Ahead of her performance at this year’s EFG London Jazz Festival, Tanita Tikaram takes Luke Turner through her favourite records, from the soundtrack of her childhood spent in military bases, via formative encounters with OMD and The Beatles, an abiding love of the jazz and soul greats, and more

Photo by Natacha Horn

In 1988, when Tanita Tikaram was just 19, her debut album Ancient Heart became a chart success, selling four million albums and getting her nods at the BRIT Awards. Ever since, she’s moved in and out of the music business – To Drink the Rainbow (An Anthology 1988–2019), curated and released by music journalist Pete Paphides on Needle Mythology, is an execllent primer. This year, she released LIAR (Love Isn’t Right) earlier…

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Primitive Man

Observance

The Denver Death Sludge trio let a sliver of light in, testing genre limits to create a monolith of heavy art

Observance by Primitive Man

A blast of feedback, squealing from overdriven tube amps the moment the guitarist unmutes their signal chain, is the simplest way to capture the raw live feel of an extreme metal show on record. While this motif opens tracks across Primitive Man’s discography, it’s less of a genre-nod and more of a warning: turn away now – or brace yourself if you dare enter.

Since 2012, Primitive Man has been churning elements of funeral doom, sludge, black metal, drone and harsh noise into something so abrasive, heavy and oppressive that it’s easy to miss the thoughtful forward-looking approach…

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Lee Adams of the legendary LGBTQIA+ techno night KAOS discusses next week’s anniversary event, the Athens experimental arts and music scene, and noice as political resistance

Lee Adams / Rotten Sun

London club KAOS deserve a medal (glistening steel, on a little leather strap, pin through the nipple) for opening the doors for a hectic and active new wave of largely LGBTQIA+ focused nights devoted to the dirty spot where techno, EBM and experimental music, sex and art meet. Each year, their ‘anniversary’ parties shift expectations of what the club gets up to, with the 2025 event focusing on live performances. It takes place on 13 November at the Peckham Levels, the new venue from the good people of Iklectik, and…

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From weighty out-jazz poetry to a dream pop / post rock wormhole, via mutating synth grids, a record fuelled by hatred of the ‘the music industry’ and more – it can only be Noel Gardner’s latest guide to the best of New Weird Britain

Birds Of Peace Orchestra

Always feels right to open another New Weird Britain with people who came here from elsewhere, and who culturally enrich this nebulous ‘here’ with their creative presence in it. And I can elevate that statement beyond formulaic liberal platitude by pointing you towards hearing them too. London’s People Of The Wind and their self-titled debut LP of weighty out-jazz poetry – acquaint yourself!

People Of The Wind were founded by Pouya Ehsaei, joined here by…

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Makaya McCraven

Techno Logic/Hidden Out!/The People’s Mixtape/PopUp Shop

The drummer-producer’s four-EP project blends live performance and post-production tricknology into a new kind of superstrong musical compound

Techno Logic (featuring Theon Cross & Ben LaMar Gay) by Makaya McCraven

Perhaps taking a leaf from Johnny Marr’s Fever Dream playbook, the Paris-born, Chicago-based drummer and producer Makaya McCraven released a double-album called Off The Record in early October: on the last day of the month, its four constituent pieces are being made available separately. Whether ingested in individual helpings or as one big blow-out, this food for the mind comes with one predominant flavour: it’s music that seeks to prove that there is hope for humanity despite the best efforts of digital ‘disruptors’.

Hidden Out! by Makaya…

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Label and shop founder Stephen Pietrzykowski gives forthright explanation of thinking behind celebration of underground racket

Able Noise

World Of Echo has been one of London’s finest record shops since it opened on Columbia Road in 2018. Earlier this year, it left the flower market and chi-chi tat zone behind to move down the road to Cheshire Street, all the while putting out a series of fascinating releases, around 25 thus far, from the likes of O Yuki Conjugate, Movietone, Mosquitos, Tara Clerkin Trio and Läuten Der Seele. On Saturday, World Of Echo are holding an all-day gig at Walthamstow’s Trades Hall club to celebrate their birthday, with a bill featuring acts from the label along with “a few more that feel…

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Stewart Smith looks forward to a celebration of the gamelan at the seventeenth instalment of the Scottish festival

Gamelan Naga Mas

Since its inception in the early 2000s, the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra has explored a range of approaches, from free improvisation and graphic scores to conduction and telematic performance via video calls. Generous collaborators, they’ve worked with free music legends such as Maggie Nicols, George Lewis, Evan Parker and Pat Thomas, while inviting poets, visual artists and filmmakers into the fold. 

Now in its seventeenth year, GIOfest is a highlight of the Scottish music calendar, with local and international friends joining the group in a celebration of improvisation. With players drawn from a range of musical (and non-musical) backgrounds, GIO has always looked…

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The dearly beloved tQ supporters can catch up with everything we’ve written about this past month here

Thanks from all of us at tQ to all those who subscribe to the site, and have supported another month of examining and celebrating the best new music, new and old. A quick reminder that those in the Subscriber Plus tier are getting new bonus playlists we’re sending out to give a sonic accompaniment to our features. Last month, they came from Hüsker Du, Severed Heads, Galaxie 500, Chicks On Speed, Soulwax and Mulatu Astatke, with along with the Baker’s Dozen selections of Sudan Archives and Ron Mael. These can all be found, with their accompanying editorial, here. This month our round-up playlist contains four-and-a-half…

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KeiyaA

Hooke’s Law

The Chicago-born singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and a record producer is like a coiled spring on this spacious yet claustrophobic follow-up to 2020’s brilliant Forever, Ya Girl

hooke’s law by keiyaA

You might recognise the scene: a bedroom lit blue by screens, soundtracked by video game bleeps and the thumbed stutter of social media feeds, perforated by an occasional phone alarm. Dishevelled bedcovers mandatory, takeaway containers optional. It’s bed rot, baby!

“Internally null and void,” as keiyaA puts it on the last track of her new album, Hooke’s Law, was how the Chicago-born artist found herself after the critical hype subsided around her 2020 self-released debut Forever, Ya Girl, a work of DIY brilliance that tinkered with jazz, hiphop, R&B, and electronic music, leaving…

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Blitz: The Club That Created the Eighties, a new book by Robert Elms, returns the reader to a bygone London of squats full of future popstars and cans of Red Stripe to recall the nightclub that birthed Spandau Ballet and Visage and might just have invented the future

Site of the Blitz Club – 4 Great Queen Street, London. CC4.0 Spudgun67

History is made at night. There are things that need to gestate before they’re exposed to daylight or have a spotlight shone on them – and sometimes the mystery heightens the mystique. That was always going to be the case with the Blitz, based in a slightly shoddy-looking joint at 4 Great Queen Street, (almost) in Covent Garden, filled with nasty…

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