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Curating the feed · Mon / Wed / Fri · Aug 14, 2026
Today's Top ReadsThe day's three most essential reads, selected from the full sweep of music, culture, and industry coverage.
Essays · Analysis · Features
On the cover
On the Cover Featured on "On 'Lost Weekend,' Phoebe Bridgers builds a memory palace"

On 'Lost Weekend,' Phoebe Bridgers builds a memory palace

Six years after Punisher and three Grammys with boygenius, Phoebe Bridgers returns with Lost Weekend, and NPR Music makes the case that it's her strangest, most personal record yet. Written through fame, a complicated love life and her father's sudden death, it plays like a scrapbook whose pages keep disintegrating: nonlinear, starting over in the middle and the end. The music finally does something new, letting a soaring metaphor and a self-deprecating zinger share the same breath.

Music & Scene Read on NPR Music →
Luminate · Music & Scene

Overseas Rappers Become Hometown Heroes Stateside

Luminate's Ikenna Ugwu takes the regionality that's always governed hip-hop and follows it across borders. The finding: overseas rappers land their biggest U.S. audiences in the cities that map to their diaspora or their influences. Nigeria's Asake indexes 3.06 in the DMV. Belfast's KNEECAP, who cite Wu-Tang, peak in Boston and New York. The takeaway for anyone chasing a breakout act: track the specific market, not the global stream count.

Read →
Joel Gouveia · Music Industry Analysis

How Artists Will Get Paid For Being Stolen From

Joel Gouveia traces how every time music culture treats theft as free raw material, the industry eventually builds machinery to make somebody pay. Hip-hop chopped vinyl into art until Biz Markie got sued and the judge opened with "Thou shalt not steal." Napster hit 80 million users before Jobs turned piracy into iTunes. If you've watched the AI-training fight unfold, you already know where this pattern goes next.

Read →
01 Music & SceneWriting about music and the culture around it. Criticism, profiles, interviews, and scene reporting, selected for insight rather than news value.
POW MAG

Remembering Nipsey Hussle

Built around a video conversation with Bino Rideaux about PROLIFIC, Nipsey Hussle's first posthumous album, this POW piece pairs the collaboration with field notes from the days after the 2019 murder: the Crenshaw and Slauson memorial, the Staples funeral, the drumline no one could see. It's a portrait of the man who walked the line between neighborhood myth and guy from down the block.

Read on POW MAG →
The New York Times

L'Rain Asks if 'Experimental' Music Can Be Far-Reaching

The "experimental" tag works as a market ceiling, not just a description — and The New York Times profiles Taja Cheek, aka L'Rain, testing where that ceiling sits on her fourth LP "Fata Morgana." After three acclaimed albums, she noticed people handling her music with white gloves. The sharpest point: for Black women with experimental perspectives, the door stays cracked, never open.

Read on The New York Times →
The Guardian

It was lonely being a young queer artist': Sam Smith on finding health, happiness - and their hazel-eyed fiance

Sam Smith talks to The Guardian from the To Be Free tour ahead of fifth album Hazel Eyes, out 21 August, and frames the downsizing (smaller rooms, first co-producing credit, a dusky 70s blues-and-folk palette) as the only sustainable footing for a queer artist under constant attack. The craft argument lands: plain singer-songwriter tropes hit differently sung by a non-binary 34-year-old in 2026.

Read on The Guardian →
Range and Basin

She's Got Herself a Universe

Jason P. Woodbury explores Madonna's "Ray of Light" as a spiritual and musical experience, examining how the song and album represent a shift in Madonna's artistic focus toward the cosmic and immaterial, with producer William Orbit's influence central to the work's sound and impact.

Read on Range and Basin →
Chartmetric

The Future of Folk Music: How the Genre Is Being Redefined

The folk canon is stuck in the 1960s and '70s, but the streaming data isn't. Chartmetric pits Rolling Stone's boomer-heavy best-albums list against May 2026 trending tracks — all released within five months, spanning India, Mexico, Chile and German hip-hop. The argument: if folk just means music representing a community, geography and genre stop mattering. Even Bad Bunny qualifies.

Read on Chartmetric →
POW MAG

This Is Her World: Remembering Sparky D

A biographical piece on Doreen C. Broadnax (Sparky D), a pioneering female rapper from Brownsville, Brooklyn who rose to prominence in hip-hop's early years. The article traces her journey from joining The Playgirls in 1983 through her work with producer Spyder D and her role in hip-hop history during the genre's formative era.

Read on POW MAG →
The Quietus

Songs Across the Line of Control: How Balti Music Survives in Ladakh

Balti folk songs in Kargil already sang about separation and longing before the 1947 Line of Control split their communities, and this reported feature from The Quietus argues those melodies became cultural memory across a militarised border. Now language loss threatens them: Kaleem Balti reckons only 10 percent survives. Younger artists like Zahra Banoo keep the Balti, change the production, and hope both hold.

Read on The Quietus →
Mason Currey

How to fall and fly at the same time

Mason Currey zeroes in on Nirosta Steel's concept of "deep play" — borrowed from anthropology, passed through conversations with Arthur Russell — as the organizing principle behind My Skyscraper, a double album where rehearsal, performance, and studio recording collapse into one continuous state.

Read on Mason Currey →
02 Music Industry AnalysisAnalysis of the music business. Deals, streaming economics, rights, and the power dynamics that shape what gets made and who gets paid.
Hypebot

Drinking From a Firehose

The artists doing the most interesting work almost always turn out to be obsessive students of everyone before them: they know every Bud Powell solo, every synth Prince used. This Soundfly essay makes that the dividing line between professionals and aspirants, citing Betty Who reeling off lyrics by instinct and pianist Kiefer asking students how many Herbie songs they've actually learned.

Read on Hypebot →
Zinstrel

Zinstrel #100: The 100 Names You Need to Know

Zinstrel's 100th edition profiles 100 key figures and companies in AI music culture and analysis, including rights-cleared training data companies, collaborative DAWs, AI production platforms, and generative music studios reshaping the music industry.

Read on Zinstrel →
AI Music Newsletter

Spotify to Start Labeling AI Artists; Suno Unveils Download Caps for Free, Paid Tiers to Combat Abuse

Two moves that quietly reveal how the AI music economy actually works: Spotify will start flagging AI-generated tracks, and Suno is capping downloads on both free and paid tiers to curb abuse. The AI Music Newsletter rounds up a disclosure push that arrives alongside a generator throttling its own output, a sign the flood of synthetic uploads is straining the platforms built to welcome it.

Read on AI Music Newsletter →
Billboard

Tencent Music's Q2 Revenue Tops $1.3 Billion on Subscription Growth, Ximalaya Acquisition

Buy your way into spoken audio, but grow on music — that's the tension in TME's Q2. Billboard reports the $2.4B Ximalaya deal is the headline story, yet the 44.9% margin expansion came from converting listeners into higher-tier SVIP subscriptions. Revenue rose 6% to $1.32B, and TME borrowed TikTok's vertical swipe feed to juice music discovery. Audiobooks aren't the engine yet.

Read on Billboard →
03 Music RecommendationsNew and recent music worth hearing. A featured pick plus additional recommendations, each with brief context and a link to listen.

L'Rain — "fata morgana"

via Shatter the Standards

Taja Cheek's third album synthesizes dancehall, tape meditations, slow jams, gospel, and crunched metal to tessellate how a person grows in a world not built for them to thrive in. Shatter the Standards notes it begins like a stammer, a four-line fragment of the same stalled sentence: "I keep trying to start the/Start."

REC 01

Charles.A.D.

Luminous
♪ Dub techno

Futurism Restated's record of the week is deeply faithful to dub techno's formula of rippling chords and crisply stepping kick/hat patterns, with the Basic Channel, Maurizio and Deepchord lineage clear. What sets the Japanese producer apart emerges on repeat listens: the carefree fillip to the chords of "Epiplegic Zone," the airy melancholy of "Urban Night #0," and the muted wash and serrated lead of "Urban Night #5."

Futurism Restatedview source →
▶ Watch on YouTube
REC 02

Nick Hakim

I Can See
♪ neo-soul minimalism

Hakim's fourth album strips out the drama that animated WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD in favor of a balmy medium zone: relentlessly moderate tempo, subdued vocals sunk in the mix, cassette hiss wrapping everything in pleasant degradation. Pitchfork hears the Soulquarians-style bounce of live instruments against MPCs, plus the Reich and Riley influence Hakim claims, though these songs proceed rather than build. The scuzz is homogenized rather than clumping, and the record recedes into the middle distance the harder you strain to hear it, making itself new with each listen.

Pitchforkview source →
▶ Watch on YouTube
REC 03

The Durutti Column

Liars
♪ ambient post-punk

One of two Renascent originals sung by Vini Reilly, his illegible, low-in-the-mix mumble scratching against Keir Stewart's velvet synths and Bruce Mitchell's drums. Recorded after three strokes nearly ended his playing, Reilly nests in a daydream, muttering "I am sorry" and "I love you" as if answering to everyone who believed in him. A concession to material reality in the lineage of Talk Talk's Mark Hollis.

Pitchforkview source →
▶ Watch on YouTube
REC 04

Topdown Dialectic

False LP A
♪ dub techno/ambient

The latest from the once-anonymous Izaak Schlossman, whose stone-faced project trades untitled tracks and 5:00 runtimes for a first spot of color: a rust-and-purple blur resembling a digitally manipulated carnation. Futurism Restated traces its lineage from Basic Channel minimalism through a Peak Oil relationship that has flourished since 2018.

Futurism Restatedview source →
▶ Watch on YouTube
REC 05

DOMi & JD BECK

WHO ASKED?
♪ jazz fusion

Everything here is the work of two players and a small string orchestra, nothing delegated: DOMi Louna on piano and keys, JD BECK on drums, both writing, arranging, producing, and singing. "ÉPiPHANiE" runs wordless as quick arpeggios trade between harps and woodwinds; "HAD ENOUGH" bounces hard-paced drums over synth bass with lyrics by Anderson .Paak.

Shatter the Standardsview source →
▶ Watch on YouTube
REC 06

Picture

Quuuuuu
♪ dub techno

The artist also known as Central turns toward dub techno on his second Short Span record this year, finding more spark and movement in the form than nearly anyone in years. "Peeeeeee" is claustrophobic techno with a swinging bassline like a wonkier Chain Reaction cut, while "Leeeeee" nears traditional dub territory: Shinichi Atobe's warmth over the pure glimmer of Vainqueur. Sitting closer to Convextion than the '90s set, Picture trades "emotional punishment" for emotional levity, unquantised swing lifting heavy, crowded arrangements off the floor.

Resident Advisorview source →
▶ Watch on YouTube
REC 07

Charli xcx

Magic Metal Montana
♪ art-pop / guitar-pop

A whole song dedicated to A.G. Cook as collaborator and friend, and it's sweet. Part of Music, Fashion, Film, Charli's fashionably short, first-draft "one for me" record that trades BRAT's club pop and wounded electronics for guitars, and career self-doubt for creativity and gratitude. This one requires familiarity with Charli's whole deal: by now you're supposed to understand she's in on the joke.

Pitchforkview source →
▶ Watch on YouTube
REC 08

Neuro… No Neuro

MemLoss
♪ post-glitch ambient minimalism

Kirk Markarian's record documents the confusion left behind by his speech and memory becoming inconsistent. His music is unrepentantly electronic, honing in on machine-generated tones, oscillations and pads, isolating and sculpting fragments into soundscapes that despite irregular pulses, bleeps and whirs have a chaotic yet cohesive, cosmically attuned flow.

The Slow Music Movementview source →
▶ Watch on YouTube
REC 09

Steve Lacy + Erykah Badu

Pure Color
♪ neo-soul / funk

Erykah Badu has been Lacy's named influence since he was a teenager, and on 'pure colour' she meanders through his loosest soul groove, bending her lines however she likes while he keeps it carefully constructed, singing that she does not recognize herself anymore. In his response verse, he confronts relatives who think he'll turn into his father: 'They don't know shit, take control of me.'

shatterthestandards.comview source →
▶ Watch on YouTube
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04 Voice & CulturePersonal essays from writers across cultural media, reflecting on how culture shapes identity, work, and daily life.
i-D

Not everyone is the main character

Nicolaia Rips's piece in i-D pushes back on the TikTok-era "main character" archetype by making a case for character-actor energy instead: the person who owns the room without centering it. Rips grounds the argument in a perfect Rockaway afternoon, piña coladas at a dive bar that's been running since the 1800s, and the specific texture of people who don't perform their presence.

Read on i-D →
Sean Fennessey

The Five Final Girls You Meet at the Movies in 2026

Sean Fennessey discusses the concept of the "Final Girl" in horror films, using the 2025 indie film Obsession as a starting point. He examines how the film's protagonist Nikki, played by Inde Navarette, represents an evolution of this trope and explores the film's gender politics and cultural impact.

Read on Sean Fennessey →
The New York Review of Books

Jerry Survives

Chris Ware on Jerry Moriarty, the painter-cartoonist who spent decades doing everything postwar art schools forbade: figuration, family, narrative. His strip Jack Survives, published in Spiegelman and Mouly's RAW, rendered midcentury American domesticity in lines that read like Bushmiller pencilled and Hopper inked.

Read on The New York Review of Books →
Financial Times

Harry Potter has ruined Britain

Emily Sundberg's dispatch from London opens with a pointed observation: they're doing Appalachia cosplay in Shoreditch. The broader target is Britain's Harry Potter economy, still expanding nearly 20 years after the final book, from untaxed wizard shops to filming-location pilgrimages. The sharpest detail: a fictional grave now outranks actual Bronze Age burial remains as a tourist draw.

Read on Financial Times →
Embedded

My Internet: Shaad D'Souza

An interview with Shaad D'Souza about his relationship with the internet, smartphones, and viral content. The conversation covers his views on AI-generated content, phone addiction, and his experience with posts going viral.

Read on Embedded →
Old New

The Long Goodbye: Main Vaapas Aaunga (2026)

A film review and analysis of Imtiaz Ali's Main Vaapas Aaunga (2026), exploring its non-linear narrative structure, emotional intensity, and thematic connections to Partition and longing. The piece discusses Ali's background as a major Hindi filmmaker and his approach to storytelling.

Read on Old New →
05 Sound on Sight Video ArchiveOne music video from the archive in each issue, ranging from a few months to sixty years old, with a short note on why it holds up.

Mother's Ruin — "Lost in Town"

1981 · Swiss punk

Zürich, 1981. Mother's Ruin had been going since 1978, early enough that Swiss punk barely existed, and director Paul Grau shot 'Lost in Town' for the 'Want More' LP while the scene was still inventing itself. Snarl from a country nobody files under snarl.

SOS 01

Dorothy Fuzz

1 2 3 Understand Me
♪ 2025 · psych-pop

Out of Los Angeles, Dorothy Fuzz stack sweet vocal harmonies over trippy psych and title the album 'Mad Art For A Mad Age,' which about covers it. '1 2 3 Understand Me' keeps reaching for connection and dissolving into haze before it can close the gap. Sunshine on top, something woozier underneath.

▶ Watch on YouTube
SOS 02

UNKLE

Rabbit In Your Headlights
♪ 1998 · trip-hop

Jonathan Glazer sends a man stumbling through a tunnel, getting hit by cars over and over, muttering Thom Yorke's looped prayer. Each impact lands harder than the last until the final one doesn't. UNKLE and DJ Shadow built the track from dread and strings; Glazer turned it into a parable that earns its resurrection.

▶ Watch on YouTube
SOS 03

Fat Lip

What's Up Fatlip
♪ 2000 · alternative hip-hop

Spike Jonze films it like a pratfall in slow motion: Fat Lip narrating his own worst day, every small humiliation landing square on the beat. It's tragi-comedy played dead straight, an itemized series of humiliations played with a stand-up's timing. The Pharcyde's sharpest tongue turns self-loathing into the funniest, saddest three minutes the West Coast underground ever produced.

▶ Watch on YouTube
SOS 04

Marina Voica

Common People
♪ 1996 · Romanian pop

A Romanian pop grande dame, who'd spent five decades exploring the outer boundaries of samba, soul, and disco-pop, takes Pulp’s 'Common People' and sings it in her own language. The pairing is the pleasure: a voice raised on the state airwaves wrapping itself around a Britpop anthem about class.

▶ Watch on YouTube
SOS 05

Jeff Mills

TR-909 Workout
♪ 2017 · Detroit techno

Jeff Mills sits down with a single Roland TR-909 and turns pattern-building into performance. No mixer sleight of hand, no rack of gear. Just the machine that built Detroit techno getting reprogrammed live, hi-hats and kicks bent in real time by a man who treats the 909 like an instrument, not a preset.

▶ Watch on YouTube
SOS 06

Slowdive

Alison
♪ 1993 · shoegaze

Neil Halstead sings a name like he's trying to keep it from dissolving. Slowdive built their reputation on guitars that swallowed themselves whole, but 'Alison' is the song where a melody fights through the haze and wins. Three decades on, it remains the gentlest thing the Thames Valley scene ever produced.

▶ Watch on YouTube
SOS 07

horsegiirL

only the best
♪ 2026 · club-pop

A German DJ in a horse mask who answers to Stella Stallion and swears she's half-equine. The joke could have ended at the viral 'My Barn My Rules,' but 'only the best' keeps the mask on and aims it at luxury, deadpanning about wanting only the finest while the beat refuses to take her, or money, seriously.

▶ Watch on YouTube
SOS 08

TWINART

Instant This Instant That
♪ 1979 · new wave

Three years before MTV switched on, the twin sisters Ellen and Lynda Kahn were already treating the music video as an art object. 'Instant This Instant That' races two women through a day of pop hyper-reality, pure jump-cut consumer delirium, and it hung at the Whitney and The Kitchen before the form had a name.

▶ Watch on YouTube
SOS 09

Amnesia Scanner

AS CRUST
♪ 2016 · deconstructed club

Build a grime beat, then delete the rapper. What's left on 'AS Crust' is the skeleton of a club track twitching with processed, unintelligible voices, all menace and nobody home. It was 2016, deconstructed club's sharpest moment, and Amnesia Scanner sounded like the genre dreaming anxiously about itself.

▶ Watch on YouTube
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06 How the AI Backlash is Reshaping CultureThe AI backlash is becoming culture: anti-AI prose, photocopied zines, human curators, records browsed by hand. Eight pieces on what refusal builds.
WIRED

More Typos, Fewer Em Dashes: Writers Are Creating an Anti-AI 'Literary Counterculture'

WIRED reports an anti-AI literary counterculture forming inside prose style itself. Writers are shedding em dashes, tripartite lists and passive voice to signal human authorship, and commissioning editors at Pitchfork and Playboy now ask for first-person, idiosyncratic copy. The headline names the tells of the craft, more typos and fewer em dashes. The piece carries its own warning: any cosmetic counterstyle can be studied and replicated, which leaves actually good writing as the only durable defense.

Read on WIRED →
Hypebot

Yes, Human Curation Still Matters for Real Fans.

MIDiA's Laura Fisher, writing at Hypebot, argues the algorithm isn't enough for superfans anymore and the tastemaker is moving back to the fore. BBC 6 Music posted stronger RAJAR figures last quarter, Rinse FM has expanded into daytime, Spotify now puts New Music Friday's human curators on camera in the US, and NTS has partnered with Atonemo on a screen-free Wi-Fi player. The piece labels the whole mode omakase listening.

Read on Hypebot →
The Guardian

More real than anything you'll see scrolling': the radical resurgence of UK fanzines, 50 years after punk

The Guardian charts the UK fanzine revival, fifty years after Sniffin' Glue, and the production choices carry the politics. Hamish Ironside prints Saudade on a Gestetner from typewriter-cut stencils; Phil McMullen sets Terrascopaedia in letterpress (around seven hours to typeset a page); young makers adopt the cut-and-paste photocopy look in open defiance of AI slop. Stephen McRobbie of the Pastels calls it the long way round with better scenery, and hyper-local titles document scenes from Glasgow (Winch) to Teesside (Point Blank).

Read on The Guardian →
Song Sommelier

Unoptimised and glorious: music to light up the moon

The album is the least optimised way to release music in 2026, and Song Sommelier's Keith Jopling treats that as the argument for it. Jopling's evidence is a 2017 Spotify strategy retreat in London, a room of roughly a hundred executives and 70 percent technologists, where a voucher for a Soho record shop went unclaimed. Two years of work by twenty or thirty people now gets a fortnight of attention, the Stones' Foreign Tongues included. Jesca Hoop supplies the stakes: without albums, the light goes out of the moon.

Read on Song Sommelier →
Why is this interesting?

The Death and Return of Browsing Edition

Ricardo Amorim builds hardware to make streaming browsable again, treating record crates, video-store aisles and bookshop tables as machines for serendipity: friction made you slow down, and slowing down made you browse. The examples run from the last Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon to a Bath bookshop whose bibliotherapists mail hand-picked books monthly. The wager is that serendipity can be reverse-engineered into systems that stay convenient.

Read on Why is this interesting? →
Infinite Catalog

More Weird Music Please

Infinite Catalog files a complaint on behalf of the difficult stuff. Weird music keeps getting made and has an increasingly hard time finding its audience, because sustained attention is what social platforms wear down, and artists like Captain Beefheart require slow, focused work to understand. The counterexample it reaches for is human radio, Flo's NTS breakfast show. Creativity, the newsletter observes, dims under observation.

Read on Infinite Catalog →
Thought Enthusiast

Meet Me at the Swap Meet

Thought Enthusiast interviews Veronica Pulcini, a third-generation Angeleno who programs The Lighthouse and still defends print magazines. Her formation ran through physical retail (drives to Tower and Amoeba, index cards of albums copied out of magazines), and it taught her that a band arrives with a world attached. The practice continues as MORNING Jahms, a song chosen daily for eight years running. She reads the hardcore mosh pit as one of the safest places in music, because everyone in it is looking out for everyone else.

Read on Thought Enthusiast →
Blood in the Machine

Understanding the Luddites in the age of AI

Brian Merchant tracks the luddite revival through an NPR word-of-the-week segment, a Nation feature, and Hasan Minhaj's Gen Z tech-backlash special. The piece then dives into the history of the actual Luddites, the British craftsmen of the early 1800s who rose against the machinery of the Industrial Revolution. Along the way it corrects the standard misreading: the machine-breakers were skilled workers who fought the way machinery was being used against them, not the machines themselves. It lands amid polling that has AI at 46 percent negative in the United States (26 percent positive, and worse among the young).

Read on Blood in the Machine →
07 Music During WartimeArtists making music inside upheaval, from Tehran to Kharkiv to Gaza to Santiago: what war takes from a scene, what it forces into the sound, and what survives.
a closer listen

Depth Map

Firas Shehadeh uses drone sounds because they are what he and Palestinians in Gaza are targeted by; the Western art canon files the same sound under texture. That inversion reorients Depth Map, the noise record he discusses with a closer listen, from aesthetic provocation into what the interview calls forensic listening (improvisations, loops and field recordings doing the work of testimony). Civilians in Gaza, children included, have now lived under that sound for almost three years.

Read on a closer listen →
A Closer Listen

Ukrainian Field Notes ~ LVII

Kharkiv has a band called Air Defence System, which is what four years of full-scale invasion does to a scene's vocabulary. Gianmarco Del Re's field notes for A Closer Listen document Ukrainian musicians still recording under intensifying Russian missile strikes, from Kharkiv to the electronic communities of Zaporizhzhia and Lutsk. The strongest thread is his decision to revisit artists he first interviewed when the invasion began, measuring what four years of war has done to how and what they record.

Read on A Closer Listen →
The FADER

Meet Medio Oriente, Chile's wildest post-genre electronic collective

Santiago's Estallido Social riots of 2019 never fully left the streets; part of them moved into the music. The FADER maps Medio Oriente, the label and collective around Segunda Mordida that channels that angst into abrasive digital hardcore (breakbeats, blown-out 808s, hyperpop bleeding into screamo). State violence and surveillance sit in the music because they sat in the founding experience, and the map runs from Segunda Mordida's digital punk outward to a whole roster built the same way.

Read on The FADER →
of songs and poems

The Bittersweet Sound of Iranian Pop and Psychedelia in the 60s and 70s

Nia's essay for of songs and poems opens in a Tehran on the edge of 1979, then rewinds through the pop and psychedelic scene that Mohammad Reza Shah's reforms and the 1963 White Revolution made room for, wider audiences and women onstage included. Googoosh defined the era and then spent twenty-one years in enforced silence; Kourosh Yaghmaei built the Iranian psych that Nas would later sample. It closes as a personal inheritance, an Iranian woman's time capsule of her country's pre-revolution sound.

Read on of songs and poems →
All Things Jazz

Rest in Peace to the legendary Abdullah Ibrahim

All Things Jazz remembers Abdullah Ibrahim, who died in June at 91, as a musician whose work served as living testimony and an instrument of resistance under apartheid. The career ran eight decades and turned the sounds of Cape Town into a global language, from District Six and the Jazz Epistles to the international run launched by Duke Ellington's endorsement.

Read on All Things Jazz →
The Politics of Dancing

I feel like a bird with broken wings

Western audiences connect to individual stories and disconnect from collective ones, and collective identity is where Palestinian political life resides. The Politics of Dancing sits with Khaled Jarrar, the multidisciplinary artist whose conversation moves through childhood under occupation, colonial versions of Islam, and the way lived experience travels, or doesn't, through media. The broken-winged bird of the title is his own phrase.

Read on The Politics of Dancing →
Shhh / Peaceful di Giulio Pecci

Cheb Runner «immigration has given rise to Morocco's multifaceted rhythms»

The long view belongs to Cheb Runner. Morocco's rhythmic diversity is an immigration story, the producer argues in Shhh / Peaceful: the country was the final stop for caravans out of Africa and Asia, and the collision of cultures built its layered rhythms. He walks through Marrakech's emerging electronic scene around venues like Kabana, his own archive of street recordings and cassettes, and the diaspora work of Rotterdam's (A)WAKE foundation. What migration put into the music has outlasted every caravan that carried it.

Read on Shhh / Peaceful di Giulio Pecci →
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