In the latest antidote to the algorithm, Robert Barry looks at the vinyl releases of the pivotal Fluxus movement – records that often resulted from the destruction of their peers

Nam June Paik by Brian Smith, courtesy of the Nam June Paik estate / Gagosian

In 1963, Nam June Paik made a doner kebab out of records. Born in Seoul in 1932, the irrepressible artist and composer had moved to Germany in 1957 to study music at the University of Munich. Soon after he fell in with Karlheinz Stockhausen and his soon-to-be-wife, the artist Mary Bauermeister in Cologne, after meeting the composer at the Darmstadt new music summer school. It was at Bauermeister’s atelier that Paik subsequently encountered John Cage, cutting off his…

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Gnod R&D

Nobody Knows This Is Anywhere

Much gnashing of teeth as the Salford’s group’s wrecking crew bring out the heavy shit

SAC-R #005: Nobody Knows this is Anywhere by Gnod R&D

Gnod are gnown to push buttons and encroach on boundaries. They regularly upset preconceptions. One minute they’re clobbering people over the head with violent aural steel and the next they’re dropping a woozy collaboration with Portuguese vocalist MC Sissi.

Back in April they released volume one of a three-part series titled Chronicles of Gnowt. In case someone accuses them of slacking, Paddy Shine and Chris Haslam have since pulled together this two-track, 32-minute-long rumpus, going by the name of Nobody Knows This Is Anywhere, for the fifth iteration of their sonic wrecking crew…

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Sicilian trio Nuhara have produced one of the best albums of the year in their debut, Rama. They speak to Patrick Clarke about how the discovery that a member’s grandfather had been recorded by Alan Lomax led to a deep dive into the island’s traditional worksongs, from which they’ve drawn a record of ferocious power and remarkable sonic scope

Photo by Pietro Motisi

Photo by Ivan-Di-Vita

In 2016, the ethnomusicologist, anthropologist and folklorist Anna Lomax Wood was in Palermo for a conference. While there, she and a friend decided to take a trip to some of the Sicilian villages that her father, Alan Lomax, had visited in the 1950s to take field recordings of local folk singing. The Association Of Cultural Equity,…

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Tariq Goddard heads to the City of London Stadium to see a live institution intent on conquering a vast space. Live photography by Brett Murray

Like a culture that becomes a civilisation, a band that evolves into an institution ceases to be judged on purely artistic terms. This is never more true than when the arc of a career grows thicker rather than taller, the music sturdier though no longer sexy, the outward churn less intent on covering new ground than building a wall round existing achievements. Having become very good at what they do, outside interest in a band invariably shifts to less flattering angles than those that show off their alleged proficiencies. For preeminent titans in their field and…

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The new album from the Washington DC-born singer makes a strong case for the argument that R&B is the most versatile, wide-ranging genre on the block

Photo credit: 91 Rules

To read some of the press surrounding the lead-up to Kelela’s third album, you would be forgiven for thinking the American artist had made her “rock album”, à la, say, Charli XCX. Kelela’s previous records staked her claim as a Black queer female R&B artist in alt electronic music spaces, as equally at home in the club as the bedroom. But long before becoming something of a cult figure for challenging perceptions of genre, she cut her teeth in the Washington DC indie scene, and the marketing around New Avatar almost seemed…

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Sha Ray & DJ Haram

Critical Thot

A thrilling exploration of sexual politics from the Bay Area-based rapper/producer and New Jersey-born beat maker

Critical Thot by Sha Ray & DJ Haram

The second ‘Thot Daughter’, the first single from the Indiana-born rapper Sha Ray’s debut full-length album, dropped on Backwoodz Studioz, the heady, increasingly adored label co-founded by Billy Woods, it immediately became one of most unique singles in the roster’s history. Home to the disparate funhouse mirror productions of Kenny Segal, the sonic trickery of E L U C I D, the backpack beats of Blockhead, there had still never been anything quite like this: club-ready, Southern-flavoured, and undoubtedly raunchy. The Drake bed-squeaks even make an appearance.

With direct, MPC-production, thick, club-ready drums and…

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Ahead of her new solo album Beard, the Odd Future and The Internet alumna talks Gemma Samways through the 13 albums that have helped shape her sound, from rage rap to samba

Photo by Nabil

At some point, every wunderkind has to relinquish their title. Syd was still in high school when she got her break DJing with hip hop iconoclasts Odd Future, and just 19 when she and Matt Martians broke away to form Grammy-nominated alternative R&B collective The Internet. A decade and half on, the prolific singer, producer and engineer born Sydney Bennett has four albums with The Internet, three solo LPs and a host of collaborations under her belt. It’s little wonder she now views herself as an elder…

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Madonna

Confessions II

The restlessly inventive artist for once looks back, but boy has she ever earnt it

For an artist defined by perpetual reinvention, the most striking aspect of Confessions II is Madonna’s resolve to look back at a career that reshaped pop music. Steeped in nostalgic, self-referential anecdotes, the album carries an autobiographical weight that makes this her most coherent work since its namesake two decades ago. Though the sixteen-track LP plays it safe sonically, leaning into commercial dance tropes rather than experimentalism, this lack of risk will be forgiven by a fanbase yearning to explore her back catalogue – a shift finally catalysed by 2023’s Celebration Tour and a renewed partnership with Stuart Price.

The record is strongest when Madonna draws…

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Scrambled DIY pop as temporal anomaly, multiple accordions in one band, a duo piping urban noise into tranquil marshes and a Tokyo-Manchester collaboration that both crushes and levitates, Daryl Worthington roams through the tapes of this infernal summer

Carlos Ferreira, photo by Luiza Padilha

A decision made on any recording is whether to capture its setting or obscure it – keep the recording earthed to the real world or synthesize another one. Some recordings of instrumentalists strive to capture the sound of the room where a performance took place. Studio recordings seldom want the studio itself to be audible as a studio. Many producers lay field recordings and concrete sound into compositions, textures from one place transported into another. Some musicians use…

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Luke Haines

Izzy Wizzy Let’s Get Bizzy

The former Auteurs, Black Box Recorder and Baader Meinhof member waxes nostalgic over the sinister forces which once lurked within the CBBC Broom Cupboard

Sartre said that hell is other people, but hell is actually being stuck in the company of someone of a certain age banging on about the TV they used to watch as a kid. Thankfully, Luke Haines has previous where it comes to reanimating what could potentially be seen as nostalgia fodder, always bringing an intelligent twist, as 2011’s 9 1/2 Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s & Early ‘80s attests. Fifteen years after that cult classic, we’re back predominantly in the 1970s, a fertile period for the Haines’ imagination…

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