Claire Sawers leaves Ljubljana with her cortex tickled and shaken by Turkish psych, sludgy doom metal, clattering techno, chaotic glitchcore, a tin whistle and a hurdy gurdy at a festival showcasing the Balkans and beyond

You can’t spell mental transformation without MENT. Shot by Lenart Lukšič

Good luck, frankly, to any algorithm that attempts to recommend music to me after analysing complex brain data from me during MENT festival. Over four nights my auditory cortex finds itself tickled and shaken by Turkish psych, sludgy doom metal, clattering techno, chaotic glitchcore, a tin whistle and a hurdy gurdy. This festival in Ljubljana – now in its 12th year – includes the folksy and the far out, guiding its international crowd of punters and…

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No cause of death has been disclosed

Éliane Radigue, the French composer and pioneer of musique concrète, has died at the age of 94.

INA GRM, the Paris-based experimental music institute, broke the news on social media, writing: “It’s with immense sadness that we learn of the passing of Éliane Radigue at the age of 94. A major figure in musical creation has left us. She pursued an exciting musical life, moving from electroacoustic feedback to electronic music (with the help of her inseparable ARP 2500) and finally reinventing herself through fruitful collaborations with numerous instrumentalists.”

No cause of death has been disclosed.

Widely under-recognised during her younger years, Radigue’s extensive catalogue of work gained significantly more acknowledgement in her later life via a…

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Lamisi

Let Us Clap

A bracing burst of African Futurism from the Ghanaian powerhouse, Lamisi

Let Us Clap by Lamisi

To truly grasp the weight of Let Us Clap, you have to first feel the vibration of the road. It’s a 15-hour haul from the humid, neon-flecked sprawl of Accra up to the arid stretches of Zebilla in the Upper East Region. This is a journey that sheds the slickness of the capital, trading the high-life gloss for themes of grassy savannah and the sharp, percussive reality of the Kusasi people. In Zebilla, clapping isn’t just a gesture of polite approval; it’s more of a communal language, a complex architecture of palms striking palms that defines the rhythm of the day. Lamisi, a powerhouse…

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Julian Hand & Demian Castellanos

Callanish Audio Visual Research

Julian Marszalek considers an eye-opening multi-media project of film, soundtrack and book which found its genesis in a 5,000-year-old stone circle in the Outer Hebrides

Callanish Audio Visual Research OST + Film Access by Demian Castellanos

For many of a certain vintage – this writer included – any contemporary fascination with ancient stone circles and ritual landscapes owes less to academic / archaeological study than it does to the children’s television shows of the 1970s that were steeped in lithic terror. The obvious and oft-mentioned touchstone today is the 1977 ITV series Children Of The Stones, a seven-part drama set in a village encircled by ancient megaliths where something is palpably and profoundly wrong.

But Children…

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Our electronic music columnist argues for the importance of trusting the curator and delivers new gear for the club, soundtracks for afters and other, weirder stuff

Nondi_

I recently interviewed Slovenian DJ and promoter Lottie for a Slovenian magazine who discussed the idea of throwing club nights without lineup reveals, how exciting it would be to go out without knowing what you’ll get, simply trusting the process. For over a decade, as long as I have been actively involved in the local club scene, this has only happened to me on one, maybe two occasions. Maybe it’s more common elsewhere, but here in Ljubljana, even if you run an in-demand night with hardcore devotees it is practically impossible, even preposterous to expect…

The post Hyperspecific: Electronic Music for February Reviewed by Jaša Bužinel appeared first on The Quietus.

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Ishmael Ali

Burn the Plastic, Sell the Copper

Chicago cellist Ishmael Ali challenges the jazz format with a dense, multilayered debut

Burn The Plastic, Sell The Copper by Ishmael Ali

There are not many cellists like Ishmael Ali. A musician who not only handles the cello but also plays guitar, moving effortlessly between rhythm-driven collective music, experimental electronics, and song-based forms. He is known from widely different contexts: as a guitarist in the genre-blending dance band Je’raf, as a cellist in Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, and as a provider of rough, bow-scraped sound fragments in Hearsay’s tightly woven whirl of beats and turntablism.

Now Ali debuts under his own name with Burn the Plastic, Sell the Copper – an album that on first listen may…

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During the last two years, Loula Yorke has released six albums and a mixtape and she’s only just getting started. Joe Muggs talks to the modular synthesist about a background in raving and activism, and why it’s time to start thinking of herself as an artist

Portrait by David Brookes

Time is a Succession of Such Shapes by LOULA YORKE

Loula Yorke is a fixture in leftfield electronic music now. She’s one of those artists whose name is a watchword for a very particular sound. In her case this means oneiric, immersive patterns created on a modular synthesiser, often blended with field recordings that have a pastoral sensibility – a feeling which she calls luminous. Her music sits somewhere adjacent to the very…

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Ben Vince

Street Druid

Premium sax honker Ben Vince is bringing sexy back in 2026 (sort of), says Bernie Brooks

Street Druid by Ben Vince

It’s hard to feel sexy these days.

2025 was screeching tinnitus all the time, was a tsunami-warning klaxon every five minutes. 2026 is workmen sawing through the pavement just outside your window at five in the morning, except that five AM feeling lasts all day. 2026 is cinema zombies clacking and grinding their teeth. The clacking is in your right ear, the grinding in your left. Constantly. That’s not sexy. That’s not sexy at all.

With his new LP Street Druid in tow, premium sax honker Ben Vince is here to help bring sexy back in 2026. Well, sort of. And…

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Audrey Golden’s book, Shouting Out Loud: Lives of The Raincoats, reframes punk history, making space for voices excluded from the usual male-dominated narratives of rock history

Raincoats, 1981, photo by Shirley O’Loughlin

Audrey Golden opens Shouting Out Loud by rejecting a premise most biographers accept without question: that any single account can claim definitiveness. Her methodology instead builds toward something more useful: a history constructed from voices that standard rock narratives systematically exclude. The result demonstrates what becomes visible when you start listening to people who were actually there, but who were never asked.

This approach was first developed in her earlier book on Factory Records. While researching I Thought I Heard You Speak: Women at Factory Records, Golden found that women…

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Three decades on from the release of Roots, Keith Kahn-Harris digs in to the legacy Sepultura’s much vaunted sixth album. This feature was first published 15/02/21

A few years ago, the Guardian’s ‘Notes and Queries’ section posed the question, “Who is the least influential band ever?” I remember only one of the suggested answers – Frankie Goes To Hollywood – but the question has resonated with me ever since. It provides a useful reminder that commercial and/or artistic success do not necessarily mean that anyone follows in your footsteps.

I am not going to claim that Sepultura’s Roots influenced no one, but in revisiting the album 30 years after its release, I found pinning down its impact much more challenging than I…

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