When you listen to ken, you’ll think of “the 80s.” While it’s easy to evoke that period with instrumentation, it’s more difficult to do so with what you might call “a sensibility.” Sure, ken has a lot of synths, but so did Your Blues.

More about: Destroyer

Collaboration is a vital element of rap music. Whether to further affirm the friendship between a pair of MCs or to simply reap the benefits of two lucrative rappers’ combined star power, hip-hop frequently revels in the camaraderie of a shared bill. But in rock & roll, artist alliances are far more precarious: so fine and capricious is the line between genuine artistic symbiosis and insipid, money-hungry tripe.

More about: Courtney Barnett, Kurt Vile

There’s a thin line between being underground and keeping your head in the sand. As the world of rap expands, its margins necessarily become more far-flung; amidst the genre’s expansion beyond the confines of a singular identity, its warring factions have increasingly defined themselves against, rather than alongside, one another. In refuting the notion of mainstream appeal, the personality and idiosyncrasies of the artist take priority — a victory for the individual, but also an easy path to excessive self-indulgence.

More about: Open Mike Eagle

How is anybody supposed to deal with the daily horror that we’re subjected to these days? The level of violence that we’ve become accustomed to is terrifying. Every morning promises to present something even more sickening and death-bringing than the day before. The abusive, prejudiced mechanics of our society have become so tightly woven together that, even now, in a time when our insidious, pervasive behavior is more pronounced than ever, we have never felt more powerless. What can we do to stop this? Will things really get better?

More about: Machine Girl

“You start something, and then you listen to it and ask it to tell you what it wants to be next, and you just keep working that way until I don’t know what, because no one had actually done that before.”
– Morton Subotnick, on Silver Apples of the Moon

“The music wanted to be something very peculiar and I changed it a lot in response to that.”
– Rafael Toral, on Moon Field

More about: Rafael Toral