Patrick Clarke
, January 29th, 2021 12:00
The new year brings a continuation of old miseries, but a resurgence of extraordinarily good music. Here s our guide to the best albums and tracks of a particularly strong month
I m not sure why, but in a year so far as disastrous as the last, in which musicians fortunes continue to plummet to the point that total collapse looms as a real possibility, the art they ve been releasing sounds stronger than ever.
From Sleaford Mods blistering career-best new album, to anti-colonialist duo Divide And Dissolve s unbelievably powerful cascades of crushing doom, to The Body s latest head-melting extremity, music has provided plenty of necessary catharsis.
Richard Foster
, January 21st, 2021 08:58
A collection of the works of 1980s recordings by one of Bruno Maderna s former students reveals a composer far too much fun to be confined to the academy
In
Inferno, his recent book on 1960s trash culture, Ken Hollings cites how Andy Warhol listened to music whilst painting. “Warhol painted while relentlessly blasting the same song, a 45 rpm over and over until he ‘got it’ . [.] ‘The music blasting cleared my head out,’ Warhol revealed.” Warhol’s process of “getting it”, one where songs are played to death and disappear into another form of consciousness, recasts popular music as a disposable energy source rather than something we should preserve.