Earl Sweatshirt, MIKE & SURF GANG

Pompeii // Utility

For some fans of Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE, an album of 33 songs entirely produced by SURF GANG, rather than The Alchemist or Wiki, might constitute a potential dud, but POMPEII // UTILITY is anything but

POMPEII // UTILITY by Earl Sweatshirt, MIKE & SURF GANG

As a medium, the ‘collab album’ can be rather polarising. Sure, fans may rejoice that two of their favourite artists are working together, but equally, they might be fearful of a low common denominator outcome. In this case, for hip-hop fan favourites Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE, a joint album would seem an obvious move for artists with similar production, cadence and flows, not to mention previous successful collaborations. Throw…

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In an exclusive extract from his new book Ukrainian Field Notes, author Gianmarco Del Re explores the soundscape of ScanEagles and Shahed drones turning the skies over Kyiv into a sonic warzone

The word drone comes from Old English, referring both to the male honeybee and its buzzing sound – a meaning that now feels grimly prophetic. In places long subjected to drone warfare, people often name them after the noise they make. Along the Afghanistan–Pakistan border, drones have been called bangana (“buzzing wasp”); in Gaza, Israeli drones are nicknamed zanana, slang for a “nagging wife”, a term that mimics their ceaseless hum. In each case, the sound is not incidental but central: an acoustic weapon that invades daily life, produces…

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A. L. Noonan uncovers the toy-like, lo-fi astral world of underground artist Larrison; space-age tableaux that challenge perceptions of outsider art while recontextualising 90s electronic music

Connecters Vol. 1: Original Recordings, 1992–1999 by Larrison

In 2020, Jed Bindeman of rarities label Freedom To Spend, purchased the full review archive of defunct magazine ND. Over the publication’s lifespan of 1982 to 1999, editor Daniel Plunkett had amassed over 1,200 tapes to be considered for review. These were now Bindeman’s and on listening to a slew of them, fatigue began to set in. Most tapes were noisy, awkwardly lo-fi productions that were starting to tax him in his search for some uncovered gem. This was until he discovered Connecters by visual artist Larrison Seidle:…

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A new album from the Erasure, Blancmange and Wrangler axis reimagines eleven disparate tracks as cohesive analogue electronica. Wesley Doyle hears how old friendships and other people’s songs begat new music and original possibilities

“My cat’s outside, meowing,” says Vince Clarke, “He’s dying to get in on this interview.” The synth pop genius is speaking from his home studio in San Diego, which – along with many, many synths – he shares with a cat called Smudge who has a marked preference for jungle and house. “My cat is quite funny. He’ll come in the studio if I’m doing a remix that he quite likes, but the moment I pick up an acoustic guitar, he leaves.”Smudge must’ve been a constant companion…

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Thundercat

Distracted

The latest from the Californian bass wizard has features from luminaries like Tame Impala, Lil Yachty, A$AP Rocky and the late Mac Miller, but it’s unmistakably a Thundercat record through and through, finds Mary Chiney

Distracted by Thundercat

Stephen Bruner operates on a frequency entirely his own. For over a decade, the man known as Thundercat has been the secret weapon of the Los Angeles beat scene, the virtuosic bass-plucker who helped anchor the sprawling, chaotic brilliance of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly and Flying Lotus’s CosmogrammaIt Is What It Is in 2020. In the hyper-accelerated timeline of contemporary music, six years is a lifetime. People forget. Tastes mutate.

Listening to Distracted, his highly-anticipated fifth studio album, it feels as though no…

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Oh Mr James, Steeling Sheep and Voka Gentle for West Country festival this April

One of our favourite West Country venues, The Cornish Bank, in Falmouth, Cornwall, is hosting a two day festival on April 10 and 11 in a variety of venues. As well as bands such as Voka Gentle and Braindance producers such as Oh Mr James, headline acts include Stealing Sheep, Opus Kink, The Golden Dregs, Nadia Reid and The Leisure Society, alongside emerging performers such as Mary Mathias, Doss, Seamus Fogarty, Daisy Rickman and AK Patterson.

Quietus editor John Doran was delighted to be invited to be part of the Conference bill on Saturday lunchtime, held at Falmouth University’s Woodlane Campus, talking about The Third Place: Ceremony and Gathering in Cornwall with a…

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Twenty years ago New Orleans’ EYEHATEGOD and Nottingham’s Iron Monkey were locked into a race to produce the heaviest album ever. Dan Franklin revisits Iron Monkey’s self-titled debut and Dopesick

Call it ‘sludge’ if you have to. EYEHATEGOD prefer ‘southern hardcore blues’, wrenched from the bayou of New Orleans: progeny of punk and doom. ‘Lack Of Almost Everything’ from their third album Dopesick, if not quite a badge of honour, tells you all you need about their resignation and bitter humour. Philip Anselmo (ex-Pantera frontman disgraced at the outset of 2016 for throwing a Nazi salute and screaming “White Power” at the end of a tribute gig for murdered bandmate Dimebag Darrell) supplied an endorsement for the 2006 reissues of their…

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Stripped back to a two-piece, the latest from the Seattle-born drone monsters returns the group to their thrillingly arboreal roots

Sunn O))) by Charles Peterson

“He painted trees as by some special divining instinct of their essential qualities. He understood them.”

So begins Algernon Blackwood’s 1912 novella, ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’, a rich and unsettling tale that follows a man who, influenced by a painter specialising in portraits of trees, develops a strange obsession with the woodland surrounding his home. Whilst the painter’s arboreal depictions are said to be “wildly inaccurate” and at times approaching the ludicrous, his skill lies in capturing the “personality” of a particular tree: “friendly or hostile, good or evil. It emerged.”

Anyone who has spent time in…

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Xylitol

Blumenfantasie

The Brighton-based DJ and producer grapples with the physical matter of sound – with electrifying results

Blumenfantasie by Xylitol

When I first read a description of the Brighton-based producer and DJ Xylitol’s music that referred to its mixture of kosmische and jungle, I approached it with a good deal of scepticism. That’s not to say the two elements cannot, or should not, be mixed – of course there’s a wealth of creative potential in making beat-driven dance music that mines the origins of electronic sound. But when I hear of any DJ invoking that golden age of synth music, more often than not what comes to mind is the most antiseptic form of electronic music, one that uses arpeggiating, wavy synths with…

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The Shits

Diet Of Worms

With their third album, the Leeds noise-punks are in danger of becoming an institution

Diet Of Worms by The Shits

The Shits have been a band for a little under nine years and Diet Of Worms is their third album. Neither of which is especially eye-catching as statistics go, but noteworthy in the context of the Leeds DIY punk scene in which they originate, where bands (including ones featuring members of The Shits) frequently rise and fall leaving hardly any documented evidence they were there. A lot of the groups who historically pre-empted the sound heard on Diet Of Worms – noise rock, pigfuck, scum rock, sludge punk or some other microgenre terminology – didn’t stick around for anything…

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