The Quietus

We live in an era where what happens next – culturally, socially, politically – seems to be in an unprecedented state of flux, and where being a music fan who prefers to collect physical objects rather than renting temporary access to music from a faceless corporation increasingly feels like you’re auditioning for a role as a contemporary Canute.

As Michael Cloud Duguay points out, church organs are the only instruments that form part of a building. Organs only play in the place where they were constructed, and people come to them if they want to listen. Duguay is a composer and producer from Ontario, and he describes Kingdom Come, Kingdom Go as “almost” a documentary about organs.

On 10 July 1981 the producer Lloyd Coxsone was minding his own business on Atlantic Road in the heart of Brixton when he spotted a young Rasta called Maliki being hassled by the police, and attempted to intervene. The legendary sound system operator was cuffed and bundled in the back of a van while a growing crowd watched in shock as it sped off to the police station.

A writer I knew once called anniversaries the ‘running dogs of the bourgeoisie’. For him they were commodification engines, devices to straitjacket the unpredictable nature of history, along with the wayward people and events that made it. I knew what he meant but I disagreed. To me, for projects and individuals no longer here, they provide a way of honouring a legacy, building a brief moment of attention and focus, the chance to light a common ground for further exploration.

“It’s a shame the way we’re killing her / We eat up artists like there’s going to be a famine at the end of those three minutes […] She’s more important than her music” Nikki Giovanni – ‘Poem For Aretha’ Pop loves a narrative too much to interrogate whether that narrative is healthy for our culture or for the artist we’re placing it upon. We valorise suffering, if it delivers a creative masterpiece.

In 1963, Nam June Paik made a doner kebab out of records. Born in Seoul in 1932, the irrepressible artist and composer had moved to Germany in 1957 to study music at the University of Munich. Soon after he fell in with Karlheinz Stockhausen and his soon-to-be-wife, the artist Mary Bauermeister in Cologne, after meeting the composer at the Darmstadt new music summer school.

Gnod are gnown to push buttons and encroach on boundaries. They regularly upset preconceptions. One minute they’re clobbering people over the head with violent aural steel and the next they’re dropping a woozy collaboration with Portuguese vocalist MC Sissi. Back in April they released volume one of a three-part series titled Chronicles of Gnowt.

Photo by Ivan-Di-Vita In 2016, the ethnomusicologist, anthropologist and folklorist Anna Lomax Wood was in Palermo for a conference. While there, she and a friend decided to take a trip to some of the Sicilian villages that her father, Alan Lomax, had visited in the 1950s to take field recordings of local folk singing.

Like a culture that becomes a civilisation, a band that evolves into an institution ceases to be judged on purely artistic terms. This is never more true than when the arc of a career grows thicker rather than taller, the music sturdier though no longer sexy, the outward churn less intent on covering new ground than building a wall round existing achievements.

To read some of the press surrounding the lead-up to Kelela’s third album, you would be forgiven for thinking the American artist had made her “rock album”, à la, say, Charli XCX. Kelela’s previous records staked her claim as a Black queer female R&B artist in alt electronic music spaces, as equally at home in the club as the bedroom.