Another week, another tech bro triumphantly declaring music solved, with hyper-individualisation via AI just around the corner. This obnoxious class of talentless grifters is obsessed with optimising everything, art included, and misses the point entirely. We want – no, need! – art to be messy, incomplete, and flawed.
Take Institut für Feinmotorik, originally from Germany’s Black Forest. The collective have spent years paring their sound down to squeaking, sparse forms that sound like mechanical contraptions in their death throes, indebted to both post-Cagean traditions and the Profan school of minimal techno. Their main medium? The Octogrammoticum – an orchestra of eight recordless turntables augmented by the scraps…
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A classical dimension has always been part of 
Doug Dulgarian founded Julia’s War Recordings in 2021 to help his friends release cassettes of the cool music they were making. The Philadelphia musician and 
…early bird vinyl pressing (limited to 400) comes with a bonus CD, the “dronus disc,” a standalone drone piece the band want played simultaneously with the album itself.
While 
French soprano saxophonist 
Television’s Marquee Moon reimagines guitar rock in such original, pioneering ways that critics and fans still struggle to describe its essence five decades after its original release. Made after the band cut its teeth for four years amid New York’s thriving arts scene, the 1977 album blends the inimitable interplay of guitarists Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd; spontaneous and precise approaches; and winding arrangements that draw as much from classical, jazz, and psychedelia as the punk ethos to which the album is often linked.
Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole into Wonderland, Lucy enters Narnia through the back of a wardrobe, and Dorothy gets whisked away in a tornado to the Land of Oz. Literary theorist Joseph Campbell would define each of those moments as a “call to adventure,” the first step of the hero’s journey that underlies all storytelling.
As a common element of science fiction stories, transmissions from space often spell doom for recipients on Earth. The recent streaming series Pluribus is an example of this plot, with an RNA sequence communicated through a radio signal from space. Once replicated, it leads to a virus that creates a hive mind among humans and resulting chaos and breakdowns. The Sirens, the new album from Animal Collective’s 
Dis Fig, producer and vocalist Felicia Chen, embraces every facet of heaviness. Chen is driven by a desire to express deeper emotions through meticulously crafted, innovative production and expressive vocals. On acclaimed collaborations with The Bug, The Body, and Asian Dope Boys, Chen’s sound is indelible.
Punk supergroup Fake Names return with 
Many current artists who have been filed by PR people with that good old singer-songwriter label have long ago abandoned what initially signified it – a singer with a singular acoustic instrument explaining what bothers or makes her or him happy. Not only have the lyrical themes diversified (a long time at that), but the musical approach has too, from diversified arrangements to bringing in elements that are not essentially either folk, blues or country in some shape or form.
There is an authenticity to the music of South Carolina’s Winyah that can’t be faked.
In the early ‘90s, Corin Tucker and Tracy Sawyer were living in Olympia, Washington, barely out of high school and finding themselves in the very heart of the just-forming riot grrrl scene. Inspired by the feminist politics and exciting rethinking of what punk rock was capable of that defined the riot grrrl movement, the duo formed 
His profile elevated for the world to see and hear as Brian Eno’s creative partner on 
25-year-old German saxophonist