Black Sky Thinking
Essays, investigation and opinion on today’s cultural landscape
Black Sky Thinking
Junk Shop Classical On Joyce Hatto: Music Stories Told £1 LP By £1 LP
Ten years on, the story of how English pianist Joyce Hatto and her husband scammed the classical music industry takes on an extra potency, says Phil Hebblethwaite, as if it foresaw the world we live in now, with blurred lines between what’s real and fake, and experts firmly on the ropes
Black Sky Thinking
Adrian From The Moonlandingz On His Love For The Glorious North
Next week, The Quietus hosts a panel at Hull City Of Culture about the perils of trying to survive as a musician in London, and music scenes that are thriving across the UK. Here, international music man and Sheffield stalwart Adrian Flanagan of The Moonlandingz tells us a thing or two about the North-South divide, snazzy donuts and the importance of bickering.
Black Sky Thinking
Junk Shop Classical On Brahms: Music Stories Told £1 LP By £1 LP
Phil Hebblethwaite invites you into Brahms’s German Requiem, one of the worst-named pieces of classical music in the canon. It has nothing to do with nationalism, or the church, and should have been called what Brahms later suggested: A Human Requiem. It couldn’t be more relevant in 2017
Black Sky Thinking
The Poet Laureate Is Up For Renewal: Could Grime Be The Answer?
Jeffrey Boakye was going to write us a piece on why Mercury-winner J Hus ought to be the next British Poet Laureate but, halfway through, he realised that a movement, not an individual, might be deserving of the sack of sherry
Black Sky Thinking
Junk Shop Classical on George Walker: Music Stories Told £1 LP By £1 LP
In August, 95-year-old American composer George Walker had his first-ever piece performed at the Proms, as part of a concert that became the breakout story of the festival. In his own way, he’s as radical and pioneering as Nina Simone, who was famously refused entry to the same music school that Walker had already graduated from
Black Sky Thinking
Dancing In The Waves – 40 Years Inside The Radiophonic Workshop
Ahead of their performance at the British Library this week, the Radiophonic Workshop's Peter Howell reflects on four decades fathoming the complex creative relationship between the Workshop's humans and their machines
Black Sky Thinking
Why America’s Anti-Fascist Students Are Their Nation’s Grown-Ups
In a year when American tensions have repeatedly come to a head at the University Of Berkeley, current student Veronica Irwin argues that its her generation of supposed snowflakes who are behaving with far more maturity than their elders
Black Sky Thinking
Junk Shop Classical on Vivaldi: Music Stories Told £1 LP By £1 LP
Unheard for 200 years, Vivaldi became a star for the second time when an Italian group had a hit album with The Four Seasons in 1955 – the same year that rock & roll exploded. But it was a brilliant 1970 recording by Britain’s Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields that, for better or worse, made it truly omnipresent
Black Sky Thinking
DIY Is Dead – Long Live DIY: Hey Colossus On The Underground In 2017
Hey Colossus are stalwarts of the UK underground, a scene that has changed beyond recognition since they formed. Ahead of their set on our stage at Sea Change this weekend, bassist Joe Thompson looks at the rapidly changing world of DIY and asks, does the concept still exist? Photo by Julie R Kane.
Black Sky Thinking
Junk Shop Classical On Lili Boulanger: Music Stories Told £1 LP By £1 LP
The chance finding of a 1960 album on a long-gone American indie label led Phil Hebblethwaite into the enormous sound world of the supremely talented French composer Lili Boulanger, who set Psalms to music and might have written a requiem for her own death in 1918 at the tragically young age of 24
Black Sky Thinking
What The KLF Burning A Million Quid Means In 2017
Ahead of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty's plans to do what ever they're planning to do in Liverpool later this month, Phil Harrison looks back to their infamous money burning incident and argues it has a lot to say about the times we live in now
Black Sky Thinking
Mick Jagger: A Warning From History
So you think 'England Lost' featuring Skepta is an appalling single and you'd sooner push your own head into a food processor than listen to it again? Well, John Doran has got bad news for you - it doesn’t even feature in the top five worst cultural things the Rolling Stones frontman has ever done
Black Sky Thinking
Vinyl Staircase: July In Record Collecting Misery By John Doran
A halo of coffee mugs? An impassable wall made from Kraftwerk box sets? The OST so frightening it can't be listened to in the dark? It can only be the return of Vinyl Staircase - John Doran's melancholy death march through this month's black wax
Black Sky Thinking
Junk Shop Classical On Glenn Gould: Music Stories Told £1 LP By £1 LP
Perhaps no one has ever made old music sound more bracingly modern than wunderkind pianist Glenn Gould, and for his third column on a classical music record bought for a quid in a charity shop Phil Hebblethwaite finds the nutty Canadian polymath going way back in time – to some English music of the Renaissance
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Album of the Week
The Lead Review: Ed Power On PJ Harvey’s The Hope Six Demolition Project
Recorded in sessions open to the public as part of an art installation at Somerset House and released tomorrow as her ninth studio album, The Hope Six Demolition Project is an "abrasively straightforward" follow up to Let England Shake, writes Ed Power.
Electronic
Digging The Past: The Month’s Electronic Music
For the latest edition of Hyperspecific, Christian Eede casts an eye over some of the month's best reissues while reviewing new releases from Bruce (pictured), Call Super, Marie Davidson, Anthony Child and more. Photo courtesy of G.K. Stephens
