https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrGD6w6n0LABoko Yout is some kind of alien character learning to live in a human world. This is a catchy song!

https://laurajurd.bandcamp.com/album/the-big-friendly-albumLaura Jurd is a UK based trumpet player (Thanks Jason for the tip!). This album is on the playful side of her work, it’s a happy time!

This concert was a little different than most. While most of the time each artist comes out and does their set, they took turns doing a few songs each and did a few together. There isn’t too much else to say, it was pretty good. We stayed at the Omni Hotel and took the Marta train back and forth. State Farm Arena was in walking distance

My favorite music of 2025!

Voilà and please enjoy - for the 21st time - Said the Gramophone's favourite songs of the year. One hundred remedies for the year two thousand twenty-five: selected by me, Sean, up in Montreal. Songs I love more than demon-hunters,...

Song two.

The story of the album Tête-à-Tête, by Annea Lockwood and Ruth Anderson

Keysound is 20 this year; Dusk + and I have been producing together for longer. Turns out I've started to notice there's some underlying patterns…Workflow: over time maybe our music making follows an underlying pattern?What if this is the workflow for how Dusk and I write music?Influences & inspirationValuesArchetypes (sometimes)Jamming x visionTracks 1/ Influences & inspirationWe

I continue to expand my Rudy Van Gelder discography for collectors. When I first created the discography, it was less than half the size it is now and I was really only focusing on titles from the ’50s and ’60s I considered “collectible”. This meant albums that were initially unreleased at the time ... More→

This is the fifth year I've done Looptober, a Fediverse exercise where you post a little track every day for all of October. Last year I did as much as I could with the Arduino which made it a bit musically uninteresting. My technical constraint this year was that I …

I often get asked by my students and their parents which drum kit to buy, so I’ve put together a guide covering acoustic kits, electric kits, and practice pads.Written from a drum teacher’s perspective, it’s primarily aimed at those buying their first kit. The advice is useful for anyone buying a drum kit, but if you’re looking to purchase one for gigging or recording, these recommendations aren’t tailored for that.You can read the full guide here → Drum Kit Buying Guide

Every talk leaves a lot of scraps, and Beyond the Machine is no exception. I read a couple books, watched about 20 hours of interviews with Brian Eno, listened to 10 hours of podcasts with Rick Rubin to make sure I wasn’t being uncharitable. (One podcast was a discussion between Rubin and Eno. A really nice listen!) I clocked some serious headphone time with Holly Herndon’s discography, which I’m eager to do again. Listening to all three of her albums in one big gulp was a trip. There were ...

Right at the end of that fabled partnership, more than any other Smokey/Temptations joint, is a song that sounds more like the Miracles than the Miracles themselves. (9)Continue reading →

Recently I had been noticing a number of artists, often very popular ones, were not having their catalogs available on Napster. I was trying to curate some playlists for my gym time, and I just couldn’t always find what I was looking for. I then found out and realized that Sony is suing Napster (again, […]

The Idea Thanks to my dad’s good taste in music, my childhood had a killer soundtrack: classic rock, 70s folk music, and 80s new wave. At home or in the car, a constant rotation of The Beatles, Cream, Simon and Garfunkel, Talking Heads, and The Human League. Things were off to a good start. Then in 1995, I encountered something completely different - techno: I had never heard music like this: blatantly artificial sounds at a blazingly-fast BPM.

Two decades ago today, I walked into an unassuming converted collection of terrace houses, somewhere in Wandsworth, South London, and began working in the music industry. It was purely by chance that I ended up there, really. Growing up, I had always wanted to work in music, but I never really knew how, or even where to start. I had no connections, no understanding of the industry beyond a vague notion of what a record label was, and certainly no resources to work as an unpaid intern — the “...