Music

Charles Aubin, Aruna D’Souza, Brendan Fernandes, Ligia Lewis and Paul Maheke take stock of the performance world in the wake of COVID-19 

The writer and musician’s latest album, Mandinga Times, is a bracing ode to apocalyptic collapse

The album is a timely affirmation for the global African diaspora, but it can’t be accepted as a universal representation of global Blackness

Pop Smoke’s posthumous release is an authoritarian play on the senses

The artist’s ambitious fourth studio album is a genre-bending journey of defiance and radiant elation

For David Grubbs, an onrush of music has led to a rethinking of musical ‘speed’ itself

After Hours is filled with a familiar, sometimes crushing, sense of yearning for something more

For her latest show at Kerlin Gallery, the artist incites a state of half-recognition reminiscent of Alzheimer’s 

The 2013 album is a compelling record of our collective fracturing 

The restless, rageful ‘No Home Record’ lures as much as it discomfits

From blues to jazz to the baroque – new fiction from Claire-Louise Bennett

Ian F. Martin traces the life and career of the pioneering Japanese musician, on the 50th anniversary of his first record

Recent R&B albums by Kelela, Lafawndah, serpentwithfeet and Solange tune to newly radiant blues

‘I was 13, with a group of friends, and it was my first time hearing anything so Black and British – and, also, so working class’

‘It would be easy to cry to this tune, but difficult to dance to it’

‘Your songs are always full of colour and samples, beats and melodies, dizzying rhythms and more melodies still’

‘The way she stumbled on stage, with her smeared lips and perfect legs, appeared at once criminally affected and wildly persuasive’

Hamza Walker, director of LAXART, has selected five eminent jazz musicians to perform during Frieze Music presented with BMW

‘Over the radio, he asked listeners a simple question: what is your favourite sound of Beijing?’

‘He wasn’t English, but he was playing an English game, the fag in the Establishment, a light entertainer, undisguised yet somehow unseen, an open secret’