Our top two tier supporters can catch up with everything we wrote about last month

We’ve had a great response to our spring sale on subscriptions, with nearly 200 sign-ups over the past week. To boost tQ into a glorious future, we’re looking to add another 300 before the end of June – you can join their number with 35% off the top tier here. These subscribers can instantly access the following perks from over the past month: In the Low Culture Podcast, Luke Turner and John Doran discussed subversions of masculinity, magic and the death of the 60s in 1970 cult classic, Performance. Our Organic Intelligence newsletter was on the fertile underground scene of the US west coast during the early 00s, while the Low…

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Kikù Hibino and Merzbow

Rococo ∞ Echomatter

Chicago-based sound artist and Signal Noise founder collaborates with the legendary Tokyo-born noise musician with results that sound primal to the point of meteorological

Rococo ∞ Echomatter by Kikù Hibino and Merzbow

The album opens like a thunderstorm. The voice that echoes around you (Alexandra Cupsa’s ASMR-modulated French vocals) becomes the green-gray sky, and suddenly, there are flickering tremors of distorted chaos, coming at you in bursts, like lightning. You hear the sounds of a tape rewinding, appropriately enough, since the album starts with the end (‘dB.XYZ’) and ends with the beginning (‘abcdefg’), as if the whole thing is being played backwards. ‘dB.XYZ’ in particular feels redolent of that sensation: a tape rewinding, or a scratchy video…

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Toby Manning examines the cultural amnesia surrounding one of Radiohead’s best (if sometimes forgotten about) albums

The fact that Amnesiac has been subject to a cultural amnesia is less ironic than apposite. Like the fabled millennium bug, Radiohead’s 2001 hit album was an expression of doubt and trepidation at the dawning of a new, digital century. The malfunction and misery which these invoked would prove to be less paranoid than prescient about a future where material and mental precarity have proved more a feature than a bug. With the forced brightness of poptimism becoming the new century’s dominant mode instead, such turn-of-the-century wobbles needed to be memory-holed.

For many, Amnesiac, like the preceding Kid A, merely reflected the contrarian, combative impulse that…

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Sapphire Goss talks with Bernie Brooks and Kristen Gallerneaux about the materials, magic, and catharsis at the heart of her debut album, Light Sensitive Materials

Screenshot

“I’m using optical sound effects. For people that don’t know, optical sound used to be to the side of the image on the film strip. When I was working with archives, there were all these public information and education films. They were always distorted and making this weird AAAAAAAA sound I really like. So, I got some samples of that, and I was trying to recreate it using different techniques,” says Sapphire Goss, talking us through the processes used to create Light Sensitive Materials, her debut album. “I’ve got some field recordings as well. It’s just…

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The site will be winding down across the next six weeks after its operators said there was no financially sustainable path forward to keeping it going

Nina Protocol, the Web3-based independent music marketplace and streaming service, is shutting down.

The team behind the platform revealed that they would be “winding down” the site in three phases over the next six weeks, citing challenges in making the project financially sustainable.

Writing on Instagram, Nina Protocol said: “In 2021, we saw musicians’ growing fatigue in the face of streaming’s one-size-fits-all payments, context-collapse, and algorithmic discovery. We set out to build infrastructure for independent music that allowed musicians to sell their music, create their context, and connect with listeners on their own terms.

“While our work created…

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The new cut combines Blawan’s unique techno sound with elements of Brazilian bass and funk

Skrillex has released a collaborative single with Blawan, Randomer and Brazilian artist MC Dricka.

Out today (29 May), ‘Thistle’ combines characteristic elements of Blawan’s modular techno sound, as heard on last year’s SickElixir LP, with touches of Brazilian bass and funk. The track has been a fixture of Skrillex’s DJ sets in recent years.

The release of the new song comes ahead of a new two-day festival at Berlin’s Kraftwerk building this weekend, CONTRA, which has been curated by Skrillex and others. It will take in sets from Flowdan, Slikback, upsammy & Valentina Magaletti, Juliana Huxtable, Bill Kouligas, and many more.

Listen to ‘Thistle’ below.

‘Thistle’ is out now on…

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Nuno Canavarro and Flora Yin-Wong are among the final additions to the lineup

Semibreve has finalised the music programming for its 2026 event.

The Braga festival’s 16th edition will take place this October, and will now take in a rare set from Portuguese composer Nuno Canavarro, whose classic work Plux Quba has been cited as an influence by the likes of Mouse On Mars and Jim O’Rourke – the latter reissued the record on his MoIkai label in 1999. Canavarro will debut a new work, /Radiant Rift, alongside LA-based Portuguese composer Bruno Miguel Pinto in a special commission by Semibreve.

Also lined up to play the festival are Flora Yin-Wong, Marta Salogni (whose a,drift show is a joint commission by Semibreve, Berlin Atonal and Unsound),…

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tQ’s staffers select their favourites from a particularly intense month of music, from microtonal voyages to xenofeminist noise via heavy ambient dub, unsettling ancient drone and more

Roasting alive in London’s concrete oven in the hottest May day since records began, attention constantly waylaid by warnings of incoming climate-induced societal collapse, lends an added intensity to one’s listening. Guttersnipe’s ferocious album of the year contender Extinction Burst!, for instance, or Deafkids’ monumental soundtrack to the apocalypse Cicatrizes Do Futuro (both in our list of May’s finest music), hit that little bit harder when you’re melting.

Everything featured below, as well as all the other knockout music we’ve covered at tQ this month, will be compiled into an hours-long playlist exclusive to our…

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Harry Sword praises the hypnotic atemporal oneness of a neglected (minimal rock) drum & bass classic

Conference of the Birds by OM

Some records are so gloriously eccentric, so complete in conception and world building, that they attain mythical status by dent not only of musical content but sheer audacity. Sleep’s Dopesmoker is a case in point. A fifty minute long, album length song that recounted the tale of a caravan of ‘Weedians’ making their way across desert wasteland, it hinged on a monstrous slow building riff built via the otherworldly rumbling interplay between guitarist Matt Pike and bassist Al Cisneros. 

Slowly unfurling like some aquatic Lovecraftian leviathan and underpinned by bruising, earth shaking sub bass (and crucially, though often less mentioned, the…

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Boards of Canada

Inferno

The Sandison brothers return after 13 years to find fragments of heaven glistening in the wreckage

Inferno by Boards of Canada

The marriage of heaven and hell took place last weekend at Judson Memorial Church. The New York City landmark was one of seven venues worldwide to host the Inferno Sessions, the global playback events accompanying Boards of Canada’s first album in thirteen years. Beneath the chancel’s Byzantine-styled rose window burned the projection of an ominous cluster of fiery hexagons – a fitting introduction to Inferno. The album provides a map to the hope-inflected ordeal hell is undergoing on here earth. Only a few hundred devotees could sit for the reckoning, each of them primed by weeks of successive unveilings…

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