A new exhibition at Somerset House explores fan-made shrines to dead pop stars, from Barnes’ Marc Bolan memorial to Nina Simone’s gum. Jak Hutchcraft talks to curator Tory Turk about art and fandom

Children of Graceland (project). Hayley Louisa Brown

How do we mourn a pop star? How do we remember somebody that we loved dearly, butnever really knew?

The new Holy Pop! exhibition at Somerset House in London celebrates the world of modern shrines, “the objects and collections that honour heroes, celebrities, and cult icons”. The show includes extensive collections of photos and ephemera, carefully crafted sculptures, decorated crypts and inner city murals protected by Perspex. Some reside in quiet spaces at fans’ home, and others stand tall at graveyards inviting awe….

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Featuring The Fall and Leigh Bowery, Charles Atlas’s revolutionary mockumentary on dancer and choreographer Michael Clark first aired forty years ago this month – looking back at it shows how far Channel Four has fallen, argues Samuel Cox

There are few better advertisements for a robust welfare state than The Fall. Mark E. Smith lapses into a rare moment of sentimentality in his autobiography Renegade when discussing his time on the dole in the late 1970s: “Other people went to university and I read books, smoked cigs and looked around most days. It’s good to have a period like that in your life, when you’re not being forced to think like others.” Smith posits that “if you’re a cod psychologist” – and…

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Phillip Golub

Partisan Ship

An album of microtonal jazz played on a Flexichord keyboard proves anall-enveloping experience, for Andrew Taylor-Dawson

Partisan Ship by Phillip Golub

The word ‘immersive’ can be overdone or feel forced when applied to artistic endeavours, be it a theatrical performance, an exhibition or indeed an album. Yet, it feels like the natural descriptor for Partisan Ship, the latest offering from LA born, Brooklyn-based pianist, composer and bandleader Phillip Golub.

Golub has become an essential artist for fans of experimental avant-garde jazz. He has collaborated with other contemporary visionaries such as Vijay Iyer and is currently on a particularly prolific run – having released two records in 2025.

With Partisan Ship, which can loosely be seen as a concept album about a sea…

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Visible Cloaks

Paradessence

Portland, Oregon duo amplify the creaks and cracks between the many different styles in their toolbox

Paradessence by Visible Cloaks

Paradessence spotlights the innate surrealism of Visible Cloaks shimmering, digital-powered exotica. Since 2014 the duo, Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile, have forged a borderless space where echoes of globally dispersed music converge in a glimmering zone and the periphery between synthetic and otherwise is porous. Their albums bring to mind Yves Tanguy paintings, filled with impressions of familiar forms contained in unusual contours and doused in hyperreal sheen.

Visible Cloaks’ first full length since 2017’s Lex, Paradessence amplifies the portals and colourful intrusions generated by their crossing of streams. Opener ‘Apsis’ begins with slithers of synth that mutate between elegant brush strokes…

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£1.2 million of £6 million raised to support small music venues appears to have been lost to “stealth” charges

The UK government has been accused of using “stealth” VAT charges to extract a significant portion from a £6 million fund that was raised to support grassroots music venues.

The funds were raised via a voluntary ticket levy that the LIVE Trust established in January 2025. The £1 levy on tickets sold for gigs at arenas and large venues in the UK was created so that the money could be redistribute to smaller venues that were facing uncertain futures.

The Telegraph reports, however, that HM Treasury is believed to have used VAT charges to extract £1.2 million from the £6 million that was raised by the ticket…

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Two compilations from 1994 and 1995 have been remastered for the new release

New Order are reissuing their compilations The Best Of New Order, from 1994, and The Rest Of New Order, from 1995.

The new combined release will be available in multiple formats, with both compilations having been remastered for the new edition. A four-CD edition will come with an additional disc of remixes, including previously unreleased versions and rarities, while there will also be a standard CD release and double and triple-vinyl sets.

Included on the release are are Shep Pettibone’s remix of ‘True Faith’, as well as CJ Bolland’s version of ‘Temptation’ and reworks by Richie Hawtin, Sabres Of Paradise and Hardfloor, among others.

Warner Music will release The Best &…

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Algiers members team up with Kyle Kidd AKA Motherboard for righteous banger ‘You Betta’

Ryan Mahan and Lee Tesche of long-time tQ favourites Algiers have teamed up with Kyle Kidd for a new project called Saint Just. Kidd, who goes under the musical name Motherboard, is part of the Mourning [A] BLKstar collective, and has collaborated with Moor Mother and Irreversible Entanglements, joins Mahan and Tesche in the group named after a Jacobin who perished at the guillotine alongside Robespierre during the French Revolution. The trio came together in 2025, writing material at a residency at Colorado’s Music District, before studio sessions with Bartees Strange and Brendan Canty in Baltimore. The first fruit of this endeavour is new track ‘You Betta’ – if…

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Stanley Okorie’s thousands of songs defined the Nollywood film industry, becoming “the vocalisation of the collective id” of a fast-changing Nigeria. Words and Subscriber Plus exclusive playlist by Mary Chiney

The power cuts out. It is a Tuesday evening in Lagos somewhere near the turn of the millennium, and the sudden, suffocating silence of the ceiling fan is immediately replaced by the collective groan of the neighborhood, followed seconds later by the violent, coughing roar of a diesel generator. The heavy, sticky humidity of the Nigerian night immediately begins to press against the windows. Inside the living room, a heavy CRT television screen flickers back to life, the static clears with a high-pitched whine, and a VHS tape resumes its rotation…

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Magic Tuber Stringband’s first LP as a trio is a work of unruly beauty that doubles as a cautionary tale, says Bernie Brooks

Magic Tuber Stringband by Dani Smith

Probably it’s best to start with Ellenton, South Carolina. This once-was-a-town and its fate are at the heart of Heavy Water, Magic Tuber Stringband’s latest and arguably best LP. Now an accumulation of concrete scars near the Savannah River, the meagre remains of an infrastructure lacking structure, Ellenton was, like many rural places in the States, a railroad town. Settled in 1870 as the Charleston and Western Carolina Railway was being cut through the landscape, Ellenton is now mostly remembered for two things: it’s erasure, which we’ll get to shortly; and a bloody…

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Seefeel

Sol.Hz

Five years on from their EP, London’s Seefeel continue to plough that fertile furrow between ambient shimmer, dub oomph and the silences in-between

Sol.Hz by Seefeel

The cover of Seefeel’s latest album Sol.Hz seems to stare back at you. A piercing blue eye gazing through your soul to foreshadow the contemplative nature of the record inside, while the surrounding void simultaneously introduces one of the integral themes of the album: use of space.

Throughout the record, decrescendos and silence are used to suck you in and ease you out of the music, whilst simultaneously dousing the listener in welcome dub flavours. Seefeel, currently consisting of Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock, might have halved in size since its inception, but is still just as…

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