Links / Music
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I don't know why this happened at the office of The New York Times, but here we are. Erykah Badu hasn't released an album in forever, and it doesn't matter. Look at her aura as she floats into the room; you wouldn't dare ask her why. The performance is just about flawless.
Currently, she's celebrating the 25th anniversary of her landmark album Mama's Gun. Perhaps someday soon, that album she made with The Alchemist will see the light of day.
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The Quietus, revamped
№ 109
Earlier this year I noticed The Quietus got revamped, and I've been reading their work much more since then. The glow-up was done by 11:11, who took on the branding, design and development work.
The revamped The Quietus, all images courtesy of 11:11. I appreciate the tactile nature of the work; the combination of the typography and illustrations makes the site feel 'reader-first', if that makes sense—as opposed to most similar sites, where the writing is buried beneath a pile of ads, waiting to be excavated.
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I very much enjoyed this two-hour mix by Caribou, Floating Points and their intern, Fred Again.., who had me at the drumless version of Earl Sweatshirt's “Chum”.
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Sunflower Sound System by Sam Shepherd (Floating Points). Photo by Angelina Nikolayeva Sam Shepherd (known as Floating Points) has built a massive sound system, consisting of eight giant cabinets and a handful of tweeters hung from the ceiling. This video from Resident Advisor shows the build, and Jeremy D. Larson wrote about it on Pitchfork. He visited Dekmantel (which quite literally happens in my backyard), where the sound system was installed at The Greenhouse Stage. I wish I had been there to experience it!
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The album I didn't know I needed: Radiohead just released live recordings from their Hail To The Thief era, a somehow, somewhat impopular album of theirs that I love.
Thom Yorke said about it:
In the process of thinking how to build arrangements for the Shakespeare Hamlet/Hail to the Thief theatre production I asked to hear some archive live recordings of the songs. I was shocked by the kind of energy behind the way we played and it really helped me find a way forward. For us, back in the day, the finishing of this record was particularly messy and fraught, we were very proud of it but there was a taste left in our mouths, it was a dark time in so many ways. Anyway we decided to get these live recordings mixed (it would have been insane to keep them for ourselves) by Ben Baptie, who did an amazing job. It has all been a very cathartic process, we very much hope you enjoy them.
This'll go into my heavy rotation immediately. The energy of this performance of There, There in Buenos Aires alone is tremendous.
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Tyler, The Creator sat down with a group of creatives to have a candid conversation about creativity, taking chances, and believing in the things you make. I must've watched this two weeks ago and—despite the sponsored element to this—found it very inspiring (as I do all of his output in recent years; Tyler is one of the artists I admire the most).
I loved how he mentioned the shift he noticed in how people perceived him, once he put “all songs written, produced and arranged by Tyler Okonma” on his album covers. It feels like his creative output has been unmatched since then.
How he created, marketed and released his latest album Don't Tap The Glass—while on a worldwide tour of over 100 shows—is a testament to that.
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Why We Quit Spotify
№ 71Hearing Things, an independent music publication, on why they've decided to stop hosting their playlists on Spotify. The decision comes after Spotify CEO Daniel Ek's investment in defense startup Helsing and Spotify's latest policy change, denying royalties to songs with under 1,000 streams.
I've long been on the fence about Spotify. The platform has become ever more convoluted, its business decisions increasingly indefensible. From a design and user friendliness point of view, there's an exorbitant amount of friction, too.
It seems to me there's a great big gap in the market that a forward-thinking, music-loving organisation could step into. Think... the 2025 version of Rdio?
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A special episode where Charlie Jermyn recites an essay he wrote for the first issue of TRANSCRIPT Magazine.
The reading is a written documentation of a ten hour experiment conducted in August 2021: a walk from Leiden to Amsterdam in search of creative enlightenment. Each hour is interspersed with music that reflects the landscape and circumstance he found himself in.
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I've been flip-flopping between Spotify and Apple Music myself, and can relate to this piece by Kyle Chayka. Changes to their apps in recent years have not favoured (album) listeners like myself. It's fascinating and saddening to see one platform steer the way we consume music into a certain direction.
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I've been replaying James Blake's latest album “Playing Robots Into Heaven” somewhat obsessively, and was reminded of this conversation he had with Brian Eno, for who he plays the music and who then provides him with his honest impression.
