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 […]
RadioPeng doesn't usually dip into the glossy waters of mainstream pop. Our orbit tends to favor the cosmic, the obscure, the droning, the free-jazz freakouts and the ambient abysses. But every so often, a song comes along so unabashedly human-so universal in its naked sincerity-that it breaks through the firewall. Enter Endless Love (1981): Lionel Richie and Diana Ross's gloriously over-the-top hymn to devotion, a duet so pure it could […]
Tangerine Dream’s Zeit is a slow, dark, and patient record. It came out in 1972. It is four long pieces. The mood is heavy, quiet, and cosmic. There are almost no rhythms. There are long drones, soft waves, and deep tones. It asks you to listen closely. It rewards you if you do. What listeners say Many fans call Zeit a tough album. They also call it unique and powerful. […]
The story begins with songs moving by Bluetooth from one phone to another across the Sahara. Cheap handsets held MP3s on memory cards. People traded tracks in markets, at roadside stalls, and at weddings. Bluetooth was the wire. The phone’s tiny speaker was the radio. This was a music network built by people, not towers. Sahel Sounds listened to that network and became a bridge. The label found the songs […]
Genesis is what happens when a group of posh schoolboys accidentally invent three different genres and then spend the next twenty years trying to outrun themselves. Formed in the late 1960s at Charterhouse School, they started as mild-mannered psychedelic folkies and ended as global pop deities with laser lights, gated drums, and Armani blazers. Along the way, they became a sort of evolutionary chart for British rock itself, one band […]
Welcome to the shimmering, softly pulsing universe of Brian Eno—composer, sonic tinkerer, ambient architect, and possibly an alien trapped in a British man’s body. If you’ve ever heard music that sounded like a ghost whispering in a rain-drenched cathedral and thought, “This slaps,” you may already be under Eno’s spell. Glam Rock’s Most Mysterious Synth Wizard Long before he was ambient royalty, Brian Eno emerged from the art-rock primordial ooze […]
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