DJ K, pioneer of a new brand of hectic, visceral and politically charged electronic music called bruxaria funk, speaks to André Forte about soundtracking Brazil’s favelas, and how his new album Rádio Libertadora has added polish to his sonic warfare

Photo by Felipe Larozza

It’s peak summer in Portugal, and winter in Brazil. Between Diademo on the outskirts of São Paulo and my gentrified European city, there’s not much we have in common beyond a shared language, a mutually recognised past, and the severance of the colonial link that forged a difference in how each of us speak Portuguese. And yet, we make it work – or, to be fair, K makes it work. This is not his first venture into northern…

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source https://thequietus.com/interviews/witchcraft-liberation-an-interview-with-dj-k/

Amaarae

Black Star

The new album from the Ghanaian-American singer and songwriter preaches liberation through excess, with guest spots from PinkPantheress, Naomi Campbell, Charlie Wilson, Bree Runway and Starkillers

Amaarae doesn’t whisper to seduce; she whispers because she can. Black Star, her third full-length, is an album built from soft command: airy, controlled, often strange, and quietly assured in its ambition. The Ghanaian-American artist has always dealt in intimacy and eclecticism, but here, she stretches her reach into something messier, more transnational, more interested in tension than resolution as she enlists Naomi Campbell, PinkPantheress, Charlie Wilson, Bree Runway and Starkillers to strengthen the track list and engross the fans.

‘Stuck Up’ opens the record like a memory of a party you half-remember: bubbling synths,…

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source https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/amaarae-black-star-review/

Songs by Madonna and Eurythmics also feature on forthcoming LP

Hamish Hawk has unveiled a cover of ‘So Hard’, Pet Shop Boys’ wonderful song of mistrust and a relationship falling into nothingness, stripping the back to piano, voice and little flutters of guitar that rather wonderfully make the whole thing sound like a Suede song from the debut album or early b-sides. The track comes from his forthcoming Covers II album, which also features his take on Madonna’s ‘Burning Up’, Eurythmics ‘Sweet Dreams’ , as well as songs by Angel Olsen and Sheryl Crow. Hamish Hawk appears at this year’s Krankenhaus Festival on 23 August 2025.

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As ‘Running Up That Hill’ turns 40, Matthew Lindsay takes a deep dive into how was it made, what it means and why it’s connected so strongly with a younger generation. This feature was originally published on 23/06/2022

“She’s really done it now – she’s gone completely mad.” That’s how Kate Bush later assessed the reaction to her fourth album, The Dreaming, upon its September 1982 release. She’d sailed to new creative heights on the ten strange, beautiful songs that make up the record; seized control as producer, delving deeper into sonic details and characters, from a bank robber to Mrs. Houdini. But this masterpiece of wild ambition and fraught emotions had come at several costs.

Endless experimentation and studio-hopping across…

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source https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/anniversary/the-rhythm-divine-running-up-that-hill-40-years-on/

From cross-century kantele duets to roaring cellos, bagpipe drones and an essential artefact from the 1980s Hungarian underground, Jennifer Lucy Allan returns with your latest Rum Music roundup

Trabant, photo by János Vetö

Writing this the morning after a weekend fast wood firing ceramics at some kilns tucked in a corner the most researched woods in the world (Wytham, where foundational work on ecosystems was laid down, being as it is in close proximity to Oxford University). I still have soot under my fingernails and a couple of splinters lingering about my person. 

The whole weekend had its own music, set by the kilns and ourselves. The firing involved a lot of listening to the flames, as they began busily crackling, then roaring…

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Leo Chadburn

Sleep in the Shadow of the Alternator

The composer (fka Simon Bookish) evokes visionary worlds from the ruins of Nottinghamshire

Sleep in the Shadow of the Alternator by Leo Chadburn

Leo Chadburn’s Sleep in the Shadow of the Alternator is a dream: a deep immersion in another world that is like and unlike our own, described through abandoned landscape, wrecked machines and lost purpose. The dream is here and now, a post-industrial Britain inspired by Chadburn’s East Midlands home town, marked by the closed power stations and coal mines, retreating back to the land and back to the future.

Chadburn is an acclaimed composer who has released several solo albums, including as Simon Bookish. Sleep… is powered by his narration, words murmured into…

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Four decades on, Tariq Goddard returns to The Pogues’ second studio LP, a record of unguarded sentiment and open hearted revelry, strange and dark surrealism, empathic univocity and plain-speaking insight

If I am asked to write about a record, even one I have lived with and loved, it is usually necessary to go away and listen to it, no matter how much of it already belongs to my unconscious. Rum, Sodomy & The Lash renders that an extraneous precaution. I can hear it whenever I want without having to put it on, in sequence and down to the exact track order with gaps between songs, each one a gift of the past, powered by the fumes of (my) history. I first…

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source https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/anniversary/rum-sodomy-and-the-lash-the-pogues-review/

On superb new album Offshore, Nadeem Din-Gabisi speaks through a football kit clad alias to explore issues of belonging and identity as a second-generation immigrant in the shadow of empire. He tells Patrick Clarke about imagining a better future, the need to antagonise the far right and much, much more

Photo by David Kwah Mensah

Photo by David Kwah Mensah

On 6 October 2001, the England men’s football team were trailing Greece by two goals to one. If that scoreline held, it would end their hopes of qualifying for the following summer’s World Cup – a national disgrace. Deep into stoppage time, however, David Beckham stepped up to whip a now-iconic free kick into the top left corner, rescuing not only England’s campaign,…

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source https://thequietus.com/interviews/nadeem-din-gabisi-offshore-interview/

Wombo

Danger in Fives

As the Louisville, Kentucky trio pushbeyond the punk rock structures of their debut, it’s theunique phrasing of singer Sydney Chadwick that come to the fore, finds Amanda Farah

Danger in Fives by Wombo

It’s not so surprising when bands that begin in the punk realm push beyond its limitations, nor that they have an appetite for something unorthodox. After the comparatively conventionally punky structures of their previous album Fairy Rust, Louisville, Kentucky, trio Wombo have taken steps into abstract territory. Their third album, Danger in Fives, sloughs off standard song structures for linear journeys not beholden to themes or time signatures.

Frontwoman Sydney Chadwick has moved away from her rock singing style to a light, airy vocal approach. This new style…

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The Bologna festival returns this October

Alessandro Cortini

ROBOT has revealed the first wave of acts playing its 2025 edition later this year.

Now in its 16th year, the three-day Bologna festival will this year take in live sets from the likes of Alessandro Cortini, DJ Haram, Lorenzo Senni, Sarah Davachi, Ela Minus, Rival Consoles, Rainy Miller and Hatis Noit, among others. There will also be DJ sets from Apparat, Acid Arab, Sama’ Abdulhadi and Retro Cassette.

More acts will be added to the festival bill in the coming months, and the programming will be spread out across several venues in Bologna.

ROBOT will take place from October 9 to 11, 2025. Find more information here.
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