When Nick Watkins was a child, he pasted articles about space exploration into scrapbooks and drew annotated diagrams of rockets. He knew this because, years later, he still had the scrapbooks, and took them to be evidence that he had been a happy child, although he didn’t remember making them. When…

The interplay between repetition and variation is central to how we perceive structure, rhythm, and depth across mediums. By: Samuel Jay Keyser BeeLine Reader uses subtle color gradients to help you read more efficiently. Made at the high point of Kline, de Kooning, and Pollock, Andy Warhol’s…

“For Richard Kirk,” says Stephen Mallinder, as his first words of the evening on stage. A mighty roar erupts inside the former Victorian steel forge in tribute to the late founding member who passed away in 2021. It dissipates into the strange, eerie opening of 1980’s ‘The Voice of America/The…

In 1949, the German historian and political philosopher Hannah Arendt visited Europe for the first time since fleeing to America during the war. A year later, she wrote an analysis of what she called “the aftermath of Nazi rule.” She found the Old World lacking in civic maturity and commitment…

For this feature, we asked tQ’s esteemed contributors to select their favourite books about music. We’ve decided to omit straight-up memoirs (no Art Sex Music, unfortunately!) in favour of biographies, histories, compendiums and outsider explorations. In response, we received a hefty list of…

‘You guys would freak out if you drove down Grand Avenue now,” says Tortoise multi-instrumentalist Dan Bitney. These days, this major Chicago thoroughfare is looking pretty bougie. “Expensive flower stores, bakeries, cafes. Back when we were there, it was empty streets, motorcycle gangs.” He shakes…

Doors Closing With ridership lagging and a fiscal reckoning looming, the L is in trouble. Here’s why our train is worth saving. April 21, 2025, 6:00 am Graham Garfield gazes pridefully from the northernmost perch of the Belmont L station in Lake View. Officially, Garfield is the general manager of…

In October 2007, after some gentle lobbying of Hyperdub boss Steve Goodman (Kode9), I had the incredible privilege of interviewing Burial. Back then, after his mesmerising first two EPs and self-titled debut album, his identity was known by just a handful of people. “Only five people know I make…

Whenever the story of shoegazing is told today – when Slowdive reform to headline festivals or Lush announce comeback dates – it typically reads like a story of betrayal. A wave of young bands in thrall to the sound of My Bloody Valentine come barrelling out of Southern England to wild media…

Music A new biography on the New Wave crew underlines their unsung importance—everyone from the Strokes to the Killers to Nirvana took lessons out of Ric Ocasek’s playbook. So why are the Cars rarely mentioned among the great American rock bands? MusicA new biography on the New Wave crew underlines…

On November 18, 1993, Nirvana performed a long-planned acoustic set in New York for the MTV Unplugged series. The show had been running since 1989 and had become something of an institution. The premise was pretty simple – big name pop and rock artists performed a set of their hits stripped down to…

Photo by Eugene Adebari There are many different strands to Soft Cell’s debut album Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. The record filtered the faded seaside sleaze of Dave Ball and Marc Almond’s upbringings, in Blackpool and Southport respectively, through the bold electronic experimentation that brought them…

What does Carrier sound like? The answer to that question has so far proven to be rather elusive. Although music journalists and headsy listeners have enthusiastically embraced the project over the past two years, they routinely struggle to succinctly describe the music, probably because there’s…

The Rocky Horror Picture Show was released in cinemas in late 1975 with little fanfare, but the provocative musical, with its campy parody of sci-fi and horror B-movies, fabulous costumes and rollicking songs, dug its glittering heels in and refused to let go for the next 50 years. The film was an…

The Caretaker at the Barbican. Photo by Matt Colquhoun I’m fairly certain that, in talking about the prospect of Repeater Books’ since-published k-punk anthology, shortly after the death of Mark Fisher in 2017, it was Fisher’s friend and colleague Kodwo Eshun who suggested that a great name for the…

“Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent” the poet Charles Baudelaire wrote in The Painter Of Modern Life, at once captivated and repulsed by the metamorphosis of Paris around him. Many artists since have tried to convey the spirit or pathology of modernity in specifically modern…

A new photography book, Drumz Of The South: The Dubstep Years 2004-2007 captures the early years of dubstep, depicting an important cultural moment in UK musical history. Charlie Bird talks to photographer Georgina Cook about the invention and excitement of the time, the influence of South London,…

10 Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit one of the manifestos of indie rock, a landmark 1992 album whose emotional peaks and diamond-sharp hooks are cloaked in fuzz, feedback, and…

The crowd at DMZ, one of the dubstep scene’s two most iconic club nights, along with FWD>> This article originally appeared on VICE UK. My relationship with dubstep dates back about a decade. I left school in Glasgow in 2005 and thought I’d go to university, but was too busy drinking cider in the…

Dominating the music news in 1984 was the early passing of one Black American master and the fullest arrival of another. On 1 April that year in Central Los Angeles, Marvin Gaye Jr was fatally shot following an altercation with his father, the highly complicated Christian pastor Marvin Gay Sr. The…

There’s no denying that Songs Of A Lost World was a monumental latter-day triumph. But let’s be honest for a minute: how many times have you re-listened to it since its release in November 2024? Be honest now and take into account how morbid it was, even by the standards of The Cure. For 50 minutes,…

The Museum of African-American History and Culture is in part a catalog of cruelty. Amid all the stories of perseverance, tragedy, and unlikely triumph are the artifacts of inhumanity and barbarism: the child-size slave shackles, the bright red robes of the wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, the…

2983 words | Dan Hollick From electron guns to tiny electric crystals - digital displays have always been the unsung hero of computing. ╌╌╌╌ I understand the irony of starting this book about software, talking about hardware. But there isn't a more under appreciated technology in modern computing…

Afterword For the Back Street Kids The voice of Ozzy Osbourne was unlike anything before it. It changed rock’n’roll, opened up the metal genre, and became the innate sound of alienation, darkness, and high gothic drama. John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats reflects on the loss of the singular…

THE HARDCORE CONTINUUM, or, (a)Theory and Its Discontents The text of a talk by Simon Reynolds delivered at FACT, Liverpool, Wednesday 11th February 2009. PLUS notes for points to be brought up during the dialogue segment with Mark Fisher but weren't owing to time running out PLUS afterthoughts on…

The last time I visited my father, I walked into his $11,000-a-month room in a posh assisted living residence and found him curled up on the floor. My sister Amy and I knelt down, touched him, and asked if he was okay. “I don’t know,” mumbled Dad, 96, a retired physician and lifelong outdoorsman. “I…

May 02, 2025 · 22 min read Album art didn’t always exist. In the early 1900s, recorded music was still a novelty, overshadowed by sales of sheet music. Early vinyl records were vastly different from what we think of today: discs were sold individually and could only hold up to four minutes of music…

Martin Gray revisits the debut long player from Dave Callahan of Wolfhounds’ beguiling, often astonishing and criminally overlooked and underrated early-to-mid 1990s outfit Moonshake: Eva Luna, released on Too Pure records in October 1992 to widespread critical acclaim. An End Followed By A…

Never trust an artist. Returning to his apartment, the young Soviet cinematographer Aleksandr Lemberg discovered his friend and colleague David Abelevich Kaufman had blackened the walls and ceiling in soot, upon which, he had drawn a multitude of clocks in chalk, all showing different times with…

What will life be like in 1000 years? Will humans still exist? Will there be a recognisable London? Such are the idle thoughts that flow to mind as I stand on Trinity Buoy Wharf, downriver from the City, upriver from the Thames Barrier. It’s hard to visualise how much can and will change in such a…

Apartment House plays Julius Eastman’s Femenine at this year’s Intonal Festival, on April 28 The legacy of Julius Eastman to the wider world is as yet untold. At the point of his untimely death in 1990, he left almost no tangible legacy at all. In his later years he was evicted from his home and…

The story of Moving Shadow is a triumph, but also a tragedy. It captures the best and worst aspects of the rave, hardcore and jungle explosion. On one hand, the white heat and unbelievable pace of innovation, the opportunities for outsiders to be recognised as creating true art, the camaraderie and…

It’s hard to describe what it sounded like back then, you know. They were different times. It’s not that there’s no innovation now – of course there is, though it mostly comes from elsewhere – but for a short time in the late 1980s it seemed that every year a handful of rock records could shake you…

Alex Lifeson (left) and Geddy Lee (with Neil Peart on drums) on stage in 1976 on the tour that followed the release of 2112. Antonia Hille/Getty Images "It could have spelled the end for us." Alex Lifeson is on the phone, calling from his Toronto home, thinking back to the time between Rush's third…

Abstract From the time of vinyl records to modern portable music capabilities on phones, music producers have been fighting for the best (read: the loudest) music releases. Sound engineers have been the primary weapons in this war. Compressing the dynamic range, or the gap between the loudest and…

from our March 2012 issue Despite the accusations of incoherence sometimes made against them by critics who ought to know better, the films of David Lynch seem to share a remarkably consistent cosmogony that can be sketched as follows: the soul originates in light and unity and has its home there.…

In June of 2024, I broke up with Spotify after a 10+ year relationship. The signs kept piling up until they simply could no longer be ignored. In the half-year since, I haven’t really looked back. I even forgot to transfer or back up my saved songs. Oh well. Perhaps a clean break was for the best:…

Photo by Brian Evans “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” —Henry David Thoreau Lately, the news has been a slow wrecking, a bruise spreading beneath the skin of the day. But nothing has broken me like the thought of America’s parks, forests, and wildlife—waiting, unknowing, on the edge of…

Explore On a blazing morning in October, I paddled my surfboard into a caramel-colored sea off a beach in Brazil, hoping to catch a wave with its own individual rights. The wave rose up against the wi