Ahead of their show at Bristol New Music, Bill Orcutt, Steve Shelley and Ethan Miller tell Jennifer Lucy Allan how a Grateful Dead tribute show led to their acclaimed new collaboration, the joy of bootlegs, and how they’re avoiding the ego-driven pitfalls that have dogged supergroups past

Photo by Sheva Kafai

“Our delightful origin story takes place around a Grateful Dead tribute show that Bill and I played together,” says Ethan Miller, when I ask how he, guitarist Bill Orcutt, and drummer Steve Shelley came to form a trio. “Don’t tell anybody that though!” 

I regretfully inform him that we are on the record. “Bill isn’t a huge Dead fan,” he explains, “but after that show, Bill told me how fun it was…

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After stripping pop down to its electro-skeleton in the first half of the decade, Prince built it back up from bones in 1986, says Toby Manning

 Prince always had a strange relationship to individualism, the ethos that was as constitutive of the 80s as his own music. As a one-man band, Prince pioneered the nervy, synthy new-wave/disco hybrid that became 80s pop, though his hits tended to be band productions like 1983’s ‘Little Red Corvette’ or the previous year’s ‘1999’. Paradoxically, once he formed a proper band, The Revolution, Prince often still played every instrument himself, as on 1984 smash ‘When Doves Cry’. Yet this control freakery didn’t extend to billing or composer credits: Prince even attributed the solo-written ‘Purple Rain’ to…

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Irreversible Entanglements

Future Present Past

Their second album for Impulse! records finds the improvising quintet in a surprisingly hopeful place, finds Andrew Taylor-Dawson

Since forming in 2015, free-jazz collective Irreversible Entanglements have charted a singular musical course. Their sound marries the fiery liberation poetry of Camae Ayewa (better known as Moor Mother), with exploratory and often improvisational brass from trumpeter Aquiles Navarro and saxophonist Keir Neuringer. Grounding their experimental style are double bassist Luke Stewart and drummer Tcheser Holmes.

The band’s music exists in a space between wild artistic freedom and the righteous anger that defines the lyrics of Moor Mother. Their focus on social and racial justice is written into their DNA. They did after all first come together as part of a…

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A Bosnian satirist Dr. Nele Karajlić recently claimed that the entire Yugo rock scene of the 1980s was created by the socialist State; but what if he isn’t joking? A report by Robert Rigny

Laibach by Nika H. Praper & Ludvik

In a small, smoky room in Sarajevo some time in the early 80s, socialist apparatchiks in suits discuss the problem of youth delinquency and the horror of “Western influence”. One comrade makes a deadpan joke that they should form a rock band. His logic is that the kids are getting restless and rock music already exists: “So let’s channel it; institutionalise it; give it a socialist framework.” The cadres nod and discuss it with the same level of seriousness they would apply to talking…

The post The Yugoslav Psy-Op That may have Given us Laibach… and Inspired Rammstein appeared first on The Quietus.

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Robyn

Sexistential

Dumb pleasure is a philosophy on Sexistential, Robyn’s fizzing record of love, sex and motherhood

Sexistential by Robyn

Sixteen years since Body Talk? Eight since Honey? Robyn’s best albums feel closer and further away than that. The Swedish indie popstar’s best music is timeless in that surreal way; untouched by trends come and gone, and so ubiquitous as to have existed with us forever. Both minimal and maximal, her songs have a purity. Beats and melody are cut down until the nerves are exposed.

That’s still true on her new album, Sexistential, a refined, immaculate set of pop songs which still burst with weirdness and impulse. She flirts with solipsism, references ‘juicy hentai’ and, inexplicably, Don’t Mess with the Zohan. And in its…

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He was already great, but over the course of one year, when he released Fishscale and More Fish, Ghostface became a legend. Words by Angus Batey

 As attentive readers of this august journal will know, the remit and parameters for the occasional Three Album Run series are exacting, the bar set so high it can see for miles. The records that define a whole genre? That’s tough. But it has to be: the artists who’ve made three crackers in a row have already earned their place in the canon, so writing about a particularly storied arc in their catalogue is obvious to the point of laziness. Ghostface didn’t make three records that encapsulated his genre, but, starting in April 2004, he…

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Approval for the development, which could have threatened the future of the London venue, wasn’t granted amid a campaign against it by the venue and its supporters

A planning application for a development adjacent to London venue MOTH Club has been refused, marking what the team behind the venue called “a huge win” for its future.

Announcing the news via Instagram, MOTH Club thanked people who supported its campaign in standing against the nearby development by signing petitions, voicing their disapproval for the plans and amplifying the venue’s cause. “We couldn’t have done it without your support,” the social media post read.

There is still some uncertainty around the situation, however. A separate planning application related to another nearby development is still in…

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tQ’s staffers select the best songs and records that have soundtracked the long-awaited beginning of spring

Last month there was a story doing the rounds about how, up until that point, it had rained every single day in the UK. It’s certainly felt like we’ve needed this particular spring quite desperately, although the flipside is that now that the sunshine has finally arrived, it feels that little bit brighter. It’s been a month of movement here at tQ, sometimes jolting, but almost certainly for the better, and here are the records that have soundtracked it.

Everything featured below, as well as all the other knockout music we’ve covered at tQ this month, will be compiled into an hours-long playlist exclusive to our…

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With their eighth album Paradises out this week, Simon Price asks Ladytron founder Daniel Hunt to shed some light (and magic) upon ten entry points into the Scouse-based synth lords’ (and ladies’) pristine body of werk. And for top tier subscribers revelation is at hand via an essential playlist

Ladytron by Mark McNulty 

One night in 2005, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, I went to see Ladytron in the company of John Doran, my former colleague at the ill-fated BANG! magazine but not yet the co-founder of The Quietus, and his mate John Tatlock, later a tQ regular himself, and John D’s co-DJ at superb electro-punk-funk-whatever club night BigSexyLand. The two Johns had known each other for decades, from…

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A new four CD reissue package, including fabled lost album reveals a triumphant portrait of the gruppe, says Alastair Shuttleworth, no matter how short-lived

When Fall Heads Roll came out in 2005, nearly 30 years into their career, The Fall were finally experiencing some proper goodwill. Their longtime champion John Peel had died the previous year, marked by a characteristically unsentimental Newsnight appearance from bandleader Mark E. Smith, but the baton had already been handed off to a raft of new supporters in the media. BBC One’s Final Score started using ‘Theme From Sparta F.C.’ as its theme, BBC Four produced the first proper documentary on the band, Skinner & Baddiel inducted viewers of ITV into the band’s world, and…

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