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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Iztok Koren & Raphael Rogiński

Nocturnal Consolations

Širom’s banjo and balafon player joins the Polish guitarist and composer to create a map of the folk unconscious, treating tradition as a field of forces in which sound drifts between memory, matter, and imagination

Nocturnal Consolations by Iztok Koren & Raphael Rogiński

The music of Polish guitarist Raphael Rogiński and Slovenian multi-instrumentalist Iztok Koren finds its fullest expression as a practice of attentive, high-resolution listening. In a world of overstimulation, Nocturnal Consolations operates through a logic of reduction. Intensification emerges at the point of sharpening. Every gesture, every vibration of a string, every resonant surface exists in suspension. Meanings arise only through the relations between sounds.

The idiom developed by Rogiński reaches an almost crystalline form here,…

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The record emerged from a live collaboration between the two artists last year

Actress and Suzanne Ciani are releasing a new album together, titled Concrète Waves.

Marking the first joint release of music by the two artists, the record was born from a live collaboration between the pair last year, which was co-commissioned by London’s Barbican and Barcelona’s Sónar festival. The two performed together at both last year, in addition to appearances elsewhere, such as Braga’s Semibreve festival.

They had first begun discussing each other’s work and the possibility of working together in 2024, according to press materials, with the music on Concrète Waves, which is the first in a new series of records from Actress’ Werkdiscs label, offering a document of what…

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Congolese collective build sonic starships ouf of the scrapyards of Africa, transforming ritual into auditory assault

All photos by Violaine Morgan Le Fur

Kinshasa isn’t the kind of city that waits for you to be ready, the city just takes over your experience. It is a metropolis of staggering contradictions, where the ghosts of Belgian colonialism collide with the relentless, vibrating hustle of hyper-capitalism. To attempt to capture the essence of this place on tape seems like a fool’s errand, yet this is exactly what the Kinshasa-based street art collective KINACT have achieved with their debut LP, Kinshasa in Action. Founded in 2015 by Eddy Ekete, KinAct first made their name not on stage, but in the gutters, markets, and intersections of…

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Taupe

Waxing | Waning

Glaswegian trio summon a lurching, many-limbed beast in a state of restless permanent flux

waxing | waning by taupe

For her latest show Lunartic, the sweetly surreal comedian Lucy Pearman plays the role of the moon. She dresses up in a giant silvery disc and puts on a performance about how it’s lonely up there in space. Various audience members are recruited to fulfil the roles of potential lovers, tickle-recipients, the earth, a cow, a cat with a fiddle, a dish, a spoon… You can see where she’s going with this. She boasts that she’s in control of tides, wolves, and periods and, at one point turns sideways and scrunches her disc to replicate a moon either waxing or waning,…

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Half a century ago – between the release of Sad Wings Of Destiny and Sin After Sin – Judas Priest were engaged in a revolution of image and sound… one that would cement the heavy metal aesthetic for good

“He said in the cosmos is a single sonic soundThat is vibrating constantlyAnd if we could grip and hold on to the noteWe would see our minds were free”Judas Priest ‘Dreamer/Deceiver’

Heads bang, speakers shake and the earth, lost in a wasteland of nothingness, grinds slowly on its axis. The pursuit of life as a metalhead most often feels very much like being part of a vast primeval continuum. For almost its entire history, heavy metal has been forced to endure derision, incomprehension…

The post Judas Priest, Sad Wings Of Destiny & The Birth Of Modern Metal appeared first on The Quietus.

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