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 […]
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 […]
Piero Scaruffi (born 1955) is an Italian-American polymath whose work spans cognitive science, artificial intelligence, cultural history, poetry, and, most famously, music criticism. Best known to the public for a sprawling website—often called the “Piero Scaruffi Knowledge Base”—that houses decades of reviews, essays, and syllabi, Scaruffi has also authored multi-volume histories of rock, jazz, and avant-garde music, as well as studies on consciousness, Silicon Valley, and the history of knowledge. […]
The Reissues as a Portal Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller (Clone, 2011–2013) is a four-volume reissue series that reintroduces Drexciya’s early EPs, singles, and deep cuts to new listeners while restoring historical context for longtime fans. Far more than archival housekeeping, the series functions as a curated portal into an undersea mythology—Drexciya as a Black Atlantis—which reframes Detroit electro not merely as machine funk but as speculative narrative and […]
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