Archie Forde hails a compilation of young Icelandic electronic music makers, austere experimentalists and noisemongers, which rails against gentrification and foreclosed futures alike

safn by plata

It’s October 2025, and Icelandic noise music collective Spider Network are crammed into a Reykjavik beer garden, working late into the night. Spools of vermillion thread cling to the space’s tarp roof; one member laboriously unwraps tinfoil and plasters it across plastic windows and walls; a ritual doll is suspended from the ceiling.  

This haunting decor is being assembled for Falconfest, a noise show held in Reykjavik venue Lemmy in collaboration with No Borders, a charity dedicated to providing mutual aid to refugees. Spider Network, who organised the gig, have homed in on harsh noise as a way to fight the closures of spaces…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/reissue-of-the-week/safn-plata-review/

Actress

Radical Frame

Making his return to the Ninja Tune label, Darren Cunningham practices typical elusiveness with doleful piano stabs amidst pounding surf and ambient textures

Radical Frame by Actress

Try to recall an Actress track and you won’t bring a melody or rhythm back. You’ll find only a noir sensation, the faint memory of wading through a city’s hazy silence at four in the morning, alone, but with something in the air around you that the skin registers before the mind does. A rusting Weltschmerz bleeds through Darren Cunningham’s music, dissolving evanescent motifs into lasting affect. Over twenty years into his career, Radical Frame sees the UK producer continue to explore music that resists forgetting.

The almost preternatural allure of Cunningham’s first proper solo…

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Ahead of a new album with Dhani Harrison, superproducer Nigel Godrich tells Elizabeth Aubrey about the 13 records that have soundtracked his life and career, from the “unparalleled” Joni Mitchell to the “high art” of Grace Jones

Photo by Darian Zahedi

“This was completely impossible,” Nigel Godrich laughs from LA, where he is busy in rehearsals. He is referring here not to his prep for upcoming live shows – to be performed with musician Dhani Harrison for their exciting new musical project, Dragonflies – but to the task of narrowing his favourite album choices down to just 13. “I’ve ended up choosing records that are not necessarily my favourite album by that artist, but they represent something that resonates with me, something that…

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source https://thequietus.com/interviews/bakers-dozen/nigel-godrich-interview-bakers-dozen-favourite-albums-dragonflies-dhani-harrison/

In this month’s antidote to the algorithm, Mary Chiney introduces tQ subscribers to a subculture that thrived on the fringes of the Afrobeats explosion

Lady Donli, via artist’s Bandcamp

If you cast an eye toward West Africa over the last decade, you’d be forgiven for viewing Nigerian music as a cultural giant. The global explosion of Afrobeats, a very polished juggernaut led for many years by the likes of Burna Boy, Wizkid, and Davido, has dominated the narrative, filling dancefloors from London to Los Angeles. At the same time, beneath mainstream Lagos, a quiet rebellion has emerged. It happened on SoundCloud, at underground thrift pop-ups, and in the bedrooms of kids who felt entirely alienated by the commercial club sound. They called…

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For all its stunning virtuosity, the tumbling fingerstyle guitar of Swedish guitarist Finn Loxbo is always in service to a set of brilliant compositional ideas

Digging through the various improvised solo and duo recordings Swedish guitarist Finn Loxbo has made over the last decade is like witnessing a slow-motion creative winnowing, observing how a feverish pile of ideas and experiments has gradually coalesced into something inscrutable. His third solo album Lummernikt is a work of astonishing focus and originality forged from familiar notions, a free improvisation practice patiently chiseled into compositional rigour. Across eight riveting acoustic pieces played live without overdubs, Loxbo melds extended technique, fingerstyle fluency and self-devised preparations to deliver one of the year’s most beguiling, detailed and beautiful…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/album-of-the-week/tripping-the-light-fantastic-lummernikt-by-finn-loxbo-review/

Kim Ximya

Dogma

A South Korean rapper backed by a cacophony of glitchy noises proves an intriguing listen for Arusa Qureshi

South Korean hip-hop has been in existence since the 80s, when American hip-hop first seeped its way into the country’s pop culture canon via army officers stationed at US military bases. But, as is the case with hip-hop’s proliferation all over the world, it was soon adopted by Korean youth who made the genre their own, interpreting and flipping hip-hop into something homegrown and localised. Eventually, reality shows like Show Me the Money – where contestants go head to head until only one rapper remains – thrust hip-hop into the country’s mainstream, but there is another pipeline of rappers that have deliberately…

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The record was adapted from his score for MaddAddam, a ballet inspired by a trilogy of Margaret Atwood novels

Photo by Rory van Millingen

Max Richter is releasing a new album, titled While The Flood Rages.

Spanning 15 tracks that are spread across three acts, the new LP was adapted from the German composer’s score for MaddAddam, a ballet inspired by a trilogy of post-apocalyptic Margaret Atwood novels. The album is said to explore themes of ecological crisis and accelerations in technology.

While The Flood Rages follows on from Richter’s previous solo LPs, 2024’s In A Landscape and 2022’s The New Four Seasons – Vivaldi Recomposed.

Listen to lead track ‘Now We Can Sing’ below.

Deutsche Grammophon will release While The Flood Rages on 16 October 2026.

…

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The original LP was released a year ago

Photo by Shervin Lainez

David Byrne has shared a digital deluxe edition of his latest solo album Who Is The Sky?, a year on from its original release.

The updated edition of the LP features four bonus tracks, including new single ‘My Madness’, which you can listen to below. Its release comes ahead of Byrne wrapping up his touring in support of Who Is The Sky? with a show at Forest Hills Stadium in New York City this Saturday (19 September).

In a statement about the song and the wider deluxe release, Byrne said: “Here’s my most recent album now expanded with two songs that were cut, not because they weren’t good (I hope) but to…

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The album was originally released during the formative years of Kompakt’s long-running Pop Ambient series

Photo by David Westlake

Markus Guentner’s ambient and dub techno classic LP In Moll is being reissued to mark its 25th anniversary.

The record has been newly remastered by composer and mastering engineer Rafael Anton Irisarri for its new edition. Speaking about the record, Irisarri said: “It immediately opened a door to a world of music I didn’t know existed. Markus showed me entirely new possibilities for what electronic music could communicate.”

The updated release takes in fresh visual elements created by Guentner himself as he revisited the album 25 years on, while the track ‘In Moll 4’ will appear on vinyl for the first time as part of…

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source https://thequietus.com/news/markus-guentners-in-moll-set-for-25th-anniversary-reissue/

It features music recorded during the studio sessions for the Slovenian band’s latest album

Laibach are releasing a companion album to their recent LP, Musick.

Musick : Encore features six tracks that the Slovenian band recorded during the sessions for their latest album, which was released in May of this year and marked their first studio record in 12 years. It also features four remixes of tracks from Musick.

The music on Musick : Encore builds on the outright pop sound that Laibach explored on their latest album. In a statement, the band said: “Perhaps these are the final moments when creating music purely for enjoyment still carries broader significance – before alien, generative intelligence outplays and outperforms us all. So, we seized…

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