New year, and you started yoga again, right? You prepared yourself, you wanted to share the beauty of that reparative exercise. Maybe it worked at first, but soon you recognised that uniform, nonsensical new-age meanderings in the background. And you don’t have a say over that schmaltzy music intended to complement your holistic experience.  Flutes, a stultified tanpura or a sitar, lazy tabla beats, that fake eastern feel in the […]

Space rock’s grammar—elongated forms, drones, tape loops, and immersive stagecraft—grew directly out of mid‑to‑late 1960s psychedelia. At its core were extended, trance-inducing structures, synthesizer textures and sci‑fi mythmaking; depending on the band, it felt either like a utopian drift or a gritty engine-room throb. As the counterculture pushed music toward altered perception, bands folded liquid light shows, non‑Western modalities, and studio trickery into rock, setting up the hypnotic textures that […]

They began in the margins, and also at the centre of things. In wartime studios where silence was a risk and continuity a duty, young women learned to ride the dials like instruments: Daphne Oram shadowing concerts with contingency recordings, testing microphones, and, after hours, coaxing tone generators and tape into a language the BBC didn't yet recognize as music. Either she was a studio engineer with a composer's conscience […]

Seniority and the strange acceleration of creativity  There's a quiet revolution happening in plain sight: musicians who once embodied youthful rupture now carry their art deeper into age, as a new perspective on creativity. The surface story—legends touring stadiums—is easy to tell. The more interesting truth is internal: as the body slows, the internal listening ear gains momentum; experience pares away the unneeded flourish. What we call "seniority" is not […]

Fasiel and Broz were there from Sicily. Alix and her friend Rocco were fresh from his band's gig in Rotterdam. Costa and I came from London. We arrived in Amsterdam from different European countries, and Mary Halvorson's Amaryllis Sextet was the reason for this end of year reunion trip. My expectations were high. I bought tickets back in June, assuming she wouldn't play London this autumn. I was wrong: she […]