An extract from Inigo Wilkins’s long awaited Irreversible Noise unwraps the black box of sonic perception to reveal the phenoumenodelic delights within.

In the year 2214, the Center for Humanistic Study has discovered an unpublished manuscript by Joanna Demers, a musicologist who lived some two centuries before. Her writing interrogates the music of artists ranging from David Bowie and Scott Walker to Kanye West and The KLF. Questioning how people of the early twenty-first century could have believed that music was alive, and that music was simultaneously on the brink of extinction, light is shed on why the United States subsequently chose to eliminate the humanities from universities, and to embrace fascism…

In 2017 I wrote a piece called Constructed Objects. The piece was the first in an ongoing project of imagining composing or making music as a sort of non-linear sculptural/conceptual project. I wanted to envision sounds as if they were material concepts (even found objects) in space that interrelate, resonate, and co-mingle in rooms. I have both ideas of assemblage or montage here as well as modular constructions. I then revisited this idea in 2020 with Correspondences. In that project, I wrote a very simple text score based on the concepts I was thinking about in photographic assemblage sculptures I was creating. Each ...

Jazz Against Apartheid (Talk + DJ Mix) Atiyyah Khan is a journalist, researcher, selector, crate-digger, event organiser and archivist from Johannesburg, based in Cape Town. She currently freelances as an arts journalist, documenting visual arts, theatre, music, film and other forms of culture in South Africa. Atiyyah is also the co-founder of music collective Future Nostalgia, which hosts listening session around Cape Town celebrating the culture of records. As DJ El Corazon, her sets explore music beyond boundaries forming connections that link the global south to the rest of the world in order to evoke curiosity in the possibility of sound. ...

Brit Schulte tends to the (“anti-conclusion”) conclusion of Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation; Shani Strand follows the sonic landscapes of drill and dancehall attuned to the social potentials of “badness”; and Kate Wagner walks—metaphorically and literally—through the possibilities sparked by Socialist Reconstruction.

Writing About The Names A statement The Names is a new Berlin/Amsterdam collective of creative musicians playing open, yet melodic, pieces in a Cage/Oliveros informed spectrum of improvised strategies and open-ended compositions. Giving homage to the Chicago tradition of AACM music as well as praise to progressive thinking in society, highlighting people such as Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander, Audre Lorde and composers such as Anthony Braxton, Eva-Maria Houben, and George Lewis, whose names, along with the names of band members and friends, have been used as the melodic or structural impetus of each composition. Shaped by the ideas of critical music, listening and ...

This episode features some of the most forward-thinking contemporary musicians and visual artists currently based in the Bay Area. There is an unspoken blueprint in the Bay Area arts and music communities allowing artists an organic crossover between practices and languages. A hybridizing of mediums that arises from spaces of deep experimentation. From the Bay Area’s openness and curiosity to the limitations of physical spaces to work and gather in – leading to the creation of multipurpose spaces that host artists across visual art, performance, and music, thus resulting in crossovers. Each in their unique way, the artists featured in this episode ...

This episode reflects on the current uncertainties experienced in Beirut and how they have influenced creative processes. The city of Beirut is a space that is constantly transforming. From the violent conflicts of the recent past to the social uncertainty of the present, Beirut has become synonymous with precariousness.

Assembled by Steve McLaughlin.

This episode examines how practices among friends help build networks to strengthen the explorations and works of artists while collectively building survival skills. The backdrop for this episode is the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires, a very rich and complex city where mainstream spaces, venues, and cultural centers are playing a less than helpful role in the artistic scenes. It’s all about profit and not about culture, as producer Ailín Grad aka Aylu explains. Notes from the Producer Nevertheless, there are public cultural centers and public spaces in Buenos Aires that welcome and finance artistic practices. Yet self-created rules are always necessary, ...

The Chill of Lonesome is the title of a bluegrass album by Ernie Thacker. Ernie, his family and friends are amazing bluegrass musicians. They live in Clinchco, Virginia. Back in 2006, I suggested to Mélanie Scarciglia, my partner, Chris Hoover, our Good Samaritan (and producer) and Garret Linn, movie director (two of my good friends from New York), to go visit Ernie Thacker and his band, Route 23, and make a film about bluegrass music. Our destination was the small town of Clinchco, Virginia. We drove the 14 hours from NYC to Clinchco without knowing what we would find there. I ...