It’s the score he produced for a commission by the San Francisco Ballet

Photo by Genevieve Reeves

Floating Points is releasing a new album, titled Mere Mortals.

The result of a commission by the San Francisco Ballet that premiered in January 2024, the 14-track record sees the UK artist play synths alongside an orchestra. The ballet itself was choreographed by Aszure Barton, and is based on the Greek mythological story of Pandora.

Floating Points, real name Sam Shepherd, previously released lead cut ‘Falling To Earth’ last month. He’s now followed it with another track, ‘Her Gift’, which you can listen to below. The artist describes the song as a “duet written for harp and Therevox ET 4.3, a dance between Epimetheus and Pandora”.

Mere Mortals…

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Alistair Fruish talks to American underground comics artist Melinda Gebbie about retrospective Greatest Fits, plus her wild and inspirational career from the burned and banned Fresca Zizis to vivid portraits Herbie Hancock, James Brown and Janis Joplin. Some images NSFW

Melinda Gebbie portrait by Joe Brown

Artist Melinda Gebbie is a true original.  A driven diarist and delineator since her childhood, she was perhaps the most accomplished artist to come out of the predominantly-male San Francisco underground comics movement of the 60s and 70s.  Moving to the UK in the 1980s, where she worked as an animator on Raymond Briggs’ harrowing When The Wind Blows.  Gebbie has the unique accolade for a contemporary artist of having her pioneering underground comic book Fresca…

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KOGG

Mechanista

Self-playing cracker whistles and Oulipo-like exercises make this duo a fun and refreshing take on contemporary music

Mechanista by KOGG

KOGG is Cerys Hogg and Selena Kay, who both teach music. With backgrounds in jazz improvisation and classical composition, respectively, they found a common interest in exploring randomness and new ways to make sounds, including building their own instruments. They describe collecting whistles from Christmas crackers and creating a device to blow them with air bulbs. Programming devised sounds into synthesisers, they have crafted their own music, and it is quite something.

As they point out, experimental music has a reputation for being a male business, and a serious one. Hogg and Kay set out to make music their own way, and the…

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In an exclusive extract from his new book The End of Everything, the Warwickshire-born SF visionary pictures the apocalypse, as seen from the shores of Kent

In the beginning – if there could be said to have been a beginning – no one really understood what had happened.

There was a decade of confusion. Populations declined across the board, as you would expect given the accompanying economic changes. All along the coast, the little places that had made an income from retirees and weekenders – from tourism in general, from a proximity to remnant medieval priories or bijou nature reserves compiled out of two or three acres of hawthorn scrub, a pond and the possible presence of a locally occurring frog –…

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Some pressings will come with a limited 7-inch vinyl of unreleased tracks

Pixies are releasing new remastered reissues of their classic albums Bossanova and Trompe Le Monde.

Marking the band’s 40th anniversary celebrations, the remastered LPs will be made available on CD, digital and standard black vinyl formats. There will also be two special limited-edition vinyl pressings that will include additional 7-inch vinyl records of unreleased songs: ‘Dig For Fire (Albini Version)’, ‘Go Man Go’, ‘Brackish Boy’ and ‘Punk Loop’. 

Bossanova and Trompe Le Monde were both remastered by Kevin Vanbergen, who has been working through Pixies’ tape archive to create new Dolby Atmos mixes and high-resolution masters of the band’s back catalogue.

You can pre-order the special limited-edition pressings, featuring the extra 7-inch records, here.

The band’s classic compilation…

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She passed away after “a courageous and characteristically determined battle with colon cancer,” a statement said

Photo by Ashley Verse

Kanya King CBE, the founder and CEO of the MOBO Awards, has died at the age of 57.

Announcing her death, the MOBO Awards said: “Kanya passed away peacefully on 3 June 2026 after a courageous and characteristically determined battle with colon cancer. She was surrounded by her family, close friends and love. The music world has lost one of its most fearless champions.”

King founded the Music of Black Origin (MOBO) Awards in 1996 while working as a TV researcher. Believing that the artistry of Black musicians was not being sufficiently recognised in the music industry, she remortgaged her own home in order…

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Headline sets by Massive Attack, Doja Cat and Bad Gyal were cancelled at short notice leaving many festivalgoers unhappy

Primavera Sound’s first full night was heavily disrupted by adverse weather conditions and crowd management issues last night (4 June).

Amid torrential downpours, headline sets by Massive Attack, Doja Cat and Bad Gyal were cancelled at short notice, while sets by Alex G and Mac DeMarco, on the Occident stage, were also unable to go ahead. A number of performers additionally had their set times postponed and disrupted by the problems.

The issues left many festivalgoers unhappy due to perceived poor communication, while there were also social media reports of bad crowd management on site. Massive Attack had originally been due to take the…

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Tariq Goddard dodges the punches and negotiates with arthritis in order to bear witness to one for the ages

I remember the shock at discovering that Marlene Dietrich was still alive in 1992. She lived long enough to have raised a glass with Brecht and listened to all but one of Kraftwerk’s albums; and if she hadn’t been careful, ample time to take in Klaus Kinski and The Scorpions as well. Perhaps sensing that contemporaneity would eventually kill her, Dietrich wisely locked the door and refused to read the papers, an option that does not exist for innovators whose enduring relevance requires meeting their public. I feel something of the same era-straddling incongruity watching Kraftwerk play live in 2026 in Bournemouth,…

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Daniel Spicer considers the impossible task of trying to compress all facets of Ra into one release…

Do The Impossible: Original Soundtrack To The Documentary by Sun Ra

Among his many mythopoeic pronouncements, the great Sun Ra maintained that he was making music for the future. So, we shouldn’t be surprised that, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and more than 30 years after he left the planet for the last time, his music is gaining more recognition than ever before. A recent slew of reissues, new compilations and previously unheard live recordings continues unabated. His Arkestra – under the direction of long-time member, alto saxophonist Marshall Allen since 1995 – continues to delight audiences worldwide. Just last…

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Words by Claire Biddles. Cover image of Sam Reid as Lestat De Lioncourt from The Vampire Lestat, by Sophie Giraud/AMC

“I was trying to write from a vampire’s perspective, but a vampire who still has a connection to the human experience,” explains musician Daniel Hart, composer of songs for The Vampire Lestat, the bolshy, brash, rock opera follow-up to AMC’s cult adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview With The Vampire. The season sees Rice’s vampire creation – played by Sam Reid – become a rock star, with songs written by Hart narrating over two centuries of undead life, love and loneliness. “Songwriting is one of the main ways in which he stays connected to humans in season three,” says Hart, speaking from his home studio…

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