There is so much music out there and so many ways of listening to it that I increasingly succumb to a kind of catatonia when trying to decide what to play. Or maybe I’m just getting old and confused. My mind can feel like an old reel of film, derelict, spliced and joined with [...]

Let This Be The Apogee of African Guitar Appropriation and Auto-tune!

Records came to me this year in waves. At times I felt like I was swimming in sound, all murky and disorienting, and I would grab for whatever was safest. Some of my life preservers this year included albums by Scott [...]

The indestructable beat of Africa seems to loom larger in a lot of this year’s music and that’s probably why I hear a more prominent influence of the Talking Heads. Together with Brian Eno they were progenitors of a pop songcraft that used african elements while pushing at the boundaries of popular music [...]