Photo: Bobby Doherty In 2018, a movie-publicity company called Bunker 15 took on a new project: Ophelia , a feminist retelling of Hamlet starring Daisy Ridley . Critics who had seen early screenings h

Part One You may or may not be tired of old people telling you how they found out about new music before the existence of the internet. I can’t imagine that it’s a terribly interesting topic for anyon

A WHISTLE of telephonic feedback, then a woman’s voice: “Are we on the air?” A DJ: “Yes, you are.” “Hello, Mom! Uh, I’d like to hear a new beat on the request line.” “OK, you got it, comin’ up. . . .”

Published 2023-06-21 05:00 5:00 June 21, 2023 am Share Political efforts to ban gender-affirming care for transgender people have escalated in the United States. Hundreds of bills have been introduced

Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’re already signed up, great! If you’d like to sign up and receive issues over email, you can do so here . Today I’m writing about

When The Replacements released Don't Tell a Soul in 1989, many of their fans felt like the record was too polished and too pop. Producer Matt Wallace [ Tape Op #128 ] took a good portion of the blame

Inside the close-knit community of stripped-back minimal, Dana Ruh is an admired and much-loved artist. She goes about her work—producing, DJing, and running a label—quietly, delivering consistent qua

I n 1989, George Evelyn was driving in a stream of shimmering headlights, in convoy, to a rave in a slaughterhouse in Blackburn with about 10,000 others. He recalls thinking: “This must have been what

Visionary hip-hop producer J Dilla never found mainstream success during his brief lifetime. But in the seven years since his death, Dilla — who would have turned 39 today — has come to represent a ma

W hen Glen “Spot” Lockett pointed his camera at something, he intended to capture what was there, not what he wanted you to see. “I paid attention to my subjects and what they were doing,” he told Vic

Throughout the 1990s, corporate CD clubs like Columbia House and the BMG Music Service dumped millions upon millions of compact discs on a consumer public ready to replace their vinyl collections en m

Pre-internet, pre-social media, it was all people had to learn about various parties, besides word of mouth. The rave scene was a movement that existed outside of most people’s consciousness at that t

John Balance and Peter Christopherson in the earlier days of Coil. Source: The Vinyl Factory Familiar to most as a 1980s New Wave/synthpop staple, Soft Cell’s 1981 hit “Tainted Love” received a drasti

Credits Joe Zadeh is a writer based in Newcastle. On a damp and cloudy afternoon on February 15, 1894, a man walked through Greenwich Park in East London. His name was Martial Bourdin — French, 26 yea

In the fall of 1975, an envelope from England arrived at the Trouser Press (I was going to say office, but we didn’t have one yet) mail box at the Grand Central Station Post Office. Inside, typed on n

‘They’re Really Close To My Body’: A Hagiography of Nine Inch Nails and their resident mystic Robin Finck ‘We possess nothing in this world other than the power to say “I”. This is what we must yield

Darran Anderson celebrates The Orb's "chance encounter between Steve Reich and Ming the Merciless in the Black Ark" – one of the most unlikely number one albums of the early 90s In the winter of 1954,

When Jeff Bridges rocked the cover of Rolling Stone on August 19, 1982, his most well-known movies were probably The Last Picture Show (1971) and, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974), both of which got h

It's Sound, It's Art, and Some Call It Music Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. See the article in its original cont

Josh Davis, aka DJ Shadow By 1991, sampling had entered a golden era with De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, NWA’s Straight Outta Compton and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique. I was a senior in hig

William Basinski ’s “Melancholia II” sounds like what might happen if despair itself walked into a studio and someone pressed the record button. Little pops poke through its smeared dreariness, like a

Lisa Whittington-Hill | Longreads | June 2022 | 16 minutes (4,445 words) Jennifer Finch is smiling, but she’s clearly frustrated. “Everywhere I go, everywhere I turn, I see this fucking face,” says th

Photographs by Grant Harder and Tony Rath Not long ago, while browsing a craft fair in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, I spotted a guitar like no other I’d ever seen. It hung half-hidden behind a display of c

by Michael Terren In March 2021, the music creation technology companies Native Instruments (NI) and iZotope announced a coalition under the name Music Creation Group. At first glance, this might seem

The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer was released in 1983 and became extremely popular, defining the sound of 1980s pop music.Because microprocessors weren't fast enough in the early 1980s, the DX7used

Web3, short for web 3.0, is a vision of the future of the Internet in which people operate on decentralized, quasi-anonymous platforms, rather than depend on tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twit

O n the evening of 9 August 1956, a couple of hundred people squeezed into a student union lounge for a concert recital at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, about 130 miles outside Chicago.

Rare is the person who could expertly comment – in a single interview! – on the rise of NFTs and their origins in the virtual worlds of gaming, the logic of the emerging regime of techno-feudalism, an

F or electronic music fans, Berlin’s Tresor has long been considered the Valhalla of Germany’s illustrious club circuit. In March 1991, months after the official dismantling of the Berlin Wall, Tresor

As Brian Eno’s seminal ambient classic Music For Airports turns 40 this year, Lawrence English examines the genre’s impact, its initial manifesto and where it can go as it struggles past its mid-life

Credit... Illustration by Shannon Lin/The New York Times The office: AN ANALYSIS Personality Tests Are the Astrology of the Office Psychometric tests like Color Code, Myers-Briggs and DiSC have become