdub with their debut 12", Please/Simulacrum, in 2008, just as dubstep was beginning to splinter.

Their first album for Hyperdub, Contact, Love, Want, Have, followed two years later, serving up a melange of post-dubstep and electronic sounds – from chiptune to UK funky – that would come to define their hybrid club productions. Over the years, they have continued to innovate, adding bumps of grime, drill and amapiano, and working with MCs, producers and vocalists such as fellow Hyperdub artist Jessy Lanza, Karen KG Nyame, Hackney grime MC Jammz, dancehall artist 45DiBoss, and many more.

Recent years have seen Ikonika increasingly bring their own vocals into their productions, and this creative shift is at the heart of their new record SAD. They take inspiration on the album from South African dance music, particularly gqom and bacardi, and the disc features contributions from interdisciplinary artist and writer Tice Cin, as well as Zambian producer SHE Spells Doom and Dutch grime artist JLSXND7RS. Ikonika describes the LP “as close to my final form as I've known” and said that in reckoning with being queer and trans in public life, they set out on a journey of “finding my voice without fear speaking first”.

The Jukebox was carried out over a video call, with Ikonika calling in from the Waterloo studio they share with producer and Night Slugs director Bok Bok.

Tracklist (with time stamps)

Introspekt (00:00)
“Dilation”
From Moving The Centre
(Tempa) 2025

Jessy Lanza (05:01)
“You Never Show Your Love” (Teklife Mix)
From You Never Show Your Love
(Hyperdub) 2015

Unique 3 (09:05)
“The Theme”
TEN 12" 1989

Martyn (13:40)
“Mega Drive Generation”
From Five Years Of Hyperdub
(Hyperdub) 2009

Loraine James (19:55)
“Glitch The System (Glitch Bitch 2)”
From Gentle Confrontation
(Hyperdub) 2023

Girl Unit (23:30)
“Wut”
Night Slugs 12"
2010

Scratcha DVA featuring Lady Lykez (30:31)
“Muhammad Ali”
From DRMTRK II
(Hyperdub) 2018

DJ Lag & Djknator featuring Thobeka (32:42)
“WaWaWa”
From Southside Mixtape
(Black Major X Ice Drop) 2025

Tshetsha Boys (36:58)
“Nwampfundla”
From Shangaan Electro: New Wave Dance Music From South Africa
(Honest Jon's) 2010

Peter Gabriel (41:35)
“Zaar”
From Passion: Music For The Last Temptation Of Christ
(Real World) 1989

Volume 49 of The Wire’s subscriber only download compilation includes tracks by Hilary Woods, Lo Egin, Nika Ticciati & Beth Veasey, S280F, Deer Park, Yuhan Su, otta & Powerplant and more

Take out a print or digital subscription to The Wire to stream and download every edition of Below The Radar

The London based MayDay Rooms’ anarcho-punk archive is a valuable resource for radical cultures and politics today, writes Seth Wheeler in The Wire 503/4

Flicking through the pages of an old diary, Dunstan Bruce, former Chumbawamba vocalist and now frontman for the agitational post-punk trio Interrobang‽, pauses. “This will give you an idea of how immersed we all were in the wider anarchist scene in the 1980s,” he says, running his finger down the diary’s fading gridlines.

The yellowing pages are divided into hand drawn columns: dates, venues, ticket prices, local contact numbers. Under “security”, the annotations harden up. For anti-fascist benefits, security was always marked as essential. “It was a very different time,” Bruce reflects. “Gigs were often war zones – the far right were very active.”

A version of this essay appears in The Wire 503/4. Wire subscribers can also read it in our online magazine library.

The 4 December edition of The Wire’s weekly radio show on Resonance FM and Resonance Extra featured music by Rupert Hine, NOWHERE2RUN, Shudder To Think, Deliluh, Qasu and more

Tracklist

Rupert Hine
“The Shout”
From The Shout
(Buried Treasure)

NOWHERE2RUN
“What Did You Do?”
From What Did You Do?
(Nowhere)

Shudder To Think
“Playback”
From Shudder To Think
(Dischord)

Deliluh
“Under Two Moons”
From Under Two Moons/Jaws Of Desire
(Bandcamp)

Qasu
“Death Dreams"
From A Bleak King Cometh
(Phantom Limb/Apocalyptic Witchcraft)

Alan Vega
“Viet Vet”
From Collision Drive
(The Vega Vault Project/Sacred Bones)

Dog Soup
“Hypnotic”
From Fragments
(Dark Circles)

Danny Brown
“Baby”
From Stardust
(Warp)

Carlos Giffoni & Joachim Nordwall
“Metras”
From New Music
(Dead Mind)

Gary Numan
“I Dream Of Wires”
From Telekon (45th Anniversary Expanded Edition)
(Beggars Banquet)

Ipek Gorgun
“Edgelord”
From Earthbound
(Touch)

DJ Godfather featuring Goodmoney G100
“Get Yo Ass Out The Booth”
From Make Your Body Jerk
(Databass)

KIK
“We Can't Dance”
From Nightshift
(Horror Vector)

Nuclear Dudes
“Tastes Like Medicine”
From Skeletal Blasphemy
(The Ghost Is Clear)

Bézier
“Peat Moss”
From Decompose
(Dark Entries)

Jacky Cougar & The Vampires From Africa
“Altamont Blues”
From Jacky Cougar & The Vampires From Africa
(Dig!)

OBF x Iration Steppas
“Calling Jahovia (Spring Verb Mix)”
From Roadblock/Calling Jahovia
(Dubquake)

Nervio Cosmico
“Círculo de Fuego”
From Singing Vessels
(Accidental Meetings)

Adventures In Sound And Music broadcasts at 9pm every Thursday on Resonance 104.4FM and Resonance Extra. Explore past shows in our On Air archive.

The 27 November edition of The Wire’s weekly radio show on Resonance FM and Resonance Extra included music by Ipek Gorgun, Leslie Keffer, Anna Schnabel, Laibach, Hamid Drake & Pat Thomas and more

Tracklist

Ipek Gorgun
“Cloudbreak Swell”
From Earthbound
(Touch)

Leslie Keffer
“Flicker”
From Fulcrum
(No Part Of It)

Anna Schnabel
“Zeitreise”
(Bandcamp)

IFS meets spalarnia
“Gratis”
From Łąka
(guides)

Laibach
“We Forge The Future”
From Laibach40: We Forge The Future (Live At the Cukrama Gallery)
(Mute)

John Duncan & Torturing Nurse
“I Smile When It Hurts”
From Glass Mind
(WV Sorcerer Productions)

Yang Ji
“The End Of The Story”
From Yang Ji Blog
(Bandcamp)

Lao Dan & Vasco Trilla
“Tea Horse Road”
From New Species
(No Business)

Phew & Danielle De Picciotto
“Paper Memories”
From Paper Masks
(Mute)

Hamid Drake & Pat Thomas
“The Way Of The Beloved”
From A Mountain Sees A Mountain
(Old Heaven Books)

Kishun
“Taishikicho Gakkaen”
From Kokai
(ato.archives)

John Butcher & Angharad Davies
“Gwanwyn vii”
From Two Seasons
(Weight Of Wax)

CHIHARU MUKAIYAMA
“the aroma of coffee drifts in the air”
From Music through transitions in time and space
(Studio-C+)

Ipek Gorgun
“Honey”
From Earthbound
(Touch)

Adventures In Sound And Music broadcasts at 9pm every Thursday on Resonance 104.4FM and Resonance Extra. Explore past shows in our On Air archive.

To accompany her report on glint music in The Wire 502, Misha Farrant explores a playlist of releases from the enigmatic South London label

South London based label glint music exists mostly in the digital realm, having originated in 2023. Emerging out of the melted loops of jb glazer’s Everything is Heavy rain, the label’s output isn’t clearly fixed on one sound, with label runner glazer referring to it as “very online; [it] holds onto some of those ideas of the internet being somewhere to connect.”

The output swings from smudgy ambient improvised collages to scurrying post-internet club music as well as putting out singer-songwriter indie pop projects. In glazer’s words, “It’s nice to have the music feel quite self aware. Not self aware in an obnoxious way, but aware of the world around it. It doesn't always have to be a critique, it can just be swimming in time and space.”

Rory J S
“romcom”
From Murky J

Deep warm synth bass and cold, sharp and dilapidated midi-piano notes set the listener in a deserted jazz club after hours as Rory has stolen an unexpected moment to play. Melodies wander recursively as the simple arrangement eases the listener in. Recorded in the midst of a snow storm in Japan, isolated in a hotel room, glazer talks about Murky J instilling the feeling of being “an alien in winter”. The final three notes are spread over 20 seconds and hang as if siphoned off an Angelo Badalamenti score.

excel dj featuring xool xool
“english as xxxx”
From zoomers (realm era '✯- '✮)

excel dj’s second release with glint music, following their dryly titled Another Release, zoomers amps up the silliness and positions excel dj firmly in jester mode. Using a glut of faux radio samples, nonsense language as well as summoning the spirit of the Yamaha keyboard “DJ” button, they overwhelm the listener with frenzied footwork and singeli style rhythmic patterns. This is further glued together with epic collage sensibilities. The final track on the album is described by glazer as “obviously the pop song on zoomers and one that shows excel dj at their most earnest... This song secured the album for me.”

Milk Eyed Sigh
“CEX Bag”
From Dog Verses

Room recorded bleary ambient washes captured from Carl Brown’s turntable sampling, accompanied by Cam Molloy’s scattered drum tinkering, make up “CEX Bag”'s nostalgic glaze. “A solo walk through the high street, fractured and artificial but human,” summarises glazer of the album's ambience, before adding, “CEX Bags are kind of like JD bags for RPG heads”. Their collaboration stemmed from glazer’s release with Brown’s label Them There Records, and glazer living with Molloy over lockdown, after Molloy “came to fix something and then got Covid”, which prevented him leaving for the year when lockdown was announced.

Competition
“cold”
From pomme

Newcastle based musician, artist and academic Craig Pollard opens the album with a choppy, waltzing track. Using string-like piano strikes he creates a melancholic ruminatory feel, even as the melodies begin to tangle up and the waltz gets faster and more confusing. Glazer describes “cold” as “human emotions transcribed through robotics”, circling back to the creation of the album using an old midi-guitar synthesiser. In a similar vein to the output of Rory J S and Alexandra Python, Competition sits on the singer-songwriter experimental pop spectrum.

ex.sses
“888”
From strange echoes

London's ex.sses combines intimate sound design with heavy bass fields and brash kicks that collapse in and out of the grid. Their work often delves into bodily intimacy using processed ASMR vocal samples. On “888” a warped, pitched down vocal sample can be heard saying “imagine us/come closer” before dispersing out into a plume of fog. Evocatively described by glazer as instilling the sensation of catching “eyes with someone passing between the bar and the dancefloor. The lights are strobing and you forget about it but whatever that feeling was stays in the sound from the speakers, infiltrating your body”.

CJ Calderwood
“[Sick]”
From Umbra Lumen Tomos

One half of Lol K and a member of Good Sad Happy Bad, Calderwood's debut solo EP was recorded during a period of medical treatment. “[Sick]” funnels confronting drone bursts of what sound like melded ambulance sirens and saxophone squalls into the listener's ears: it's like being stuck in traffic as the urgency of getting to the hospital increases and it's pouring with rain. Pairing it with the follow up track “Keyed Out“ creates a stark break as the noise cuts off and a piano and flute arrangement sink in.

Alexandra Python
“The Rooms”
From Places I Go

Alexandra Python wished to stay anonymous upon the release of this introspective organ laden hypnogogic pop EP. As glazer says, “AP is a mystery that was passed on through a friend.” Places I Go was named after a lyric from The Sundays’ “Here’s Where The Story Ends”, and as the penultimate track on the album it winds down into dubstep schisms. The vocals lean toward Lolina and Inga Copeland stylings through the reverbed processing and layering. Listening to “the dubstep flourishes amongst the organ and drum loops” took glazer to “a specific seaside town” like Hastings.

jb glazer
“Siness”
From Everything is Heavy rain

Originally meant to be played at a third of the speed, “Siness” employs semi-indecipherable, hurried spoken passages combined with gaseous pipe noise and tumbled beats spilling into empty oil tank convolution reverb so that the reflections bounce around. Yanking us out of the club just as quickly as glazer dropped us in before we're kicked into a wind tunnel and then unfurled into tactile string orchestrations. “Written during the days of getting the [London bus] P13 pre-7am,” glazer says, the track evokes “pouring rain and finding someone waiting to take you to anywhere other than wherever the bus was actually going”.

Read Misha Farrant’s full Unlimited Editions report on glint music in The Wire 502. Wire subscribers can also read the article online via the digital magazine library.

Abi Bliss reviews a new project that draws on the sound archive of BBC Radiophonic Workshop co-founder and electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram in The Wire 502

vari/ations: Ode To Oram
Various
(Nonclassical DL/LP)

“The home computer is today a very sophisticated machine, getting better every year,” wrote Daphne Oram in an article published in 1994 in the journal Contemporary Music Review, shortly before suffering the stroke that would bring her remarkable career to an end. “How exciting for women to be present at its birth pangs, ready to help it evolve to maturity in the world of the arts. To evolve as a true and practical instrument for conveying women's inner thoughts, just as the novel did nearly two centuries ago...” Oram had seen the potential of computers to liberate music technology since the 1980s, when she taught herself to code and hoped to adapt Oramics, her groundbreaking optical synthesizer system, for the Acorn Archimedes. Sadly, she didn’t live to see the era when her vision would come true for an ever-increasing number of female producers.

When Oram died aged 77 in 2003, she was remembered chiefly for co-founding and directing the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1958, then leaving it the following year, frustrated with shoestring budgets and its low status within the organisation compared with such crucibles of musique concrète as the RTF studios in Paris or Warsaw’s Polish Radio Experimental Studio. Even if no single recording of hers has the level of fame enjoyed today belatedly by Delia Derbyshire's rendering of the Doctor Who theme, every year brings greater appreciation of her work and influence.

The 2007 compilation Oramics and 2011’s The Oram Tapes put her music back into circulation, from compositions such as 1965's Pulse Persephone, to sound design that enhanced films (The Innocents, Dr No) and advertised everything from Lego toy bricks to washing machines. Her unperformed work Still Point, which combined an orchestra, turntables and electronic manipulation back in 1949, was finally (fully) realised at the 2018 Proms in London. Documentaries and theatre told her story; buildings have been named in her honour, while her post-BBC base at Tower Folly in Kent is recognised as the first electronic music studio founded by a woman.

Notably, Oram's archives were saved from disposal by her friend Hugh Davies and are now preserved by the Daphne Oram Trust at Goldsmiths, University of London. To mark the 2025 centenary of her birth, the Trust, together with the Oram Awards set up to celebrate and develop those same female and gender-diverse artists whose use of technology vindicates her prediction, commissioned this album, whose ten pieces use a sample pack drawn from tapes spanning 1956-1974.

This isn’t the first time that Oram’s sound collection has inspired collaborations beyond the grave. Taking its title from one of Oram's earliest radiophonic pieces, Andrea Parker and Daz Quayle's excellent 2011 album Private Dreams And Public Nightmares braved the eerier corners of her sonic archive, while 2014’s Sound Houses by Walls was an agreeable, if less successful attempt to merge the Anglo-Italian duo’s sensibilities with Oram's own. Where vari/ations: Ode To Oram distinguishes itself is in engaging with how the wider picture of her life interwove with her sonic achievements. Of course, much of the inner world of this famously independent composer is now lost to time. While also referencing the formative moment when a medium told the teenage Oram that she would excel in music, “Séance”, by xname aka London based Milanese producer Eleonora Oreggia, acknowledges this: veiled fragments of Oram's speech emerge between bursts of Oramic engine: Daphne Oram presenting at East Surrey College, Redhill, 1980 static, wispy sine tones and bubbling pops of melody then slip tantalisingly away.

For all the variety among the contributing artists, the shared sample pack means that sounds and motifs bind the album together with a pleasingly psychedelic quality, heightened by a recurring quote from Oram about music that “floats in a distant dreamworld of its own". As well as both featuring a contentedly purring cat, Cosey Fanni Tutti’s “Tributum” and Nwando Ebizie’s “The Art Of Living” both evoke a flowering creative consciousness, the former as loops and rhythms emerge from a cavern of filtered bells and slithering textures; the latter as the cat’s rumbles agitate flurries and specks of sound into a luminescent haze. By contrast, producer/DJs TAAHLIAH and Deena Abdelwahed make their respective “Gosamour” and “Eidolon” tough for the dancefloor yet still alive with intricate sonic details.

Elsewhere Tower Folly looms large, both as home to the composer’s Oramics explorations and symbol of how her commercial work co-existed with more esoteric ideas, folly to some, but visionary to others. Setting an emotive, multilayered cello solo and wordless vocals against jittery, sped-up samples, afromerm and abi asisa’s “1966 Interrupted" references the year when Oram’s apparent mental breakdown severed her working relationship with Graham Wrench, a valuable engineer for the mercurial machine. Meanwhile Lola de la Mata’s arresting “Folly Folly Folly” starts as prosaic waveform lesson Oram enunciating “sine wave”, “sawtooth”, “square wave”, and so on then takes flight as a soprano choir chants the title into a space both intimidating and unfettered.

Ultimately, Oramics became not just a means of sculpting sound, but a philosophy. As Oram's 1972 manifesto An Individual Note Of Music, Sound And Electronics outlined, to her, music could become (as Albert Ayler put it) the healing force of the universe. Whether her beliefs would endure in today’s age of 432 hertz obsessed YouTubers is a question for another time, but as layered frequencies sing an ambient elegy through the ether on Marta Salogni’s closing track “An Individual Note”, this rewarding compilation suggests that there is still plenty more to learn.

This review appears in The Wire 502 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.

Irene Revell reflects on the life and work of Fluxus co-founder Alison Knowles, who died in October

There is a German television newsreel of the Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik at Museum Wiesbaden in autumn 1962 that captures what is often described as the genesis of the Fluxus movement. In the opening shot the line of protagonists take the stage: first is Alison Knowles who radiates a gnomic poise in her commanding stature; joint performances ensue with her colleagues Nam June Paik, George Maciunas, Benjamin Patterson, Philip Corner et al.

For Knowles, it is this moment of co-founding Fluxus that equally heralds the flourishing of her own highly multifaceted oeuvre that encompasses participatory installations, performance, sound, poetry, publications and tactile objects. Most immediately, on these early European Fluxus tours she would write many of her iconic event scores: Newspaper Music (1962), Nivea Cream Piece (1962), Shoes Of Your Choice (1963), and perhaps best known of all, the eponymous proposition Make A Salad (1962).

As she explained decades later to composer John Lely: “A lot of people followed us from city to city – we had to have fresh material... it had to be super simple, it had to have no theatre accoutrements, and it had to be for anybody in the group who was travelling with us. I composed them when we were touring and we did them the next day. It was very, very exciting.”

Scores that bring attention to, and ultimately revel in a shared wonder and joy in the simplest elements of everyday life. The rhythms of preparing a salad; the story of the shoes on your feet (or any other pair); applying hand cream as a communal and sounding event; works that produce an infectious social materiality yet are simultaneously so precise, incisive.

Born in 1933 in New York, from a childhood permeated by her father’s literary interests (a college professor and Don Quixote expert), as well as a love of disappearing into the woods behind her teenage suburban home, Knowles trained in painting at Pratt Institute in the mid 1950s. Without independent wealth, in parallel she took up professional layout and page design work to maintain financial autonomy, techniques that would also enter her own practice through silk-screening onto canvas – as well as in a multitude of artist book projects. In 1960 she married her second husband, and fellow Fluxus artist, Dick Higgins, and in 1964 they would have twins, now artist Jessica Higgins and art historian Hannah B Higgins (with three grandchildren, including Shimmy Disc musician Clara Joy). The aforementioned event scores would find their way into her first publication, By Alison Knowles (1965), one of the Great Bear Pamphlet series published by Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press, a press which she in fact named and contributed to copiously – perhaps most prominently co-editing the Notations (1969) score anthology with John Cage.

But the book is more than a medium for Knowles, something to be explored from all perspectives. In her Big Book (1967) gallery installation the giant pages become a physical habitat. Bean Rolls (1963), her first book object, also inaugurated two further long-standing interests – quite literally as it says on the tin, a fascination with beans (dried beans are in the tin alongside written scrolls that detail her research on the topic) – and more broadly with sounding objects (here, the beans’ percussive quality). These converge again in the Bean Garden (1971) installation, a giant amplified tray of 200lbs (90kg) of dried butter beans that was a stage for invited performances, as well as members of the public during Charlotte Moorman’s 12th Annual Avant Garde Festival, and then slowly consumed, a circular economy present in much of Knowles’s work that presciently anticipates contemporary interest in ‘art and ecology’. In all these examples, the inherent playfulness is also underpinned by a profound and long-standing material enquiry.

Many of these interests converge in her most ambitious undertaking The House Of Dust (1967) project, thought to be the first computer-generated poem, that uses FORTRAN-IV software coding (with the aid of composer James Tenney) to generate and print 100s of permutations of quatrains, meditating on different forms of housing, another highly prescient concern. One of which “a house of plastic, in a metropolis, using natural light, inhabited by people from all walks of life” became the basis for her Guggenheim fellowship large-scale sculptural installation (with electronic sound by Max Neuhaus) installed in the Lower East Side, and later shipped to the desert of CalArts while Knowles taught there in the early 1970s, operating as a site for gathering and performance with Knowles’s students.

If she cut a lone female figure at Wiesbaden, it was in the early 1970s that some of her creative friendships with women would blossom. First the deliciously sardonic Postcard Theatre (1974) series with Pauline Oliveros (Beethoven was a lesbian; Chopin had dishpan hands; etc). In turn, Oliveros would introduce Knowles to Annea Lockwood with whom she would co-edit and self-publish the score magazine project Womens Work (1975-8) – my personal point of intersection with Knowles’s work, researching that project’s history, and collaborating with Primary Information on re-publishing it in 2019. During this period Knowles would also inaugurate (with Lockwood, Ruth Anderson and Jean Rigg) the 48 hour marathon reading of Gertrude Stein’s 925 page novel The Making Of Americans Over New Years 1974/5, that would then become a tradition at Paula Cooper Gallery (with various more recent revivals). Composer Tom Johnson, writing in The Village Voice, described this as “the ultimate Knowles work … one of her most personal and characteristic”, exemplary in as much as she always works with existing materials, concerned with social implications and the bringing together of people, taking an “exceptionally modest stance”. And for Johnson, most characteristically of all, works that allow for her to remove herself altogether, as in many of her scores.

Alison Knowles’ works have only circulated more over time in both art and music contexts, and crucially the in-between, intermedia communities that she has been so foundational in nurturing. Yet it is clear that her centrality is still not understood fully enough. In the last decade several major museum retrospectives have begun this work including the still touring By Alison Knowles; and next year the first monograph study of Knowles's life and work, Performing Chance: The Art Of Alison Knowles In/Out Of Fluxus by Nicole L Woods will be published. More than anything, though, her work will live on through her many scores. While these have been taken into the classical repertoire – most recently in concerts by the LA Philharmonic – what is perhaps most notable is the sheer breadth of contexts in which her scores are performed: in London alone, in recent years, at Wigmore Hall, Whitechapel Gallery, the London Contemporary Music Festival, and, most repeatedly, Cafe Oto.

Make A Salad (1962), first performed at the ICA in London just weeks after Wiesbaden, would go on to be presented in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2008 for an audience of 3000, and of course in so many other instances here and elsewhere, with and without Knowles’s own presence. In a lockdown performance over Zoom with my own sound arts students, we each set to work with the ingredients we had assembled in advance. Chopping together and apart, inevitably at some point I find myself no longer performing a score, no longer in a class on a call but completely absorbed in the work at hand. A feeling of how alive we are, how connected to each other and the world around us; even in these bleaker moments, or perhaps even more so.

Wire subscribers can read Louise Gray's review of Womens Work in issue 426 in the digital library.

The 20 November edition of The Wire’s weekly radio show on Resonance FM and Resonance Extra included music by Mulatu Astatke, Anna Högberg Attack, Test Dept, Alexander Hawkins & Taylor Ho Bynum and more

Tracklist

Mulatu Astatke
“Kulun”
From Mulatu Plays Mulatu
(Strut)

Anna Högberg Attack
“Ensamseglaren/Inte Ensam” (excerpt)
From Ensamseglaren
(Edition)

Test Dept
“Shock Work/Workshock”
From The Strength Of Metal In Motion
(Artoffact)

Alexander Hawkins & Taylor Ho Bynum
“Anderson Knows”
From A Near Permanent State Of Wonder
(Rogue Art)

Ian Spektor
“Side B” (excerpt)
From Cherven
(Kyiv Dispatch)

Eve Libertine & Eva Leblanc
“What The Fuck?”
From Live At The Horse Hospital
(Caliban Sounds)

Sly & The Family Stone
“Skate Now”
From The First Family: Live At Winchester Cathedral 1967
(High Moon)

Noura Mint Seymali
“Ch’tib (Naha)”
From Yenbett
(Glitterbeat)

georg-i & Older Brother
“To Be A Man”
From Warm Skin EP
(Grace)

Walt Shaw
“Timepoints/Sliding Doors”
From Cave Printmaker
(Discus)

Kali Malone & Drew McDowall
“The Sound In My Mind”
From Magnetism
(Ideologic Organ)

Ishmael Ali
“The Cut And The Turn”
From Burn The Plastic, Sell The Copper
(Amalgam Music)

Jan Bang & Arve Henriksen
“Seeing (Eyes Closed)”
From After The Wildfire
(Punkt Editions)

David Shea
“Stillness”
From Meditations
(Room40)

Kris Davis Trio
“Lost In Geneva” (excerpt)
(Pyroclastic)

Adventures In Sound And Music broadcasts at 9pm every Thursday on Resonance 104.4FM and Resonance Extra. Explore past shows in our On Air archive.

In his latest Secret History of Film Music column, Philip Brophy analyses the musicalisation of purgatory in Japanese sci-fi series Alice In Borderland

The first season of Shinsuke Sato’s live action science fiction series Alice In Borderland (2020, based on Haro Aso’s manga serialised between 2010 and 2016) opens with a shooter game being played on a large bedroom screen by Arisu, a self-absorbed, unemployed rich kid. The game’s audiovision is violent, meaningless, enthralling. Cut to Arisu and his slacker friends Kurabe and Chota meeting up at Tokyo’s Shibuya station. Unexpectedly, Arisu becomes conscious of something just beyond his grasp. A slow track into his face actively fades down the sound of swarming people on their way to work. A few softly played piano notes are sounded: this is a premonition of the frailty of life, which Arisu and his friends may soon lose.

After experiencing a power outage while in Shibuya station, the trio emerge onto an entirely emptied Scramble Crossing. Composer Yutaka Yamada unfurls low horn sustains and rumbling sheets of noise: something is seriously wrong here. They don’t realise it yet, but they’re in a ‘borderland’ between life and death, where they’ll be forced to play an unending series of death games. Returning individually to their work places, each realises the breadth of erasure around them. Rising multiphonic tones musicalise the omnipresent air-con ringing audible in both interior and exterior environments. Interspersed with these chordal passages are the distant looping of electronic tones, as if an electrical home appliance has been left unattended, sounding a soft warning tone, the type of which was pioneered in Japanese consumer appliances in the late 20th century.

A quick historical aside. Since the 1960s denki revolution of accelerated electronics design, music in Japan serviced industry in ways that would shape the psychoacoustic environment of the country for decades to come. Through the combination of piezoelectric actuators and 8-bit audio, beeps, tones and melodies became ubiquitous in products which sonically communicated to users. Before too long, Japan’s tightly shaped congestion of public space and close-quartered confines of private space hummed with a dissonant symphony of digi-voices, synth gongs, cute zaps and googly sonics. Alice In Borderland’s multitude of screens (from giant window displays to tiny LED lozenges) tinkle and ting incessantly, informing Arisu and company of cruel time limits and non-negotiable restrictions. Their electroacoustic world is always polite and accommodating, often guided by a recorded female voice whose obsequiousness masks its passive-aggressive manipulation, like a life-draining geisha.

That’s the sound of the world for those momentarily alive in Borderland. For those who die, the last sound they hear is a laser beam piercing their cranium. A thin red beam descends from the stratosphere – inside or outside, the result is the same – with the abrupt force of a metallic stun gun, executing loser humans like cattle. The zap is a multi-layered power punch of finality, like a distorted dubstep kick-drum fused with an anvil pounded by a red hot hammer. Similarly, Yamada’s titles theme to Alice In Borderland builds from a galleon-sized single cello note, tattooed in compound time, atop which violas fretfully saw Vivaldi-like triplets with maddening repetition. This compressed sound of morbid singularity is expressed as that last nanosecond when you realise you are about to die.

A compositional template unfolds throughout Alice In Borderland: submerged synth tones as player tension builds, contrasted with earth-shattering thwacks as gameplay logic decimates participants. Mostly, a composed noisescape engulfs each life threatening situation, overwhelming the viewer/auditor as much as it drains Arisu and his colleagues. The series is relentless with this psychoacoustic terror, recalling the electromagnetic pulse attack that initiated the creation of Borderland at the beginning in Shibuya.

The second episode of season one opens with a montage of famous tourist spots in Tokyo, each digitally modified to represent an evacuated city. Almost inaudibly, soft tonal patterns carry from afar. This is music left to perform and sound itself, in a realm where life is disallowed. To evoke pervasive death, Yamada constructs tones as if the city itself – its network of soothing ‘earcons’ and polite warning beeps – is playing itself, atmospherically dispersing its chipmunk pips like trees falling unheard in a void forest. This self-erasing compositional technique merges with the series’ sound design, rendering Borderland tonal, harmonic and musical. And forever deadly.

Each episode of Alice is ingeniously centred in an architectural domain, highlighting the unique characteristic of a space (a danchi apartment block, a botanical garden, an underpass tunnel, a resort hotel) which players must navigate to survive. Yamada’s minimal music is less an issue of style and more a thematic sounding of these spaces’ acoustic design, and how such environments – originally designed with living people in mind – have been reconfigured to hasten their demise. The simplistic tones are as non-humanist as the bleep of a dishwasher completing its cycle: it isn’t speaking to ‘you’; it is simply sounding its programmed ‘self’. The perverse psychological ploy typical in the human drama of manga and anime dark phantasmagory is that human characters attain consciousness by realising they are as socially programmed as a dishwasher. Alice In Borderland points to an entire subgenre of ‘death fantasy’ in Japan that proceeds from this premise.

Taking in seasons one and two of Alice In Borderland (2020-2022) is as draining as the emotional exhaustion experienced by its survivors, headed by Arisu. Season three (2025) radically commences well outside of the previous seasons’ mortal combats. Arisu is being interviewed by professor Matsuyama, part of a government department tasked with analysing people who in the real world have survived the initial meteorite destruction of Shibuya. An aerial panorama of a razed Shibuya evidences this reality, powerfully depicting Shibuya as a multi-tiered hive of reconstruction. The sequence is matched to a sharp organ chord, sizzling in a freeze frame of absolute devastation.

Back in his campus office, Matsuyama reviews his analysis of the near-death experiences of the Shibuya survivors. A tantalising single chord breathes in a slow pulse, again like harmonised air conditioning. The single chord carries over Matsuyama making his way across Shibuya and its mobile throngs, their ambience muted under the carpeted synth tones. This becomes emblematic of the headspace of Matsuyama, and the drive he exhibits in seeking to discover the mystery not of life, but of death. As a researcher obsessed with such a topic, he is an asocial entity – the opposite of Arisu, whose battle experience has shaped him into a caring, responsible adult, now with a wife (Usagi, his game partner from the previous two seasons).

Surprisingly, Yamada’s music seems to be mixed at a softer level in season three. Yet it retains its power and purpose, here redefined to accentuate how people are nothing but nodes moving through networks. The delicacy of tones – percussive, textual, harmonic – connotes inescapability, resignation and inevitability. Yamada’s score here acknowledges the series’ pivoting from adrenaline inducing survivalism to migraine massaging existentialism. The music is often diminutive and politely subservient to the well designed social spaces of an otherwise affluent and aspirational Tokyo. Arisu and Usagi are clearly presented as the ideal ‘new family couple’ one sees in current promotional adverts in Japan of new urban utopian housing developments.

This is where Alice In Borderland is less about the border between life and death, and more about the border between designed attainment and programmed existence. Tokyu Corporation, East Japan Railway Company and Tokyo Metro Co Ltd collectively instigated the Shibuya Station Area Project (SSAP), a masterplan of formidable scale incorporating the contemporary urbanism of architect Kengo Kuma. Preparations commenced in 2010; Phase I was finished in 2019 (Shibuya Scramble Square); Phase II commenced this year (the Central and West towers) and is due to be finished by 2030; the total development is slated for final completion in 2034. Alice In Borderland seems to deliberately skewer the SSAP and its marketing of upward mobility with cynicism. But season three is also the most emotional: as Arisu struggles to save his wife Usagi, the score swells like a treacly rendition of Scelsi drones rich in upper harmonics. Yamada’s digi-orchestral surges connote involvement, commitment and hope.

Most interestingly, silence is deployed to powerful effect, framing sonic incidents and musical moments with breathtaking precision. Yamada’s music becomes a matter of secretion, shading and residue, forwarding the notion of how nothingness sounds, and how death shapes one’s environmental consciousness. Anime has excelled in this for decades (eg the score and sound design to Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex from 2002). Yamada’s distinctive pounding drums and cello seesawing are introduced only in the last ten seconds of season three’s first episode. To some, his music may be lacking in distinction or personality. But as with so much Japanese musical composition and production, that’s precisely the point: to be something through nothingness.

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.

In an extract from his new book, Mike Adcock explores the aural properties of stone and introduces some notable figures in the development of lithophones

Music stones go back a long way. Nobody knows how long, but it could well be that stone, along with bone, wood, reeds and grass, was one of the first materials used by humans with the intention of making sound. It is of course in the nature of the medium, being transient, that it’s not possible to know what sounds they were making in those far distant days. With visual images, whether they be petroglyphs carved into stone or cave paintings, the proof that they were produced is there to be seen with our eyes, but with sound the only evidence is circumstantial.

The oldest known musical instrument is thought to be a bone flute, possibly between 50 and 60,000 years old and its identification is based on the existence of a hollow piece of bone with holes in it, which has survived. There may well have also been flutes made from wood and reed flutes, but they have long since perished. Stone endures and the evidence that it might have been used percussively is found in markings on its surface: if there seems to have been repeated striking with no other explanation as to why that should have taken place, it might be deduced that the purpose was to make sound. Sounds produced in this way may have had a functional application, being used as a form of communication over distances, possibly for sending warnings, or perhaps incorporated into rituals or ceremonial occasions. The point at which any of these activities can be defined as music remains open to debate.

The purpose of Music Stones is not to trace, or speculate on the history of stone being used musically. Nor is it a survey of the way in which different cultures around the world have included the playing of resonant stone within their musical traditions. Rather, it is looking at how, in the modern era, a number of people have discovered the aural properties of stone, often unintentionally, and chosen to pursue the idea in a musical way. Some have done this quite independently, pursuing their own chosen path of travel, while others, having seen existing examples, chose to develop the idea in their own way. This is what happened in England in the 19th century with the formation of a series of so-called family rock bands.

Those responsible, all residents of the town of Keswick in Cumbria’s Lake District, built large instruments incorporating stone bars sourced from the local terrain and two of the resulting bands went on to have extraordinarily successful musical careers. The story being told here starts with those pioneers in Keswick and has continued to develop through to the present day in numerous locations. The question of why people should have chosen to make music from this unlikely material is one which lies at the heart of this investigation.

When struck together any two pieces of stone will make some kind of noise. In most cases it will be a dull thud, which according to most definitions would not be described as particularly musical. But some rocks will resonate with an attractive ring, reverberating in such a way that the sound continues, at least for a short time, before dying away and it is these resonating pieces of rock which have been utilised by certain cultures across the world and across time. Although there is no guarantee that a particular kind of rock will ring there are some types which are more likely to do so, with hard rock, for example, being generally more resonant than soft. It might be igneous, volcanic rock formed from lava, such as black granite or basalt, or one of the varieties of metamorphic rock, including slate and marble. Some kinds of sedimentary rock will ring, particularly limestone, whose hardness partly comes from being formed from fossils and shell fragments. Even among geologists there is a degree of uncertainty as to why it is that one piece of rock from a certain place will ring while a similar piece beside it will not.

The reason seems to lie in the condition of its internal structure. Although very porous rock may well not be hard enough to ring, being porous itself is not an impediment. As long as the outer wall of each pore is intact the sound vibration can travel, but if it is fractured, it will not. From the second half of the 20th century onwards, there has been a good deal of research supporting the belief that stone was used for musical purposes in prehistoric times. The unearthing of 11 large slabs of stone in Vietnam in 1949 which, on examination were judged to have been tuned for musical use, possibly thousands of years ago, was followed by further similar discoveries in the same country. An increased awareness of the part played by stone instruments in the musical history of some of Vietnam’s musical minority cultures has resulted in a revival of interest in the playing of stone instruments in the country, on a scale not found to such an extent anywhere else.

It goes without saying that musical instruments made from stone are not a common sight. They may date back to the neolithic period but what has happened to them since cannot rate as a great success story. There are good reasons for this, one self-evidently being one of weight, an instrument built from substantial pieces of rock highly being impractical to transport. Another factor is the limited feasibility of stone as a material to work with: other materials such as wood and later bronze proved to be far more malleable and thus suitable for making necessary refinements.

The general name given to a stone instrument, lithophone, is derived from the Greek words for stone and sound. There are those who insist that the word specifically applies to a set of tuned bars of stone, played with handheld beaters and that to call any musical instrument made of stone a lithophone would be the equivalent of calling any wooden instrument a xylophone. Whilst there is a case to be made for this, the history of language shows that logic does not always prove to be an effective decider on such matters. The remit of Music Stones, stretching as it does beyond such a tight definition, sidesteps the controversy by neatly excluding the word lithophone from its title.

The reason for the commonly experienced surprise and fascination upon seeing a lithophone for the first time seems to be more than just its novelty, but to lie in the nature of the material it’s made from. The associations we have with stone and the way we use the word metaphorically doesn’t tally with attributes generally associated with music: stone cold; stone dead; stone deaf; heart of stone. Stone is inanimate, lifeless, probably not something we would wish our music to be. Yet in the visual sphere we have long been fully aware of the potential of stone to be turned into things of beauty and profundity: architecture, jewellery, sculpture being common examples. These things are part of our world. But in them stone is no longer rough, visibly hacked from the landscape, it has been transformed into something else. And we do like our musical instruments to be things of visual beauty too: the subtle curves of a violin or a Les Paul guitar, the magnificence of a concert grand, the brazen flamboyance of a trumpet or trombone, or the sparkle of a drumkit. So a row of roughly hewn stone slabs doesn’t initially hold much promise, yet paradoxically that seems precisely why, when those low expectations are defied, the enjoyment is all the greater. It was the sheer amazement at the quality of music being produced, as familiar dance tunes and popular classics were played on rustic-looking stone slabs in English towns in the early 1840s, which led to the success of the family rock bands.

When stone first began to be employed in the playing of music may be impossible to pinpoint and remains a matter of conjecture, but we can perhaps be more specific about the first documented use of the term “music stones”. Peter Crosthwaite, while curator of the Crosthwaite Museum in Keswick, wrote in a memorandum: “On the 11th June 1785 Peter Crosthwaite found his first Music Stones”.

Having collected enough stones from the foot of the nearby Skiddaw mountain, he went on to assemble them into a musical instrument. It was his music stones, which he displayed and played in his museum, which later inspired Joseph Richardson to build his much larger lithophone and form the first of the family rock bands. From our standpoint in time, the difficulty of having to contend with the idea of rock bands being around in the 19th century is rather confusingly compounded by the fact that this term was not only applied to the group of musicians but also at times to the instrument itself.

Mike Adcock's Music Stones: The Rediscovery Of Ringing Rock is published by Archaeopress. You can read Katrina Dixon’s review of the book in The Wire 502. 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.

The 13 November edition of The Wire’s weekly radio show on Resonance FM and Resonance Extra included music by Malibu, Godflesh, Zuli, Širom, Hilary Woods and more

Tracklist

Malibu
“Watching People Die”
From Vanities
(YEAR0001)

Godflesh
“Pure”
From Pure
(Earache Records)

Zuli
“Hikma حكمة”
From Swag Lee – Habibi Loops Vol II
(Bungarr)

J Fisher
“CHOP”
From DEADLOOPS2025
(DeathBomb Arc)

DJ Marcelle/Another Nice Mess
“Never Again Means”
From Sorry, No Silence
(Cortizona)

WULFFLUW XCIV
“Mithril Veins”
From Index_0
(Bandcamp)

Yuhan Su
“Tomorrow (Alternative Mix)”
Unreleased

Haykal, Julmud, Acamol
“Dihhiyyet Samaana دحية سمانا”
From Kam Min Janneh | كم من جنّة
(Bilna'es بالناقص)

htmljones featuring Reptile B
“get lost”
From British girl ep
(Bandcamp)

우륵과 풍각쟁이들 Ureuk And The Gypsies
“기산 (Spiritual Outburst)”
From 풍류 Pungryu
(Bandcamp)

Ship Sket
“Dysentery”
From InitiatriX
(Planet Mu)

Hilary Woods
“Offerings”
From Night CRIÚ
(Sacred Bones Records)

Misery//Pleasure
“Magick II”
From Trapped In Life
(Brachliegen Tapes)

Nakibemebe Embaire Group & Naoyuki Uchida
“Oteranga Waira”
From Phantom Keys
(Nyege Nyege Tapes)

Širom
“No One's Footsteps Deep In The Beat Of A Butterfly's Wings”
From In The Wind Of Night, Hard-Fallen Incantations Whisper
(Glitterbeat)

Atef Swaitat
“Palestinian Psychedelic 1970s Dabka Archive Pt 2”
From Palestinian Bedouin Psychedelic Dabka Archive
(Majazz Project/Palestinian Sound Archive)

dj galen
“born a star”
From the Death of Music
(Orange Milk Records)

Translation Loss Records and Pro Sound Effects share an exclusive early stream of Ann Kroeber and Alan Splet’s I Thought I Heard A Stranger

To celebrate the memory of sound artists Ann Kroeber and Alan Splet, sound library Pro Sound Effects and Translation Loss Records have released an album of soundscapes created from Kroeber and Splet’s Sound Mountain Collection.

Kroeber and Splet were frequent collaborators with David Lynch on films such as Eraserhead, Dune and Lost Highway. When Splet died in 1994, Kroeber created Sound Mountain to preserve and carry on the extensive library of sound effects the two had built together over a 15 year personal and professional partnership.

For this album, PSE sound designers Daniel Louis D’Errico, Sebastian Henshaw, Huascar Alberto Holguin, Eric Mooney and Facundo Moreno revisited Sound Mountain to create a soundtrack honouring Kroeber and Splet’s creativity.

Wire subscribers can read Paul Schütze’s obituary of Alan Splet from February 1995 in issue 132 in the digital archive. A review of I Thought I Heard A Stranger will appear in The Wire 503/504

Listen to the music we played to Test Dept during their Invisible Jukebox interview in The Wire 502

Each month in the magazine we play an artist or group a series of tracks which they are asked to comment on – with no prior knowledge of what they are about to hear.

In The Wire 502 it is the turn of industrial pioneers Test Dept.

Here you can listen to a mix of the tracks our correspondent Mike Barnes played to Test Dept during the interview, which is published in full in The Wire 502. To find out what they said about them, subscribers can read the interview in our online magazine library here. Or you can buy a copy of the magazine in our online shop.

But first, a brief biography of our subject:

Test Dept formed in South London in 1981. Their percussion based music played on scrap metal and found materials was augmented by electronics and samples, and their ultra-physical approach made them a striking proposition both sonically and visually. The group’s 1982 debut album History (The Strength Of Metal In Motion) was the first of many self-released cassettes. They achieved greater exposure on signing to Some Bizzare and releasing Beating The Retreat in 1984. Their political activism was most overtly demonstrated on 1985’s Shoulder To Shoulder, recorded during the UK miners' strike with the South Wales Striking Miners Choir. Live, Test Dept used multiple slide and film projections and worked collectively with artists from other disciplines under the banner Ministry Of Power.

They made a number of ambitious site-specific performances around London, at Arch 69 and the Titan Arch railway arches at Waterloo, and Bishops Bridge Maintenance Depot at Paddington Station. Elsewhere, with theatre group Brith Gof, they staged Gododdin, based on a heroic medieval Welsh poem, in an abandoned car factory in Cardiff. Test Dept’s musical ambitions expanded further on Pax Britannica (1991), initially performed at St Rollox Railway Works in Glasgow. John Eacott’s score was played by Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Schola Cantorum of Edinburgh and conducted by James MacMillan.

Through the 90s Test Dept pursued a more electronic tack, partly as a reaction to the passing of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994. They split in 1997 but resumed activities in 2014 around founder members Paul Jamrozy and Graham Cunnington. Their large-scale film installation DS30 utilised Dunston Staiths, an industrial building in Gateshead, to mark the 30th anniversary of the miners' strike.

Test Dept's most recent album is Disturbance (2019), and they are now working on a new one for Artoffact, who this month are set to release the archival box set Industrial Overture: Studio & Live Recordings 1982-85.

The jukebox with Cunnington and Jamrozy took place via Zoom.

Tracklist (with timestamp):

Tools You Can Trust (00:00)
“Messy Body Thrust”
From Yet More Proof
(Red Energy Dynamo) 1985

Einstürzende Neubauten (02:04)
“Tanz Debil”
From Kollaps
(ZickZack) 1981

Mikhail Karikis (05:26)
Sounds From Beneath
(YouTube) 2010

The Beatn*gs (12:07)
“Television”
From The Beatn*gs
(Alternative Tentacles) 1988

Diamanda Galás (17:49)
“Panoptikon”
From Diamanda Galás
(Metalanguage) 1984

Faust (32:57)
“It's A Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl”
From So Far
(Polydor) 1972

Charles Hayward (40:25)
“Smell Of Metal”
From Skew-Whiff: A Tribute To Mark Rothko
(Sub Rosa) 1990

Arvo Pärt (45:10)
Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten
From Tabula Rasa
(ECM) 1984

Vic Reeves (50:54)
“I Remember Punk Rock”
From I Will Cure You
(Island) 1991

Stream a selection of tracks from releases we listened to during the making of our December 2025 issue

The full chart:

Alien Trackers
Dubs From Vortex Beach
(Jahtari)

Anna Högberg Attack
Ensamseglaren
(Edition)

Binary Digit
Summer Tape III
(Bandcamp)