No Joy

Bugland

Restless French-Canadian one-woman-band teams up with Fire-Toolz to wreak havoc in the digital uncanny valley

Bugland by No Joy

Second-guessing the sound of a No Joy album before it comes out isn’t always easy. For one, the band-turned-solo project’s evolution borders on arcane. Exercising their rough magic, No Joy have pivoted from scuzzy Montreal shoegazers, to glam rock enthusiasts, to spidery dream-poppers. By 2020’s Motherhood, they weren’t even a band. If there seems a logical next step for No Joy’s gyroscopic sound, just know it probably isn’t the one that frontwoman and sole permanent member Jasamine White-Gluz is going to take.

On their fifth album, No Joy reach into the shoegaze landfill and stumble across fierce, cybernetic treasure. With IDM/maximalist/face-melting augur Fire-Toolz…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/no-joy-bugland-review/

Ahead of the North American premiere of their ongoing collaboration at this year’s MUTEK Festival, upsammy and Valentina Magaletti speak to Jennifer Lucy Allan about architecture as an instrument, and striking a balance between turbulence and clarity

Valentina Magaletti, photo by Louise Mason. upsammy, photo by Neven Allgeier

In 2023 Dutch DJ and electronic music producer, upsammy, aka Thessa Torsing was offered a prestigious commission by the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam to create new audio work for an upcoming exhibition showing major pieces from the collection of the Boijmans van Beuningen museum in Rotterdam, including paintings by Monet, Yayoi Kusama, Dalí, Picasso, Mondrian, Rubens, Kiefer and others. 

Instead of responding to any particular work, Torsing brought in Italian drummer Valentina Magaletti, working with her…

The post Shake Up the Space: An Interview with upsammy and Valentina Magaletti  appeared first on The Quietus.

source https://thequietus.com/interviews/upsammy-valentina-magaletti-interview-mutek/

With our precious small music venues continuing to struggle, Dan McCarthy investigates how the model of mutual ownership pioneered by the Working Mens Club movement offers hope for the future

The Trades, Hebden Bridge. Photo by Elspeth Moore

The sprung wooden floor of The Trades Club in Hebden Bridge is no stranger to dancing. It’s hard to imagine today, but its modest upstairs hall was built in 1924 for graceful ballroom affairs – all waltzes and foxtrots to classical music. A century later, it has become a revered grassroots music venue on the UK circuit; a place where world-touring acts regularly choose to play intimate, sold-out shows to just 200 fans. King Gizzard, Laura Marling, English Teacher, IDLES (and the rest) have…

The post How Community Ownership can Save our Grassroots Venues appeared first on The Quietus.

source https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/black-sky-thinking/music-venue-crisis-working-mens-clubs-trades-hebden-bridge-ferret-preston/

Horses 4K

Nina

Equine-themed album mixes country-style lap steel with some wild electronic processing

Nina by Horses 4k

NINA, the debut work of Horses 4K, is an electronic album with Americana as its source material. The duo of Jacob Trombetta and Robin Guiler feed pedal steel guitar into samplers and synthesizers, taking a distinctive instrument and manipulating it into something sometimes unrecognisable and otherworldly.

But an overarching equine theme and a masked cowboy schtick for the promo photos bring with them the power of suggestion of rugged landscapes and vast expanses. The opening notes of the album ring out and twist like the filmic memory of the Old West. Little clinking details that evoke campfires and starry skies, before gently crashing electronics fully take over.

There…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/horses-4k-nina-review/

It’s lifted from forthcoming album Private Music

Deftones have released a new song, called ‘Milk Of The Madonna’.

It marks the second taste of the band’s forthcoming album, Private Music, which is their first full-length release in five years – they previously shared lead single ‘My Mind Is A Mountain’.

Private Music is Deftones’ 10th studio album and follows 2020’s Ohms. The band co-produced and recorded it in California and Nashville with producer Nick Raskulinecz, who also worked with them on 2010’s Diamond Eyes and 2012’s Koi No Yokan.

Listen to ‘Milk Of The Madonna’ below.

Reprise will release Private Music on August 22, 2025.

…

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From Tokyo speedbastards to small town Connecticut hardcore, to a band billing themselves as a two-piece despite one of them being a dog, Noel Gardner’s roundup of the best in global punk returns

Béton Armé, photo by Jesse Ramirez

Renaissance (La Vida Es Un Mus), the debut album by Montreal’s Béton Armé after six years and a fair whack of shorter releases, dropped just after the last one of these columns was published. Still, I don’t think it’s a big stress to review something whose sound is somewhere between four and five decades old two months late, all things considered.

I’m being facetious, slightly: Béton Armé play, in essence, skinhead punk rock in the classic fashion, and being Quebecois (Quebec Oi!s, if you…

The post Straight Hedge! Noel Gardner Reviews Punk & HC for August appeared first on The Quietus.

source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/punk/straight-hedge-noel-gardner-reviews-punk-hc-for-august/

Tony Njoku

All Our Knives Are Always Sharp

With features from Tricky, James Massiah, and Ghostpoet, the latest album by the London-based composer-producer combines liquid coos with vaporous electronics, finds Eden Tizard

ALL OUR KNIVES ARE ALWAYS SHARP by Tony Njoku

The shadow cast by Tricky is a long one. But beyond the raspy, roach toke vocals, what does a Tricky tune look like? What shape does it take? It’s hard to say. You can point to the downtempo bass and murk, but that foundation leaves you with plenty of room to roam. His spirit can be felt in Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland, Tirzah and Coby Sey, Young Echo and Space Afrika. The list goes on.

More than one of these artists show up…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/tony-njoku-all-our-knives-are-always-sharp-review/

Farshad Akbari

Echoes of Nothingness

Squealing bleeps, synthesized winds and melancholy themes evoke an arid desert soundscape on the latest album from the Iranian-born electronic music composer

Echoes of Nothingness by Farshad Akbari

The sun, a skull, and a vast expanse of desert. The imagery that makes up the woven artwork for Farshad Akbari’s Echoes of Nothingness provides an intriguing signpost for the headspace that this music was created in and where it leads its listeners. Whilst the sand-filled skull might be a signifier, this isn’t the desert psychedelia of El Topo, or the paranoid insanity of Gerry. Nor is it the peculiar sprawl of Walkabout and Picnic at Hanging Rock. It arises, instead, from Akbari’s homeland of Iran, the same landscape depicted by…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/farshad-akbari-echoes-of-nothingness-review/

Ben Pester’s brilliantly surreal new book is a “horror novel about office work” where the monster is a business park. Here he takes us through the songs he played while writing and the songs the book seems to summon for him now it’s finished and (almost) out in the world

We should get it out of the way early that I am not cool. I have written a kind of horror novel about office work – about worrying if you are good enough as a parent, as a person, and about how we all seem to be disconnecting from reality in a permanent way. The monster in this story is a self-growing business park. The unseen fear is that of being…

The post Hypnosis for Cats: Ben Pester’s Expansion Project Playlist appeared first on The Quietus.

source https://thequietus.com/culture/books/ben-pester-expansion-project-playlist/

The major label is seeking $9.2 million in unpaid royalties, and a possible $36 million in further damages from copyright infringement

Sony Music Entertainment (SME) is suing Rhapsody International, the parent company of streaming platform Napster.

In a lawsuit filed last Friday (August 1) in Manhattan federal court, Sony claimed that Napster failed to make royalty payments for over a year, while continuing to include music from its catalogue on the streaming service. It’s now seeking $9.2 million in licensing fees and unpaid royalties from Napster, as well as a potential $36 million in damages from copyright infringement.

In March, the Web3 startup Infinite Reality acquired Napster in a deal worth $207 million. At that time, Rhapsody allegedly owed over $6.5 million to Sony Music…

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source https://thequietus.com/news/sony-music-launches-lawsuit-against-napster-over-unpaid-royalties/