Houston hip-hop’s chopped and screwed sound has inspired one of the internet’s loneliest and most beguiling corners. --- Moore, known to his 24,000 subscribers as Slater, is regarded among aficionados as the originator of the “slowed + reverb” phenomenon, a simple DIY remixing style that has thrived on YouTube in recent years. Slater provided a blueprint that many others have followed: Start with a moody song that’s already popular on YouTube; ratchet up the sense of druggy melancholy by slowing it down and adding a touch of digital echo; pair it with similarly wistful animation; watch the views pour in. […] The songs that people want to hear, in other words, often owe a sonic debt to Screw before they’ve even been slowed, having absorbed it directly or through Screw-influenced artists.

Why is ultra-repetitive music so special? Matt Unicomb speaks with Robert Hood, William Basinski and more to find out. --- For the first minute of Robert Hood's "Self Powered," you might focus on the bassline. But as it loops, your attention may shift to the hi-hats and the subtle ways they're manipulated. A great loop techno track hooks a lister with simple pattern. A listener who allows themselves to fall into the track actively follows the progression, whether they realise it or not. Subtle changes, like a slight filter effect on some bleeps, shifts the sound, bringing the listener even closer. The best producers, perhaps inexplicably, know exactly when and what to tweak, to the point where a simple series of tones and a four-on-the-floor kick becomes intensely powerful. […] There seems to be an inverse relationship between the prevalence of great loops and the amount of equipment available to producers.

Our brains reward us for seeking out what we already know. So why should we reach to listen to something we don’t? --- The act of listening to new music in the midst of a global pandemic is hard, but it’s necessary. The world will keep spinning and culture must move with it, even if we are staid and static in our homes, even if the economy grinds to a halt, even if there are no shows, no release parties, and even artists sink even further into the precarity that defines a career as a musician. The choice to listen to new music prioritizes, if for one listen only, the artist over you. It is an emotional risk to live for a moment in the abyss of someone else’s world, but this invisible exchange powers the vanguard of art, even in times of historic inertia.

Head Hunters states its intent in its name: The music will blow open your skull the second you press play, the instant the bassline from “Chameleon” comes out of the speakers in full stereo sound. And if that doesn’t move you, how about when Harvey Mason comes in with the funkiest drum part in the history of drumming, a groove even Hancock said he had never heard before in his life, that snare hit coming just before the two, the kick drum so dead and relaxed, are you kidding me? Head Hunters rightfully belongs to the Library of Congress as one of our nation's most treasured recordings, sitting there, smoking, untouchable, a factory of winces and hoooos.

An interview with musician Siavash Amini. Following U.S. sanctions, widespread protests, internet blackouts, and government crackdowns, COVID-19 is the latest calamity to befall Iran’s avant-garde.

We're a playlist platform that directly supports independent music, built on our streaming integrations and powerful curation tools. The closest analogy for what we are would be Patreon for music or Substack for playlists. We enable artists to create a space to elevate the music and artists that they enjoy for their fans and accept tips from supporters. You can think of it as a newsletter of music, featuring thoughts alongside selections for fans to listen to. We enable fans to have a closer connection to their favorite artists via curated playlists, personal thoughts, and early previews of their work.

JQBX lets you play & listen to music in sync with friends or public groups. We believe music is better with friends. JQBX lets you be a DJ, join a party, or just kick back and listen to music with friends or strangers from all over the world in real time. JQBX hooks into your Spotify account and is 100% free to use. Give it a try and start listening. Together.

Read an exclusive interview with Andreas Tilliander and Axel Willner, discussing Stockholm's underground music scene and such projects as TM404, The Field, Mokira and Lars Blek.

Before Billie Eilish performed the Beatles' "Yesterday," during the Academy Awards "In Memoriam" segment last month, she walked the red carpet in a look that's become something of a signature for her: custom oversized Chanel tracksuit, a chunky, gold cuban link chain, long black acrylics. --- The internet has provided, for white youth who've spent a large part of their adolescence on it, a front seat to the creation and distribution of Black cultural products — Black music, slang and dances. But as those cultural products move across the internet, they get farther and farther away from their original context and meaning and often become collapsed under the simplistic label of "youth culture." This isn't as democratizing as it seems. Apps like TikTok and its spiritual predecessor Vine not only encourage the performance of Black culture by non-Black teens, but incentivize it with real money to be made. It used to just be financially viable for pop stars to perform Blackness. Now, it presents an opportunity to non-Black teens everywhere.

For years, the elusive singer-songwriter has been working, at home, on an album with a strikingly raw and percussive sound. But is she prepared to release it into the world? --- When you tell people that you are planning to meet with Fiona Apple, they almost inevitably ask if she’s O.K. What “O.K.” means isn’t necessarily obvious, however. Maybe it means healthy, or happy. Maybe it means creating the volcanic and tender songs that she’s been writing since she was a child—or maybe it doesn’t, if making music isn’t what makes her happy. Maybe it means being _un_happy, but in a way that is still fulfilling, still meaningful. That’s the conundrum when someone’s artistry is tied so fully to her vulnerability, and to the act of dwelling in and stirring up her most painful emotions, as a sort of destabilizing muse.

Electronic artists and agents talk about the potentially catastrophic ramifications of the current health crisis on the world of dance music. --- But as club cancelations and postponements pile up, DJs and electronic musicians are left facing the prospect of a month or more without earnings. And a global patchwork of measures—the UK has resisted banning large events, for instance, while San Francisco has temporarily prohibited all non-essential gatherings of 100 or more—means that many DJs are still uncertain as to which events they can still expect to play.

Browse over 6380 of our featured Ableton 10 themes.

The experimental/ambient label has survived not just due to hard work, but to the depth, breadth, and persistence of their vision.

Five years ago I started a tumblr called Invisible Music, in which I posted tracks of (mostly) experimental electronic music and wrote about them without naming them. It was a lot of fun and I loved doing it but, alas, as happens with most online writing projects, I stopped doing it, and it’s time to put it to bed. Here are the tracks I posted, and there are a few pieces of writing here I still like. If you followed it, I hope you enjoyed it.

Looking into Deezer’s Spleeter and Facebook’s Musixmatch. Source separation can extract isolated vocal and instrumental tracks from any recorded song, but its potential repercussions for artists and streaming services hangs in the balance.

Oregon once aimed to be the greenest state in America. Its leaders adopted the nation’s first bottle deposit. They controlled urban sprawl. They declared ocean beaches public property. But in the last four years, Oregon’s most powerful industries have killed, weakened or stalled efforts to deal with climate change, wolf recovery, disappearing bird habitat, cancer-causing diesel exhaust, dwindling groundwater, industrial air pollution, oil spill planning and weed killers sprayed from helicopters. What changed Oregon? Money. Lots and lots of money. […] The consequences of Oregon’s logging practices are clear. State and federal scientists have blamed major population declines in species including the coastal Coho salmon, northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet on timber harvesting and state policies governing it. The Oregon Department of Forestry found 242 plants and animals listed or at risk of listing under the Endangered Species Act as of 2012. The trend was getting worse. Then the state agency, whose mission includes promoting the timber industry, stopped publishing the numbers and deleted past reports from its website.

Just outside of Paris. Enter the still-functioning workshop of the innovative and influential French sonic pioneers.

Background music was once relegated to elevators and waiting rooms. Now the groundless consumption of music has become omnipresent. --- The idea of purposeful listening—which is to say, merely listening—is becoming increasingly discordant with the way that music is sold to us. […] In March, Warner Music Group’s Arts Division signed a twenty-album distribution deal with the German app Endel. The app’s proprietary algorithm “creates personalized soundscapes to give your mind and body what it needs to achieve total immersion in any task.” The company reports that its technology “is backed by science and uses personal inputs such as time of day, location, heart rate, weather to create custom sound frequencies to enhance one’s mood towards sleep, relaxation and focus.” Though I appreciate Endel’s creators not calling the app’s output “music,” I am nonetheless agog that my fellow-humans are comfortable with a late-capitalist robot voice telling them, “It’s 3:30 P.M. It’s a great time to get some work done,” and then generating electronic sounds designed to propel them deeper into their to-do lists. […] It makes sense that, in 2019, as we grow collectively more uncomfortable with our own quiet, inefficient sentience, we have also come to neglect the more contemplative pursuits, including mindful listening, listening for pleasure, listening to be challenged, and even listening to have a very good time while doing nothing else at all.

As we enter a new decade, the ways in which we define electronic music styles are rapidly changing. Chal Ravens explores the etymological evolution of “UK club music” and speaks to some of its key players: about how regional roots are growing into digital ecosystems, and powering new conversations about globalisation in club culture. --- It’s more about the mood, ultimately: vibrant, kinetic, unpredictable. In fact, club is probably best understood as a style of DJing rather than production, a sound invented in real time. The element of surprise is highly valued, along with quirky edits, bizarre blends, and a fearless approach to clashing musical keys. You might hear a spinback or three. It’s music to stay on top of rather than music to get lost in. […] Why aren’t these UK club DJs appearing on European festival lineups? “If I knew I’d be playing more festivals,” says Finn, who wonders if there’s a basic mismatch in attitudes and expectations. “There’s not much room for humour in dance music. It all feels like it has to be quite serious,” he says. […] In the process of absorbing and reframing various black genres, the term “club” obscures the roots of its own diversity. That shouldn’t write off its utility as a catch-all term; how else might we capture the contemporary intermingling of dozens of related global scenes? But intersecting factors of race and class are always at work in the creation and adoption of new styles. […] There’s an absurd feedback loop at play in which promoters excuse pedestrian bookings by citing commercial imperatives, which does audiences a disservice by suggesting that they’re too bigoted or unimaginative to branch out from house and techno. But insofar as club music is thriving in small clubs and basement parties in the UK, the next challenge will be to establish the current generation as an internationally recognised creative powerhouse.

He’s been DJing for more than two decades, so we talked about a lot besides that. --- I ask him simply: is this why you do it? He snaps out of his stasis, looking at me indignantly. "I just love it. I genuinely love the music I play. I love looking at people's faces when they lose it." He stops. "I've spent the past 35 years seeing how collective euphoria works. It's people coming to escape; to lose themselves and lose the stresses. For two hours, four days – they become part of this bigger thing. This sexy mess. There's a level where you can totally freak somebody out. It's the equivalent of making them cum. It's half-voyeurism, half-vampire; my secret of eternal youth. Not drinking the blood of the young – absorbing their sweat! I genuinely love it."

She says 'Miss Anthropocene' is about making "climate change fun"—and she can't stop talking about her hopes for an AI-driven future. But she might just be playing with our perceptions. --- But the Internet is notoriously good at simplifying the messiness of reality into cut-and-dry projections of our deepest hopes and fears—symbols so gripping that they can sometimes cause us to make assumptions that go against our values. To believe that Grimes has made an album designed to spread good faith in Silicon Valley is to undermine her intelligence and agency as an artist, one whose artistic reckoning with the world—and her place within it—has never been anything close to straightforward. The trouble with owning one's perceived badness so completely that you transform yourself into a literal demon, though, is that it's a bit of an out. There's nothing inherently wrong with trying to use technology to democratize music-making, or to offset our reliance on fossil fuels—but it's hard to take techno-optimism seriously when its proponents also seem strangely blind to the world that exists right in front of them. In the realm of business, that blindness can take the form of building a fortune partly based on the idea that you're trying to stop climate change while also discouraging your employees from unionizing. In the realm of art, it can mean getting so carried away by the grand design of your vision that you fail to realize that it's motivated by something a bit solipsistic, a mirror of your unique prison of pain. At worst, it can produce art that is less a reflection of shared experience than a vision of the world that was dreamed up in a corporate boardroom, by people who have the luxury of turning existential crises into an entertaining thought-exercise.

The story of a record-store snob struggles to fit an era defined by shared enthusiasm. --- The easiest way to update the satire would have been to change its milieu, making it about video gamers, for instance, or hardcore comics and superhero fans—or YouTubers, for damn sure. It’s all too evident there are toxic preference patterns to be skewered in those realms, set for processing through High Fidelity’s patented epiphany-and-redemption filters. But since it sticks to music, the show has to reckon with the fact that music fandom isn’t what it was 25 years ago. […] A general trend toward aesthetic eclecticism was already being noted by sociologists who study cultural taste before Hornby’s book came out. Surveys of previous generations found that people tended to share both their preferences and vehement distastes with other members of their social classes and backgrounds. Their tastes tended to follow, along class lines, the old model of “high art,” “middlebrow,” and “low culture.” But by the 1990s, elite cultural consumers were sampling widely across categories and creating more bespoke taste profiles—somebody might be an equal aficionado, for instance, of Asian art films, graphic novels, and WWE wrestling. Even in the original High Fidelity, the Championship Vinyl boys are well aware it would be lame to confine themselves too much to any single genre. While specialists still argue over how to read the data, it seems likely to me that the internet’s democratization of distribution has made this omnivore eclecticism the popular default (Exhibit A: “Old Town Road”), and it encompasses eras as well as styles. Through the “universal jukebox” of streaming, it’s as easy to give yourself an instant education on classic late-1960s Brazilian Tropicália—the new High Fidelity features a conversation about an Os Mutantes box set—as it is to inhale Young Thug’s whole discography in an afternoon. […] But from a lowercase-marxist perspective, it strikes me—and I realize this is a stretch—that being a cultural magpie, more noncommittal and contingent about which ever-changing suites of tastes might suit your moods and situations, roughly parallels the kind of flexibility and adaptability that’s demanded by today’s gig-and-hustle economy. We need to be able to change jobs, switch loyalties, move cities, update skill sets and personal images, to suit the ever-disruptable, often geographically and even physically disembodied labor marketplace. Being too strongly wedded to an identity becomes a liability. […] She wants to use music not to assert superiority and distance but to forge human connections—ultimately, despite her ragged insecurities, about being a music-maker herself. This might be where the new High Fidelity picks up the thematic thread from the original, in its radically different context, suggesting that it matters less what the characters’ particular tastes are than the ways they cultivate and care for them, along with one another. It isn’t what you like. It’s how you like it.

Todd L. Burns interviews Pitchfork Reviews Editor Jeremy D. Larson. A lot of really excellent advice in here. Q: What's the best way to pitch an album review to Pitchfork? Just email me; I will get back to you soonish. I like getting pitches from people who have an extensive background in writing music criticism, whether that’s at other outlets or on your own personal blog. It’s a bit of a different skill set than reporting or culture writing, and there are a few basics I like to see with new writers. I like reading people with a voice and would much rather read some fun thing you wrote on your Tumblr than a capsule review you wrote for a magazine or newspaper. As a general note on pitching: Try to find a way to pitch with the voice that you write in. Show me who you are as a writer. I get a lot of pitches that are in this stiff, stilted, overly formal tone, which, I understand, writers want to be respectful to editors they don’t know. Don’t email me and be like “fam bam lemme do that Dungen live album cool?” but do find a middle ground. If you can come to me with an elevator pitch or some sort of key or flourish to unlock an album that is written in a way where I can see that I don’t have to spend a ton of time editing it, that is the best. Think of pitching as an audition—the director is very busy, they are watching a hundred people today alone, everybody can generally do the job just fine, things start to sound the same after a while, but they are looking for the person who can do the job like no one else and make their life the easiest. You have one minute to grab someone’s attention. […] Q: Describe your basic approach to editing a typical piece. In general, I like making sure there is a beginning, a middle, and an end—they should all be braided together. The lede should be the best thing you’ve ever written. There should be value judgments; you’d be surprised how many drafts I’ve read that do not tell me whether a record is quite simply good or bad. The best stuff should be at the top. Cut cliches, idioms, cut most adjectives and adverbs. I’m not a huge fan of reading how instruments sound, especially because it is very easy to simply listen to the album and hear it yourself, and describing a synth or guitar often leads to bad or boring writing. I cut a lot of quoted lyrics—most lyrics pulled out of context don’t really offer much insight into the songwriter, or they fuel an argument that is straining for meaning, or sometimes the context is just plain wrong. Lots of drafts hem and haw or are very equivocal, so I try to eliminate crutch phrases and draft language such as “almost feels like” or “some fans will find” or “so it makes sense that,” things like that. Also, the phrases “proves to be” or “finds himself” are vestiges of college newspaper writing and sound wretched, just use “is” or activate the sentence. What’s left I send it back to the writer, to address the edits and make sure they are happy with the final copy. […] It’s easy to glom onto an artist’s massive audience and cruise in their wake, but there is a better audience, a smarter and more attractive audience, who cares deeply about what a critic and a journalist think. Write for them.

The makers of the Cristal Baschet glass musical instrument. I must visit this place in France! The Baschet Sound Structures Association’s mission is to ensure the work of the Baschet brothers lives on.

Featuring Patricia Wolf’s new project that turns any device with a web browser and speakers into a piece of a larger sound art. Every time you invoke the Cellular Chorus page, a random audio file will be set as the browser’s default. (There are currently 64 different audio files in all.) Then let them play, all of them at once. Move the devices around the room. Don’t let any single device take prominence. Adjust the volume accordingly. Use the pulldown menu or the forward/back buttons to alternate between tracks. Note how the same file will sound different on your rattly old tablet than it does on your brand new laptop, how your humble kitchen speaker can’t hold a candle to your bleeding-edge smartphone.

I’m not very into this album but this review absolutely nails it. Grimes’ first project as a bona fide pop star is more morose than her previous work, but no less camp. Her genuineness shines through the album’s convoluted narrative, and the songs are among her finest. --- So much about the actual music of Miss Anthropocene succeeds that the choice to bury it below a warped—and yes, misanthropic—concept about “The Environment” makes it hard to connect with who Grimes is as an artist today. Standing in the way of humans reckoning with climate emergency are multiple delusions: that wealth brings freedom, that boundless acquisition and unchecked growth remain tenable, and that political and economic institutions are inherently trustworthy actors. Grimes sounds like the pop star she’s worked very hard to become, but her imagination seems diminished—or, like many of her celebrity ilk, is cordoned off in a bubble floating above the rest of humanity. In 2020, revolutionary pop stardom might try to clarify, rather than obscure, the havoc that systems wreak when it comes to, say, gender roles and social compliance, technology and surveillance capitalism, nationalism and land exploitation, or whiteness and pathological denial.

Boucher has recently seemed at a loss to regain control over her career, and naive about her role in its dissolution. But Miss Anthropocene reveals an astute understanding – evidently well honed – of humanity’s worst impulses and how to appeal to them. […] Against all odds, Miss Anthropocene is a beautiful and emotionally complex album: Boucher’s continuing personal testament to creativity as resistance against destruction, and an unlikely optimistic gesture that still believes art can be a powerful force for social good. It also finally finds Boucher reconciled to her relationship with the public. On Miss Anthropocene, she is a mirror, inviting us to examine the source of our bad faith.

The ability to harness new technology, of course, is a mighty power. That Buffy Sainte-Marie was using synthesizers and quadraphonic sound to upend conventional narratives about North American colonialism only made her more terrifying to the status quo. Perhaps that is why she has continued to make her life’s work bringing computers and digital technology to indigenous communities, as she has done with her Cradleboard Teaching Project or her 1999 manifesto “Cyberskins.” Emerging technology, she writes, can “counterbalance past misinterpretations with positive realities, and past exploitations with future opportunities. The reality of the situation is that [indigenous people] are not all dead and stuffed in some museum with the dinosaurs: we are here in this digital age.” Fifty years ago, Illuminations was a declaration of that same life-affirming truth, and so it remains. It’s a portal to another world, as full of possibilities and alternative realities as that telephone-switchboard-like matrix into which Sainte-Marie plugged cord after cord. Lay down your cool cynicism, your rationality, your linear Western thinking, Illuminations instructs, before leaning close to whisper its secret: “Magic is alive.”

A fascinating story! Rupa’s Disco Jazz is nearly 40 years old and more relevant than ever.

Chapman and Blondie also used plenty of other little tricks on “Heart Of Glass”: digital reverb, multi-tracked guitars, echo machines, a Minimoog, Chapman’s own backing vocals. It’s a beautiful piece of recording, all these sticky and hazy interlocking pieces combining together into a sighing, rippling landscape. Parts of it — Clem Burke’s lockstep drums, Nigel Harrison’s funky and vaguely Chic-esque bass-pops — sound truly disco. Other parts sound like rockers in an expensive studio attempting to figure out how the Giorgio Moroder magic was made. The whole thing glimmers and flutters and fades like a mirage on the horizon. It’s beautiful.