In this month’s Low Culture Essay, Wrongtom weaves the life of his jazz pianist grandad into his encounter with Norman Cook & co’s 1990 hit single, and explores how it changed his own musical trajectory

Perhaps it began in my grandparents’ living room in the spring of 1990. I watched, quizzically, as my cousin Nancy popped her Walkman headphones over my grandad’s thick ears, and clicked the clunky play button. He looked as puzzled as me, then lifted one of the fuzzy earphones and asked “what is this?” Nancy replied with unabashed enthusiasm, “it’s rap”.

I was up like a shot, grabbing the headphones to find out what rapping delights she’d bestowed upon my grandad, and just in time to catch a…

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Water Damage

Instruments

Austin-based motorik supergroup (feat. David Grubbs, Patrick Shiroishi and Thor Harris) ascend to the astral plane

Instruments by Water Damage

Consistency and continuity are what make the backbone of Water Damage. The Austin-based psych/drone-rock collective consists of noise rock veterans and experimental musicians from bands like Marriage, Expensive Shit, USA/Mexico, Black Eyes and Swans, some of whom are in their third decade. Water Damage functions more as a commune with variable line-ups from five to eleven people, usually with multiple bassists and drummers. Even though they are often compared to Tony Conrad’s collaboration with German krautrock legends Faust, Outside the Dream Syndicate, their understanding of motorik rhythm comes mainly from later Fugazi albums. That’s why their albums’ titles, like 2022’s Repeater…

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Stereolab mine the retrofuturistic dreams of late 70s and early 80s synthpop, resulting in a meticulously crafted, cinematic masterpiece

Stereolab fans have expressed concerns in recent weeks that the Groop appear to be using AI to create the music video for the album’s single ‘Aerial Troubles’. Some viewers suggest it goes against the band’s progressive stance – estimates suggest that ChatGPT uses enough energy per day to charge eight million phones, or to run the Empire State Building for 540 days. Others insist that the video is meant to look like it was created with AI, but actually isn’t. One message is now extremely clear: we don’t know Stereolab as well as we think.

As a youth, Tim Gane claims he went…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/album-of-the-week/higher-frequencies-instant-holograms-on-metal-film-by-stereolab/

A high court decision against Lambeth Council last week had put the festivals under doubt

A number of festivals at London’s Brockwell Park “will go ahead as planned”, organiser Brockwell Live has confirmed, despite a high court ruling against Lambeth Council last week.

The status of the events – including Field Day, Wide Awake and Cross The Tracks – had been put in doubt after a high court in London ruled in favour of local residents group Protect Brockwell Park, which raised over £40,000 last month for a judicial review of Lambeth Council’s approval of the festivals. Calling the events “unlawful”, the group argued that large areas of the park were left inaccessible to people for too long due to added construction…

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source https://thequietus.com/news/brockwell-park-festivals-to-go-ahead-despite-court-ruling/

The group’s 10th studio album is out in September

Suede have shared details of a new album, titled Antidepressants.

Taking in 11 tracks, the band’s 10th studio record is influenced by the past three years spent touring 2022 album Autofiction. It was recorded between studios in London, Brussels and Stockholm.

In a statement, frontman Brett Anderson said: “If Autofiction was our punk record, Antidepressants is our post-punk record. It’s about the tensions of modern life, the paranoia, the anxiety, the neurosis. We are all striving for connection in a disconnected world. This was the feel I wanted the songs to have. The album is called Antidepressants. This is broken music for broken people.”

Bass player Mat Osman added: “This is a widescreen and ambitious…

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It started with the sound of a fridge… Daryl Worthington studies the tributary network of connections that make up Editions Mego via ten of their crucial releases

“You could write a whole book about this,” says Stephen O’Malley. The Sunn O))) co-founder is talking about the network of musicians, sub-labels and visual artists connected by Editions Mego and its predecessor, Mego. It’s a topology which, over the last three decades,  has connected far-flung corners of groundbreaking music. Early on Mego documented artists taking radical approaches to computers as performance and composition tools, captured particularly acutely on Russell Haswell’s pair of Live Salvage albums. It’s released landmark albums of shimmering glitch by Fennesz and Oneohtrix Point Never. But ‘electronics’ only scratches the…

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source https://thequietus.com/interviews/strange-world-of/editions-mego-best-records/

As Peter Murphy releases a new solo album – his first for a decade – the erstwhile Bauhaus frontman looks back at the music that has excited and inspired him, from glam to punk, classical to devotional, jazz to trip hop

Photo by Jolene Siana

It’s been over a decade since Peter Murphy last released an album – 2014’s Lion – but the intervening years have been far from quiet. Between solo tours – both with a full band and stripped back – Murphy undertook a partial Bauhaus reunion with bassist David J to celebrate 40 years of their debut In The Flat Field. He also began a residency at Le Poisson Rouge in New York in 2019, which was cut short…

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source https://thequietus.com/interviews/bakers-dozen/peter-murphy-bauhaus-bakers-dozen-favourite-albums-silver-shade/

Karman Line Collective

To Be

Wolfgang Buttress and friends follow the bees’ lead on an album full of apian tooting, quacking and purring

TO BE by KARMEN LINE COLLECTIVE

Karman Line Collective’s, To Be, is released to coincide with National Bee Day. The reasons for this become apparent from the first seconds of the opening track, a field recording of bees buzzing in aural close-up. It sounds as though they are tuning up, searching for an ‘E’. As they locate it a drone kicks in, generated by humans, electronic layers start to build up into an apicultural ambient soundscape.

To Be is the soundtrack to an installation by Wolfgang Buttress called BEES: A Story of Survival, at the World Musuem in Liverpool. Buttress is also a…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/karman-line-collective-to-be-review/

The Latvian festival will welcome These New Puritans, Shabaka Hutchings and more later this year

These New Puritans, photo by Jeremy Young

Skaņu Meźs has unveiled the first wave of acts playing its 2025 event this October.

Returning once again to its base of Hanzas Perons in Riga, Latvia, the festival will this year take in a headline performance from These New Puritans, in the wake of the release of their new album, Crooked Wing.

Also lined up to play are Shabaka Hutchings & Hamid Drake; Joan La Barbara; Sega Bodega; Fatboi Sharif; Kilbourne; and Muqata’a. Further acts are set to be added to the bill in the coming months.

Skaņu Mežs is one of a number of european festivals that participates in the SHAPE+…

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Ahead of a much-anticipated slot at this year’s Supersonic Festival, the Canadian-Zambian rapper speaks to Alex Rigotti about her pivot away from industrial beats, the end of her award-winning album trilogy and an embrace of considered craftsmanship on Only Dust Remains. Content warning: this article contains discussions of suicide.

Photo by Méchant Vaporwave

Backxwash’s musical identity has been reborn on her newest record Only Dust Remains. Under the moniker, Ashanti Mutinta had broken out with a trilogy of metal-infused industrial hip hop albums, each one more ear-bleeding than the other. Snagging the Canadian Polaris Prize for the first instalment, 2020’s God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It, its follow-up, 2021’s I Lie Here Buried With My Rings…

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source https://thequietus.com/interviews/backxwash-interview-only-dust-remains-supersonic/