Feeling Is Structure explores the relationship between physical form and human emotion.
Across 10 spatial audio-visual works, Cooper examines how structure in sound, architecture, biology and art, shapes the way we feel.
The album is built on the idea that our inner emotional lives are profoundly connected to our lived environment. Developed from a commission to create a live show for London’s Royal Albert Hall, expanding on this idea, Max explains:
“I’m fascinated by architects who can imbue brutalist buildings with humanity, or artists who can paint a block of colour representing their soul.” says Cooper. “We have this remarkable capacity to spill ourselves into the world through form. When I began working on a show…
Category: indie
They just might not call it by its original name, but trip hop is back. And if you need any further proof that it is coming back in a big way, than you don’t have to go any further than Black Salt, the new (second) album by Kiiōtō. Those who might have forgotten about the prime time of trip hop back in the mid and late ’90s, Lamb were one of the big names in this genre, and Lou Rhodes was lead vocalist and co-founder of that band, and he even got a Mercury Music Prize nomination. Now, he is joined by award-winning songwriter/pianist Rohan Heath to form Kiiōtō, both being in a sort of hiatus from making music.
Joined by several guests, notably guitarist Hawi Gondwe (Amy Winehouse), double-bassist Andy Hamill (4 Hero, Carleen Anderson),…
One thing you can almost instantly spot with singer songwriters is if they have classical music background. The key thing there is how they use that background in a pop/rock musical setting – are they able to make a balance between the two, or are they overstating one or the other?
Judging on her second album, We Swallowed the Sky, L.A.’s Arielle Kasnetz, aka Beatrix, has an almost perfect balance there, using her classical training to bring in different song structures into her music, as well as some intricate arrangements without trying to be either a show-off or overstating any elements there.
It seems that both her background and her penchant for Americana-style pop/rock come to her naturally, making her music here…
…Based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, IRKED’s debut, The Grievance, blazes with their own particular (fire)brand of bruising garage punk with vocals howled by a twirling dervish of pure fury.
Whether it’s in the short, sharp jolt of sub-one-minute rager ‘Running’, or ‘Who Asked’s grim cycle of working and drinking, underlined by the chorus “Why does everybody want to fuck with me?”, the band are never far from spitting out a mouth full of bile.
At times it’s delivered in the form of snark, like in the cutting refrain on ‘Death Cult’ around personal responsibility towards global issues: “Keep up, you’re not doing enough.” Or, similarly, in the lines “Keep off the grass, stay out the sea, don’t piss in the pool, keep ‘em on a lead”…
Pigeon have recorded their debut album Outtanational in Margate of all places – the once-dying seaside town that has become, in recent years, a retreat for artists like Tracey Emin and The Libertines. The choice of location means something here. Like Margate, Outtanational announces itself as something genuinely hard to pin down.
Across 10 tracks, there are elements of afro-disco, krautrock, punk-funk and post-punk. Opener “NRG” sets the tone immediately as lead vocalist and percussionist Falle Nioke sings of smoke magic and energy vampires over a groove that is fresh, fluid, and plain unpredictable. It’s an intriguing sonic stew that certainly grabs the attention.
Nioke is the heart of the record. Hailing from Guinea-Conakry, he is a member…
Every other year, club culture is allotted one perfect track that punctures the underground-commercial barrier; one god-tier banger uniting both the 6 a.m.-arriving Nowadays member and the casual Friday-night goer-outer. In 2024, it was Nick León and Erika de Casier’s “Bikini.” Before that, the now platinum-certified (in four countries) “B.O.T.A.” This year, Jump Source, the duo composed of two of Montreal’s finest producers, Francis Latreille (aka Priori) and Patrick Holland (aka Project Pablo), are vying for the crown with their stellar debut album, Fold.
Entering 2026, Jump Source were in prime position to connect the dots between North America’s niche club music scenes and the mainstream. Over the past decade, the two…
TripleAkuma is the third in a series of essential live documents from Merzbow.
The stage and the studio are not the same place, and Merzbow has an acute understanding of this juxtaposition. Whilst the sheer density of the music might be maintained across both spheres, the live experience of Merzbow is truly something that exists as profoundly physical and moreover, overtly performative.
Merzbow’s live methodologies draw not just from a saturation of frequency at all levels, but a recognition of how frequency can be used to affect the body. Working at the extremes of both low and high sonic energies, he creates a situation within which the fullness of the body can be tested; the aural body, that of our ears…
Gabriella Smart introduces listeners to the term Parasymbiosis, asking if two separate organisms can share a living space. The parable can be applied to many situations, but Smart concentrates on the earth and the universe as a whole
…Parasymbiosis was recorded live at 2024’s Music Meeting Festival in The Netherlands. Smart plays the Electric Cristal (which creates amplified sounds through manipulation of glass rods), and is joined by Kasper Toeplitz on bass and electronics, and Didier Casamitjana on percussion and electronics. Toeplitz and Casamitjana’s contributions do not become obvious until later in the album (gritty and menacing, no less), though they may have been present throughout.
Across eight numbered and self-titled tracks…
Anastasia Kristensen has spent the better part of the last decade sidestepping expectation. Whether releasing via Houndstooth, Turbo or Warp’s Arcola imprint, the Copenhagen-based producer has consistently pushed against the functional rigidity of club music, favouring something more playful, unstable and deeply personal. Even in large-scale festival settings, her DJ sets rarely settle into predictable patterns, instead veering between moods and textures with a kind of gleeful unpredictability. That same instinct animates Bestiarium Sombre, a debut album that feels less like a conventional techno record and more like an invitation into an unruly parallel ecosystem.
Kristensen once described her ideal records as having “a face” – tracks with character,…
“Wired for anger, wired for deceit.” Screams of these lines close the title track of Wired, Basement’s fifth studio album. The song is a statement of intent: Basement are as emotionally-driven as they’ve ever been, and they return unshakeable and demanding to be heard.
Wired marks their emergence after an eight-year hiatus from new music. Three years after their support for 2018’s Beside Myself, Basement – vocalist Andrew Fisher, guitarists Alex Henery and Ronan Crix, bassist Duncan Stewart and drummer James Fisher — returned with an appearance at Outbreak Festival in 2022, and various tours and another Outbreak slot to follow. ‘WIRED’, in turn, hears the band’s post-hardcore, emo and grunge elements bottled into one…
Gun Outfit is a long running lifestyle band out of Los Angeles, California. For two decades the group has been making unclassifiable underground rock music that strives to remain humble and true to life. This has been documented on several releases through fine imprints like Post Present Medium, Paradise of Bachelors and Joyful Noise. Beginning as a crude duo, they have solidified into a crack five piece; a post punk band playing experimental folk rock with a local flavour. The sound has grown mellower, more expansive and more intimate in response to the schizophrenic environment in which we live.
Process and Reality is their most ambitious record yet. Self-recorded over the course of a month on a ranch in Pine Flat…
Alive & Alright a double live album recorded in front of a small gathering of about 50 fans on February 4th, 2000, performing all of the Between The Bridges album plus one b-side,” also filmed for video in an attempt to find a workaround to the emerging problem of music videos costing more than the budget for entire albums, thinking Canada’s music video channel might possibly play various live recordings in lieu of music videos, which they did not.
When attempting to provide an overview of a big story – one that encompasses both the myriad achievements of its subjects over a span of several decades and the impacts of those achievements – you can take two routes. There’s the “just the facts” approach, where you list off…
The Loft’s return to the recording studio to make their long-awaited full-length debut album – 2025’s Everything Changes, Everything Stays the Same – was such a delightful treat that it feels greedy to expect anything more from the group. It would have been fine if they had packed up their gear, shaken hands warmly, and moved on to other projects secure in the knowledge that not only had they not besmirched their legend, they had added to it. Things didn’t quite work out that way and the band decided they had so much fun making Everything Changes that it seemed like a good idea to tempt fate and give it a second go. The more cynical among their fans and followers might have felt that it was a risky move, that hoping for lightning to strike again was folly.
Let X=X triple-LP / double-CD set was recorded live during a 2023 tour by Anderson and the jazz band Sexmob-Steven Bernstein on brass, Kenny Wollesen on drums and percussion, Douglas Wieselman on winds and guitar, Briggan Krauss on saxophone and guitar, and Tony Scherr on bass. Its cover and interior packaging feature paintings by Anderson. The album features 23 songs, including many favorites from throughout Anderson’s career, performed in new arrangements-plus one by Lou Reed and Metallica, “Junior Dad.”
The New York Times said Anderson and Sexmob’s concert at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) “wasn’t a historical recreation of past recordings; Sexmob’s sound is a beefier one than on Anderson’s albums.
After the Numero Group released a comprehensive look at the American Analog Set’s 1990’s recordings on the New Drifters box set, it only makes sense that they would do the same for the combo’s 2000’s output. Destroy Destroy Destroy is another beautifully packaged retrospective that gathers up the three albums they released during the decade — 2001’s Know By Heart, 2003’s Promise of Love, and 2005’s Set Free — plus two discs of stray singles, EPs, compilation appearances, and rare tracks.
The set captures the evolution of the group from a more abstract musical group dedicated to repetition, space, and subtlety to one that utilized that same basic template while applying it to songs that were more narrative and concise.
Whitehorse have returned to their folk-rock roots on their latest full-length record, All I Want Is All of It. The Canadian husband-and-wife team of Luke Doucet and Melissa McClellan recorded the album in a 19th-century farmhouse to capture the mood of past spirits in the ancient place.
Of course, only a New World denizen would consider a place built 200 years ago old. Its semi-rural setting on the other side of the tracks offers a haunting aural landscape. The musicians said the location functioned as the creative inspiration behind the new disc.
Whitehorse‘s 11 songs are purposely experimental and vary in style and tone. They range from the primitive rawness of a demo (“Lighthouse”) recorded on McClellan’s iPhone…
Midge Ure released A Man of Two Worlds, a new double album. His first album of new material in 12 years sees the former Ultravox frontman divide the offering into two parts. The first half, World One: Music, consists of eight instrumental pieces, while the second half, World Two: Songs, features eight ‘proper’ songs (with vocals).
This concept is said to be partly inspired by the time Midge spent during lockdown listening to instrumental music, and some of the work he heard whilst presenting THE SPACE on Scala Radio. He began writing what became a selection of instrumental pieces — “music shaped by reflection, uncertainty, and a strange kind of quiet”.
The eight vocal songs which form the second part of the album, are described as…

Social Distortion has returned with their first album in 15 years. born to kill is led by a pair of singles and follows 2011’s Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes, as the Orange County punk rock legends mark a significant comeback on their eighth studio album.