Sound Signal. Curating the feed every Monday, Wednesday and Friday
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Curating the feed · Mon / Wed / Fri · Oct 30, 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 "Their orchestra is not a sacred object but a tool for struggle – Paris’s musicians join the frontline"

This ‘Flying Dutchman’ Tests the Limits on Artists Speaking Freely About Israel

Thomas Rogers, reporting from Berlin, uses Milo Rau's new "Flying Dutchman" at the Deutsche Oper as a stress test for a question haunting German arts right now: can a state-funded stage criticize Israel over Gaza without losing its subsidy? Rau recasts Wagner's cursed captain as Germany's Holocaust guilt, Senta as Israel. Politicians called the house during development; the premiere opened with bag searches and closed with a man shouting "Nazis" at the cast. The leverage is the funding.

Music & Scene Read on The New York Times →
Chartmetric · Music Industry Analysis

Listeners vs. Fans: How to Build a Fanbase That Sticks Around in 2026

Chartmetric puts hard numbers behind something you already suspected: the monthly listener count is lying to you. Post Malone out-streams Olivia Rodrigo by millions, yet cancelled six US shows while she sold out all 85 dates of her tour. The piece, built on interviews with composer Michael Whalen and female:pressure's Luisa Houseworks, argues the gap is intention: streaming delivers exposure, not fans.

Read →
Track Ten · Music & Scene

Rihanna and Katy Perry built the download era. Why aren't they still on top?

Each era's format shapes its stars, and Track Ten's latest Hit Material entry nails why Rihanna and Katy Perry ruled 2008-2015 and then vanished from the top. The 99-cent single, not the album, drove revenue, and both artists were singles machines: hook-first songwriting ("na na na na na come on"), rapper features for crossover, albums as mere packaging. The numbers are staggering (Rihanna logged 51 weeks at #1), and the piece makes clear why streaming's shift left pure singles artists behind.

Read →
01 Music & SceneWriting about music and the culture around it. Criticism, profiles, interviews, and scene reporting, selected for insight rather than news value.
Can't Get Much Higher

The Worst Taylor Swift Song

What's the worst Taylor Swift song? Can't Get Much Higher averages dozens of critical discography rankings to crown "A Perfectly Good Heart" (and, in a holiday aside, "Christmas Must Be Something More"). The sharper finding: her recent albums cluster near the bottom alongside her debut, suggesting that without folklore, evermore, and the pandemic, the world-conquering Swift never happens.

Read on Can't Get Much Higher →
The New Yorker

Why the Broadway Musical Refuses to Die

The Broadway musical should have died with the talkies, yet it persists. Reviewing Mauceri and McWhorter's "Broadway in Black and White," The New Yorker argues its staying power comes from melding Black musical traditions through Jewish melancholy: a spiral running from "Porgy and Bess" through jazz standards to Miranda's "Hamilton," which did with hip-hop what Gershwin did with the blues.

Read on The New Yorker →
The FADER

KATSEYE, VCHA, & Saint Satine: Can the K-pop system work internationally?

HYBE and Geffen's KATSEYE experiment proves the K-pop playbook can mint Western pop stars, but The FADER argues the machinery exacts a price: member hiatuses, Manon branded 'lazy' as the group's only Black member, Lexie fleeing Saint Satine over the same pressures she escaped at Dream Academy, and VCHA's KG suing JYP over abuse. The pop factory, exported wholesale.

Read on The FADER →
The Guardian

Their orchestra is not a sacred object but a tool for struggle – Paris’s musicians join the frontline

Gas canisters landed in double-bass cases during last week's French student protests, where L'Orchestre du Nouveau Monde kept playing. The Guardian profiles Étienne Jarrier's deliberately scrappy, anti-capitalist ensemble, which judges performances by consciousness-raising impact rather than correct notes, and traces its lineage to the Scratch Orchestra and Portsmouth Sinfonia. The argument: classical music's pretense of apolitical purity is the root of its self-inflicted irrelevance.

Read on The Guardian →
The Line of Best Fit

La Nueva Escena Chilena: How the twin powerhouse cities of Santiago and Temuco are fuelling a Chilean rock revolution

A feature on Chile's burgeoning indie-rock and emo scene, centered around the capital Santiago and the smaller city Temuco. The piece explores how bands from different regions are connected by shared ethos rather than sound, drawing comparisons to Washington D.C.'s 1980s hardcore explosion, and highlights emerging acts like Asia Menor.

Read on The Line of Best Fit →
The Quietus

Picking a Quarrel: The death of Edward Burra and the birth of British punk

Edward Burra died in Hastings on 22 October 1976, the same day Stiff released the Damned's 'New Rose.' The Quietus resists the lazy everything-is-punk move and instead reads Burra as punk's unlikely forerunner: watercolors of bullying machines tearing through English pasture, a toothglass of whisky, recalcitrant interviews, and bodily ruin that prefigure punk's cracked, bodily-fluid semiotics. No transfer claimed, just a shared diagnosis of a Britain ill at ease with itself.

Read on The Quietus →
The Guardian

With albums under threat, Raye’s Mercury win is a triumph for grand statements

More than half of 2026's 40 biggest sellers are greatest-hits sets or catalogue classics, so The Guardian reads Raye's Mercury win for This Music May Contain Hope (73 minutes, 17 tracks, four sections, meant to be heard whole) as a defensive bet on the grand statement. The worry: two straight years of crowning No. 1 albums suggests the prize now rewards A-listers, not underground risk-takers.

Read on The Guardian →
Fandom Exile

Pandering is the point.

Pandering is the point, Fandom Exile argues, using the rise and collapse of North Star Boys to show a group that were content creators first and musicians second, their actual songs parked on a separate channel with a tenth of the audience. When you mine parasocial attachment to build a fandom, you trigger the toxic dynamics that implode it.

Read on Fandom Exile →
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.
Network Notes

Universal wants out... but can it pull that off?

Darren @ Network Notes reads Universal's senior-exec layoffs and reported private-equity buyback talk as the same story: a company refusing to play Wall Street's game. He traces it back to the Bill Ackman spat, where Pershing Square wanted debt-fueled growth and risk-taking Universal wouldn't deliver.

Read on Network Notes →
Billboard

Merck Mercuriadis’ New Hipgnosis Is Rolling Eight Management Companies Into a ‘Juggernaut’

Having turned songs into an asset class and exited to Blackstone, Mercuriadis is now consolidating eight management firms into Hipgnosis Artist Partnerships, with a co-ownership model: artists keep majority stakes but assets created in the partnership never leave it. Billboard reports he'll lease Universal, Warner and Sony infrastructure while controlling the spend, the first deal landing Q1 2027.

Read on Billboard →
Billboard

Anthropic Sued For Stealing Elvis Presley Music to Train AI: ‘Deeply Protective of These Iconic Songs’

The AI training fight gets its first marquee individual plaintiff: Authentic Brands Group, which controls Elvis Presley's catalog, is suing Anthropic over 274 songs including 'Can't Help Falling in Love.' Billboard notes the lead attorney is Richard Busch, who won the 'Blurred Lines' verdict against Robin Thicke. Anthropic says it will defend the case fully, resting on the same fair-use argument now pending across dozens of suits.

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.

Moses Boyd — "Songs For Sinners"

via The Gig

A project Boyd has been dreaming about since he was 13, released on his own Exodus label. Fairly called a gospel album, it balances postmillennial UK jazz, soundsystem culture, deep spirituals and R&B, and features a group of vocalists from the extended Boyd family he calls 'the kitchen choir.' The video for 'Say Yeah' incorporates footage of Boyd working with kids at the Woolwich Creative Club.

REC 01

Loidis

From the Toolkit of Lovers
♪ minimal house/dub techno

Brian Leeds, whose Huerco S. work specialized in sticky, charcoal-hued textures, moves into sleeker territory as Loidis: brushed stainless steel, graphite against paper. A direct extension of 2024's One Day but crisper and more hypnotic, with a lot of Luomo in its chordal flicker and percussion that's an expression of clicky bliss. The dozen tracks run eight to twelve minutes with no drops, no climaxes, no hooks, just crosshatched expanses of overlapping rhythms. Out on Anthony Naples' Incienso label.

Futurism Restatedview source →
▶ Watch on YouTube
REC 02

Logic1000

Confirmation
♪ dance / UK garage-adjacent house

Flow State picks the title track from Samantha Poulter's new album as part of the mix's quickening pace, slotted alongside Loidis and Charanjit Singh as the energy picks up.

Flow Stateview source →
▶ Watch on YouTube
REC 03

Andrew Tuttle & Darren Cross

AT/DC
♪ ambient folk / cosmic country

Tuttle is a banjo and guitar-wielding ambient folk producer out of Brisbane who's kept company with Steve Gunn, SUSS and Luke Schneider; Cross brings guitar, synth and a hard drive of field recordings from Sydney. Trading files across distance with a few shared parameters, their mutual love of drones opens the portal: 'Athletic, Eup' starts with nature sounds and pastoral picking before 'pink Skyyy Sixth Prize' prods the boundaries of cosmic country, and 'Afternoon Sunrise (I Saw Galadriel at 711)' drifts into weightless, star-spotting ambience.

The Slow Music Movementview source →
▶ Watch on YouTube
REC 04

Dawn Richard

creole culture
♪ avant-R&B

Shatter the Standards frames Dawn Richard's latest as the next chapter in a career spent singing through characters, from the Danity Kane manga superhero she drew for Diddy to D∴WN, the triangle-spelled solo persona staking a claim to revolutionary R&B. creole culture centers on a New Orleans monarch bearing her likeness, reckoning with the city she fled for Baltimore after Katrina.

Shatter the Standardsview source →
▶ Watch on YouTube
REC 05

Stevie Wonder

My Life Story of Love
♪ Soul

A Songs in the Key of Life outtake that sat on a shelf for half a century, released on the album's 50th anniversary and mixed by two original engineers. Soulpolitan has rotated it the most of the four-track EP: Stevie planting a woman in his garden of love to turn her into a flower, a twisted conceit sung over bossa, with lyrics by Susaye Greene of The Supremes, who co-wrote "I Can't Help It" for Michael Jackson.

Soulpolitanview source →
▶ Watch on YouTube
REC 06

Four Tet

Essential Mix (BBC Radio 1, rec. Boomtown Fair)
♪ electronic / dance

Beat Connection found this scrambled its head on a second listen: unpredictable even after already hearing it. The powerful lift-offs resolve efficiently rather than feeling glib, the subs get a cleansing workout, and the momentum is giddy, varied, and ravey without everything sounding early-nineties. "How to Build a Bassline" lands as the funniest track encountered in an age.

Beat Connectionview source →
▶ Watch on YouTube
REC 07

Salah Ragab & The Cairo Jazz Band

Egyptian Jazz
♪ Egyptian big band jazz

One of the first jazz big band records from Egypt, Dinner Music frames it as a response to the American jazz scene of the 60s and 70s, drawing influences from Mongo Santamaria to Randy Weston to Sun Ra while asserting Arab musicians' own history within the Western tradition.

Dinner Musicview source →
▶ Watch on YouTube
REC 08

Duke Deuce

AMERICA IS OURS
♪ crunk / buck

Shatter the Standards ties Duke Deuce's crunk revival to Noble Drew Ali's Moorish Science and a century of contested indigeneity, threading those messages through his buck anthems. Deuce, who fell asleep to the same drums his father Duke Nitty made for Gangsta Blac, leans into buck's territorial edge, the older Memphis form crunk grew out of.

Shatter the Standardsview source →
▶ Watch on YouTube
REC 09

Gilla Band

Pugnello
♪ noise-rock

The Line of Best Fit flags this among a trio of brilliant Irish records landing on the same day: Gilla Band's noise-rock ravages here, alongside Trá Pháidín's boggy post-rock and Gurrier's pounding post-punk.

The Line of Best Fitview 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.
POW MAG

On Elizabeth Holmes's Fake Husband and His Unseemly Obsession With Hip-Hop

An essay examining the documentary 'You Can See Everything' and the revelation that Elizabeth Holmes's quasi-husband Billy Evans has been writing her social media posts from prison, with particular focus on an awkward exchange between Evans-as-Holmes and rapper Meek Mill regarding AI video creators. The piece explores the overlapping currents of celebrity, fraud, and hip-hop culture.

Read on POW MAG →
Exclusive Content

Depravity Has Found a New Depth

A personal essay reflecting on the disturbing experience of encountering a deceased woman's personal belongings being sold at an estate sale, including her hospitalization shampoo and intimate items. The piece explores themes of commodification, loss, and the violation of privacy through the lens of objects left behind.

Read on Exclusive Content →
SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE

SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE 99

The con man isn't a modern invention — he's a foundational American archetype. This Substack essay works through a shelf of grifter fiction (Portis, Thompson, Gresham's Nightmare Alley) to argue that the figure's staying power comes from the way hustlers reframe moral failure as fate: some people are marks, others aren't, and the theater requires both.

Read on SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE →
Gary's Journey Through Hell

Just Three Weeks Until THE SENSUALIST Hits the Stores

Gary's Journey Through Hell is publishing the opening of The Sensualist (out November 7th) in serialized installments this week. The intro frames the book as a defense of pleasure against what it calls the oligarch-optimized joylessness of the present: billionaires in hoodies, Silicon Valley monks forgoing sensation, hedge funders eating creative cuisine without smiling. The argument runs through survivorship, Soviet government cheese, and garlic discovered at a Spanish restaurant in high school.

Read on Gary's Journey Through Hell →
Gary Shteyngart

Part 2 of My Introduction to The Sensualist

Gary Shteyngart's introduction to his essay collection The Sensualist lays out a philosophy of pleasure as resistance: against accumulation, against ambition that 'eats away at pleasure,' against the deadening completeness the billionaires he's met have never found. The central exhibit is a 2005 NYT Magazine piece about tasting garlic for the first time at a Village Spanish restaurant, a moment that cracked open a sensory life his Soviet immigrant upbringing had sealed shut.

Read on Gary Shteyngart →
Why is this interesting?

The Monday Media Diet with Claire Stapleton

Claire Stapleton discusses her favorite podcasts including Poog, Doomscroll, Celebrity Book Club with Steven & Lily, The Dig Radio, and TrueAnon, and shares her recent reading including Bill Peet's "Buford the Little Bighorn" and Graham Greene's "The Quiet American," reflecting on how the latter's themes about power and good intentions relate to Silicon Valley and institutional collapse.

Read on Why is this interesting? →
Projections

Someone Take My Childhood Away From Me Before It's Too Late

Sean Fennessey uses Jay-Z in 8, an eight-part filmed conversation between Jay-Z and Rick Rubin currently sitting unwatched on HBO Max, to diagnose how streaming has turned even major cultural artifacts into tiles. A project that would have been unmissable in 2006 or 2016 is now just content, and that flattening is the whole argument.

Read on Projections →
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.

Jim WIlson — "Center Core Never More"

Early 90s · instrumental rock

Jim Wilson plays guitar the way you'd expect from someone who spent years alongside Harvey Mandel and Rcollins: dense, exploratory, allergic to the tidy hook. "Center Core Never More" is the kind of early-90s instrumental that got buried under grunge, worth pulling back up for the way the tone keeps mutating under your ear.

SOS 01

The Stripes

Ecstasy (Plattenküche)
♪ 1980

The singer is Gabriele Kerner, three years short of '99 Luftballons.' The Stripes were her first band, formed in Hagen in 1979 and finished by 1982. The show is Plattenküche, a WDR variety hour with fountains, a filing cabinet that toppled every week, and a working kitchen where the co-host cooked dinner on air.

▶ Watch on YouTube
SOS 02

Portishead

The Rip
♪ 2008

Nick Uff, a gardener by trade, drew it frame by frame on 16mm without a storyboard, letting the film go where it took itself. That scratchy hand-made animation sits over an arpeggio Adrian Utley couldn't get a sequencer to play, so he recorded the notes one at a time and edited them into the loop.

▶ Watch on YouTube
SOS 03

Plastic Rap

Frieda
♪ 1980 · downtown video art

Before Tom Rubnitz became downtown New York's patron saint of camp, he helped make this: a performer named Frieda rapping backed by a chorus line of dolls, production values scraping the floor on purpose. 'Plastic Rap' is Lower Manhattan circa 1980 deciding that cheap and ridiculous could be an aesthetic, not a limitation.

▶ Watch on YouTube
SOS 04

Ludacris

Get Back
♪ 2004 · Southern hip-hop

Spike Jonze gives Ludacris a pair of prosthetic Popeye arms and aims them at a man who won't observe bathroom etiquette. Interestingly enough, the man is Fatlip, the Pharcyde rapper whom Jonze had filmed four years earlier narrating the worst day of his life. In 2004, he is still the one getting hit.

▶ Watch on YouTube
SOS 05

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.

▶ Watch on YouTube
SOS 06

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 07

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 08

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 09

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
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06 AI Detection & LabelingEvery platform is deciding what to do with work no human made. One detector, the backlash against it, and what the label already costs in music.
Post (Substack)

Against Claudefishing

According to Substack, “Claudefishing” is the moment a reader unknowingly invests real attention in writing no human produced, and the platform's answer pairs Pangram detection scans with optional how-I-make-this statements from writers. The wager underneath is that provenance grows more valuable as generated text gets better at passing. Everything that follows is a fight over collecting on that wager.

Read on Post (Substack) →
404 Media

Substackers Say New AI Detection Tool Is a 'Witch Hunt'

Emanuel Maiberg reports on the backlash to Substack’s move on “Claudefishing” arriving on two distinct fronts. One is from writers who lean on AI assistance and reject the stigma the label carries, while the other is from writers who never touch it and fear a false positive will cost them the credibility their names are built on. A trust feature managed to make both camps feel accused (Maiberg's read: detection is a policy problem as much as a technical one). Substack cannot label its way out without deciding what AI-assisted actually means.

Read on 404 Media →
Jennifer Hong

Blade Runner 2049: The Detector That Decides Who Counts on Substack

Hong catalogs who the detector counts out: second-language writers, neurodivergent writers, writers working outside Western prose conventions: all of them read as machines to even the best detector available. The enabling terms changed quietly the day before launch. For Hong, the real tell is the cap tables. If quality beats method, she argues, then a machine that scores method is not defending writing so much as shipping a product.

Read on Jennifer Hong →
Sources

The State of AI Writing on Substack

Months before Substack switched on its Pangram detector, Taylor Lorenz ran the same tool across the platform's top content. Tech newsletters topping the AI-generated charts surprised nobody. The harder finding sat lower: philosophy and health writing clocked in at 22 to 23 percent machine-generated (categories a reader subscribes to precisely because a trusted human authority is supposed to be home). Sources flagged the breakdown in April and drew no hard conclusions. The numbers have been waiting for a fight to belong to.

Read on Sources →
404 Media

LinkedIn and X Are Flooded With AI Spam, Browsing Data Suggests

Jason Koebler's data moves the question from how much AI text exists to how much readers actually meet. The numbers come from Pangram scanning passively as people browse (a measure of the feed as lived, not a theoretical platform-wide total). LinkedIn is the flood zone, with 41 percent of the longform users encounter likely machine-generated; X runs close to a third; Reddit and Substack land near one in ten.

Read on 404 Media →
Zinstrel - AI Music Culture & Analysis

When AI Transparency Becomes a Penalty

Crediting a collaborator is generosity; a label that kills your reach is a fine. Zinstrel argues the platforms keep blurring the two, with transparency language laundering what functions as punishment, and though the piece is written about music streaming, it describes any service where disclosure triggers consequences. Once honest disclosure becomes the costliest choice on offer, nobody should be surprised when the tags disappear and the work keeps shipping.

Read on Zinstrel - AI Music Culture & Analysis →
The New York Times

Labels for Music Created With A.I. Could Join Explicit Lyrics Warnings

Ben Sisario covers the music industry's version of the label fight. An RIAA-led proposal would attach two marks, one for fully generated tracks and a softer variant for human work made with AI assistance, on the model of the Parental Advisory sticker. Sisario grounds the stakes at Deezer, where 75,000 AI tracks arrive every day, nearly half of everything the service ingests. Enforcement across the streaming services is the question the proposal leaves open.

Read on The New York Times →
Flashlight

The Stamp Got Teeth Yesterday

TIDAL was the most lucrative platform for synthetic music, paying three to five times Spotify's per-stream rate. As of mid-July it is the least: fully machine-generated tracks now earn zero royalties there, and listeners can filter them out of the service entirely. Flashlight reads the move as the moment the disclosure mark started setting the price. Whatever Substack's detector is today, TIDAL is the demonstration that a label rarely stays descriptive once money is attached.

Read on Flashlight →
A Different Lens

The Blues: LOCKSS it up!

The last word goes to the archive. A Different Lens splits AI blues fraud into two kinds: the fantasy fake, which announces its own fiction, and the archive fake, which impersonates a real 1962 John Lee Hooker release with no credits and no history to check. The second kind does not need to fool a listener; it needs to fool the algorithm, and the person who finds it a decade from now. Labels, stickers, and scanners are all guarding the same thing, the record of who actually made what.

Read on A Different Lens →
07 StorylinesStandalone features that follow one story in full. Each gathers the coverage as it appeared, annotated and in sequence, with a written introduction.

Watching the Watchmen: On AI Composition and Detection

21 articles · story collection

After AI slop overwhelmed their services, the platforms struck back, with Substack releasing an AI detection tool and LinkedIn adding a button that lets users report slop. Whether this was good stewardship or evidence of a witch hunt is an open question, and we dive into the debate with 21 articles that wrestle with how we value AI (and human) writing.

Open the collection →

Me and the Devil: Fenix Flexin's AI Authorship Fight

11 articles · story collection

Maybe Fenix Flexin won't be remembered as the Elvis Presley of AI music, but his track "Rubberz", which delivers street-rap verses over '80s synth-pop, reached the Hot 100, drew months of accusations, and ballooned into one of the biggest stories of 2026. We track the story's twists and turns, and consider where we're going (and where we've been).

Open the collection →

2026, the Summer of Nostalgia

16 articles · story collection

Between a billion dollar Michael Jackson biopic, a blockbuster Madonna album, and the return of "Wonderwall" and "Mr. Brightside" to the charts, 2026 could be defined not so much by what we created, but by what we remembered. We survey the landscape, and consider what it means when culture turns into a hall of mirrors.

Open the collection →

The Onset of the AI Remix Era

11 articles · story collection

For years, the labels sued to stop fans from generating AI covers of licensed content, and then Universal and Spotify signed the deal for a tool that does just that. Beneath the product announcement lies the story of how billion dollar catalog acquisitions have created incentives for the industry to recycle the catalog rather than invest in new music.

Open the collection →

Don't Look Back: Miles Davis at 100

10 articles · story collection

Miles was the avatar of cool who kept detonating his own styles, a privileged Black artist who declined every story offered to him about privilege or suffering, and both an undeniable genius and a man who hurt others, particularly women. And a hundred years on, he remains a mystery and a contradiction, which is probably what he would've wanted.

Open the collection →
08 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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