Something was afoot in the corridors of Yorkshire TV during the early 70s, fuelled by crates of Double Diamond beer. The chipboard sets of Rising Damp, a luridly claustrophobic set piece transmitted into the country’s living rooms, shared production space (if not a specific studio) at Kirkstall Road Studios, Leeds with another domesticated strain of British culture: the pub. 

Long before Luke Littler brought darts to the TikTok generation and Sky homogenised the arrows’ presentation, The Indoor League brought pub-based sports to British living rooms. In 1972 audiences had been able to watch the News Of The World Individual Darts Championship from Alexandra Palace on ITV’s World Of Sport – this was something new for the small screen. For six series after its first broadcast in 1973, The Indoor League poured the pastimes of the tap room into the living room – not just darts, but also the more atavistic arm wrestling, shove ha’penny, cheese skittles, table football, and bar billiards, or ‘the devil amongst the tailors’ (named after a riot in a theatre).

The Indoor League was presented by cricketer Fred Trueman, always in regulation Stonehenge haircut, Bri-Nylon shirt, tie and cardigan combination, and never without a panelled tankard of mild or a pipe. In 1973, he was a TV household name. ‘Fiery Fred’, the Yorkshire and England fast bowler, famous for his splenetic temperament, had appeared as a thinly veiled version of himself in an episode of Dads Army called ‘The Test’ in 1970, and would go on to host A Question Of Sport. He punctuated the programme with regular preludes, sum-ups, and spitfire gnomic expressions. Delivered in a thick Yorkshire accent they were, to the uninitiated, a new and belly-laugh inducing language (according to my father, who watched it as a schoolboy in rural south Gloucestershire). 

Trueman’s presentation, beginning with “Now then!” or “ey up” and always terminating with “Ah'll sithee” tethered the activities of primary colour-clad participants. They battled it out in one room across multiple tables on a range of sports that belonged indoors – specifically, in the boozer. Who wants the fresh air of the race track, or the mud of the football pitch, when you can ferment in the effulgent cig smoke of the Leeds Irish Centre? Now canonised with a blue plaque as “the crucible of darts”, this community venue, established just a few years previously, became a virtual pub for the series. This stand-in for the local was given even more atmosphere by the garish cardboard set that lined the room. Welcomed across the threshold, the viewer was to vicariously “pot, lob, skittle, twiddle, nudge, cue, whack, and strain with the champions”.

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In this month’s antidote to the algorithm, Kamyar Salavati explores the evolution of Iran’s experimental electronic music scene

I regret not being there, but fellow music critics still remember the shock of buying a ticket for a small concert in central Tehran, only to discover that the artist doing visuals for the electronic musician Sote was none other than Radiohead collaborator Tarik Barr. His Wikipedia photo is from that trip, framed by a detail of the iconic Azadi Tower in the background. This surprising presence was a sign of how the Iranian electronic music scene had gained some remarkable international visibility despite the country’s isolation – a musical equivalent to the international prestige and critical success of Iranian cinema.

In the 70s and 80s, Iranian electronic pioneers such as Dariush Dolatshahi and Alireza Mashayekhi were associated with an artistic avant-garde. Under the influence of composers like Stockhausen (who performed in Iran during the 1972 Shiraz Arts Festival) and Pierre Schaeffer, Iranian musicians began to develop their own vision. Many of these musicians, then and now, came from academic backgrounds, often trained in Western or Iranian classical music. Even when artists such as Sote entered the scene, the music still retained its reputation as that weird thing listened to by the likes of the galeri-gard (gallery wanderer) and antelekt (intellectual).

One factor that contributed to this status may have been an unexpected one: restrictions on public dancing and on certain Western popular genres meant that a less dance-oriented and more artistic, sonically focused, and abstract version of electronic music came to represent and embody desires that could not otherwise be expressed. The music had to be justified as high art, perhaps to skirt around the suspicious official filters. Partly due to this artistic ethos, a defining feature of the electronic scene in Iran has been its ability to communicate across artistic disciplines.

While the laptop continues to reign supreme, Modular synthesisers entered the art scene gradually, but by the mid-2010s, they appeared in Tehran festivals like SET and TIEMF. Modular music, once rare, appeared in many live performances, patch cables generated abrasive drones, and sub-bass rattled the walls.

Multiple festivals, mostly in the capital, showcased a wide range of young talent and invited international artists. I recall how, up until a few years ago and before things tightened under Trump, it was a common scene to see international electronic musicians perform in independent art venues in central Tehran. At least six major festivals emerged in the last decade, some of which (like Tehran Annual Digital Art Exhibition - TADAEX) became grand events backed by art investors, while others (such as SET, which entered an official partnership with Berlin’s CTM) succeeded in building international networks. Even last year, after the first war between Iran and USA-Israel – known as the Twelve-Day War – disrupted many cultural events, an electronic music festival (TIEMF) was held.

Now, trying to rise from its ashes in the aftermath of the protests, the second Iran-USA war, and frequent disruptions to internet access, the electronic music scene seems to be in a confused state. Prior to 2022 one could easily categorise music performances in Iran as either ‘overground’ (official) or ‘underground’, those boundaries are now blurred. Behind the thick curtain that reduces Iran to bleak headlines and unrepresentative images of everyday life, musicians of all genres are performing in venues that are not hidden, yet not loudly public. This also means that the music is moving towards a less elitist character, as it need not to be defined as such as much as it did before. Below you can find five entry points to modular electronic music from Iran. 

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Behold! A horrific-looking, lumbering beast comes crashing through his environment, pulverising everything in his path with his concrete-vapourising breath, leaving a trail of destruction that will take months to repair. But once John is settled in his shed, behind the mic and ready to talk to Luke, it’s time for another Quietus Low Culture Podcast. 

This month the pair discuss Godzilla, which is both a type of Kaiju (strange beast) and the name of a sensational black and white Japanese film from 1954 (although tQ’s co-pilots have a lot to say about the recent ‘prequel’ Godzilla Minus Zero as well). The original film had already been commissioned when a Japanese tuna fishing vessel Lucky Dragon Number 5 strayed too close to American A-bomb tests near the Bikini Atoll causing sickness among the crew and, eventually, one fatality. When execs at the Toho studio decided to capitalise on the outrage generated by this incident they were only adding one more facet to an already very complex and powerful allegory in the making.

Director Ishirō Honda, while walking home from internment in China after the end of the Second World War, had to pass through the razed city blocks of Hiroshima, picking up a hatred of nuclear weapons along the way. Conversely, special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya – whose vision set up the aesthetic of a ‘man in a rubber suit’ rampaging through a detailed model of a city – had honed his craft as one of the country’s top propaganda film makers during the war. But contemporary audiences queuing to see the film on the week of release would have been just as traumatised by the March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo and just as on edge about the potential of a cold war nuclear strike.

John and Luke, with reference to the nuclear beast known at home as Gojira, talk about changing national attitudes to the history of the kamikaze pilot, kabuki theatre, bunraku puppetry, the vision of Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto and how, over a period of 72 years and across 39 films, Godzilla has become a constantly refreshed tabula rasa onto which Japanese (and world) anxieties can be written. 

Thanks to Alannah Chance for producing the podcast. Subscribers can log in to the site and listen beneath the paywall below, or via their podcast feed.

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Catch up with everything we’ve been writing about this month, as well as your other subscriber perks

September is always when things get into gear after the quiet music summer, and last month was no exception – as you’ll be able to hear in over four hours of fantastic music in the Subscriber-exclusive playlist below.

Just in case you missed any of your perks over the past four weeks, here’s a quick reminder of what both the Subscriber and Subscriber Plus tiers have had. In the Low Culture Essay, Jon Buckland explored depictions of masculinity in Dumb And Dumber, the Organic Intelligence newsletter was by Mary Chiney on Nigerian Alté, and John and Luke discussed complicated French cinematic classic Betty Blue in the Low Culture Podcast.

For Subscriber Plus members, a slight senior moment involving spreadsheets meant that you got all sorts of extra plus bonus playlists last month, featuring Iggy Pop, Joy Division, Suede, selections from the Baker’s Dozens of Nigel Godrich and Matt Cargill of Sly & The Family Drone, and music inspired by JG Ballard. This month’s Guest Playlist was by Gilla Band. Finally, your support has allowed us to fund a new long read essay series, the latest of which was about how rock changed forever in 1991 thanks to Nirvana, Metallica and RHCP. The accompanying playlist, along with the others mentioned above, can be found here. If you’re a Subscriber member and want to upgrade to access all this right away, you can do so here.

Your September wrap-up playlist can be found below. Thanks as ever for all your support of our work, from Luke, John, Paddy and all at tQHQ.

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“If Harry does something dumb, you drink, and if Lloyd does something dumb, I'll drink”

After seconds of consideration, my wife and I came up with these exhaustive rules to determine, once and for all, which of the two leads from The Farrelly Brothers’ 1994 comedy deserved the title of ‘Dumber’. We chose our respective poisons and, one night early on in our relationship, set about solving a question that nobody had dare ask. 

In a sea of gross-out comedies that have aged poorly, Dumb And Dumber stands pumpkin-pie haircut and shoulders above the competition. It was released during the year in which Kurt Cobain died, Green Day released Dookie, and Oasis and Blur’s tedious ding-dong was barely visible on the horizon. The era of the lad hadn’t fully barged in just yet and, somehow, in that gap, Dumb and Dumber emerged as a surprisingly thoughtful portrayal of male friendship. 

Harry and Lloyd, (played by Jeff Daniels and Jim Carrey, respectively), are two dunderheaded friends eking their way through life. In a bid to return a lost briefcase to a woman named Mary (played by Lauren Holly), the pair embark on a calamitous road trip across the USA. Little do they know that the briefcase contains the ransom for a kidnapping, and their retrieval of it triggers a chaotic string of events, resulting in retching cops, furious rednecks, poisoned henchmen, a duped blind boy, millions of misspent dollars, and multiple instances of avicide.

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If you cast an eye toward West Africa over the last decade, you’d be forgiven for viewing Nigerian music as a cultural giant. The global explosion of Afrobeats, a very polished juggernaut led for many years by the likes of Burna Boy, Wizkid, and Davido, has dominated the narrative, filling dancefloors from London to Los Angeles. At the same time, beneath mainstream Lagos, a quiet rebellion has emerged. It happened on SoundCloud, at underground thrift pop-ups, and in the bedrooms of kids who felt entirely alienated by the commercial club sound. They called it ‘Alté’.

The word itself – short for ‘alternative’ –  started as a label thrown around loosely in the mid-2010s, usually to describe artists who didn’t quite fit into the Afrobeats machine. Alté is less a rigid musical genre and more a fiercely independent subculture. Coined around 2012 by the pioneering rap group DRB LasGidi, the term became a sanctuary for the misfits of Lagos. These were artists raised on a chaotic, internet-enabled diet of 90s R&B, dancehall, indie rock, emo, and vintage Nollywood. They didn’t want to sing about popping champagne in VIP sections; they wanted to write moody, introspective neo-soul, anime-inspired synth-pop, and lo-fi reggae.

Alté is as much a visual and lifestyle movement as it is a vibrant one. In a deeply conservative, religiously strict, and intensely patriarchal Nigerian society, presenting as an Alté kid was an act of quiet defiance. It meant wearing chunky platform boots, matrix sunglasses, and oversized vintage leather in the sweltering Lagos heat. It meant experimenting with gender fluidity, dyed hair, and DIY aesthetics. Their music videos eschewed the high-budget yacht shoots of Afrobeats for VHS glitches, spooky supernatural motifs, and hyper-saturated nostalgia.

For years, the mainstream industry mocked them. The radio stations wouldn’t play their tracks, dismissing them as too weird, too foreign, or too lo-fi. The Alté scene therefore built its own ecosystem. They threw their own raves, directed their own visuals, and formed intensely loyal digital communities.

Fast forward to today, and the movement that started as a secret handshake among Lagosian outcasts has irreversibly altered the DNA of African pop. The mainstream eventually realised what the underground already knew: the Alté kids were the cool ones. 

What still lingers, though, is the part of Alté that resists documentation entirely. For all its influence, so much of it lives in moments that don’t travel well — half-remembered house parties, dead SoundCloud links, collectives that formed and dissolved before anyone thought to archive them. It’s a scene built as much on disappearance as presence. And maybe that’s the point. Alté was never trying to become a fixed idea or a clean export; it thrives in the gaps, in the unfinished, in the versions of Nigerian identity that don’t always make it into the official story. What remains isn’t just the music, but the permission it created — to exist, to experiment, and to leave things unresolved.

Below are five essential dispatches from a scene that proved you don't have to fit in to take over.

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Luke was drawn in as a young man by the promise of steamy sex scenes, John, as a teenager, because he thought watching it would make him look like a Gauloise-puffing hipster. But now they are in different stages of their advancing ‘careworn’ years, how do the Low Culture Podcast hosts feel about the 1986 film Betty Blue? While Luke had forgotten just how grim it was, conversely John hadn’t remembered just how funny it can be (in different parts, of course). Both now have a deeper appreciation of the painterly eye of Jean-Jacques Beineix, not to mention his commentary on a France coming to terms with the appalling failure to live up to initial promise shown by the government of Francois Mitterrand. They wonder to what extent the (disparaging) critical brickbat of cinéma du look was even deserved, given that there are very few blockbuster directors working today in Hollywood who couldn’t learn a thing or three from this glorious film. The pair consider the odd structural similarities Betty Blue has with Rumble Fish and Withnail And I, in as much that all three concern unusually close relationships where one half of the couple must die for the other to thrive. Closer inspection reveals that all seem to act as commentary on the failure of the countercultural 60s, the spirit of which must be crushed in order for creativity in the neoliberal 80s to thrive… And the pair make a plea for good – rather than censorious – criticism which helps everyone navigate great art that is nevertheless very problematic (which this film undoubtedly is, for several reasons).

Thanks to Alannah Chance for producing this pod, and to you all for subscribing and keeping tQ alive.

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Physical and digital music from More Eaze is available exclusively to our subscribers

This month marks the 18th anniversary of The Quietus’ operation as an independent publication, meaning that if it were a person, we could take it down the local for its first pint of mild and a chat about how to venture forth as an adult into this terrifying world. As it is, we’re not making a huge splash about the birthday this year, given that the bit 20th is looming in 2028, except to say thanks to supporters new and old alike for being the only reason that we’re able to continue in this hostile landscape for independent culture. We recently heard the amount some TikTok influencers are paid to gab and spout at music festivals, a sum of money for one weekend wafting one of those tiny mics around that could pay for the entire tQ operation for a month. We believe that our greatest strength will always be in our writing, paid for by subscriptions – without you, we wouldn't exist.

Our friends at Thrill Jockey have given us a lovely gift to pass on to you to mark it in the form of More Eaze’s new album Valley And Structure. You can read Richard Foster’s fascinating interview with Mari Rubio on the site here, discussing her compositions and bewildering array of collaborations, and the methods she uses to “take super simple ideas and really stretch them to their maximum potential”. You can listen to two tracks from new record Valley And Structure, ‘they tried to shove me in the structure’ and ‘what’s wrong with the structure?’ here. Norman Records have 35 CD copies of the album and limited edition score booklet to give away – you’ll just need to pay the P&P. These are available on a first come, first serve basis via the Norman shop here. Thrill Jockey also have 30 digital copies to give away via their website, using the code moreQuiet. Again, once they’re gone, they’re gone.

Thanks to you all for your continuing support of tQ, and to Thrill Jockey and Norman Records for arranging this giveaway.

It’s that time again when we round up the exclusive perks that you’ll have had as a Quietus subscriber over the past month. In August 2026, the Low Culture Essay saw Kirsteen McNish explore her relationship with Jason Molina’s Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go, an album she first heard after-hours in the smoke-filled Hull Adelphi as the staff wound down from another gig. The Low Culture Podcast featured John and Luke chatting about Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love and this month’s Organic Intelligence newsletter was on political reggae in 1970s Jamaica. If you’re a Subscriber Plus member, you’ll have had playlists on the Strange Worlds of Krallice, The Cramps, and Stiff Records, a guest offering from Saul Williams, and Baker’s Dozens round-ups from James Ellis Ford and Flora Yin-Wong. These can all be found here, and if you’re at the Subscriber tier and want to upgrade to access these, and the dozens of further playlists now on the site, you can do that here. Even though August is always a quiet month release-wise there are still nearly three hours of music in our round-up playlist, which you can find below the paywall. September 2026 marks the EIGHTEENTH birthday of The Quietus, which means we can now go and legally have a celebratory snifter, and raise a glass to all of you, our subscribers. Without your contributions, tQ would never have made it this far.

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Two decades on from the week of its release, Kirsteen McNish reflects on how a rainy night in Hull connected her to a quiet, moving album from the Mid West rust belt.

One rain-soaked evening in a coastal city I discovered an album that has stayed with me for nigh on two decades, glimmering in the periphery of my memory. I wish it onto film soundtracks when scenes feel like they might be improved by it, weave it into the pace of my walks at dusk, and into the corners of my kitchen in the dark as autumn looms. I feel it meet the night air as the moon moves and glows through clouds.

Jason Molina’s Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go often sounds as sparse as the black and white photograph that stares disarmingly back at you from the cover. It creaks, sighs and hisses. His career, by the time of the release of this album in 2006, was in a state of flux. His first group Songs: Ohia released a final album, The Magnolia Electric Co., in 2003 – this then became the name of the band for which Molina would become best known. Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go was Molina’s tribute to his origins in the Midwest Rust Belt where he was born, but also his then new home in Chicago. At the time, it divided critics between those taken with its emotionally raw dropped anchor, and those who thought it overly bleak or under-produced. One review in Slant Magazine remarked that the album was “relentlessly gloomy” and the titular track full of “crappy drum machines and Stratocaster farts”. It made me stop and try to listen harder. What I found was a record that felt like the quiet constant ticking of a clock in a train station in between journeys. 

Molina often seemed to inhabit the in-between spaces of discomfort, hovering, restless, and ungrounded, never quite there. This sensibility endured until his death at the age of 39 on 16 March 2013, from organ failure related to alcohol addiction. Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go was recorded in Indiana, around the time he released work under the moniker of The Electric Magnolia Company. He was deep in depression, disenchantment and loss, and the album has a sense of isolation and abandonment that is hard to pin down simply. Writing at the time, Laura Snapes’ Pitchfork obituary reported that that he had worked in a Mid West farm to convalesce from illness. His family reached out to his fans to appeal for funds to help pay for his time in hospital providing a PO box address where you could send him postcards and well wishes. It was a raw and poignant gesture from those in Molina’s orbit who were hopeful and desperately willing him to still hold on. 

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In 1971, almost ten years after the independence of Jamaica, a charismatic socialist leader ran for the elections at the head of the People’s National Party (PNP). His name was Michael Manley, but people on the street called him “Joshua”, and saw him as “another Moses”, who’d lead them to the Promised Land. His opponent, then Prime Minister Hugh Shearer, was identified as the wicked “Pharaoh”, and his party, the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP), as the supporter of the old unfair colonial system. Michael Manley blew with the wind of social change, using Rasta and reggae music as tools. He adopted the Rasta rhetoric, shouting: “Hail that man!” to his supporters, referring to himself as “I-man” and speaking of the “sufferers” (the poor among the poor). During his rallies, he brandished a stunning rod, which, he claimed, was a gift from Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia. As Rasta people regard Selassie as the living God, this rod was more than a symbol – it was a promise. 

Manley also organized the PNP Bandwagon, a reggae tour across the island that featured big names like Bob Marley & the Wailers, Ken Boothe, Max Romeo, the Gaylads or the Inner Circle band, and used reggae songs as political anthems. Following Manley’s landslide victory in 1972, many major reggae artists recorded songs known as “Joshua tunes” in his support, and openly stood against the JLP.

Manley was re-elected in 1976, and remained Prime Minister until 1980, when the JLP wiped him out of power. These eight years of socialism drove Jamaica to the edge of civil war. Indeed, the new leader of the JLP, Edward Seaga, endeavoured from the start to destabilize the Manley administration by any means necessary – he started with portraying Manley as a dangerous communist plotting a coup in Jamaica, and asked the USA for their help. He then secured some political constituencies in the poorest communities of Kingston, including Tivoli Gardens, by handing his supporters guns and bribes to defend their community against their PNP enemies, and then to attack and conquer the PNP communities around them. It wasn’t long before the PNP adopted the same methods. West Kingston turned into a battlefield – these are the “tribal wars” set up by “Babylon” (the politicians) and funded with “blood money” (stained with the blood of the sufferers) you hear so much about in reggae songs. 

The Rastas stood aside and commented on what was happening around them. This was “Marcus Garvey time” (The Gladiators), that is to say the accomplishment of the prophecy of Garvey – the Apocalypse had started with the return of the Messiah Haile Selassie, and only the righteous would survive “in this Armageddon” (Willi Williams). Many recorded songs to warn the youths about the situation, and to call for peace. But they had to express themselves with caution, using Biblical parables or allegorical lyrics, as the consequences for artists could be terrible. Indeed, the 1976 assassination attempt on Bob Marley proved that not even the Third World superstar could take sides with impunity. In Jamaica, reggae music had to submit to politics, like everything else.

Here is a selection of five reggae songs from the 1970s that are deeply rooted into local politics.

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This month we're talking about one of the greatest albums ever made – and not just in our opinion either. Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love was both a critical and commercial hit on release, and its stature has only grown since. The Quietus’ editors John Doran and Luke Turner discuss what has occasionally been skipped over in discussion of the album, its interesting spin on gender fluidity, and a deep intellectual curiosity which spans everything from war films to Tennyson, from a love of Killing Joke to Carl Jung and MR James to Wilhelm Reich, whose life inspired the video for ‘Cloudbusting’. They talk about the wild inventiveness and creativity of the record, made in Bush’ own studio out in the countryside, and marked her definitive breaking away from music industry expectations in a defiant state of independence. The world that Kate Bush existed in – with Billie Holiday and Peter O’Toole popping around for tea at her parents’ house, a terrifying painting on the wall – was unique, but not the affectation that some thigh rubbing music journalists of the time perceived it to be. Instead, Hounds Of Love is a deeply philosophical meditation on childhood, personal transfiguration, the dissolving boundaries between people in a moment of extreme crisis, an exploration of the complex situation of humanity within nature and, on a simpler level that would explain the mass appeal, the fear of love. Hounds Of Love has gone on to have an incredible legacy, from the live musical theatre staging witnessed by John back in 2014, to her reaching a new generation via streaming and Stranger Things. Thanks to Alannah Chance for producing the pod, and to all of you for subscribing.

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Before we get to the playlist, your monthly reminder of all the subs perks you might have missed over the month of July. We were surprised and thrilled by the reaction to our slightly leftfield choice of subject for The Low Culture Podcast – clearly many of you are as concerned as Luke and John are about the decline of the ploughman’s lunch. If you missed it, discover what makes up the ultimate tQ ploughman’s here. The Low Culture Essay saw Albanian-born writer Ledio Cakaj exploring about how Geek laïko music sustained him through years as an undocumented migrant, working the building sites and grill restaurants of Athens. Our Organic Intelligence newsletter was a guide to the vinyl releases of the Fluxus art movement. For the Subscriber Plus tier members, the bonus listening for July came with an exclusive guest playlist and interview from Nick Granata of Shovel Dance Collective, Baker’s Dozen collections from Syd, Eartheater and Martyn Ware, another to go with Mary Chiney’s fantastic Black Sky Thinking essay on the joy of album interludes and fragments, and finally Ledio Cakaj’s laïko selection to go with the essay above. This month’s catch-up playlist takes in almost four hours of music and features the likes of Dis Fig, Tara Clerkin Trio, Sophia Space Agency, Kelela, Charli xcx, Tyla, Arca, Quiet Husband, Tricky, Nuhara, Madonna, Luke Haines, Insecure Men, Tommi Iommi, Boy Harsher and Dinosaur Jr. Thanks to all of you for keeping tQ powering on into the second half of 2026. Your playlist is below:

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Laïko (meaning ‘of the people’) is the popular music that has nursed Greek heartbreak since the middle of the 20th century. It grew out of rebetiko, the raw, syncopated music of Greeks displaced by the catastrophic population exchange with Turkey in the 1920s. The bouzouki, that pear-shaped long-necked lute, carried the music alongside its smaller cousin the baglama. By the 50s, composers like Vasilis Tsitsanis began pulling the genre toward the mainstream, and it emerged over the following decades into various strains: the heavy, lamenting style of Stelios Kazantzidis, the orchestral grandeur of Dimitris Mitropanos and Haris Alexiou, and the radio-friendly pop sheen of artists like Vasilis Karras. What unified all of it was the tendency to sit with the heartache, whether from physical displacement or romantic longing. For people like me – an undocumented Albanian teen in Greece in the mid-1990s – laïko provided relief. And normalcy of sorts.

Marinella was the first Greek singer I knew. The Albanian communist regime allowed her to perform in Tirana in September 1977. I wasn't born until six months later. RTSH, the Albanian national television channel, would show clips from her concert for years afterward. People speculated she was of Albanian origin, in part because she had released an album titled Albania, with songs about the Greco-Italian war. Others said she was a plant from the Greek secret police. Sent to sow chaos, the rumour went, but the dictator Enver Hoxha loved her voice too much to care.

I only knew her well enough to tease my friend Enea with a line from her songs – “Σ'αγαπώ,” I would yell at him, not knowing it meant “I love you.” Enea's great-grandmother, Jaja, was Greek, brought over during the war, marooned when the communists sealed the country. It wasn't until I was in Greece that I understood: Jaja – γιαγιά – is the Greek word for grandmother.

When Communism fell and the country began to teeter on the brink, Enea's family moved to Greece, Jaja's old papers coming in handy for a Greek visa. I wasn't that lucky. I tried twice to cross on foot. Once aged 15,when I was  turned back by the swollen Vjosa river. Less than a year later I tried again with my cousin and a friend. We stole two doors from our elementary school and sold them to fund the trip to the port town of Igoumenitsa, planning to sneak into a lorry bound for Italy. Policemen caught us shivering under a bridge and sent us home.

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Back in the stressful early days of The Quietus John and Luke would often cheer themselves up by heading to the shops to purchase the constituent parts of a ploughman's lunch – the traditional trio of bread, cheese and onions. But then, as the site expanded, so did their culinary horizons, and they branched out into Europe and beyond, inventing the French ‘homme de charrou’, the Spanish ‘arado de hombre’, and so on. Regular readers and listeners will know that the site’s founders are big believers in pushing the cause of neglected or threatened culture, so when they heard tidings that the ploughman's lunch was in a state of crisis and decline, they knew they had to act and make it the subject of The Low Culture Podcast. So in this month’s episode, Luke and John leash their horses to the nearest gatepost, untie their neckerchiefs from a stick, and unwrap their ideal ploughman's lunch (a giant slab of cheddar, freshly baked bread, at least three onion-related items) as they discuss the storied history of this most humble repast. Although John was unable to find a ploughman's lunch being served in the pubs of Rotherham, the town where the modern plough was invented, it was in William Langland’s 14th century poem Piers Plowman that we arguably encounter the first reference to what would become the ploughman's lunch. The vernacular meal occasionally appeared in the history books and wider culture until the 1950s when, due to stringent wartime rationing, it had fallen out of favour. Concerned by this cheese calamity, the Milk Marketing Board encouraged pubs to serve cheese with beer by codifying the ploughman’s lunch – and this is the dish we know today, much messed around with, and now threatened by rising prices, and competition from hipper alternatives. But is the ploughman's a culture war issue, a symbol of a Britain that never was? These are the important matters we’ll chew over with our pickled onions and cheese, that perfect combination of fat, salt and acid, in this month’s episode. While listening, subscribers will be happy to know that they’ll be getting a discount in the planned Quietus Ploughman’s Lunch Cafe – the ploughman’s fight-back begins here. Thanks to Alannah Chance for producing the podcast, and to all of you subscribers for supporting our work.

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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. It was at Bauermeister’s atelier that Paik subsequently encountered John Cage, cutting off his tie and emptying a bottle of shampoo on his head in the middle of a performance there one night in 1960. Cage, apparently, was “terrified”, but also, somewhat fascinated. He paid close attention to the younger artist’s work from then on.

It was at Paik’s first solo gallery show in Wuppertal, in 1963, that he originally presented his sculpture Schallplatten-Schaschlik: a rickety tower of phonograph discs (‘Schallplatten’ in German) standing tall on a single spindle resembling the rotating meat-slathered spits familiar from Turkish eateries. Visitors to the gallery could place a record player tone arm at any point on the dozen-odd spinning discs to create their own aleatoric turntablist composition. Hence, the work’s subtitle: Random Access.

The previous year, Paik had participated in the very first Fluxus festival of new music in Wiesbaden. With Benjamin Patterson, George Maciunas and others, he studiously smashed at the strings of a piano in a performance of a work by Philip Corner and dipped his tie in a pot of paint then dragged it across a long stretch of paper on the floor by way of interpreting the single instruction that comprises La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #10 (“Draw a straight line and follow it”). There were no record players on stage at that first Fluxfest in Germany, but following Paik’s lead, the format would play a major part in the movement’s future – unsurprising, perhaps, given that several artists who went on to play a significant part in the group (such as Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, Robert Watts and George Brecht) had spent the late 50s studying experimental music with John Cage, who had pioneered the use of phonographs in his Imaginary Landscape series of 1939 to 52.

When Germano Celant curated ‘The Record as Artwork’ at the RCA in 1973, he included platters by Kaprow, along with other artists associated with Fluxus, such as Joseph Beuys and Henning Christiansen. Later exhibitions of artists’ albums, such as Ursula Block and Michael Glasmeier’s Broken Music at the Daadgalerie, Berlin, included numerous works by Paik, Kaprow, Brecht, Beuys and Christiansen, alongside recordings from Fluxus events, documenting performances by Watts and Ben Vautier. Others were made specifically as records, and some, like Paik’s vinyl shashlik, use LPs and 7” as the raw material to make new work – sometimes in rather alarming ways. What these discs tend to have in common is a certain sense of anarchy and insurgency – not to mention an especially deadpan humour.

I would never be able to afford anything once exhibited by Celant or Block. Beuys’ Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee, in particular, recorded at a Fluxus concert in Düsseldorf in 1968, now goes for absolutely silly money, despite being originally issued in an edition of several hundred. But at a certain point, thanks to the magic of Discogs, I did manage to start picking up a few slabs of Fluxus-adjacent wax. I think it started during the pandemic. While you were busy doing High Intensity Interval Training with Joe Wicks and whispering sweet nothings to your sourdough starter, I was poring over Items For Sale lists and weighing up whether I could really justify laying down £40 for an album in which one woman records herself flushing the toilet and a Frenchman whistles like a bird.

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Hello, dear Quietus subscribers, whether you’re among our new members from the current spring sale, or 2020 stalwarts. There are nearly five hours of music for you based on what we wrote about in the broiling month of June, from Converge to The Cure, Bob Smith’s top pop pal Olivia Rodrigo, Julia Holter, Luft, Soft Cell, DJ Plead, Marie Delprat, Earth Ball, Gamut Inc, Marisa Anderson, Alison Cotton, Tara Clerkin Trio, Kelela, Actress, Suede and much more.

In case you missed any of your subscriber perks over the past month, a reminder that the Low Culture Podcast featured John and Luke discussing the impact that seeing the evolution of Sunn O))) had on the early years of The Quietus, Robert Barry’s Low Culture Essay was on the Sea Organ at Zadar, and the Organic Intelligence newsletter explored contemporary New York hip hop. For the Subscriber Plus tier, there were bonus playlists to go with our feature editorial: 13 Baker’s Dozen bangers to go with a night on the pingers, Simon Reynolds on the reinvention of the guitar in 13 albums, guides to The Cardiacs and Arooj Aftab, and a guest playlist from Alif Hilal. Thanks for your support, and if you’re enjoying what we do, please tell your friends, families, and any especially financially solvent gerbils. Your playlist can be found below.

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Sunn O)))’s original name Mars tells you something, it being both the name of a massive planetary body but also a piece of music by Gustav Holst which is a an Ur-text in the history of heavy metal, given that it is the direct musical influence on ‘Black Sabbath’ by Black Sabbath. And this is what the band did, guiding heavy metal to an irreducible, super heavy core of skull crushing riffs stretched out to absurdity and beyond. Boris are a transcendent experimental heavy rock band from Japan, named after a track by the Melvins, who have spent most of their career as a three piece. Sunn O))) take one mode and wrench infinite variety from it; Boris have used a bewildering number of genre styles while it’s more something spiritual or philosophical that remains constant. Both groups are committed collaborators so it was only right that they made a kind of yin yang album together, Altar, which was released on Halloween 2006. And, as we hope will become clear, the album signified a huge sea change for both cultural and personal and professional reasons here at the Quietus. From the confusion of early encounters at ATP festivals, to barging into incredibly loud gallery shows, then on to changing the face of our culture permanently, this is a sound that represents a journey from rupture to healing taking in Miffy the Rabbit, getting spannered on a pirate ship, a coffin made from salt and an old woman giving birth to a sturgeon along the way.

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If you walk north up the Nova Riva on Zadar’s Adriatic waterside, you will start to hear a hum. It is not attributable to any passing traffic or any of the idling cruise ships up at the headland. The tone is deeper than that, warmer and rounder, less fuzzy. Come a little further along, following the line of trees which separate the promenade off from the road, past a copse of broad white umbrellas marking the territory of a seaside cafe spilling out onto a wide terrace, and you’ll notice a low whistle, something like the pitch of an alto flute. Reaching the crest of the peninsula, the mounting flux of moans and sighs resolves into a pair of unsteady chords beating against each other, like the crashing waves that power them beneath the paving slabs.

The Zadar Sea Organ (or Morske orgulje) provides a constant bed of mellow, ululating music. The sound is ambient, but not quite new age. The harmonies are too indefinite for that, too vacillating and unsettled. Yet it is oddly calming. It is constantly changing, but it remains broadly the same, subject to the movement of tides and any outside forces which might agitate the lapping waves. You watch the breaks approaching and then hear the surge in intensity from the pipes embedded in the stone steps, leading gently down to the water. The wake of a passing ship or a strong gust of wind will provoke a crescendo. 

One morning, as we sat in the sun, listening, four small jet planes, their fuselages painted in red and white, flew by in formation, adding a white noise rush to the lulling sound of the Organ, like the amped up swoosh of an EDM track. Otherwise, the music of the Organ is without climax or resolution. Different notes poke through at different times, teasing out different implications of the chords, changing the harmonic emphasis. The sound rises and relaxes, ebbs and flows. 

Opened to the public in 2005, the Sea Organ was built by Croatian architect Nikola Bašić as part of the reconstruction of the quayside in Zadar’s historic centre. Some seventy metres long, with 35 organ pipes set into the concrete promenade, it is a permanent installation in the very heart of the city, an autonomous musical instrument ‘played’ by the push and pull of the water lapping against the land. 

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In this month’s antidote to the algorithm, Auden Alsop praises the rappers and producers drilling into the essence of contemporary New York

In Jem Cohen's 1996 film Lost Book Found the narrator, a pushcart vendor in New York City, meets a man who survives by fishing treasure from the rivers that run beneath the sidewalk grates. The man loans him a book containing cryptic lists of events, addresses, and prices. This haunts him, causing him to question whether there "really [are] any laws and systems, scales, balances? What is the city made of? ...the rubble of stories and memories, layers and layers..." Thirty years later, a loose group of musicians are asking the same questions and crafting near-answers out of that same rubble. Their collective work comprises a movement, of sorts, out of which is emerging some of the most vital music being made today. 

It can't be a coincidence that so-called 'abstract' hip hop – a label that may have first been used to describe the style of the Ultramagnetic MC’s in 1988, was codified by the mid/late 90s with groups like Company Flow and Cannibal Ox, and seems today to have largely engulfed what used to be called the underground–is thriving in the same city where hip hop was born just over fifty years ago and where, thirty years before that, the art critic Robert Coates coined the term Abstract Expressionism. There's a world of difference between Abstract Expressionism and abstract hip hop – two different mediums, not to mention another 80 years of strain under rampant capitalism and the fundamental difference between Black and white experience in America – but the shared term invites intriguing comparisons: the pressure of an inherently (though differently) conflicted American-ness, their diametrically opposed engagement with tradition, a shared reliance on independent venues and routes of distribution as both economic necessities and centers of community, as well as a distinct gender gap ( The work being made by artists like Anysia Kim, DJ Haram, duendita, keiyaA, and Philadelphia's Moor Mother is incredible and a great sign of progress, but there's still a lot of room for improvement.)

But why label this music abstract when the materials from which it is constructed – the words a weave of experiences, stories, and memories lived, invented, and ancestral alike; beats pieced together from fragments of old records, each with its own cultural weight – are not? Implicit in the label is a distance from reality which, for the Abstract Expressionists, was the key to their escape into the sublime: a freedom, Barnett Newman hoped, from "the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth." In today's media environment, this distance manifests in the relegation of all music to the state of 'ambient', fit for comfortable indifference and passive consumption. Abstract hip hop exists in opposition to this distance; its aim is not to escape reality but to rearrange it: to piece together a mirror, however uncomfortable the reflection, rather than attempt to flee to some distant, metaphysical plane of sensory experience. 

The Abstract Expressionists tried, during their brief reign in New York, to step out of time; time will be the judge of their success. Abstract hip hop is, I think, the record of our time: a judgement of history as it appears, now, in the present. In fulfilling this role, it may sometimes sacrifice ease of enjoyment (though not necessarily humour, if you've a taste for the bleak) for the sake of honesty, but then isn't that what we're looking for, when we go fishing in the digital sewer that is the internet for something with which to feed our souls? (It isn't all doom and gloom, either - there's a lot of joy, if you know where to look.)

Abstract hip hop may or may not be abstract (to whom, is the question) but it does touch the sublime: a different, human kind. The sublime of the Abstract Expressionists was that of a time where the willful delusion of a better world's possibility was at its apex, an understandable rebound from the nadir of human history. The sublime of this music is that of our present where, sinking fast, we are reminded every day by the news that everything we know can either slip away slowly or be lost in a moment. Now is the time.

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Firstly, a warm welcome to anyone who has signed up to become a Quietus subscriber during our spring sale, but whether you’ve just joined or have been one of the faithful since 2020, thank you for your support in helping us provide the antidote to the algorithm in all we do. Just a quick catch-up on the subscriber perks for last month. In the Low Culture Podcast, Luke Turner and John Doran discussed subversions of masculinity, magic and the death of the 60s in 1970 cult classic, Performance. Our Organic Intelligence newsletter was on the fertile underground scene of the US west coast during the early 00s, while the Low Culture Essay was by Mary Chiney on Stanley Okorie’s astonishing soundtracks for the Nollywood film industry. That article came accompanied by a special playlist for Subscriber Plus tier members – they also received exclusive human-made playlists of music from the Baker's Dozens by Kurt Vile, Fire Toolz, Mark Leckey and Olof Dreijer, plus the best of the contemporary Chicago underground, and Marisa Anderson guiding us through the inspirations for new album, The Anthology Of UnAmerican Folk Music. You can find all these here. Your look back at May playlist is below. All best wishes for the month of June to you all.

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Stanley Okorie’s thousands of songs defined the Nollywood film industry, becoming “the vocalisation of the collective id” of a fast-changing Nigeria, writes Mary Chiney

The power cuts out. It is a Tuesday evening in Lagos somewhere near the turn of the millennium, and the sudden, suffocating silence of the ceiling fan is immediately replaced by the collective groan of the neighborhood, followed seconds later by the violent, coughing roar of a diesel generator. The heavy, sticky humidity of the Nigerian night immediately begins to press against the windows. Inside the living room, a heavy CRT television screen flickers back to life, the static clears with a high-pitched whine, and a VHS tape resumes its rotation inside a dusty deck. You are watching a Nigerian home video. The picture quality is slightly degraded, washed in that distinct, over-saturated, feverish yellow light of early digital camcorders. On the screen, a woman in traditional mourning clothes is weeping in the red dirt of a village compound. Then, the music kicks in. It does not sound like a Hollywood score. It does not swell with the organic warmth of a string quartet or the cinematic, thundering boom of a brass section. Instead, it hits you with the harsh, compressed, instantly recognizable twang of a cheap Casio or Yamaha MIDI keyboard. The percussion is a rigid, pre-programmed synthetic clap. The bassline is a stiff, funkless stomp that marches like a metronome. And over this beautifully plastic, unapologetically cheap instrumental, a man begins to sing in a voice dripping with absolute, unfiltered agony, narrating exactly what is happening on the screen.

To the uninitiated, the early era of Nollywood, the massive, straight-to-VHS film industry that exploded out of Nigeria in the 90s and early 00s, might seem like a cinematic fever dream. Movies were shot in a matter of days on budgets that would barely cover the catering on a Western independent film. They were chaotic, hyper-dramatic tales of blood money rituals, wicked stepmothers, university cults, wandering spirits, and ghosts seeking vengeance. The acting was often theatrical, bordering on hysterical, designed to project emotion to the back row of an imaginary theatre. But the true, unsung avant-garde genius of this era did not lie in the camera work, the practical blood effects, or the editing. It lived entirely, completely, and triumphantly in the soundtracks. And at the absolute center of this bizarre sonic universe was a man named Stanley Okorie.

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“You’re the lone ranger!”, “I like a bit of a cavort!”, “It was Mad Cyril”, “Comical little geezer – you’ll look funny when you’re 50”, “Too much vitamin B12 has never hurt anybody”. The countercultural gangster film Performance (1970) might be so endlessly quotable it ended up in songs by The Happy Mondays and Big Audio Dynamite, but there’s much more to it than that, as John Doran and Luke Turner discuss in the latest edition of the Low Culture Podcast. Shot in 1968 but only premiered in 1970, Performance is a riot of firsts – Mick Jagger’s debut starring role, James Fox breaking type (and in the process nearly breaking himself), Anita Pallenberg’s only major English-speaking film role, and screenwriter Donald Cammell’s first outing as a director. That’s without mentioning debutantes in their own ways Nic Roeg, producer Sandy Lieberson, young French actor Michèle Breton and London boxer Johnny Shannon. Everything banked on the magnetic draw of the Rolling Stones, yet the glamour brought by the casting of Jagger acted as a Trojan horse for one of the weirdest, darkest and most authentically magical examples of British cinema.

 John and Luke discuss how Performance is concerned with visual representations of the psychology of sex and violence in an age when the censor still ruled with an iron fist, alongside literary allusions to Yeats, Burroughs, Artaud and Borges scattered across the script. To some, this visionary study of the ‘performance’ of masculinity (and femininity, and class, and nationality, and sexual orientation) might sound pompous, but as John and Luke discover, such claims say more about the accuser than the film makers. Performance might have scandalised and outraged cinema goers and critics alike, but the real violence was efflorescing off-screen with the film’s dank and occulted conduits to the magic of Aleister Crowley, the violently hungover quart-monde of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, the death of Brian Jones and the fatal stabbing of Meredith Hunter at the Altamont Speedway, the Kray Twins and the Manson family. Alongside Withnail & I, it is an essential reflection of the end of the short 60s.

Thanks to Alannah Chance for producing the pod, and all of you for subscribing to keep tQ on the road.

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The U.S. West Coast underground in the early 2000s was orogenic, jutting out from the collisional dynamics of predecessor scenes with both the brute confidence and flexibility of fresh igneous rock. Sidestepping orthodoxy, its participants generally seemed to forgo the internecine battles of the 90s in favour of a queered politic of mischievous possibility, deep weirdness and all-together-now sense of play. Each major city and university town seemed to suddenly be restocked with a cultural vanguard of cool ruler lesbians, visionary trans zine-philosophers, gay and bi bois in thrall to No Wave as much as John Waters, omnivorously outstanding women, and guys who grew up loving Bikini Kill rather than being threatened by them. Surrounding these archetypes, and occasionally coalescing as anti-neoliberal/neocon popular waves, was a febrile network of outsider artists, green and Situationist-inspired anarchists, food redistributors, Black urban farmers, biodiesel mechanics, Butoh masters, pirate radio broadcasters, crip activists, psychic warlords, feminist chain letter videographers, weed trimmers, Oblomovists, radical goths, DIY fashion mavens, train surfers, b-boys, Gramscian librarians, taggers, nihilist bike messengers, psychedelic cosmonauts, four-track mad scientists, and so much more.

Coursing through these networks was an as yet un-gamed and algorithmic internet typified by Indymedia and blogs that replaced tape-trading, breathing second lives into once impossible-to-find music, allowing groups like The Slits, DNA and more obscure variants to be re-heard and re-contextualised into outré rock and experimental forms. Cultural adversaries, e.g. indie sleaze hordes chortling at Vice magazine, seemed somehow more avoidable and were rightfully snorted at as hopelessly retrograde, a (barely) alternative mirror of the Spectacular overground. This was one of the last underground scenes before Myspace, its antecedents and later streaming services lured artists wholesale from self-production/distribution into too-large ponds and commodity/content/productivity fish traps. It can therefore can provide maps for weirdos seeking both refuge from prescriptive cults and blueprints for what an underground can be. Scratch the surface of this West Coast (and its endless older reincarnations) and one will find its pulse still burns underneath layers of gentrification and Trumpist and Silicon Valley-led counter-revolution.

At the turn of the century, Olympia still served as a radical cultural incubator, with legendary events like Homo-a-Go-Go, the original Ladyfest and the Need’s mighty community opera The Transfused. Gossip were still in Olympia at what was arguably their no-wave twang/swing/stomp peak circa Movement. One also found fellow queer paragons The Need and singer/drummer Rachel Carns’ subsequent King Cobra/TWIN projects, Tracy and the Plastics, BK/Frumpies offshoot Spider and the Webs, Joey Casio, Anna Oxygen, Growing, and The Punks. Portland had Sleetmute Nightmute, Get Hustle, Yellow Swans, Monitor Bats, and the first and best incarnation of Glass Candy (the 1999 to 2002 Shattered Theatre era with several great drummers including Mark Evan Burden, Avalon Kalin and Ginger Peach).

Seattle had the fabulously combustible and lurching early Chromatics lineups (the first of which morphed into Shoplifting, which included this writer), Talbot Tagora, Filthy Details, Mikaela’s Fiend, and Display (actually from Everett). Sacramento had Antennas Erupt!, Outhud and Marnie Stern. San Franciso and Oakland had seemingly endless rainbows of dazzling bands including Erase Errata, Subtonix, Numbers, K.I.T., Gravy Train!!!!, The Lowdown, Deerhoof, Dynasty Handbag, Coachwhips, Heart of Snow, Panty Raid and Pink & Brown. Los Angeles had Mika Miko, Shady Ladies of Emily’s Sassy Lime/Skinned Teen/Petty Crime pedigree, Southern transplants XBXRX, BARR, Silver Daggers, Godzik Pink, Young People, and Wives. San Diego had The Peppermints and Kill Me Tomorrow. North in Vancouver and Victoria B.C., one found Channels 3x4, Shearing Pinx, and Mutators, alongside which, glided the ever-relevant people’s music of Mecca Normal.

Please note this guide is both subjective and decidedly incomplete and meant purely to connect a few dots before one’s own investigation. Happy spelunking!

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A happy first of May to all our subscribers as we get in touch with a thank you for supporting our work in providing the antidote to the algorithm, and a reminder of all the bonus editorial you had this past month. The Low Culture pod saw John and Luke discussing cult “cosmic horror” TV show Children Of The Stones; the Low Culture Essay was James Bailey on The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark, while the Organic Intelligence newsletter explored the history of medieval plainchant Dies Irae in popular culture. For our top Subscriber Tier members there were bonus playlists – a guide to the work of Irmin Schmidt, The Strange Worlds of Spacemen 3 and Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, your essential Harry Styles, and John Robb’s Baker’s Dozen selection. This month’s guest playlist came from Bait, Enys Men and Rose Of Nevada director Mark Jenkin, accompanied by an interview on his sonic influences. You can find all these here. If you’re a Subscriber tier member and want to listen to them, you can upgrade to Subscriber Plus here. Everyone can find their monthly playlist below, and catch up with our Music Of The Month feature here.

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In a department store somewhere in northern Europe, a young woman named Lise is trying on a dress. The garment is garish, its pattern featuring a psychedelic clash of geometric shapes and vivid colours. Yet Lise seems delighted with her choice. “That’s my dress”, she announces happily to the shop assistant: “Lovely colours”. The assistant tells her that she agrees; the fabric of the dress, she adds enthusiastically, has been “specially treated” so that it won’t pick up stains. In an instant, the cool air of the fitting room burns hot. “Do you think I spill things on my clothes?”, Lise shrieks furiously, her outburst turning the heads of the other customers: “I won’t be insulted!”. Before she storms out of the shop and onto the street, she registers the gasps and gawks of those around her with an expression of satisfaction. In the bright, bland, stain-proof world she inhabits, she seems to understand, she has begun at last to leave her mark.

So begins Muriel Spark’s 1970 novel, The Driver’s Seat, a pitch-black murder mystery that was praised by The New Yorker as its author’s “spiny and treacherous masterpiece”. I’m quite fond of that description. It conjures an image of a bristly-bodied centipede, scuttling about unseen before releasing its venom. The book’s influences are manifold: pulpy detective thrillers; newspaper reports of violent crimes; the anonymous interiors of chain hotels, department stores and airports; giallo horror at its grisliest. It all amounts to a thoroughly disquieting depiction of voyeurism, mania and deadly self-estrangement, on which Spark worked intensely over a few short weeks and finished from a hospital bed. “I frightened myself writing it”, she later recalled, “but I had to go on”. Over 50 years on from its publication, The Driver’s Seat still unsettles. Even Nick Cave – that gothic “godfather to lurid inhabitants of an oily netherworld”, in the words of this website’s own Luke Turner - confessed to being left rattled after reading it. High praise indeed.

I first encountered the book as a teenager. I was a morose, introverted creature back then, prone to bunking off school in favour of disappearing behind a dog-eared paperback in a friend’s bedroom or the neglected corner of a greasy spoon. Spark’s novels, most of which are short enough to be read in a single sitting, were a perfect companion on days like these. I loved the sheer nerve of their plots: a group of pensioners receiving nuisance phone calls from death in 1959’s Memento Mori; a man, who may or may not be the devil, upsetting the status quo in 1960’s The Ballad Of Peckham Rye; a woman overhearing the clanking typewriter keys of her own author in Spark’s debut, 1957’s The Comforters. But it was Spark’s merciless wit – a delicate blend of cruelty and camp – that I most loved. “You will end up as a Girl Guide leader in a suburb like Corstorphine”, sighs her most famous creation, the titular schoolteacher in 1961’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, to a terminally dull pupil named Eunice. That was me hooked; stuck in my own suburban slump, I appeared to have found a writer who spoke my language.

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It’s December 5, 1830, and 26-year-old French composer Hector Berlioz is debuting his Symphonie Fantastique at the Paris Conservatoire. The work is set to a loose narrative that follows its creator’s descent into opium addiction, sacrilegious nightmares and infernal Sabbaths, all inspired by Berlioz’ doomed and unrequited passion for Anglo-Irish actress Harriet Smithson. He will, however, later marry her. The young Frenchman has detailed all his symphony’s programmatic elements in small pamphlets, which sit neatly on the chairs of perplexed Parisian businessmen, rising bourgeois critics and a young Franz Liszt. The audience is a motley and aristocratic assembly unaware that in the following 50 minutes they will encounter a definitive piece of 19th century Romantic music full of lonely, Satanic, druggy visions. What the audience cannot also yet know is that Berlioz’ score, and more specifically his deranged fifth movement, is about to introduce something far larger into popular culture: the modern musical afterlife of Dies Irae.  

Thomas de Celano, friend and biographer of St. Francis (of the Franciscan order) is believed to have penned the doomy hymn in the mid 1200s. Falling at the end of the Catholic funeral mass, it explicitly details a violent and terrifying day of judgement. There are entire deeply rewarding and often maddening academic rabbit holes dedicated to Dies Irae and its endurance, just as there is an exhaustive list of music that has used it. 

In researching this piece, I went on my own odyssey to track down a doctoral dissertation about Dies Irae’s use in secular music, written by a man called Forrest Irving Wanninger. The paper, which I had to call a perplexed librarian at Illinois’ Northwestern University to procure, remains the most conclusive piece of literature on the chant. Wanninger wrote it in 1962 and died in 1998. His work remains largely unnoticed, but his strong connection with the chant is beautiful and palpable. Wanninger was a Second World War veteran, and he goes into great depth about an obscure translation from an anonymous soldier in the Civil War, who wrote his own version of the chant, presumably because the man-made horrors he saw were worse than anything a monk could depict. I like to think that Forrest, in his early 50s at the time of writing his dissertation, saw something in the melody and translation that related to his own experiences.  

From John Fahey to John Williams, the tune has quietly woven its place into our collective consciousness. It has become an instant semiotic of all things deathly among film composers, and even a means for American football teams to scare their opponents – The University of Georgia’s marching band play it at every game. Like Berlioz’ unsuspecting audience, you’re perhaps unaware what Dies Irae is, or at the very least unaware of the sheer amount of culture that it’s managed to permeate. But hark! This is your guide to a rich and fulfilling musical underworld that spans chthonic composers, NBA commercials, Swedish metal, kitschy Romantics, horror films and hip hop.

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In this month’s Low Culture podcast, Luke gets in his battered Austin Maxi and heads down to Wiltshire to pick up John before they head to Avebury henge and hope not to get caught in a time shift caused by a powerful ray from a distant black hole. Yes, this can mean only one thing – the cultural artefact up for chat is 1977 TV drama Children Of The Stones. Shot in the woozy heat of the summer of 1976, the six-part series concerns the arrival of a Professor Adam Brake and his son Matthew in the village of Milbury, where they settle down to investigate the history of the ancient stones that surround the rural community. It quickly transpires that the villagers seem split into two groups, with the power of the henge, and the presence of an astronomer turned landowner, seeming to have something to do with the strange goings on. A potent blend of science fiction, the occult, folk tradition, this is a fantastic work of what John calls “cosmic horror” that sits on a continuum with the writing of M.R. James. They discuss the cultural impact of the series on Stewart Lee, Boards Of Canada, folk horror and all sorts of wizards, along with Julian Cope’s critique before going on to make comparisons with Dr Who and True Detective, explore the ideas of “deep England” subverted by the programme, point out the amount of daytime drinking that goes on, find uncanny synchronicity with Derek Jarman’s 1971 Super8 film Journey To Avebury, and divine the profound questions asked in what essentially was created as a piece of kids TV. And finally, if you’re in the vicinity of Avebury or Buckfast Abbey and find yourself hankering after a carvery, John and Luke have you covered. Thanks to Alannah Chance for producing the podcast, and all our subscribers for funding our work.

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With March done and dusted with the appalling pollen of early spring, we’re back with your regular playlist of everything we wrote about over the past four or so weeks. Firstly, a reminder of your other perks during that time: we had the Low Culture Podcast on Suicide’s debut album, an Organic Intelligence newsletter on psychedelic Porto, and the Low Culture Essay featuring Natalie Marlin on the relationship between The Chemical Brothers’ Hanna soundtrack and her trans identity. Subscriber Plus tier members have their bonus playlists featuring music from Baker’s Dozen selections by Sarah Nixey of Black Box Recorder, Sherelle and the artist George Shaw, as well as curated playlists of music from Ladytron, Pet Shop Boys and Ed Kuepper. Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip gave us the month’s Influences Playlist. These can all be found here. The monthly playlist for March features the likes of Gong, My New Band Believe, Irreversible Entanglements, Cobrah, Kim Gordon, Bill Orcutt, Kwes., Tanya Tagaq, Bill Callahan, The Afghan Whigs, Loraine James, Aldous Harding and much more – you can find them below. Thanks for putting your hard-earned towards the continuing existence of tQ – without you we’re nothing. With all the best for the long weekend from Luke, John, Paddy and all at tQHQ.

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Hanna does not live with music to guide her, at least at first. Her life is scored solely by the openness of the tundra, the crackling of fire. The stillness of open air, of onyx-drenched night. A dwelling shared only with her father, far from any others, from any chatter or clamour. No incandescent hums or white noise whirrs or industrial thrums to speak of. Hanna will not find music here, not until the world beyond this one encroaches. Not until she finds her tune beyond the silence she has known.

It’s a curious start for a film scored by one of the biggest electronic music acts on the globe. Joe Wright’s 2011 action film Hanna wasn’t loudly advertised as a vehicle for the Chemical Brothers’ soundtrack in the same way that, say, Tron: Legacy was for Daft Punk around the same time. Coverage was fairly muted, treated as more trifling novelty for a duo just settling into a place as elder statesmen of their genre. Reviews were decidedly mixed, both for the film and the score. Wright, who had just begun to establish himself as an acclaimed director of period drama adaptations like Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, was not known for directing sleek thrillers; The Chemical Brothers had never composed original work for a film and, as of the time of writing, have never done anything like it since.

Nevertheless, I’ve felt a continued pull to this coming-of-age tale in the years since its release, and an even deeper fascination with its score. I’ve spent countless hours pouring over the peculiar record that Ed Simons and Tom Rowlands birthed, one that contorts their festival-ready brand of ecstatic (in more than one sense) rib-pulsing beats into a warped compositional framework. I’ve come to see the soundtrack album as a narrative in itself, one that takes its own path toward the film’s throughlines of discovery and sense-making in a world far bigger, far more complicated than the pocket of life where you began.

I also see in the record a parallel story to my own history as a trans woman – I, too, initially lived as a girl decontextualized, shapeless, drifting without a melody to call my own. I, too, gave myself new meaning upon leaving the siloing bounds that confined me for years, claiming a tune for myself, and seeing that music reshaped time and time again by the world that I found waiting for me.

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The Lovers & Lollypops record label holds a place in the Portuguese music scene that’s similar to the Bonfim district within the city of Porto. The gentrified centre has been reshaped for tourism, while Bonfim is a neighborhood where daily life is diverse and vivid – here, creativity is lived rather than displayed, authenticity is preserved, and being out of the spotlight allows new ideas to flourish. 

Think of Cemitério do Prado do Repouso or the amazing views of Miradouro das Fontainhas, where the Douro opens up in a lived-in view of the city, far from the polished Ribeira. As you pass by the Faculdade de Belas Artes, which gives Bonfim its unique character, and get lost in the Labirinto do Parque de São Roque, the spirit of Lovers & Lollypops becomes clear. Albums from the label could serve as a perfect soundtrack for these spaces, but their reach extends beyond the city and Portugal, serving as an important stage for underground music across Europe.

Founded in Porto in 2005, what began as a record label focused on underground and alternative rock quickly expanded into a multidisciplinary platform. They now release albums, organize concerts, run festivals, and, more recently, have established a venue of their own in Porto at Rua de São Vítor. Throughout its evolution, Lovers & Lollypops has remained musically eclectic. Psychedelia in their releases is an attitude, not a style, and takes many forms: heavy, improvised riffs, drums and metal, delicate electronic landscapes. ritual or intimate whispers.

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Many moons ago, tQ heard Henry Rollins describing the time that he and Ian MacKaye had spent the afternoon listening to the 1977 debut album from New York duo Suicide, and were so disturbed by it – especially by the song ‘Frankie Teardrop’ – that they had no idea how to respond, other than to wander the street yelling. In this month’s Low Culture Podcast, Luke Turner and John Doran hope to be more articulate as they delve deep into one of the most thrilling and influential electronic records ever made. They discuss the duo’s roots in New York at the start of the 70s, the influence of both Martin Rev’s jazz training and Alan Vega’s obsession with Iggy Pop and Elvis on what started out as a project rooted in art galleries as much as gig venues, with Suicide promoting their gigs as being a “punk mass” as early as 1971. Yet Suicide had an awkward relationship with the New York art world as much as they did with the punk audiences, who in the late 70s would try and bottle them offstage. John details his thoughts of Suicide and ideas of the trickster archetype versus the radical, and they discuss how their hectic sound was eventually distilled onto record, years after they first formed, with just three channels on the desk, but with Craig Leon bringing the influence of dub to the sessions. Of course, a chat about this record wouldn’t be complete without discussing ‘Frankie Teardrop’, Vega’s horrific scream, and the society that spawned it. And finally, John and Luke talk about their memories of seeing Suicide live in Alan Vega’s twilight years, in which he had lost none of his power, and the duo refused to conform to nostalgic expectations. Thanks as ever to Alannah Chance for producing the podcast, and to you all for subscribing and keeping tQ alive. You can listen to the pod via your feed or using the link below:

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After the moderately quiet but of course far from silent month of January we’re back with a bumper blaster in this month’s Subscriber Playlist stakes, with about five hours of music from the likes of Cobrah, Hen Ogledd, Shackleton, Lana Del Rey, Bill Callahan, Kevin Richard Martin, Maria BC, Peaches, Loula Yorke, Jill Scott, Annie Hogan, Squarepusher, Kim Gordon, Robyn, Converge, Geologist, Alan Sparhawk, Sunn O))) and much much more. You can of course find out which of these made it to our music of the month list here. Just to recap, for our Subscriber and Subscriber Plus tier members, the Low Culture Podcast for February was on Missy Elliott’s Miss E… So Addictive, the Low Culture Essay was on the early 00s London depicted in computer game The Getaway, and the Organic Intelligence column/newsletter was on the grubby racket of Slovakian techno. If you’re a Subscriber Plus member, your bonus playlists featuring music from our Baker’s Dozens, guides to eg. Talk Talk and Shane Parish essentials, and the music that inspired Liars’ Drums Not Dead and Hen Ogledd’s latest are all to be found here. Thanks for all your support keeping The Quietus moving forward. You can find the links to the relevant playlist below:

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“She's not the slightest bit squeamish about a bit of claret.” Outside my penthouse flat, a gang of mercenaries are squabbling about how to kidnap my son. As I get to the window, I see them shoot my wife and snatch the kid before bundling into a red Jensen Interceptor. My wife dies into my arms, gasping a dying request: “Get our son back.” Fight and flight fuse together and I jump into my green Alfa Romeo, in hot pursuit of the Jensen. Pumping techno soundtracks the chase, sounding for all the world as if Luke Slater had done the soundtrack for Goldeneye.

And so The Getaway begins. Set in central London, the PS2 game follows ex-con Mark Hammond enacting his revenge on mob boss Charlie Jolson. It’s basically a Guy Ritchie film, but you’re the playable main character. The game was originally slated for a 2000 release, to coincide with the launch of the PS2 console. But setbacks led to it being pushed back until December 2002. It sold decently, with 300,000 copies shifted within two weeks and it even bodied Grand Theft Auto: Vice City off the top of the charts. According to Next Generation, it was the 53rd best-selling game released between 2000 and 2006. But while Next concluded that it “did seem to strike a chord,” the game ultimately didn’t deliver the lasting impact of a knockout hit.

Now, though, a reappraisal is gathering speed online. Three years ago, it attracted attention when Tom The Taxi Driver, a cabbie and YouTuber, revisited the game and described it as “bang on” in terms of its accuracy. It’s this rendering of early 2000s London that makes The Getaway so special. The game projects a hyper realistic simulation of the capital’s streets into your living room, from Michael Ball posters in the West End to Dixons, The Link to Virgin Megastore, old Routemasters to retro police cars. It's basically a perfectly preserved snapshot of a particular London era. Somehow, though, I’d never played it before. So, a few weeks ago, I managed to procure a copy of The Getaway for a tenner on eBay. I slotted it into the dusty drive of my old PS2 and kickstarted the story mode.

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Any discussion about the history and evolution of techno over the past near-four decades will always naturally be dominated by two cities: Detroit and Berlin. For a period of around 10 years, though, beginning in the mid-90s, the capital of Slovakia, Bratislava, became a vital outpost for an austere, industrial-edged take on the genre that was cultivated at the now-closed U.Club.

Opened in 1993 by Tibor Holoda, the venue was situated inside a former underground nuclear bunker that was built by the ruling Communists to prepare for the possibility of Cold War-era apocalypse. Holoda and DJ partner Dalibor Kŕč – who was otherwise known under the monikers Loktibrada, Kre and Olga+Jozef – established a weekly residency at the club where they brought the techno of Detroit and Berlin, as well as the ‘Birmingham sound’ of figures like Regis and Surgeon, to tons of eager, young ravers for several years. Another key figure in the story of Slovakian techno, Juraj Tokár – otherwise known as Rumenige – joined the rotation towards the late 90s.

As the club’s reputation grew, various DJs on the global techno scene were invited to play, including the likes of Jeff Mills, Regis, Oscar Mulero and James Ruskin. In a 2012 interview with Electronic Beats, Regis described the venue (positively) as “cold, dark, sterile and brutal,” adding that “it all went hand-in-hand with the music”. The connections built with these touring circuit DJs would eventually carry over on record as Kŕč, Tokár and other U.Club-affiliated figures took to putting out their own work in the late 90s via their own labels – such as Olga+Jozef, Palicavonzvreca, Numb and Antidandruff – and others based around Europe.

Theirs was a metallic sound that was heavily influenced by the stony, stripped-back and hypnotically repetitive nature of the techno coming out of Birmingham in the 90s. If you want a full-scale introduction to the sound, your best bet is to take an hour out of your day to listen to Loktibrada and Rumenige’s brutal 2004 mix CD Evergreens & Everblacks: A Standa DJ Mix. Coming off almost as a Slovakian techno greatest hits collection, it sees the two DJs combine to run through several of their own productions, as well as those of fellow key local figures like DJ Boss and HU, and international peers such as Mulero, Christian Wünsch, Takaaki Itoh and Female. Mixed at a dizzying pace, it’s thrillingly dour and yet imbued with the deep sense of groove that all of the best techno should have. 

Rumenige, Loktibrada, DJ Boss and HU all disappeared for a decade or so towards the late 00s and U.Club closed its doors in 2003, later rebranding under various different names before the space closed for good in 2019. In recent years, they’ve reappeared however, to self-reissue much of their respective back catalogues via Bandcamp, and share new music. Madrid DJ Héctor Oaks also used his OAKS imprint to shine a light on some of the best cuts from the short-lived Antidandruff label viaa pairof reissues in 2020. Sitting alongside hard-edged modern industrial techno records on OAKS by the likes of D.Dan, Peder Mannerfelt and the label owner himself, it served as a fitting cross-generational homage to a brief but significant point in techno’s history that had gone all too under-the-radar since the closure of U.Club.

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Missy Elliott (along with Timbaland) meets The Quietus’ benchmark for genius, not necessarily via the route of producing three all time great albums in a row but as someone who changed popular music decisively, twice. And it is the exemplification of the second of these occasions, the stupendous Miss E... So Addictive album from 2001, which creates the Low Culture conversational glue of this months' podcast. John and Luke consider the scenius of late 80s early 90s Virginia (compared to Oslo in the same period!) and the years of hard graft that eventually made Missy Elliott and Timbaland's talent look so effortlessly achieved. There is some talk of an overdue reckoning with hip hop's long occluded roots in disco, some disbelief at the origin myth of 'Get Ur Freak On' which comes across compositionally as more like the work of Magma or Herbie Hancock than a bored beat maker whacking a keyboard because he wants to go home for his tea. There’s also a heartfelt plea for more anthems about male sexual inadequacy. Pour yourself a cuppa, retire to your most comfortable chair and prepare to go on a journey with your 43-minute men, John and Luke. 

Thanks to our producer Alannah Chance for putting this together, and all of you our subscribers for helping tQ survive. Subscribers can listen to the podcast below, or via their usual podcast platforms.

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Even though January’s always a bit of a quiet month for releases we’ve still got a fair wedge of music for you to kick off 2026. We’re also here to remind you that if you’re a Subscriber Plus member you also have access to bonus playlists – the music from Peaches and Mike Dirnt of Green Day’s Baker’s Dozens, artist guides to go with the Strange Worlds Of David Berman and Toumani Diabaté, the Low Culture Essay on Susumu Yokota, the Quietus Interview with Powell, and the International column on the artists struggling on against a hostile government in Georgia. You can find those here and if you’re a Subscriber tier member who wants to upgrade you can do so here. In the meantime, your playlist featuring the likes of MPTL Microplastics, Knats, Denzel Curry, Dry Cleaning, The Soft Pink Truth, Craven Faults, Qasu, Peaches, Jane Weaver, Zu, Sleaford Mods, Lightning Bolt, Megadeth, Thundercat, Bruce Springsteen, Robyn and Shackleton is below. Thank you, as ever, for supporting tQ.

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The first time I tried to buy a Susumu Yokota album I was in my late teens. I picked up a copy of Image in Vinyl Exchange in Manchester's Northern Quarter. I was taken by the artwork: the vintage colour grading, the abstracted shape that could have been a tree branch or a spool of tape. It was inviting but felt important; those dates – 1983-1998 – were a promise of longevity; of material that might survive the passage of time. When I got it home, I found the wrong record in the sleeve. I did not go back to change it. I was too young, too embarrassed. 

I don't know where I would have first heard of Yokota. I know he was referenced regularly in the magazines and blogs I was reading then, when his early 00s albums like Sakura were already being hailed as key touchpoints for a wave of artists making what was then more often classed as electronica, and which is a genre now largely absorbed into ambient. When I recently listened to Image, for the first time in nearly 20 years, it became a time machine.

It played back from a past when I knew much less than I know now; when I was taking chances on music I had only read descriptions of, which often came detached from context or understanding. So, if I don't know where I first heard his music, I know I have been hearing his name since I began delving into electronic music, almost certainly because Leaf issued much of his Skintone catalogue. Listening to Image again now in its remastered form, I find an album that contains the triptych of feeling that is at the core of Yokota's sound, whatever sonic space he's occupying, a holy trinity of love offered, curiosity manifested, and an exercising of play with sound itself. He was a musician who sprawled across genres, a magpie for sound both recorded and in the world around him, and had a capacity for making connections for us in his music. The feeling that oozes from its signals are that of a most generous creator. 

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“I guess it’s shadowy seen from an outside point of view,” says Mikel Acosta of Hegoa Diskak, an independent label repping the undervalued music of the Basque Country. ‘Shadowy’ was the term given to the scene by the London based experimental music writer Bradford Bailey, writing on the Sound Ohm website, but it stuck, and is now proudly quoted on the Hegoa Diskak Bandcamp page. “The history of the Basque Country is shadowy,” considers Acosta, who grew up in Irun on the Spanish-French border. “There’s elements of conflict, so there’s a lot of questions about what’s happened there, which take you to why some people are making this really harsh sounding music. There’s an anger, there’s something to be said.”

The semi-autonomous Euskadi region, which straddles the two countries, strove for political and cultural recognition throughout the brutal Franco dictatorship, and by the 1970s and 80s, punk and radical rock had taken hold across the region. Networks of DIY collectives and gaztetxes – semi-official squat venues – remain in place today, and underpin contemporary Basque music. While most underground music scenes put down roots in the urban spaces of the city, hotbeds of Basque independent culture are often found in local towns and left wing communities such as Azkoitia in Gipuzkoa and Bera in Navarre. The sheer unusualness of the Basque language – the oldest commonly spoken language in Europe, with no connections to those surrounding it, but one which is widely embraced by bands and artists – is another ingredient of the region’s extraordinary and enigmatic music. 

Hegoa Diskak began in London in 2021 with a compilation of music by Angel Katarain, a sound engineer for the IZ label who had been creating his own synth pop experiments on the side. Since then, the label has championed lone experimentalists, ambitious auteurs and archival finds which are little known outside (or even inside) the Basque region. “I’ve learned more about my culture from outside, by separation,” says Acosta, who moved to London to make music, but is about to return to the Basque country to further his curatorial projects. “There have been different narratives that haven’t been told. And that’s what I’m interested in.” Each Hegoa release is pressed up in just a few hundred copies, but their projects often emerge after a long period of gestation, and like STROOM or Cortizona in Belgium, or Akuphone in France, it’s a European label whose releases carry the force of serious primary research.

Hegoa has just entered a new and notable phase of its operations. Acosta has returned to the Basque country with several collaborative and curatorial projects on the table, much of it cultural activity well under the radar of the English-speaking media. Alongside Xabier Erkizia, a researcher and film maker who has already completed a film about the Argentine electroacoustic explorer Beatriz Ferreyra, Hegoa plan to release archival work by Llorenç Barber, who composed for bells in the 1970s and 80s, as well as a major archival project exploring early compositions for magnetic tape by the celebrated 20th century sculptor Jorge Oteiza.

In recent years, many of Europe’s most fertile microscenes have emerged amid the smaller countries, independent regions, and lesser known languages – in Finland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Slovenia and elsewhere. Basque music is another instance of a smaller cultural group going its own way and punching above its weight.

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Hay no banda! There is no band… just two fine looking gentlemen of a certain age resplendent in their seasonal knitwear. John and Luke start 2026 with a resolution to be optimistic and positive in outlook from this point onwards. And all things considered – given the spiritually crushing subject matter at hand – they are fairly good to their word on the first Low Culture Podcast of the year. Mulholland Drive is a David Lynch neo-noir/black-comedy horror take on a romantic tragedy, nestled inside a metaphysical satire of Hollywood, built from the wreckage of an abandoned TV show pilot. It was released in 2001 to mixed reviews and general bafflement; but perhaps more importantly, it was deemed a commercial misfire to the extent that the director only produced one more feature film before his death last year. But at some point since its release, Mulholland Drive has gone on to become widely considered one of the best films of the 21st century so far. The be-jumpered pair place the film on a continuum that includes The Day Of The Locust (1975) and The Substance (2024), and consider it, ultimately, as a genuinely spiritual film about the possibility of redemption. John attempts to explain his grand narrative of what the hell he thinks is going on in the film, but will Luke be satisfied? But also the pair ask, what does this have to do with William Blake, or with an American ranching dynasty of the late 19th century, or in fact with Lynch’s East/West syncretic belief system? Pull up a pouffe, open up a packet of gluten free Hobnobs, whisper to yourself, ‘This is the girl’ and settle in, because it’s going to be a deep dive. Thanks to Alannah Chance for producing, and all of your for funding this work.

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Catch up with everything we wrote about in the last two months of 2025

As is now traditional on tQ, we combine our round-ups of the last two months of the year into one playlist and feature, to make sure that they don’t get lost in the barrage of material relating to our end of year round-ups of the best albums, tracks, reissues etc and columns of the past 12 months. This means that you get a bumper pack of stuff to listen to in the gooch, the gulch, the interregnum, the purgatory, or whatever it is you want to call the odd gap between Christmas and New Year. The playlist, as ever made up of hours of music, can be found below. We also wanted to say thank you for all your support over the past 12 months – it goes without saying that The Quietus wouldn’t exist without you, and we love you, each and every one. We hope the seasonal break, if you’re having one, continues to be restful. With all best wishes from everyone at tQ.

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It's a seasonal special for the final antidote to the algorithm of 2025, as guides us through melancholic Medieval, rousing Baroque and stolen carols

A December afternoon, and I’m watching the afternoon sky turn from light to dark grey to black. An overgrown holly bush waves vigorously at me through the window. It is a stark backdrop, but one softened by an ancient magic from my speakers as I take a deep dive into my favourite early Christmas Carols. By this I mean ‘early’ as in properly ancient, rather than from the seasonal pop classics of the 80s or 90s (although I have a lot of favourites from then too), and neither am I talking about Victorian hymns or classical pieces. My love of early carols means going all the way back, not just one hundred years or so, but to when some of my favourite music was created. If you plugged in headphones to my constant internal musical streaming monologue you would find the music playing on the pre-wax pre-cylinder would be from the fifth to seventeenth centuries – and this is where we will find the origins of festive music.

A carol didn’t used to specifically refer to a piece of Christmas music, but a seasonal song from any point throughout the year. The most famous non Christmas carol is a summer one, ‘Sumer Is Icumin' which dates from the mid thirteenth century. I could go deep into the fraught subject of ‘what is a carol?’, but for now I want to share with you my top list of old Christmas music. 

An important consideration when choosing with the early music of long dead and anonymous composers is to find the performances that most resonate with you. There are countless versions of the following songs and tunes, but I have trawled and listened and searched, and these are the versions you need to hear. I hope you will agree that this selection sounds as fresh and crisp as a medieval winter's day. Imagine yourself in a thatched cottage (which I have decorated in greenery from the nearby hedgerow), and immerse yourself in this ancient music, it will get you through the darkest season. So enjoy this selection of ancient music and instruments, baroque bowed fiddles, rousing choruses, renaissance serpents, bagpipes and more. It’s a mixture of the old and new, popular and unpopular, sacred and secular, festive, melancholy and experimental. Merry Christmas and Happy Yuletide to you all.

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Tariq Goddard declares that in Jeremy Brett's portrayal of the fictional detective the actor delivered one of the greatest TV performances of all time – one that was so total, it arguably destroyed him

I did not fully believe in Sherlock Holmes’ existence until I first set eyes on Jeremy Brett, the actor smirking mischievously at me from our small television screen in a manner his literary model would have rejected as unserious. As befitting a fictional detective, a fact not altogether obvious on my tour of his ‘house’ 221b Baker Street where he was referred to as a real person throughout, Holmes has been played by over 300 performers. The Sherlock Holmes Society hails Douglas Wilmer, the Grand Vizier in The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad, as the “definitive Sherlock Holmes” (a judgement the actor unsurprisingly agreed with), regarding Brett as “rather embarrassing”. For a role which encompassed everyone from Dracula (Christopher Lee) to Moses (Charlton Heston) opinion on whom the cap best fits is inevitably contested, but for me no one has ever come close to the deranged necromancy of Jeremy Brett, the all seeing eye and keeper of secrets, who played the fictional detective from 1984 to 1994, overseeing my intellectual development and the first fissures in the dominance of terrestrial broadcasting. If Conan Doyle created a deductive case solving machine, venerated for his ability to see past the world of appearances into truth itself, Brett bequeathed Holmes with the missing pieces that turned him into a credible being a precocious boy could hope to one day emulate. 

What makes Brett’s efforts comparable to the American telly-titans that followed in his wake (the most obvious being James Gandolfini’s portrayal of Tony Soprano), is the way he occupied his assumed identity with Shakespearean levels of immersion for over ten years, fairly well destroying his life in the process. Nobody played Holmes more time than Brett – 41 episodes, out of 64 stories written by Doyle, several of them film length. He insisted that the screenwriters did not deviate from the original stories, and prepared for the role with close textual analysis bolstered by his personal identification with the character (which he always referred to as ‘you know who’). As a consequence Brett ended up cannibalising his own sense of self in an artistic triumph and personal tragedy that ranks among the most disturbing achievements of British drama.

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'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a clump of earthworms in a musician’s mouth. John and Luke, as has become part of tQ’s annual tradition, try and stifle their beleaguered coughing fits long enough to praise the the length… the depth… the breadth… the sheer freaky might of this year’s Albums of the Year chart. As well as Aya's Hexed – which contains one of the weirdest sleeve photos in recent memory – the pair summon vast reserves of praise for spiritual black metal band, Agriculture, and pre-eminent avant pop bridesmaids, These New Puritans. The pair both dream of being able to hang up their editors’ hats to take early retirement but realise that until Liars are rightfully recognised as the greatest American band of the 21st Century and Canadian progressive hardcore band NOMEANSNO reform to tour the world again, there is still too much work to be done! The pair also find time to dive into the deceptive depths of Coil’s magnificent Black Antlers LP, and to heap laurels upon the continued excellence of Charli xcx.  Thanks to Alannah Chance for producing the pod, and all of your support as subscribers.

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Of all the editorial we create on The Quietus, it’s our annual Albums of the Year chart that has the biggest reach, always read by tens of thousands of people in the 12 months that follow its publication. We know that being featured in it makes a massive difference to artists, especially those from the further reaches, and hopefully leads people to the wider musical ecosystem we celebrate on tQ. If you’ve seen the site today or opened the missive in our main mailing list, you’ll already have seen that the playlist of about eight hours of music is in the feature itself – if you’ve missed that, the links are below. Were it not for your support, this chart would not exist, and neither would tQ. We’d like to thank you for your continuing help in celebrating the best in new music against an increasingly hellish landscape *makes sweeping gestures in horror* out there, and for being the hard currency behind our antidote to the algorithm. A reminder in case you missed anything last month, the Low Culture Podcast featured John and Luke discussing the cultural history of Doc Martens boot, the Low Culture Essay remembered Ozzy Osbourne in the context of the strange 1989 Moscow Music Peace Festival, and the Organic Intelligence newsletter was on the Legacy of Bollywood disco legend, Bappi Lahiri. Subscriber Plus members can find November’s bonus playlists – including David Lynch, Kevin Shields essentials, early Cabaret Voltaire and more – here. With many thanks again for all your help keeping the power on.

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In the fiftieth Organic Intelligence, Anu Shukla explores the influence of Bappi Lahiri on Indian music both at home and as an inspiration to British Asian artists including M.I.A.

Draped in his signature gold chains, velvet jacket, and glittering bracelets, Bollywood’s flamboyant disco king Bappi Lahiri would have been basking in the limelight of his 73rd birthday this week. Born in Jalpaiguri, West Bengal, the prolific composer who electrified 80s India with his disco-infused anthems died on 15 February 2022, leaving behind a legacy that democratised music by bringing Western beats to Indian streets – sounds previously only accessible to the elite – and reshaped the country’s musical landscape by inspiring new generations of Indian electronic artists. 

Lahiri discovered disco for the first time in 1979 at a club in Chicago listening to Saturday Night Fever, an experience that would change the course of Bollywood music forever. With the electronic high hats of ‘Jimmy Jimmy” and the disco funk of ‘Jawani Janeman’, Lahiri emerged as one of India’s first pioneers of sample culture, helping to spearhead cultural globalisation. He inspired Bollywood contemporaries like Charanjit Singh to experiment with the TB-303 and TR-808 that powered the creation of the acid-soaked 1982 cult classic ‘Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat’. 

Affectionately known as Bappi ‘da’ (meaning ‘brother’ in Bengali), he transported hearts and minds to another dimension with his music, becoming a household name not just across the Indian subcontinent, but also among the UK’s South Asian diaspora in the 80s. Racism was at an all-time high in Thatcher’s Britain and fascist, anti-immigrant hostility still surged – the echoes of Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech had not died away

Bollywood gave Brit-Asian communities a sense of belonging in the face of all that. Everyone went out and bought video cassette recorders so they could rent Bollywood films and tape TV shows like Network East that featured bhangra bands like Alaap and singers such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Gurdas Maan.

As a kid, my jaw dropped to numbers like ‘I Am A Disco Dancer’ and the ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’-sampling ‘Auva Auva Koi Yahan Nache Nache’. And as I began to explore this glitzy synth-soaked sound of Bollywood disco through a Brit Asian lens, I suddenly felt not only proud of my Indian roots but empowered to give the middle finger to the racists.

Music became a liberating force for the second generation South Asian diaspora and by the early 90s we were already buying albums by the likes of Fun-da-Mental and going to bhangra ‘daytimers’ – underground raves where DJs mashed up Bollywood disco with bhangra, R&B and hip-hop. 

Artist M.I.A., who grew up on Bollywood disco in Sri Lanka, later paid homage to Lahiri with an autobiographical rework of ‘Jimmy’, while Indian artist DJ Harry Anand kicked off a remix wave around Lahiri’s 1981 classic ‘Thoda Resham Lagta Hai’, popularising the sampled hook (“Kaliyon ka chaman tab banta hai”) in the aftermath of DJ Quik’s unlicensed use of the track in Truth Hurts’ ‘Addictive’ - a move that led to a successful lawsuit by Lahiri. 

Back in India, Lahiri has continued to inspire new generations of artists. DJs like Suggahunny blend Bollywood with breaks and electronica, most notably in her live Rickshaw DJ set featuring remixes of retro tracks. Similarly, DJ Nida has paid tribute with a set featuring Lahiri remixes of tracks like ‘Hari Om Hari Om’. Many others cite him as a key influence, reimagining classics such as ‘Habiba’, ‘Disco Dancer’, and tracks like this MadStarBase remix of ‘Mausam Hai Gaane Ka'.

This new wave of emerging artists - both across the Indian subcontinent and within the South Asian diaspora - is living proof of Lahiri’s enduring legacy. He brought disco to the Indian mainstream with infectious energy, producing 180 songs for 35 films at his peak in 1986 and earning a place in the Guinness Book of Records. Open about borrowing tunes in an era when it was seen as inspiration rather than plagiarism, Bappi Da effectively introduced the concept of sampling to India, sparking a remix culture that continues to influence producers and DJs everywhere. Here’s a look at some of the tracks that cement his lasting impact.

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Although they went to the same primary school, Duncan Wheeler knew little about Ozzy Osbourne until Jon Bon Jovi led him to a VHS of a gig that counts as one of the strangest live events in rock history

In recent years, the legacy of Black Sabbath in Birmingham has been increasingly recognised, from 2019’s Home of Metal: Black Sabbath exhibition, various tourist campaigns, and of course most recently the epic Back To The Beginning concert that took place at Villa Park on 5 July 2025, only twenty days before the death of Ozzy Osbourne. It was not ever thus, however. Like Ozzy, I went to the Prince Albert Primary School in Aston, but he was hardly celebrated by either teachers or pupils. Ozzy popped up in conversations around Aston (one local barfly always claimed to be his illegitimate child), but he had largely been forgotten at school. One ageing teacher who insisted my middle name was Gregory, not Graham because my mother was Scottish (?) was similarly confused about Ozzy: she claimed Jimmy Osmond had attended the school – at eight, I knew better than to pay much attention to many of my teachers. When I attended Prince Albert, it was hardly a centre of academic excellence (we had books claiming man might one day land on the moon) but Ozzy had it much worse: his dyslexia went undiagnosed, and few teachers had great expectations of students expected to become factory fodder.

By the 1980s, the area had changed massively since Osbourne’s day. I was the only white child in my class, and in the space of a generation Prince Albert had gone from being a breeding ground for heavy metal fans and musicians to being a multi-ethnic playground in which Steel Pulse, The Beat and later Apache Indian were local heroes. I discovered hard rock and heavy metal just as I was leaving Prince Albert to go to the local grammar school (located just down the road, but a different world). My point of entry wasn’t the innovative heaviness of Sabbath, but the lighter American rock of Aerosmith and Bon Jovi.Yet they were the gateway drug to what had been on my doorstep all along. Wandering around Tower Records in Piccadilly Circus, I was drawn to a set of two VHS tapes featuring recordings from the Moscow Music Peace Festival. The iconography of the front cover  –  the double-headed Eagle of the Russian coat of arms into which the flags of the home countries of the musicians who participated had been inserted – was suitably heavy to convince me that the tapes were a worthy investment for my pocket money:. Back in Birmingham, I opened the tape with the recording of Bon Jovi with excitement and must have watched it a dozen times before curiosity got the better of me and I looked at Ozzy's performance. I knew some but not all of his songs, and was shocked that young Russians were more familiar with them than the mighty Jovi songbook. When Jon Bon Jovi was interviewed in 1989 about the Moscow Peace Festival, he said perhaps the most remarkable thing about what was being dubbed the Russian Woodstock would be that Ozzy was on the radar of George H.W Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev (neither would get as close George W. who made the mistake of introducing a pissed Prince of Darkness at a White House Correspondents Dinner – Gorbachev, a more discerning host, did invite the Scorpions to the Kremlin in 1991).

The Moscow Music Peace Festival ranks amongst the strangest live events in rock history, but it also tells us a lot about the international music industry and soft power. Chicago born Don McGhee was a player in 1970s Miami who was busted in 1982 for his involvement in a deal importing weed into the US from Colombia. Before sentencing took place, he had become arguably the biggest manager of hard rock bands on the planet with Bon Jovi, Mötley Crue and the Scorpions on his roster. This enabled him to negotiate a lighter sentence (almost all of his fellow defendants did prison time) in exchange for, ironies of ironies, launching a drugs and alcohol-awareness charity for which the first major rock festival in Moscow would serve as a fundraiser.

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“I’ve been wearing Dr Martens for so long,” says tQ co-pilot Luke Turner, “that I can look down at my feet and can connect with all these different bits of my past – it’s a lovely thing for a shoe to be able to do.” In this week’s podcast, Luke and John Doran eschew the usual album, book or film to discuss the enduring popularity of the Dr Martens boot. They’ve both been wearing this distinctive leather footwear since their tender teenage years, when the hard leather of the OG Dr Martens boot would tenderise their feet while being worn in. John and Luke discuss the history of the boot, its origins in post-war Germany, and the initial popularity with housewives before it moved across Europe to be made by Griggs, the family shoemakers who added the yellow stitch and turned Dr Martens into a global brand. The DM boot has of course been ubiquitous among different cultural tribes, from The Who onwards through punk, mod, OI, indie, and rave. Now, though, it reflects our fragmented, less tribal culture by being worn by artists in any genre going, from the underground to pop red carpets. They ask if new DMs are as hard on the feet as they used to be, discuss the crazy Shoe For Life offer that ought to keep Luke shod until he shuffles off to join the silent majority, and ponder far right associations – and whether they’ve been transcended. Luke and John finish by talking about how brands now end up spending an absolute fortune to be associated with music, with the most egregious examples of this happening in the early 00s – tune in to hear the time Luke commissioned the then extremely thirsty John to go on a 24 hour series of gigs at which all that there was to drink was pissy lager Carling. Thanks to our producer Alannah Chance for putting this together, and all of you our subscribers for helping tQ survive.

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Thanks from all of us at tQ for supporting another month of examining and celebrating the best new music, new and old. Hopefully those of you in the Subscriber Plus tier are getting the swing of things when it comes to the new bonus playlists we’re sending out to give a sonic accompaniment to our features. Last month, they came from Hüsker Du, Severed Heads, Galaxie 500, Chicks On Speed, Soulwax and Mulatu Astatke, with along with the Baker’s Dozen selections of Sudan Archives and Ron Mael. These can all be found, with their accompanying editorial, here. This month our round-up playlist contains four-and-a-half hours of music, including Rosalía’s stunning collaboration with Björk and Yves Tumor, Lankum’s cover of ‘Ghost Town’, alongside The Soft Pink Truth, Hey Colossus, Bruise Blood, Jerskin Fendrix, HAAi, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Lily Allen, The Utopia Strong, Sunn O))), Kara-Lis Coverdale and much more. In case you missed any of the rest of your subscriber perks, they were the Low Culture Podcast on Brian Eno’s Another Green World, a Low Culture Essay on Michael Mann’s The Keep, and our Organic Intelligence on the music on Southend avant-rock. And a reminder – it’s just under a month until we’ll be sending out the epic Quietus Album of the Year playlist, a listening treasure trove that wouldn’t exist without your subscription. Your playlist can be found below the paywall:

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A dank night in London’s Docklands. After clocking off a shift at a nearby magazine, I’d ducked into dinky and wood-pannelled Limehouse pub The Grapes for a jug of Landlord. Waiting for the quiz to start, I heard a gasp from the back room. Rounding the door and padding the corridor in slippers and gown traipsed Sir Ian McKellen. Compering the quiz is an ad hoc predilection of the great actor – it’s his pub – but I was, along with a cohort of shocked tourists, rather starstruck. 

It wasn’t the vision of Gandalf, pilfering chips as he drifted towards the bar, that did it. Nor the definitive King Lear, mellifluously barking questions on spaniel breeds. Instead, what startled was the sudden presence of Dr Theodor Cuza: scleroderma riddled Jewish historian and protagonist of The Keep. This 1982 horror flick set in the Second World War was Michael Mann’s maligned second picture, McKellen’s worst ever performance, and one of the more batshit films of the past half century. 

A longtime Mann apathist, there’s no revelatory nostalgia to my love of The Keep. It existed ambiently in my life for years before I bothered watching it via its artwork – a woozy blue/purple approximation of the title fashioned into a blocky castle – intermittently popping up on Netflix, subsumed by the platform’s morass of crap. One evening I pressed play, and I’ve been transfixed by the thing since. 
On paper, The Keep is objectively fantastic. Visually stupefying, with a fine ensemble cast and a rollicking Tangerine Dream soundtrack, it sees a battalion of tired Nazis diverted from the Russian front to a remote Transylvanian village. Here, they accidentally release a primordial force beneath a bizarre castle, which takes corporeal form as it nobbles the fascists, and must be returned whence it came.

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