“No worries, I am officially nocturnal,” is Phil Hartnoll’s text assuring me it’s OK to call him for an interview at 11pm midweek. Later on, he jokes, “I can’t tell the time anyway”, when I […]
Mathman interview: ‘We’re writing our history – right now’
“Our history books are being written day by day by the artists around us, and that’s a very powerful thing.” Get Adam ‘Mathman’ Fogarty talking about Irish hip-hop and he goes off on one, in […]
Nothing is forbidden: Tallinn Music Week 2019
“Remake / Remodel is the key… not that we haven’t stumbled and fell,” says Ingrid Kohtla, one of the creative minds behind Tallinn Music Week – one of Europe’s most consistently fearless, diverse festivals, in […]
Boomelant – TARŁO: An EP made from porn sounds that’s actually quite SFW
I found this electronic curio while stuck in a Bandcamp wormhole, digging around “field recordings” tags, trying to find some Chris Watson-type nature recordings to help me sleep. But instead of the ambient sounds of […]
Oran “Juice” Jones – The Rain: A weirdo boogie-soul revenge fantasy (1986)
Ah, the 80s – a simpler time for gender politics, when the most popular comedian on the planet was Eddie Murphy, doing his routine about gold-diggers, and on the big screen the most aspirational figure […]
GZA’s still in da Front
I‘m not dissing the rest of the Wu-Tang Clan, but GZA is the only member who you could imagine boasting onstage about the number of books he saw with his own eyes in the Trinity […]
Sansibar makes some Finnish EBM-techno noise on White Swan
Helsinki producer Sansibar has been turning the dial in recent years, flitting between trip-hop, dark techno and even lo-fi punk as Shoplift – but hopefully he doesn’t change the station after hitting a bullseye with […]
Overexposed at the edge of town: Mart Avi – Back 2 Light
There’s something spectral and unearthly about Mart Avi’s avant-garde pop, and he further explores the nocturnal outer limits on his new video for the single Back 2 Light. The song is taken from the Estonian […]
All the right noises: February & March 2019 in 20 tracks
From long-form ritual ambient, to sick Finnish grindcore, to Japanese brain-fry hip-hop and a love song to an ancient sea sponge living on a dying coral reef, here’s a selection of the best music from […]
John Grant’s an avant-garde pop weirdo hiding in plain sight
On his 2018 album Love Is Magic, John Grant fully indulges the electronic quirks and avant-garde left-turns that made up much of his previous album Grey Tickles, Back Pressure. But Grant’s fourth album also ditches […]
The Internet have finally found it
With a self-sabotaging un-Google-able name and a an open-doors fluctuating policy with members, The Internet don’t always make it easy for themselves. Frontwoman Syd (fka Syd Tha Kyd) also had a rocky enough start as […]
‘Tomorrow’s music and ideas’: Who to check out at Tallinn Music Week 2019
On the weekend of March 29 when a collective facepalm spreads around Europe over Brexit, at least one city will be fuelled by an inclusive, open-door international ethos, as Tallinn Music Week once again hits […]
For the record: The sound and vision of Eamonn Doyle’s Dublin
Few artists in the early days of techno had a long-term projection, aside from an abstract idea they were making the music of the future. Legacies were for classic rock bands, and even a 10-year […]
The Armed keep flipping hardcore
The Armed call themselves a “punk rock band from Detroit, Michigan” on their Bandcamp page, but they’re selling themselves short. The band take hardcore rage as a starting point and wrangle in atonal electronics, noise-rock […]
Interview: Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley on the enduring legacy of Daydream Nation
One of the defining music documentaries of the 90s was 1991: The Year That Punk Broke, which captured noise-rock pioneers Sonic Youth on tour in Europe in 1991 with a rising young band called Nirvana. […]
Moo Kid 