Monday

Arca announced a new album, out Friday. And although I am, technically, press, I do not have an XL Records plug, so my excitement gets to stew for another three days like everyone else’s.

São Tomé and Príncipe had an election that broke the mould of their political system. Carlos Vila Nova first came to power in 2021 with ADI backing; a Christian, “centre-right” party (I use the term for ease, though I think the left-right spectrum is mostly redundant at this point). This year he ditched the ADI, ran as an independent, and won anyway. His line has always been that a president’s job is to be a neutral arbiter between the government, the assembly and the courts, rather than a party’s person in the big chair. Whether that holds is another question entirely, but it’s a rare thing to run on and a rarer thing to win with.

Tuesday

I went to, and helped organise, the Tempa takeover at Kindred, the best radio station (and record shop) in London. It went smoothly, at least as far as I could tell, and I got to hang out with two of my goats, Introspekt and Carré. Kindred are running a day party this Saturday outside the store in Farringdon, so if you’re free, head down!

Wednesday

Gabriel Moses shot the latest EAFC (fka FIFA) Ultimate Edition cover. I love Gabriel Moses. This is… not it. Idk. It feels like he had so much more in him, and it doesn’t even give FIFA. Happy for him, obviously. But…

A new venue, funded by the Arts Council, is opening in Tottenham, with its first event this Friday. 250 capacity, which I’m happy about, though it does read a little posh; it describes itself as a “sound-led listening space.” But you know. Don’t judge a book, etc.

Thursday

Apparently the V&A has an institutional racism problem. Unsurprising, if still disheartening. Their programming has been making real strides, but there’s always dissonance between what an institution curates for the public and how it runs behind its own doors.

In the evening I hit the opening of Ted Childish’s debut exhibition, ‘BE KIND TO HIM WORLD,’ documenting the life and times of Ned Pobaby. I liked it, and I don’t say that lightly. If you, like my (unnamed) friend, are “so curious who is this Ned and what happened to him,” head down before it closes on Thursday.

Friday

Worldpeace DMT dropped their latest project. I saw them live a few weeks (months?) ago and they were great. can’t wait to listen, which is exactly why I haven’t: I’m holding out for the right moment. I’m gassed.

In the evening, a Nike party in King’s Cross for a brand new trainer. Fun night, absolutely rammed, and the lights in the venue were nuts. I ran into bare people too, both new and old additions to my life, which was nice.

Saturday

Nell Frizzell wrote a great piece for British Vogue on the summer holidays and what they do to parents and children alike. I’ve always thought the summer holidays were too long, and I can’t imagine the toll of stacking childcare, finances and work on top of one another for six straight weeks.

One good way to spend a weekend, though, is taking your dog to Margate to see the sea for the first time like I did. She was shy for maybe ten minutes, and then she was chasing seagulls through the water and swimming back to shore like she’d been doing it her whole life. She’s still not made peace with birds being able to stay airborne for that long; fair enough when your only frame of reference is the fat London pigeons I suppose.

Sunday

A horrific attack at Berlin Pride left one person dead and sixteen injured, and handed regressive grifters (cough, Nigel Farage, cough, the AfD) fresh ammo to pretend they care about queer people while inciting hatred against Muslims and ignoring everyone actually affected. I’m just glad it wasn’t worse.

Late afternoon, I headed to the Yaku sample sale and workshop, where I made a keychain out of an old Unknown T tee and picked up plenty of tips for my new, incoming era.

Until next week,
Sik

P.S. I really like the new Charli album. The new Nia Archives, not so much. Also it’s my birthday next week (August 4th), I’m finally gonna be an adult. The world is ready for me, I hope. I fear the opposite.

It’s been a few weeks, so here’s the short version of what I’ve been up to: a few nights in Kent with a friend, including a day in Margate, which was every bit as good as people promise. The Lucid PR summer party, which was worth it even just for the sight of my Epic Records gaffer a little tipsy. I made my SHOWstudio debut, reviewing the latest Louis Vuitton and Dior menswear shows and having tea and biscuits with Nick and Charlotte Knight. And I’ve been glued to the World Cup (plus a bit of Wimbledon, when the football lets me).

I also finally finished Jesse Bernard’s ‘Escaping Babylon’ and Candice Carty-Williams’s ‘Queenie,’ the latter right on time for the sequel. Both worth your time.

Anyway. On with the week.

Monday

Jay-Z is coming to London on 4 September. I already have my tickets and I am, frankly, outrageously excited. His first solo London show in over a decade. Rumour has it he’s bringing out Giggs, and while I’d take that, I’m more than happy with just Jay. Anyone else going?

Tuesday

Andre King, co-founder of the Lion and Lamb, has been accused of predatory behaviour, with the venue and his co-founder cutting ties with him entirely. It’s grim, and it’s grimly familiar; the volume of this stuff you hear about in the creative industries, and in music especially, is its own kind of open secret. The people who came forward deserve better than the venue’s statement and a news cycle. I hope the accountability doesn’t stop there.

In the evening, I went to see Lily Allen at the O2. Entirely underwhelming. The set was cool to look at, but I wanted more from the show inside it. And no opener?? At the O2?? Ridiculous.

Wednesday

M&S are making their London Fashion Week debut this September. Great news for the BFC, who are presumably being paid a shit ton of money. Less clear what M&S are adding to the schedule, exactly. But the BFC needs the money so I’ll take it, I suppose.

In the evening I gave a lecture at Lost Property on some of my favourite London urban legends: the one about Sneakbo turning into a cat, the Highgate Vampire, the Beast of Hackney. Good fun, though I learned the hard way that a room can be entirely Highgate Vampire-literate and have not one single Sneakbo head in it. Wrong crowd, I guess.

Thursday

Jorja Smith answered 20 questions for AnOther. I would love to interview her; she comes across so unbothered, so genuinely chill. And I am, admittedly, a sucker for a Midlands accent (cough cough Jude Bellingham).

Ted Childish has announced his debut exhibition, ‘BE KIND TO HIM WORLD,’ opening 23 July. I’m intrigued. I’m also braced: I hope it isn’t one of those shows that’s so busy being internet-ready and forward-thinking that it forgets to be any good.

In the evening I went to the Surfinia exhibition at the Koppel Project. Didn’t do a thing for me, if I’m honest. Possibly I’m missing something. Tell me if I’m missing something.

Friday

Roots Manuva’s ‘Witness (1 Hope)’ turns 25. An all-timer, and the video too. Twenty-five years and it still doesn’t sound like anything else. Iconic isn’t the word, but it’s the word.

Joe James released his debut album, ‘The Ends, Never Ends.’ I’d been counting down to this one, so it pains me to say I was a little let down. I think he could’ve gone harder, and I think it could’ve been more considered, which, yes, is a contradictory ask, but you know what I mean when you hear it. There are flashes. The Kelela album is supposed to be excellent and I’ve still not got to it. Next week, promise.

In the evening we celebrated Corbin Shaw’s birthday at Avalon Cafe in Bermondsey. Really lovely. I finally met a few people I’d only ever spoken to online, bumped into faces I hadn’t seen in a while, and met a handful of new ones. Rare that a night does all three.

Saturday

To the pub with my friends to watch England (narrowly) beat Norway. Bellingham fever in full swing. I fancy us against Argentina, and I’ve got the pun locked and loaded already…if we win, it’ll make the newsletter.

Sunday

Went with a friend to the Dove’s Words’ first pop-up. Nice to see Mya Nicoll again (my Cypriot twin) though I left empty-handed. Saving for uni and a new laptop, but if I wasn’t I would’ve left with the whole shop.

Until next week (fr this time),
Sik

P.S. I wanna write a book.

Welcome back to the Editor’s Log. Great week, even if it’s far too hot to function. Mostly, though, I’m just glad to be done with school forever (tbh, still can’t quite believe it’s all done).

Monday

Tummy Ache has released its Horny issue, which I’m excited to dig into, though I can’t shake the feeling this particular market is firmly in the Erotic Review’s grip. Room for two, hopefully.

Tuesday

Dev Hynes is at work on his sixth film score, this time for Olivia Wilde’s new A24 film, ‘The Invite.’ I never made it through ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ (by most accounts the press tour was the better watch), but I’ve got high hopes for this one; the cast includes Seth Rogen, Edward Norton, Penelope Cruz, and more.

Wednesday

Bianca Saunders won the BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund! I’m a big, big Bianca Saunders fan, my favourite pair of trousers is hers, as I’ll tell anyone who stands still long enough. She’s also announced her move into womenswear, arriving next year.

Two Shell have announced their next album, out October 16th. Everything they do intrigues me, so I’m very ready for this one, blurring the line between man and machine.

Thursday

Fimiguerrero dropped a surprise EP, and it’s really good. Fimi’s always been one of my favourites from the underground, his album ‘Immigrant’ is essential listening, so if this is the direction he’s heading, count me in.

I also sat my last ever exam! Thank god. Still, no rest for the wicked…

Friday

The new London Museum opens this November, with treasures including the guitar from the cover of The Clash’s ‘London Calling,’ Banksy’s ‘Piranhas,’ and Charles Dickens’ chair. They’re pitching it as more of a social space too, with programming that runs to free afternoon tea parties and family events. (A museum that feeds you? Sold.)

Magculture is throwing its first ever fair, with works from the Erotic Review, Mitchell Bradshaw, and others. It’s set for July 4th, and best believe I’ll be heading down.

After that I hit Ellen Poppy Hill’s Alfie’s Antiques pop-up, where she was selling dresses and hangers. I adore all her work, though this time I restrained myself and didn’t buy a thing. Alfie’s Antiques is very cool though, not least for the (fake) shark lurking in their koi pond.

Then it was Wingstop before EartH Hackney for Eastern Margins and Maxxing. Amil Raja’s set was a highlight, and it was very cool to see Thaiboy Digital live. I interviewed him a couple of months ago for The Face, though it closed before the piece could run.

Saturday

Nike very kindly invited me to their box at Wembley for Harry Styles and Shania Twain. First time in a box, which was nuts, and everyone was lovely. I can’t say Shania Twain quite won me over, but Harry Styles was very cool. I won’t claim to be his biggest fan, yet I had a great time. And the stamina: nearly two hours straight. Very, very impressive.

Sunday

The Dove’s Word hosts its first pop-up on July 12th, with all sales going to the Malala Fund. The line-up includes Mya Nicoll, Lucila Safdie, Aaron Esh, and Ashley Williams. An honourable endeavour, and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s on offer and hopefully buying something.

Until next week,
Sik

P.S. Hope everyone had fun at Fete. Next year, I’m there.

Welcome back to the Editor’s Log. I know it’s a Wednesday, I’m two days late. Shoot me. Tomorrow is my last exam ever, and then it’s freedom, and on-time newsletters, for the rest of my life (or, well, until I start uni in September). Safe to say, I’ll be active every night this summer.

Monday

Rihanna looks amazing on the cover of EE72. Of course she does, it’s Rihanna. Cover of the year, perhaps? It feels very vintage and yet still very now. Shot by Szilveszter Mako, who also did that viral Elle Fanning shoot a while back. The man is on a run.

Tuesday

Evilgiane’s new album drops this Friday, set to feature Nourished by Time, xaviersobased, YT, and plenty more. I love his work with Jawnino and John Glacier, but I’ve never really dug into the rest of his discography, so hopefully this is a nice way in. Especially intrigued by the Nourished by Time and Kwes E features.

Wednesday

N4T was in Dazed! I really enjoyed ’GHANAMUSTGO,’ and it’s a lovely chat digging into the project (RIP BeauBeau’s). Though, if I’m honest, I think it would’ve landed better dropping closer to the next album.

The trailer for The Social Reckoning is out. I’m not one for unnecessary sequels (Devil Wears Prada 2 and the later Toy Story films will not be seeing me) so I take anything like this with a generous pinch of salt. That said, Jeremy Strong looks great as Mark Zuckerberg; it’s the same muscle that made him so good as Roy Cohn in The Apprentice. I think I’ll watch this one. Wary, but I’ll watch.

Thursday

66 North very kindly invited me to pick up a new jacket for summer, and I blagged a hat and some socks while I was at it. Perfect timing, too, because I’m planning a trip up to Scotland with my dad and my dog this summer. We’re heading to the Highlands, so if anyone has recommendations, send them my way!

Then I had an exam before hitting the ASICS x Griff party. I’d never had a Negroni, and I can now confirm I really do not enjoy a Negroni, but the sushi going round was lovely, and the space, designed by Kat Milne, was beautifully done. I really like Kat Milne’s work. She also did the Climax shop here in London, which somehow feels sterile and uninviting, unlike this space, which felt warm. Strange and impressive given the two are clearly cut from the same cloth.

After that, the opening of Basic Space at the Old Selfridges Hotel. Not the best-curated thing I’ve ever seen, but at the end of the day it’s a posh car-boot sale for rich design fiends, so what was I expecting. Cool to see more of YY’s work in the flesh, plus a few other bits and bobs, though nothing else really blew me away.

Friday

David Hockney died. I’ve never truly been a fan of the work, but the influence and legacy are undeniable. I should probably sit down and give it all another proper look.

In its first London sale of South Asian modern and contemporary art in seven years, all 93 lots at Christie’s sold above their presale estimates. Kattingeri Krishna Hebbar and Abanindranath Tagore (yes, nephew of the legendary, if slightly controversial, Rabindranath Tagore) both set auction records. South Asian art is clearly having a moment on the circuit; how much of that money actually reaches South Asian artists, though, I’m far less hopeful about.

RWD Magazine is back! I do wonder whether it’s quite the right moment, and whether they can reposition for a younger generation, but I’m rooting for them.

I hit up the Westside Gunn popup with a friend. The prices were ludicrous (cheapest record was around £400, plus £75 for the man himself to sign it), so, safe to say, I bought nothing. Then on the walk home we found a £300 JD gift card lying on an otherwise deserted street. The universe provides. We definitely had fun that day.

Saturday

We’ve got our first proper look at the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. There was a great interview in The New Yorker a couple of weeks ago about where he’s at, how he’s feeling these days, and how hands-on he was with the design. I’m no Obama fan (though, god knows, better him than Trump), but I do like the center: public library, playground, museum, etc... Hopefully a productive addition to the area.

Sunday

Heidi Blake wrote a phenomenal, and deeply disturbing, investigative piece for The New Yorker, unpacking Andrew Tate’s rise to the top of the manosphere. Enlightening and grim in equal measure. 100% recommend.

Until next week,

Sik

P.S. No defining song of the summer this year. How curious.

Welcome back to the Editor’s Log. How’s everyone’s week started? Mine’s been pretty good so far, so I’m praying the vibes hold; the weather, less so. I wasn’t out that much this week, but plenty still happened. Let’s get into it…

Monday

Charli XCX has announced her new album, ‘Music, Fashion, Film,’ out July 24th. I know about all the discourse, I’ve seen it all, but if you take the title as an extension of the ironic framework the singles set out, it makes sense. Whether that was her intention is, of course, TBC. It did get me thinking about who I’d put on mine, and, as it stands: Skepta, Grace Wales Bonner, and Gaspar. All up for debate, obviously (music was easily the hardest to pin down).

Joe James also announced his latest, ‘The Ends, Never Ends.’ The first single is fire, and the feature list is stacked: Dave, Hak Baker, Loyle Carner, the lot. I’ve got a Joe James freestyle compilation saved on my phone that I just keep replaying out of sheer excitement. He’s built different. Never forget the time he said, “I love money like middle-aged women love Debenhams.”

And dubstep legend Skream just turned 40! I’ve not been so hot on the newer brosteppy tearout stuff, but the old material is timeless. One of my passwords used to be the date he recorded a certain song (please don’t hack me). He’s a legend.

Tuesday

Morgan Allan, who runs one of my favourite magazines, was interviewed by the Tenth Man. He and the mag are very much ones to watch.

Wednesday

Peyton Dix wrote a phenomenal essay for Vogue about their gay grandmother and everything she taught them. I never knew how legendary their lineage was. Wowww. The essay is 100% worth the read.

The editors of e-Flux have doubled down on their commitment to high-standard journalism, and I’m glad someone’s planting a flag. The decline of the public intellectual is certainly concerning, I don’t know where we’re headed.

Lauren Martin has written a new book on dubstep, featuring interviews with the likes of Mala, Youngsta, and my GOAT, Kode9 (who could easily have made my Music, Fashion, Film cover). It hits shelves from August 3rd (the day before my birthday) so best believe I’ll be first in line. I’m so excited you literally cannot understand.

And Kai Isaiah-Jamal, a hero of mine since before my early teens, has announced new music! They dropped a few things last year that I adored, so a whole tape has me buzzing.

In the morning, I went to the press preview for the latest Serpentine Pavilion and grabbed one of the architects for a quick interview. I quite like it, actually, though it’s very ambitious to try and subvert a wall, a thing built for division and obstruction, into an object of community.

Then I checked out the Cecily Brown exhibition at Serpentine South. Not super crazy about her work, though.

Thursday

The CSM BA show gave birth to some future legends (see my picks here). This really seems like a standout year: Harvey Bigg and Zahra Al-Najjar especially. Very excited to see where they go.

Sonic Liberation Devices have unveiled their latest, the Global South Drum Machine & Sampler. I can’t say I follow all the jargon, but I’d read their manifesto to get a sense of what they’re about.

On Road is running music journalism workshops, for beginners and old hands alike. Everyone there is brilliant, so if you fancy getting into the field, I’d defo sign up.

Five Fold is hosting an evening of short films and a Q&A at Young Space tomorrow (Tuesday). They’re so cool, and if I didn’t have an exam on Wednesday, I’d be there in a heartbeat.

I also watched ‘Obsession’ with friends in the evening. It was fun! And very scary! Though I’m not sure I entirely get the hype.

Friday

The legendary Kanya King, who remortgaged her house to put on the first MOBO Awards, has died from bowel cancer, aged 57. She was a true giant of UK music, and she’ll be deeply missed.

In the evening, I headed to the Serpentine for London Gallery Weekend drinks, where I linked Joe and Laurie, two of my favourite writers and a wonderful couple, and got to see the new pavilion in all its glory. Watching it fill up with people actually using it to socialise really won me over. (Although one guy was incredibly rude to me…)

Saturday

I wrote about my picks for London Gallery Weekend, then hit up Floetic’s mixtape launch. From what I caught, I really liked it, and I’m looking forward to the official release. Also, free Wingstop never goes amiss…

Then it was Manor Place for a screening of the England vs New Zealand friendlies. Lovely to catch up with so many people, though I did get pulled off a ledge by a friend… I also blagged a free scarf, so swings and roundabouts. And I met dexter in the newsagent, who was so funny and so nice.

Sunday

Mansfield Museum has an exhibition of the worst album covers ever made. The curator’s only rule was that they had to make him laugh. If you’re in town and fancy a giggle, I reckon it’ll serve you well.

Until next week,
Sik

P.S. Who else is feeling the summer vibes (weather permitting)?!

You can see straight through the brickwork — it’s permeable — and gathering and community clearly sit at the centre of the design. But serpentine walls also carry a history of fortification, and they predate England, going back to ancient Egypt. Was that history part of how you approached this?

We think a lot of the answers to our present climate and social crises lie in vernacular ways of building. So we’re very respectful of ancient construction methods — though we always try to give them a twist and make them contemporary. We love learning from what’s been done for millennia.

Brick has been used for maybe 10,000 years. It was the main material humanity’s first cities were built from, in Mesopotamia. There are records of serpentine walls in ancient Egypt, but they may have been used even earlier. We know they were brought to the UK by Dutch engineers, who had a practice of reclaiming land from the sea — they’d settle along the coast in Suffolk. When the brick tax was imposed at the end of the 18th century, people looked for ways to use as few bricks as possible. And to us it’s amazing that, through the intelligence of the geometry, an undulating wall can do exactly that.

So to me, everything is full of connections. You mention the royal park — we’re very aware that a garden is not the natural world. It’s an allegory for it, an invocation of it. And I’m conscious that this isn’t a crinkle-crankle wall either, but an invocation of one. That matters to us, because through allegory you can hold several meanings at once. That’s what we’re trying to do, subtly, through architecture: to gesture toward broader social questions, and toward a more connected world.

The gaps you look out through also recall the slits archers once fired through at the palaces nearby — symbols of war and of empire. Was that tension, between war and community, something you were thinking about?

For us, architecture should be something you navigate and discover step by step. We love that from afar you read these walls as opaque, almost massive — and then as you get closer you realise they’re actually permeable. There’s a moment of discovery there that I find poetic and beautiful, and that anyone can feel, whether they’re a child or an adult.

It comes from the construction method. If you look at the columns, it’s the same element repeated throughout the whole pavilion — the walls are really one column after another. For us it’s also an evocation of the cactus fences in Oaxaca, in Mexico, traditionally planted to divide plots of land: cactus after cactus, until you’ve drawn a boundary.

Last question. Why build with brick — a material famous for its durability — for something temporary, and then crown it with a roof that recalls a tarp or a marquee?

We believe brick has real endurance. Laying it without mortar is deliberate: it means the pavilion can be disassembled and shipped to a second life, even though it’s only here for a season. And for the roof, we needed something very light — something that could work as a lantern at night, filtering the light. It’s the counterpoint to the floor and the brick below, which reads as a heavy platform, a kind of tray. Against that weight, we wanted the roof to feel almost weightless.

‘a serpentine’ is on view at Serpentine South, Kensington Gardens, from 6 June to 25 October 2026, with a programme of talks, performances, screenings and family events running throughout the summer.

Welcome back to the Editor’s Log.

I was out a lot the back half of this week and had a stupid amount of fun. The whole week was honestly a bit mad, and I think/hope I’ve got some big news to share with you soon… I also dropped an essay on political apathy, so give it a read and let me know what you think if you’ve got a sec. Anyway, let’s get into it!

Monday

Bank holiday, so not a lot going on. I did treat myself to some new books, though: Seamus Heaney’s ‘Beowulf,’ Candice Carty-Williams’s ‘Queenie,’ and Angela Davis’s ‘Women, Race & Class.’ The to-read pile grows ever taller, but I can’t wait to dig in.

Tuesday

The Face is back… and I feel torn. Great that it’s back (obviously), but the old staff, who were truly the most daring in the game, have already been let go, and I’ve got a creeping fear it’ll just morph into another influencer masthead. Or maybe I’m being a pessimist. (Hopefully.)

Solomon PM and Thom Waite have put together a glossary of key Mark Fisher terms. Defo worth a read if you’re new to his work, or just to brush up.

Possibly the earliest copy of the Lancelot-Grail cycle ever to go to auction is heading under the hammer in July. I’ve been one for the esoteric and the occult since I was tiny, so this is absolute catnip for someone like me, though I doubt I’ll scrounge up two mill in time. Anyone fancy chipping in, do give me a shout.

Legendary grime crew Roll Deep have announced a new tape for June 19th. As a fan: buzzing. As a realist: who cares about this besides the diehards? Hmm.

Wednesday

A new 7,000-cap venue is landing in London this October. So unnecessary. Give us clubs! We are not short on concert venues, I promise you. Who’s asking for this?!

Epic Records UK have given their Instagram a glow-up and announced a partnership with Stay Solid Entertainment. Epic’s roster is kinda eclectic, so Stay Solid is an interesting addition, but it makes sense. I just hope they don’t let the Instagram curdle into another standard label account. There’s room to have some fun with it.

Cynthia Igbokwe has officially launched C-STUDIOS!! I’ve never met her, but her roster and body of work might be the most up my alley thing to ever exist: Liz Johnson Artur, Ewusie, Rachel Jones… And there’s a music selection library I am itching to get lost in.

Thursday

Gymskin linked Madonna in a turn of events that’s wild but, weirdly, not entirely unprecedented (still: wtf). He seems like such a sound bloke, and I hope he is, and that the success sticks. No clue why Madonna was flirting with him, or why he looked so completely unaware. Fair play to him, I guess.

In the evening, I hit the Echo Forward private view. Scarlet Griffiths’s work was my fave, her use of colour especially. And always lovely seeing so many faces!

I also… got… DJ decks. I promise, everyone, I won’t become one of those people. Ykwim.

Friday

Eliza Rose dropped her FABRICLIVE album! ‘Pingers’ (the CASISDEAD version) has been running my summer so far. I’m such a fan it’s almost embarrassing.

Fakemink was in Interview Magazine. Not gonna lie, I still haven’t made my mind up on ‘Terrified .’ (essay incoming, perhaps). The article really humanises him, but it also feels like he’s playing a character, though that character might just be him. Either way, he’s the most interesting artist in the UK underground right now, by a long way.

In the afternoon, I linked Nori and Kieran at the studio; half hang, half interview. I’ve interviewed Nori a couple of times over the years, and known them both for ages, so you already know it was a good time. And honestly, few things bring me more joy than being on aux on studio speakers.

Then I headed to Manor Place for the Living Proof Mag launch. Free drinks never go amiss, but nothing ever feels quite real at Manor Place. It’s a bit like Coal Drops Yard: that half-private, half-public limbo. You can never fully feel at ease.

Saturday

Jay-Z shelled down the Roots Picnic. The performance looked fucking insane, and that freestyle… whoosh. We NEED a new album. Please.

In the evening I went to Charli XCX and her husband George’s talk, hosted by Shaad (a brilliant music writer). Massive thanks to my faves at Huxley for the invite! My one gripe with basically every 30-minute Q&A ever is that they spend the whole thing on introductions, but that didn’t happen here. Not once. I loved hearing them riff. They also gave everyone a notepad, a pen, and a disposable camera to take notes and pics with, which was such a nice touch. Arriving was so chaotic too: so many kids who’d queued for hours and hours. The dedication… wow. I also ended up sat next to one of George’s mates, who put me on to the Origin Story Podcast, which I’m yet to check out. I’ll report back next week.

Then Charli and George went b2b at a venue nearby. Literally couple goals. I keep seeing the clips of her mortifying him by dropping ‘Chocolate.’ Rockstar couple in the best possible sense. Now I just need to get the disposable developed. No doubt the photos will be dreadful, but isn’t that the surest sign of a good night?

Sunday

Speaking of power couples: Dua Lipa and Callum Turner got married at Marylebone Town Hall! I fw Dua heavy. Not the music, necessarily, but everything else she’s about, whether it’s the book club, the activism, or any of the rest of it.

And I published an essay on the political apathy of young people today, pulling from Nietzsche and Emily Dickinson all the way through to Little Simz and Burial. The responses have been lovely so far, so have a read and let me know what you reckon.

Until next week,
Sik

P.S. I’m free pretty much all day, every day, from June 19th to September 22nd, so give me a shout to work on anything and everything, even just to grab a coffee and chat. I’m open to basically anything, and I need to stack some bread before uni…

“Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.” So opens Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ in 1915. The image medicalises the sky and anaesthetises the landscape, turning the cosmos into a body incapable of feeling. This is Prufrock: hyper-aware, hyper-articulate, incapable of action. He has “measured out [his] life with coffee spoons” and does not “dare to eat a peach.”

In Capitalist Realism (2009), Mark Fisher invokes Eliot’s argument that “tradition counts for nothing when it is no longer contested.” We inhabit, Fisher says, a culture of repetition and dead time, no longer alive. Writing a century apart, both diagnose a civilisation that has lost the capacity to feel its way forward.

If Prufrock was already etherised in 1915, what does it mean to call numbness a feature of life today? My argument is that the conditions producing it have intensified and become pharmacologically, technologically, and aesthetically managed in ways earlier modernity could not have imagined. Under neoliberalism, numbness has developed from a symptom of modernity into its preferred default mode.

Numbness today is tripartite. It is a symptom (produced by structural conditions), an aesthetic (circulated as style, sound, silhouette), and a strategy (chosen by those for whom feeling is dangerous). The three are inseparable. Aesthetic numbness sells the symptom back as style; strategic numbness is subsumed into the aesthetic; the symptom is reframed as personal choice.

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), Nietzsche describes the figure who terrifies him most. Not the villain, not the nihilist, but the Last Man — comfortable, risk-averse, mildly amused, modestly medicated against discomfort. “What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?” the Last Man asks, and he blinks. The same gesture Dizzee Rascal will describe 120 years later from an East End tower block: “My eyes don’t move left or right, they just blink.” For Nietzsche, the Last Man is who we become when comfort eliminates the conditions for struggle or true feeling. In part we have become him. Not for lack of struggle, but because of how total our manufactured consent has become. Our outrage is contained before we can act. When we have no hope, feeling is futile.

Emily Dickinson, writing after the Civil War’s mass death, suggested “After great pain, a formal feeling comes — / The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs.” She names the body “Mechanical” fifty years before Taylorist factories made the metaphor fact. Her numbness is a defensive structure, not an absence of feeling: “The Loneliness One dare not sound.” To recognise it would be to let it engulf her. Dickinson wrote from seclusion, refusing the literary marketplace that would have got its paws on her work.

Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) sees the living as already dead: “I had not thought death had undone so many.” In The Hollow Men, the post-war generation is “Shape without form, shade without colour, / Paralysed force, gesture without motion.” The modernist numbness Eliot defined was, in part, the residue of mass trauma for which there was no language.

However, you could argue, maybe our numbness is just realism. Maybe people don’t act because action doesn’t truly work. But this is exactly where our moment differs from every prior one. For most of history, the lag between collective will and visible change was enormous: petitions took years to circulate, movements took decades to cohere, and a person could reasonably feel their lifetime was too short to see the result of their effort. That lag has now collapsed. The internet has compressed the machinery of change to near-instantaneous speed: information propagates globally in hours, coordination that once required years of pamphleteering happens in an afternoon, and a cause can reach saturation before a week is out. The mechanisms have been accelerated so radically that if mass feeling were going to translate into structural change, it would, by now, have done so. The infrastructure for it exists and runs at full tilt. Its persistent failure to deliver is not a problem of speed or reach.

The missing variable is who participates. Historically, the tipping point for political change has rarely been the most oppressed acting alone. It has been the moment the middle class joins them, lending numbers, resources, and a stake the state can’t ignore. And this is precisely what reflexive impotence forecloses. The comfortable-enough majority, the people with rent to pay and a face to keep smooth, are the ones most thoroughly anaesthetised and most expensively invested in not feeling. The very group whose participation has historically tipped the balance is the group the system has most successfully numbed. So the machinery spins at full speed and the one input that would move it never arrives.

By the mid-2000s, British electronic music had built a sonic vocabulary for this condition, just as neoliberalism reached maturity. Burial’s records sound like London after everyone has gone home: vinyl crackle, rain, distant sirens, RnB love confessions stripped of context and made to grieve themselves. His music is the texture of the post-rave comedown, drawing you into a tension with no catharsis. Fisher reads him as the exemplary hauntological artist, mourning our “lost futures.” (Check out their interview here).

But Dizzee Rascal got there first. Boy in da Corner opens: “I’m just sittin’ here, I ain’t sayin’ much I just think / My eyes don’t move left or right, they just blink.” His thinking has become a trap: “I think too deep and I think too long.” He knows why… a nostalgia for foreclosed futures: “it was only yesterday, life was a touch more sweet.” This is hauntology before Fisher, written when Dizzee was just sixteen.

Little Simz indicts the structure directly on ‘Angel’: the system doesn’t care “if your mental is on the brink of somethin’ dark / as long as you’re cuttin’ somebody’s payslip.” Dave, on his last album, folds two senses of occupation, wage labour and military rule, into one bind (“Afraid to speak [because] I don’t want it risking my occupation / We got kids under occupation, my parents, they wouldn’t get that”): to speak of the second risks the first. His silence is materially enforced. Numbness is the rational response of someone with rent to pay. And yet he offers a counter: “It’s a process / Gotta stand and protest / [Because] they want man silenced / [Because] they want man dead or they want man hopeless.” Action is obligatory, even from inside despair.

What is capitalist realism? The sense that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Young people suffer a reflexive impotence: they know things are bad and that they cannot change them, and their depression is recast as a private mental-health crisis rather than a structural diagnosis. As Fisher asks: “how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?”

The rapper Ceebo names the result. Gen Z, he says on ‘Blair Babies,’ are “engendered by a feeling of hopelessness in the face of a world built and shaped before our input.” The movements that might have organised collective feeling were defeated before we were born. The consolation prize is “constant consumption… Few of us recognise that this is not a life.”

Byung-Chul Han describes us as neoliberal subjects who willingly self-exploit in pursuit of self-realisation, turning our bodies, relationships, and biographies into assets to be optimised. When optimisation fails to deliver the promised life, we read it as personal inadequacy rather than a systemic impossibility. Numbness becomes a way of carrying that shame.

The attention economy is its architecture. We are attention mines; numbness is the by-product of extraction. The infinite scroll is a slot-machine reinforcement schedule ported to our phones, engineering the engaged-numb hybrid that defines us: captured attention, almost no feeling, time disappearing while the eyes blink. The technology now industrialises what Dizzee described by hand.

Then the pharmacology. Botox literally paralyses our expressive musculature, and because the face is a part of affect’s feedback loop, freezing it partially freezes the feeling. This is now sold to young people as “preventative.” Ozempic, beyond weight loss, suppresses desire itself: the blockbuster drug of our time treats not sadness but wanting. In ‘My Year of Rest and Relaxation,’ Moshfegh’s narrator — young, wealthy, beautiful, the demographic for whom late capitalism should be most tolerable — sedates herself through an entire year. Even with every advantage, she has no life worth being awake for. And the diagnosis itself has become a product: a paperback on the bedside table.

Audre Lorde famously declared “your silence will not protect you.” Is that still true, when millions have protested the genocide in Gaza and nothing has meaningfully changed? Numbness here splits in two. For marginalised people punished for expressivity — the “angry Black woman,” the autistic person masking until burnout — strategic flatness is a survival tactic and a real refusal. Glissant called it the “right to opacity”: the numb face is the face that will not be read by power. But when numbness becomes permanent rather than a mask, it stops being resistance and becomes the success of the conditions that imposed it. So: is numbness inherent to modernity? Yes, mostly. Industrial labour, urban anonymity, the death of meaning, the colonisation of inner life by the market…these structurally produce affective flattening, and neoliberalism has intensified them into a system that sells numbness as wellness and depends on the quiescence it enables. But numbness is not undifferentiated. We feel flat where political feeling would be useful — voting, solidarity, class anger — and hyperstimulated where consumer feeling is profitable: outrage cycles, fandom, culture wars. This is the system working as designed.

The risk is not individual unhappiness. It’s that a population trained to flatten its expectations, smooth its face, and silence its appetites cannot organise against the conditions producing the numbness. Reflexive impotence becomes a self-stabilising loop.

I end with three voices across 140 years. Nietzsche: the Last Man has invented happiness and blinks, the prophecy fulfilled in administered, pharmacological form. Eliot: the patient is still on the table; the diagnosis was correct and the treatment never came. Dave: “It’s a process / Gotta stand and protest.” The diagnosis and the refusal have to coexist. I’m writing this essay from inside the condition I’m describing, as someone who has scrolled and listened to Burial and wondered, like Dizzee at sixteen (only a year younger than me), why the eyes only blink, and who, in writing it, refuses to let that be the last word. The question is no longer whether numbness is inherent to modernity. It manifestly is. The question is what we are willing to do from inside it, knowing the inside is where everything has to be done from. We have to stop accepting it.

Welcome back to the Editor’s Log.

Hope all my UK readers had a nice bank holiday. I’m trying my best to have fun, but I fear it’s just a tad too hot for a country with no air conditioning, not to mention my exams still aren’t done. And I keep having dreams of my birthday even though it’s not for another couple months…weird

Monday

N4T announced new music, which dropped yesterday. It’s cool, but nothing earth-shattering. It really just feels like a placeholder until his new era. The artwork is fire though.

Samuel Hine has been appointed senior men’s style editor at New York Magazine. I really like him, the man has a lot of swag, and I’m very much looking forward to reading his newsletter for the mag.

Tuesday

Chanel has returned to growth on the back of the frankly insane demand for Matthieu Blazy’s work at the house. Honestly, I hear it. I’ve said before that I don’t particularly care for the big houses, but Blazy is the exception, he’s truly come into his own at Chanel.

Happy 78th birthday to the icon that is Grace Jones. Surely one of the coolest people alive, and that’s not up for debate.

DaMetalMessiah called in Jon E Cash for a Producer’s Cut. ‘Hoods Up’ is forever a classic, and my ‘Westfield’ white label is one of the most treasured records in my collection. If you don’t know his work, the post is a great place to start.

Arsenal won the Premier League for the first time since before I was born! Now, I’m not about to LARP as some die-hard who watches every game, but I’m a North Londoner, born into an Arsenal family, so it’s hard not to celebrate anyway, and I’ve scarcely seen my dad this happy. The scenes at the Emirates looked unhinged, so maybe I’ll join the parade this weekend…

Wednesday

Autechre’s ‘elseq 1’ is getting a physical release for the first time, as a 5xCD set. I’d pre-order it in a heartbeat if it weren’t almost £100. Insane price, though it is very cool, and anything The Designers Republic touches turns to gold. I might grab tickets to see them in October, or maybe I’ll try to blag press.

Barber Osgerby is closing after 30 years. Their work was hit or miss for me, but always interesting; their most iconic piece is probably the London 2012 Olympic torch. A real loss for the design world.

In the afternoon I went to the Design Museum for the Nigo exhibition, which was really fascinating. I’ve never been crazy about Nigo as a designer, but I’ve always admired the way he simply did whatever he wanted, and it was sick to see so many of the things I was obsessed with growing up in real life. Worth heading down, if only to understand Nigo the person and the journey that got him here.

Then I checked out Russ Jones’ new show at Ladbroke Hall. Some lovely ideas: there’s a Japanese zen cabin, and the rest of the show spills outside, mostly a series of flower arrangements paired with poems. I’d never been to Ladbroke Hall before, which is stunning.

To close out the night, I went to Canning Town for, I think, only the second time in my life, for BeauBeau’s music club. The last time I went was back when it was still actually at BeauBeau’s (RIP), so it was nice to see it going strong, and to catch Dripset again.

Thursday

Happy birthday to Jammz, one of the most wholesome people I’ve ever met in grime and one of my favourite MCs full stop! His album ’No Remorse’ was one of my favourites of 2024.

In the evening I went to the listening party for fakemink’s new album, ‘terrified ..’ In 24 hours he managed to pull 1000 kids out for him, which was nuts. He’s a strange sort of savant; not great at explaining his own work, but the work is excellent, and he somehow manages to both undersell it and oversell it in the same breath. I’m intrigued to see where he goes. Also, I can’t believe he took the secret feature off… And everyone who works at Huxley has so much swag it’s crazy.

Friday

Karoline Vitto and Sinéad O’Dwyer were in conversation for Another Mag, discussing their work with corpulent bodies, specifically around the Met’s new exhibition, while touching on a whole host of other things. A super interesting chat, and reassuring to hear that an institution like the Met is actually trying to get this right. More of this, please.

The largest Agatha Christie exhibition in almost 25 years opens at the British Library this October. I was a voracious reader growing up and adored the Poirot books, ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’ especially, so this is firmly on the list.

Kano, the GOAT, picked up the Visionary award at the Ivor Novellos, presented to him by Dave. Glad they finally rate him… and he teased new music, plus he’s been hinting at studio sessions with Blue May. My excitement is climbing by the day.

To mark the bank holiday I went to the Buffalo Zine launch, hosted by Bimba y Lola. Once again: everyone at Huxley, insane swag. I also met Hetty Mahlich, who was so sweet, and a 30-year-old who didn’t know who Dave was…(insane, right? And she was from South London).

Then I headed to the Worldpeace DMT and Femcels show at Chats Palace. The show was amazing; I especially loved The Femcels, though my friend was more of a Worldpeace person. Either way, Rowan did a stellar job, being part of both bands.

Saturday

Martin Margiela is set to auction off a large chunk of his archive. Everything from his office telephone to samples from his Hermès years is going under the hammer. I won’t be able to afford so much as a paperclip, but I hope at least a few pieces end up in public museums where they belong.

E-flux published their review of ‘A Kind of Paradise’ at Museum Rietberg in Zurich. There’s a lot to unpack, and the work sounds compelling, the shapeshifting section in particular. I almost certainly won’t be trekking all the way to Zurich, but I’ll be digging into every artist in the show.

Sunday

And Living Proof New York has published a London edition featuring so, so many of my faves, including, but not limited to, Wiley, Amy Leung, and DaMetalMessiah. Best believe a copy is top of my to-do list.

Until next week,
Sik

P.S. Sampha, please come back, we need new music. And if anyone fancies throwing a club night on 3rd August, that wouldn’t go amiss.

Welcome back to the Editor’s Log.

Sorry I missed last week. I was deep in revision stress over an exam (which thankfully went well), processing the horrific local election results, and finishing an essay that should be out very soon. There also wasn’t loads worth covering apart from Yaku’s super fun Nike launch party (the DJ played ‘Hyph Mngo,’ so of course I had a good time), Jesse Bernard’s enlightening book launch (go buy the book), and PinkPantheress’ great new music video.

Monday

FKA Twigs is set to play Josephine Baker in a new biopic. She looked incredible at the 2025 Met Gala in Wales Bonner, inspired by Baker herself, so I’m excited to see how she approaches the role. I’m still not fully convinced by her acting chops, but I’d love to be proven wrong.

Tuesday

Russell Tovey and Olivia Colman are set to play Lee McQueen and Isabella Blow in a new short film. I am SO excited for this. Honestly, perfect casting. Though I still think their relationship deserves a full TV series to properly explore how complicated and transformative it was for both of them.

26 years of the Tate Modern! I’ve seen so many incredible exhibitions there over the years, and it remains one of my favourite buildings in London. I’ve never gone without ending up on some random side quest. My one dream is to have experienced The Weather Project in person though. I’m praying they bring it back one day.

Wednesday

Ted Childish has creative directed a TV show! I’m such a fan of everything Ted does, so this is huge to me. The show is brilliant and really interesting. It’s a full-length reboot of Kareem Rahma’s old TikTok series Keep the Meter Running, where cab drivers take him to their favourite place in the city. Definitely worth watching.

Thursday

Anok Yai looks amaaaazzzzzing on the cover of British Vogue. I feel like her personality has really started to come through in recent interviews and appearances, and I’m so here for it.

i-D has announced a writing competition. I would enter, but it’s 18+… still a great opportunity for anyone trying to get published there.

LVMH has sold Marc Jacobs. Such an interesting move. It feels like LVMH is slowly shifting away from aspirational luxury and leaning fully into old-school exclusivity. Hmm.

Friday

Rene Matić has won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. I’m a big fan of their work and very happy to see them getting their flowers. I still think there’s loads more room for them to expand their practice though, which is exciting.

20 years since Burial’s debut album. Absolutely insane. If you haven’t listened to it, you need to. He’s a genius. And Untrue is even better. God-tier music.

UGG also sent me some shoes, which was very nice of them. They kind of give me Charlie Constantinou vibes; I could definitely see him playing around with a similar silhouette. In the evening, my friend Amelie and I went to the UGG Sunroom to see Zara Larsson. She’s not necessarily my thing musically, but I still had a really good time, and she’s a great performer.

Saturday

I went to Offprint and picked up It’s Urgent!, a poster book curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist. Really cool publication. I also bought Mindy Seu’s A Sexual History of the Internet. I missed out on tickets for her ICA performance, so I’m looking forward to experiencing some of those ideas through the book instead. Definitely recommend both.

I also went to the Up Ya Archives takeover at V&A East. I’m still not fully sold on the current exhibition, but the permanent collection is definitely worth seeing. They’ve got work spanning everyone from Claude Cahun and Kehinde Wiley to Nasir Mazhar and Molly Goddard. The takeover itself was cool too, even if nothing completely blew me away.

Sunday

This Swatch x AP collab has the whole world in uproar. It’s a fucking pocket watch, everyone. Let’s calm down. And it’s not even limited stock. I really don’t understand the hysteria. Maybe I’m just not a watch person.

Until next week,
Sik

P.S. I’ve got loads of spare time this summer, so hit me up about anything and everything that could be cool to work on.

Welcome back to the Editor’s Log. Hope everyone’s enjoying the bank holiday.

This week I published a couple of pieces I’m really happy with: one on worldbuilding and what it means to be a “great” artist, and another with The Culture Crypt on Made in the Manor. Would really appreciate you taking a look at both, especially the first one!

Quick one as well: I’m thinking about adding a short Q&A to the end of each newsletter — a few hundred words with someone interesting. Would you be into that? And if so, would you prefer it written or filmed? Answer in the poll below.

Monday

The Barbican is launching a film programme tracing Pan-african thought, starting early July. I’ve only really brushed up against the ideology before (bits of Marcus Garvey and a surface-level understanding of Haile Selassie), so I’m looking forward to filling in the gaps.

The Culture Crypt published my piece on Kano’s Made in the Manor. One of my favourite albums ever, and I’m happy with how the article came out.

Tuesday

Matthieu Blazy delivered again with his Chanel resort collection. I’m not usually that invested in the big houses, but his work has such an allure. No notes.

The Good Immigrant is being reissued for its tenth anniversary this September, with a new foreword by Candice Carty-Williams. Having only read (and enjoyed) a few excerpts so far, and being a big fan of Candice, I’ll definitely be picking this up!

In the evening, I went to my friend Emily’s art school. I cannot paint to save my life, but it was nice just being around people making things. She’s building something special.

Wednesday

Nia Archives is taking over V&A East next Saturday with her label, Up Ya Archives. Omg I’m excited for this. I loveeeee Tim Reaper so I can’t wait to finally see him live for the first time. She’s also announced her next album, with features from Jorja Smith and Sampha. Expectations are high.

Little Simz also announced the Sugar Girl EP, dropping this Friday!

After school, I linked Slayr, hold tight the goat (Gaby) for patterning that. He was cool, and I randomly had my sword with me (long story), which felt oddly appropriate given the name.

Thursday

DaMetalMessiah called Gabriel the greatest tune of all time. I get the sentiment, it’s a classic, but that might be pushing it.

I went to Kindred’s takeover at Sadie Coles. I only caught Daigo Sakuragi’s performance, but it was interesting, and they used the space really well. I’m so here for anything Kindred does at this point.

Friday

Kelela announced new music, dropping tomorrow (Tuesday). Idea 1 was interesting, if a bit sparse, so I’m hoping this next one fills things out.

In the evening, I went to drinks for Masha Popova’s sample sale. The clothes are really well-made but it feels like they could push further aesthetically.

And I visited my friend Petra’s studio. To be perfectly honest, at first, I wasn’t totally convinced by her work, but having sat with it for a couple months, I adore it.

Saturday

Yaku Stapleton’s Nike collab is launching this Thursday at the LN-CC. I wouldn’t miss that for the world!

Sunday

The protests have started against Jeff Bezos’ involvement in the Met Gala, which takes place tonight. It’s a difficult one. On one hand, he’s obviously a terrible guy and is clearly using it to rehabilitate his image; on the other, the event does provide the Costume Institute with much-needed funding. Not a clean situation.

I also published my essay on shapeshifting, worldbuilding, and what makes great art. It’s ambitious, probably more of a framework than a conclusion, but the response so far has been positive. If you get a chance to read it, I’d really appreciate your thoughts!

Until next week,
Sik

P.S. Do fill in the survey, or just message me if you’ve got ideas.

Each new tendril is immediately recognisable as part of the same root system. To encounter Wales Bonner’s world is to be handed a vocabulary for your own becoming. To inhabit it is to borrow her philosophy, implement it through your own lens, and emerge more fully yourself than before.

This is what the total work of art is capable of at its highest degree. It is not a product to be consumed, a style to be imitated, or a brand to be worn. It is a framework for living.

Humanity can be defined by its propensity for shapeshifting and worldbuilding. As humans, we learn and adapt — we choose our friends, how we dress, how we decorate our homes, and in some cases our names — building our very own worlds. The two acts are both sides of the same coin: to shapeshift is to rebuild your world, and to rebuild your world is to shapeshift.

Jean-Paul Sartre, particularly in ‘Being and Nothingness’ and ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism,’ argues that there is no fixed human nature to appeal to; beneath our performances we have no stable self. Most famously: “existence precedes essence.”

Working through this framework, shapeshifting is not an eccentricity of the artistic temperament but a keen aspect of the human condition. “Man is condemned to be free,” Sartre wrote; “once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.” To give life a meaning, here, is the option to create the world and philosophical framework you exist inside.

To act in “bad faith” (“mauvaise foi”) is, for Sartre, the refusal to acknowledge one’s radical freedom, the retreat into fixed roles and identities. Extended into this framework, bad faith is the refusal of shapeshifting and worldbuilding: tying yourself down to your role in society, letting the world be made for you. As Akala once asked Nines: “your environment doesn’t define you, but how can you transcend it?” In the terms being laid out here, “bad faith” is artistic death.

Nietzsche’s injunction to “become who you are” (derived from Pindar) is a call to self-creation, not self-discovery. It is a command to create the self that you will then become. The idea of the Übermensch is that of a human who has taken on the full weight of that self-creation: the person who gives themselves laws (a framework and philosophy for life) rather than inheriting them, in “bad faith,” from God, tradition, or the market.

Great artists do this on an incomparably larger scale, and with an incomparably greater degree of deliberation and alchemy.

Worldbuilding is not an elite practice reserved for geniuses; it is the human practice, elevated to its highest expression. The word for that elevation is Gesamtkunstwerk.

Gesamtkunstwerk is a German compound: Gesamt - total; Kunst - art; Werk - work. It is translated variously as the “total work of art,” the “universal artwork,” the “synthesis of the arts,” the “all-embracing art form.” The term was first introduced by Trahndorff in 1827, but Richard Wagner coined its modern usage in his 1849 essays ‘Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft’ (”The Artwork of the Future”) and ‘Oper und Drama,’ which synthesised his vision of opera as the fusion of music, poetry, and visual art. Here, the concept has far outgrown Wagner’s operatic ambitions.

The first great modern instance beyond the opera is the Ballets Russes, founded by Sergei Diaghilev between 1909 and 1929. Here, the total work of art comes together as the collision of its parts rather than merely the sum of them. Diaghilev brought together Stravinsky (music), Picasso and Matisse (set and costume design), and Nijinsky (choreography) to create something no single discipline could have generated alone. The works were revolutionary because of their broadness: they introduced abstraction and plotlessness to ballet, pushing against Plato’s concern that art is merely a twice-removed imitation of truth: a painter copying a chair that is itself a copy of the perfect Idea of a chair. The Ballets Russes did not imitate existing life; they created a new form of consciousness.

The most complete historical Gesamtkunstwerk remains Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus, the Weimarian art school operational from 1919 to 1933. The Bauhaus brought to life an entire world: furniture, typography, textiles, theatre, architecture, and graphic design, all under a single philosophical framework. The school held that art and craft are not separate; it aimed to abolish the hierarchy between fine arts and applied arts, viewing the artist as an “exalted craftsman,” moving away from ornamentation toward a “less is more” minimalism.

Every modernist chair, sans-serif font, and open-plan interior since has taken cues from the Bauhaus. More importantly, while it was alive, the Bauhaus was a living philosophy that generated endlessly new work from a secure and consistent core. This is what I mean by timeless: not unchanged, but continuing to operate as a framework for living long after the Gesamtkunstwerk has had its moment. The Bauhaus offered a new light source through which to consider the world. The highest-degree Gesamtkunstwerk is a new framework for living.

Ye’s (fka Kanye West) My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (MBDTF) is the most frequently cited contemporary example of the Gesamtkunstwerk, and with good reason. During its creation, Ye was explicit about his ambition to create a massively expansive total work of art, in one concentrated gesture, at the highest possible production level. The album cost around $3 million to make, making it one of the most expensive albums ever recorded. He assembled potentially hundreds of collaborators, brought together custom paintings by George Condo, a 35-minute film accompaniment directed by Hype Williams, and elaborate packaging art directed by Virgil Abloh.

MBDTF is an exploration of human self-indulgence and toxicity taken to its most spectacular register: you enter it, and you leave it. Ye opened and closed the world in under two years, establishing its wide-ranging foundations and output before shutting it down before it could expand or shapeshift. The spectacular Gesamtkunstwerk is entirely valid. But the livable one is far rarer, and far harder to build. Guy Debord argued that modern capitalist life is reduced to a “spectacle” of images (advertisements, news, entertainment) that alienate us from lived experience. Jean Baudrillard extended this, arguing that the spectacle has itself become a simulacrum: a copy without an original. In this economy, the image of total art circulates as cultural currency, often outrunning the work itself. The livable world, when truly enacted, resists this because it is too distributed, too embedded in daily life, to collapse into a single representable image. MBDTF is spectacular enough to be immediately iconisable — the censored covers, the price tag, the guest list — in a way that Wales Bonner’s or Solange’s worlds are not.

The best entry point into Grace Wales Bonner’s world is her own description: “Wales Bonner proposes a distinct notion of cultural luxury that infuses European heritage with an Afro-Atlantic spirit.” This, alongside her rigorous academic research into archival material centred on the African diaspora, Black intellectualism, and the spiritual and the sensory, sets the framework that generates everything she makes; the protected core from which all of her world’s expansion proceeds. Her practice integrates research, literature, music, film, curation, and fashion design. The garment and the research essay are differently embodied manifestations of the same thought. This is the multimedia non-negotiability the contemporary total work of art argues for: not simply that it engage more senses simultaneously (though Wales Bonner’s does), but that different media reinforce and traverse each other until the world feels inescapable and livable.

The Wales Bonner world embodies Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the rhizome in the truest sense — spreading in multiple directions simultaneously without becoming centreless, with an internal consistency that makes every new tendril recognisably part of the same root system. Wales Bonner’s world is total without being totalising.

Kode9 is my most intellectual case study, and perhaps my most underappreciated. The founder of Hyperdub Records, author of Sonic Warfare (a rigorous academic text on the weaponisation of sound), a philosopher (one of the founders of the CCRU), and a DJ and producer spanning grime, dubstep, ambient, and conceptual electronic music, his practice collides the club, the classroom, and the art gallery. His work evokes expanse, minimality, and a mastery of sound that coheres across every register of his practice.

His album Astro-Darien is built around Scotland’s 1690s Darien scheme (its catastrophic failed attempt to colonise Panama) reimagined as a speculative futurist world. This example proves a crucial allowance for the contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk: it need not be autobiographical. Kode9’s world is built around a philosophy, a sensory texture, and a set of recurring questions about power, space, colonialism, and sound. Astro-Darien is a new conceptual world that uses historical material as a raw ingredient, alchemised beyond recognition. You can’t see the seam between the real-world source and the transformation. That is the mark of a high-degree alchemy.

Solange’s practice is one of the clearest examples of the livable Gesamtkunstwerk. Through her Saint Heron library, she has put out glassware and literature and hosted community programming, creating an accessible invitation to inhabit her philosophy. Her musical output largely centres her experience as a Black woman in America.

Where MBDTF is a $3 million entry-and-exit world of spectacular self-indulgence, Solange’s practice invites community and leverages Saint Heron’s accessibility into a political and aesthetic statement about who art is for and how it can be inhabited.

This is where Bertolt Brecht’s objection to the Gesamtkunstwerk becomes important to address properly. Brecht formed his theatre theory largely in opposition to the Wagnerian total work of art, arguing that Wagner’s immersive synthesis created a dreamlike, druglike state in the audience — a state of hypnosis that prevented critical, rational engagement with the work and the political issues it pointed to. Brecht sought what he called an alienation effect: techniques that kept the audience awake to the fact of their spectatorship, so they could think rather than merely feel.

The worlds of Solange and Wales Bonner directly rebut this concern by making the immersive world itself a thinking space. The Saint Heron Library is most literally a community resource for exploring Black and Brown cultural histories, and so to truly inhabit the world requires engagement with critical thought. The immersive world, at its highest degree, produces critical consciousness through inclusion rather than alienation. The audience can never be fully controlled; they will always receive a world through their own lens. But the wider and deeper you make your world — the more you reinforce it across media, the more thoroughly you alchemise it — the closer the audience’s reading will inevitably converge on the artist’s intention.

This is the only way to pull audience perception toward intention: keep expanding the world, keep adding entry points, keep deepening the philosophy. Brecht’s worry is real, but it is a worry about the spectacular Gesamtkunstwerk. The livable world is its own answer to it. Living in Solange’s world does not impose a Sartrean “essence” on the liver. To live inside it is to borrow her vocabulary for your own becoming. The Gesamtkunstwerk, at its highest, is a temporary and partial home for other people’s own shapeshifting. It becomes a catalyst for the audience’s own becoming.

Charli XCX’s ‘Brat’ occupies this structure in a peculiar way. The album, her writings, and the accompanying film reinforced one another in a moment of extraordinary cultural alignment. The ironic, messy, self-aware “Brat” attitude was built into the world’s texture from its inception; a smart and deliberate decision that positioned any misstep as an aesthetic move rather than a failure. The bright green cover became a cultural shorthand almost instantaneously, circulating as a sign before many people had heard the music. But this is precisely the Baudrillardian trap: ‘Brat’ risked becoming a simulacrum of itself before the underlying work had time to fully land. It was aware of this risk, and used irony partly as a hedge against it. But the awareness alone does not resolve it. The Brat world worked, in part, because the timing was right — the attitude was legible enough to travel fast and wide. However, a world that works because of cultural timing suffers from contingencies.

This is the distinction between a successful traversal and a timeless one. Timelessness is the ultimate test of how deeply the alchemising has been done. A world that shapeshifts with time — that can operate as a living philosophy decades later — is a higher form of Gesamtkunstwerk. Brat does not reach the divinity of a Bauhaus or a Wales Bonner.

It is a successful, occasionally brilliant world, but one that may not survive its own moment.

Then there’s the one that got away. Skepta, circa 2016. The world built around ‘Konnichiwa’ felt complete. The Nike trainers, the OG Mains, and the album brought together a coherent aesthetic world. It didn’t feel like a brand packaged around a musician. Skepta had crystallised a singular vision of what it meant to be a well-dressed working-class North Londoner with global ambitions and underground, political sensibilities. Everything in his world reinforced a single, coherent texture. Konnichiwa featured collaborations with A$AP Nast and Pharrell Williams, and the subsequent Praise the Lord with A$AP Rocky felt authentically an extension of the world’s logic into new territory.

What followed tore his world apart. The work with Flo Milli and Puma pulled against the world’s texture rather than extending it, feeling cheap in a way the earlier collaborations hadn’t. Skepta’s goals had become too rooted in the real world, more enamoured with going mainstream than with expanding his already-rich creative world. He had gone from a Nietzschean self-legislating creator to a shill of the mainstream; from giving himself laws to borrowing someone else’s. The world collapsed because it was compromised from within. Skepta’s later work swiftly became a simulacrum of itself: the image of Skepta the world-builder still circulating, the actual alchemising having stopped. The spectacle outran the reality. This is the key structural vulnerability of the Gesamtkunstwerk: when the core philosophy is compromised, the entire world begins to dissolve. Missteps in expansion are survivable if the foundation remains secure. An artist who makes a misstep and returns to their centre retains their capacity for traversal. An artist who makes a misstep and lets it pull their centre out of alignment loses their world entirely.

The Gesamtkunstwerk must constantly shapeshift, but always from a secure philosophical centre. Nietzsche’s foremost concern was that the herd wins when the self-legislating creator starts borrowing from the herd’s values. Skepta is his proof.

Several artists are currently in proximity to the fully realised Gesamtkunstwerk without yet having arrived.

Yaku Stapleton has a promising beginning, but the threads his work alludes to haven’t been pulled together into a coherent framework. The expansion is ahead of the foundation. His world isn’t yet defined enough to function as a philosophy for living. What would it take? The philosophy doesn’t need to emerge solely from fashion design. Most simply, it can be explored through writing, laying the red thread between all his work. The philosophy is the final glue that turns separate projects into a traversable world. Once the foundation is stable, expansion becomes possible on its own terms.

Jawnino’s 40 is an accidental masterwork of worldbuilding. Rebuilding London in his own image created such a defined world that it cohered without conscious planning; the transformed elements feel uniquely his, and the world’s texture is immediately recognisable without their framing. But the strongest worlds are generally well-considered; deliberation allows an artist to expand their world while maintaining its philosophy. An accidental world can cohere in a single gesture, but developing it further without conscious understanding of what you’ve made is a harder hold to get. The mark of a deep enough alchemy, however, is the totality of the immediate foundations, and by that measure, 40 succeeds.

Ebun Sodipo is extremely close. Her poem In The Archive (taken from the Toe Rag 06) weaves a personal and political history into a compelling conceptual world; her philosophy — producing “real and imaginable narratives of Black trans women’s presence, embodiment, and interiority across the past, present and future” — is convincing and clearly generative. The gap is between the writing and the visual art, which relies too heavily on collage of existing quotes and film stills. The philosophy is there. The alchemy isn’t yet total. The question she faces is the same one all these cases pose: not whether the vision is strong enough, but whether every medium of the world has been transformed deeply enough that the seam between source material and creation disappears.

Ellen Poppy Hill’s practice is the clearest proof that the Gesamtkunstwerk keeps its structure at the intimate scale. Her writing, fashion design, and drawing all serve a coherent and philosophically grounded world exploring 21st-century girlhood; specific enough to feel true, open enough to be inhabited by others. Claude Cahun, one of her biggest inspirations, is a precedent for exactly this: a French surrealist who used photography, writing, and performance to explore self-multiplication and identity construction before either had a theoretical vocabulary. Cahun’s practice was itself a Gesamtkunstwerk through its total self-construction that refused easy categorisation. From Cahun to Hill, the framework holds at every scale.

Today we live in a tastemaking economy. Platforms and publications have led to the proliferation of “taste” as the primary cultural currency, reflecting a structural shift in how cultural value is produced and distributed away from critical gatekeeping, toward the construction and navigation of taste universes. In this economy, a total world is more enticing to step inside than an isolated drop. This does not make the single-medium artist obsolete. Andrew O’Hagan writes only literature and writes brilliantly; like any great artwork, he creates worlds through his writing. But a complete multimedia world will always offer more ways of living inside it: multiple points of entry, multiple daily touchpoints. Applying a Deleuzian viewpoint: the single-medium work is a trunk, root system, and canopy; the Gesamtkunstwerk is a rhizome. The transformation must, however, be total enough to constitute a new world, not merely a recombination of existing ones. Virgil Abloh notoriously proposed a “3% rule:” the idea that a 3% change from an existing reference is sufficient to constitute a new work. The Gesamtkunstwerk demands the opposite: a transformation large enough that the source material becomes an unrecognisable, raw ingredient alchemised beyond recovery. The distance between curation and alchemy is the distance between a recombination of existing worlds and the creation of a new one.

One of the deepest challenges to this framework comes from Baudrillard: even a high-degree alchemised world will eventually slide into simulation once enough time passes and cultural context shifts. The transformation that felt total becomes a recognisable style that can be imitated, commodified, and turned into its own simulacrum. How does Wales Bonner’s world avoid this? How does Bauhaus avoid becoming merely a style replicated in airport hotels?

The answer is shapeshifting. The worlds that remain alive have a philosophy that is generative: they continue to produce new work, new connections, new traversals. They cannot be reduced to a single aesthetic signature because the signature itself keeps evolving. The Bauhaus became a style after it stopped shapeshifting (it was forcibly closed by the Nazis in 1933). While it was alive, it was a living philosophy. A world that stops growing calcifies into style and risks becoming exactly what Plato feared: a fixed image of something that was once alive. This is what determines whether the attempt is sustained or merely brilliant. Divinity is not in the attempt itself; it is sustained through ongoing shapeshifting and expansion from a secure philosophical centre. The attempt that stops, or compromises the core, is not divine. The artist who makes a misstep and returns to their centre retains their capacity for traversal. The artist who lets a misstep pull their centre out of alignment dissolves their world.

As humans, we are natural curators — we draw together already existing things into our own world. What makes an artist a great artist is the act of transformation. The transformation must be large enough to constitute a new world, not merely a recombination of existing ones.

The fully realised Gesamtkunstwerk is a framework for living: a consistent philosophy the audience can inhabit and implement into their own lives. The philosophy can consist of, but is not limited to, a set of recurring questions, a texture or sensory signature, a way of seeing, or an emotional or spiritual north star. The form is up to the artist; the implementation is up to the audience.

The artist’s world is fully realised in their own mind before it is opened to others. The act of invitation (opening the world to an audience) is itself a form of shapeshifting, extending the divine traversal between their world and the real world. The audience will always receive it through their own lens, but the wider and deeper the world, the more points of entry, the more thoroughly alchemised, the closer that reception will converge on the artist’s intention.

To build your own world and traverse between that world and the real one is divinity embodied. You encounter the ‘Brat’ world, inhabit it for a season, then it passes. The Wales Bonner world accumulates around you. It is inhabited, and the inhabiting changes your very own world.

A great artist gives you a vocabulary, a texture, and a philosophy to borrow and build your own world from. Not a system to be understood and reproduced, but a territory to be entered and traversed. They leave behind an entire world with an open door, one that continues to shapeshift, and by shapeshifting, stays alive.

The highest-degree Gesamtkunstwerk is the one that makes your own becoming more possible, more deliberate, and more alchemised. It is not a mirror. It is a new vocabulary for your very own shapeshifting and worldbuilding.

Welcome back to the Editor’s Log. Didn’t go out too much this week, but never a dull day.

Monday

Business of Fashion put out a survival guide for independent brands. If you’re running something small (or thinking about it), it’s definitely worth a read, at least as far as I can tell.

Tuesday

Brian Eno, Mechatok, Massive Attack and others signed an open letter urging organisers of the Eurovision Song Contest to ban Israel this year. They argue that the competition should apply the same standard used when Russia was excluded after its invasion of Ukraine. If you’re an artist reading this, click here to join the boycott and geoblock your music from Israel.

Polygon Portal, a new listening lounge, is opening in London next month. The programmed albums aren’t entirely my thing, but they’re pairing records with commissioned essays, which could be where it gets interesting. I’ll reserve judgement for now.

Little Simz has started teasing a new era, and it sounds like she’s leaning further into dance territory. Drop 7 hinted at it, so I’m curious to see that direction fully realised.

The British Art Show returns for its tenth edition, with artists like Liz Johnson Artur and Alvaro Barrington involved. I’ll definitely be heading down once it opens.

Wednesday

Boards of Canada are set to return next month with their first album in thirteen years. It’s only just clicked for me how many of my favourite electronic artists passed through Edinburgh; there’s clearly something in the water.

Jesse Bernard is launching his new book next week at Reference Point. That one feels like a must-attend.

Thursday

Rihanna covers W Magazine; one shoot with baby Rocki, one without. The custom Dior nappy is ridiculous in the best way, but I actually prefer the Chanel cover. There’ve been so many strong covers across magazines recently, it feels like everyone’s trying to outdo each other.

Friday

The LVMH Prize finalists are in. I’m rooting for Petra Fagerström, this feels like her moment.

Palantir dropped merch, which is… something. If you’re buying into that, just remember the countless war crimes they’ve been involved in, if not the 22-point manifesto they put out last week.

Guvna B’s new album is finally here. It’s strong, not quite The Village Is On Fire, but still well worth your time.

I finally made it to Tate Britain for Hurvin Anderson’s retrospective. I thought I’d connect with the work more than I did, but the curation by Dominique Heyse-Moore and Jasmine Kaur Chohan is excellent. Also, I can’t lie, Tate Britain as a whole surprised me, and the Chris Ofili mural in the stairwell is incredible.

Then I went to Tate Modern for Tracey Emin’s Second Life. I’ve never been fully sold on her, but seeing the breadth of her practice in one place was definitely illuminating.

In the evening, I went to Kibo’s homecoming show. Literally everyone I know was there. Keko and Xtiana set the tone perfectly, and Kibo himself is just operating on a different wavelength. The show had this loose narrative where people were wrestling him on stage for the “Kweffy World Champ” title, and he brought out Jawnino too. I had a great time, and I met Novelist for the first time (very sound guy.)

Saturday

Happy would-be 98th to Cy Twombly, one of the greatest to ever do it. I’d love to see a proper London retrospective at some point.

And Lubaina Himid got married, big congratulations to her.

Sunday

The London Marathon took over the city. Huge well done to everyone who ran, and especially Sabastian Sawe on breaking the record. It almost made me want to go for a run…almost.

And finally, Rihanna linked up with Diya; a long overdue crossover, and a very powerful one for India’s global cultural standing.

Until next week,
Sik

P.S. I’m looking for speaking engagements, so if that’s you, get in touch.

Welcome back to the Editor’s Log. A lot this week, but fun on the whole.

Monday

Who knew Snoop Dogg was tapped into Kode9?

I watched Rachel Sennott’s new show, Big Mistakes, co-written with Dan Levy of Schitt’s Creek. Honestly, very boring and very millennial. Her internet-born humour and irony feels completely flattened. Whether that’s Levy’s doing or Netflix’s, I can’t say.

Tuesday

W Magazine has launched WYouth. I hope it reimagines the space that the now-shuttered Teen Vogue once held; one of the only publications that engaged young people on politics, art, and fashion with the grace they deserved (most famously their Donald Trump is Gaslighting America essay). That was, until Chloe Malle decimated the masthead (firing mostly women of colour and trans people), installed herself as EIC, and folded the whole thing into Vogue.com. WYouth will be led by W Editor-in-Chief Sara Moonves and Ava Nirui, former Creative Director of Marc Jacobs’ Heaven. The full team is still unclear, but if they’re hiring, I’m right here.

Saul Nash has designed the costumes for Wayne McGregor’s Quantum Souls at the Royal Opera House. His fashion films are always brilliant, and there’s something special about seeing his work in actual motion, really looking forward to seeing this in the flesh.

The Forbes 30 Under 30 is full of familiar faces: Corbin Shaw, Petra Fagerstrom, Jim Legxacy, Sinead Gorey, Gabriel Moses, and more. Congrats to everyone selected.

And I finally bought the Mark Fisher Bible. Still working through it, but I already feel inspired.

Wednesday

Some unseen work by George Condo is heading to auction, courtesy of his wife. I’m a mild fan of Condo’s work, and some of these pieces are truly striking. I hope at least a few find their way into a gallery rather than a private vault.

London’s largest independent book fair is back, 15–17 May at 180 Studios. Participants include ISOLARII, Perfect Lives, Reference Point, and plenty more. Already saving up.

Fela Kuti will become the first African artist inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this November. Long overdue for a true legend.

I caught the press day for V&A East’s first exhibition. I was disappointed. Presenting itself as an expansive and definitive guide to Black British music, it falls remarkably flat. Too much of the space is devoted to the history of African migration to the UK, so by the time you reach the actual music, there’s barely room to breathe. The reggae section is a highlight, but the UK Garage section has no mention of Wookie and Lain’s Battle; Grime barely references Wiley and omits D Double E, Wretch 32, and so many others entirely; and the Dubstep section is just two pictures (one of Skream, one of Benga). Full stop. The timeline ends there, with some throwaway nods to V9, Stormzy, and Little Simz. No Afroswing, no UK Drill, nothing from the underground, not even a gesture toward Grime 2.0, let alone 3.0. Very, very disappointing.

I did pick up Dean Blunt’s Black Metal on vinyl from the gift shop, and consoled myself further with Jim Legxacy’s Black British Music on vinyl and 2Pac’s Greatest Hits on CD. DaMetalMessiah made me Proud to be a Londoner to close out the day.

Thursday

Myles Lewis-Skelly is Wales Bonner’s latest muse and I am completely here for it. The predators he’s been wearing lately, chef’s kiss.

Charli XCX is on the cover of British Vogue. Really strong, possibly my favourite Chioma Nnadi cover so far. And she’s making a rock album?! Really intrigued.

Hans Ulrich Obrist was interviewed for Cultured Magazine. So real. He mentions buying a book a day and namedrops Ebun Sodipo…a man after my own heart. I’d love to work with him one day. Might have to get through at least one book on his reading list first.

Burnermunde are back with W*NKER. I enjoy their stuff, though I wouldn’t call myself a fan; it’s very British anti-humour. Their documentary 6 TILL 6 is defo worth your time though.

Friday

Fakemink linked HUNTER BIDEN at Coachella. This is like when Skepta linked Michael Jordan, so random.

Susie Cave, the coolest person alive, is back with a new brand. Very intrigued to see how it shapes up.

Kindred is hosting Sadie Coles’ Gargle next Thursday. Fan of both, so should be a good one.

Took a friend to Rowan’s: smoked him at bowling and pool, though he edged me at air hockey, before we headed to the Sammy Virji concert. Sammy Virji is one of the worst DJs I’ve seen. In the AI era, clean mixing is a baseline, not a skill. You need to read the crowd, curate the room, take people somewhere. Virji isn’t it (bad pun sorry).

Saturday

Solange is previewing a series of glass decanters designed via Saint Heron. They’re beautiful.

Sunday

Started watching Curb Your Enthusiasm. I’m not usually one for American culture, their TV shows are my only vice, but this is really hilarious. Apparently an old English teacher of mine wrote his university dissertation on it.

Until next week,
Sik

P.S. Open for business x

Welcome back to the Editor’s Log - on time again, that’s right! I wasn’t super outside this week; I’ve got exams coming up, but I got a few things done…

Monday

Jamie Demetriou visited the Criterion Closet and walked out with Being John Malkovich and Punch-Drunk Love, two personal favourites of mine, among some others. A fellow Cypriot and one of the most exciting people working in film and TV right now, I’m fully here for everything he does. If you haven’t seen Stath Lets Flats, that’s on you.

I picked up the latest Crack Magazine; I contributed to the Filter section of this issue, writing about Milo’s Susurrus, Teebo’s COD 45, Tkay Maidza’s Pressed, and Carré’s Hibiscus EP. They got my pronouns wrong though…

Tuesday

Anna Wintour and Meryl Streep on the cover of Vogue. So boring, so predictable. I’m not an Anna Wintour person (Sarah Mower clears, easily) and nothing from the Devil Wears Prada 2 promo has landed for me yet, even as someone who loves the original.

Ye has been banned from the UK ahead of Wireless. No complaints here. Tyler, The Creator was banned a decade ago for perceived homophobia, what Ye has done since is incomparably worse. Wireless really should have had a contingency in place. But the ban does expose an obvious double standard: spewing antisemitism gets you barred, but gushing transphobia or Islamophobia (see: Donald Trump) apparently doesn’t.

I also went to Lahore Kebab House for the first time. So leng. 100% recommend.

Wednesday

Kelela’s back. The new tune doesn’t get anywhere near Rewind or Contact for me, but it’s decent.

Despite being the nerd I am, I’d somehow never heard of the record label Road, even though it sat under Ammunition Promotions. As someone obsessed with both Margaret Calvert and grime/dubstep, this is quite embarrassing. Serious bangers in that catalogue. Hold tight Blue Dollar Billz for putting me on.

Sadiq Khan has pledged £30 million to youth centres across London - great news. My only caveat: so much youth funding goes towards responding to harm after it’s already happened, rather than preventing it in the first place. I hope this goes somewhere meaningful.

Took my mum to see Kibo at the Nike x Palace party at Club Cheek. She had more fun than me. (Honestly, fair.) I can’t wait for his headline show!

Thursday

Nick Land is, surely, one of the worst people alive. Right-accelerationist, technocapitalist, wants humanity to render itself obsolete… truly evil stuff. One tweet of his has been everywhere on my timeline, but I think he’s wrong (as usual). Mark Fisher once wrote that living and growing up in late capitalist Britain had come close to being reclassified as a sickness, does his death not prove it?

Friday

Jesse Bernard’s new book, Escaping Babylon, drops on 7th May, perfectly timed alongside V&A East’s upcoming exhibition on Black British Music. Cannot wait.

That evening I was on a panel at the BFI, hosted by Tag Agency and Five Fold. I was nervous going in, but it ended up being a lot of fun. I think I held my own. Hoping to do a longer one soon.

Saturday

Started reading Mrs Dalloway. She’s just like me fr: wandering around central London, thinking too much, bumping into people… A day in my life.

Finally watched One Battle After Another. I enjoyed it, but I’m still coming to a conclusion, wondering whether it actually says something.

Sunday

Justin Bieber played Coachella with just a laptop and a microphone, taking requests from the crowd. I thought it was cool, it makes complete sense for someone with his catalogue and internet-native rise. More of this, please.

Read the New Yorker’s Sam Altman piece. He’s not Nick Land-level evil, but he’s not to be trusted either. Worth your time if you can get to it.

Until next week,
Sik

P.S. Exam stress is at an all-time high. Send help.

Welcome back to the Editor’s Log - on time, for once! This was a fun week: lots of news dropping, lots of things to say, and I actually got some writing done too. Check out my piece on Beuford Smith and my review of Riz Ahmed’s Bait.

Monday

Frieze reviewed Jill Westwood’s ongoing show at NEVEN Gallery. I’d never heard of her before, but her work seems really cool, very much my kind of thing. Definitely need to head down before it closes.

I also linked my friend Dylan at his art studio. Dylan’s been doing his thing for a while now, and I think it’s time more people knew about it. If you don’t know his work, you need to tap in.

Tuesday

New Dean Blunt in collaboration with Celeste! Two people I rate enormously, so this was a pleasant surprise to wake up to. I love the tune, only real complaint is that it’s not longer.

Cult London venue Lost has officially secured a rolling contract at its current site. I’ve never been myself and it seems like one of those places people either love or can’t stand. Hopefully it stays open until I’m 18 at least, then I can form my own opinion.

Lauren Auder joined Lea Ogunlami on her Foundation FM show for a really enjoyable set. I’m a fan of both of them individually, so watching their worlds collide was a treat.

Wednesday

A conversation between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Alexander Kluge was unarchived by e-flux. I’ll be honest, it’s not the easiest read; it meanders a bit and assumes a lot of knowledge, but stick with it, because there are some really rich ideas in there. Definitely worth your time.

Dialled In has launched their own record label! They’re describing it as “dedicated to developing and amplifying boundary-pushing South Asian artists on a global stage,” which is an exciting proposition. Dialled In have always had great taste and a clear sense of what they’re doing, so I have a lot of faith in this. Very excited to see what direction they take it in.

Also, a few anniversaries worth marking this week. 15 years of Katy B’s On A Mission. What an album. Timeless rave music. Every track still hits, it still sounds current, it still makes you want to be on a dancefloor somewhere.

10 years of Dean Blunt and DJ Escrow’s BBF too. Another forever classic. That album has a texture unlike anything else, it just sits in its own world.

And 9 years since the death of Darcus Howe. A political hero of mine, and one of the most important figures in British political history. His courage, his clarity, his refusal to be spoken over… His impact really can’t be overstated. Legend doesn’t cover it.

Thursday

Grace Ladoja is the first Nigerian woman to collaborate on a Nike signature shoe. Honestly, it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person; she’s been a powerhouse in global culture for years, operating across music, fashion, sport, community-building, all of it simultaneously. The collab makes complete sense. And the trainers themselves are some of my favourite TN colourways I’ve ever seen.

Olivia Dean is on the cover of Elle this month. I’m such a fan. Anything she does, I’m immediately interested. The interview is worth reading too; she namechecks bell hooks and Audre Lorde, which tells you everything you need to know.

The Saka Sauce is back!! I have to be real with you, it tastes a bit shit. I don’t know how to put it more gently than that. But Reuben Dangoor absolutely did a madness on the packaging art, so at least it looks incredible on the shelf.

Friday

I wrote about the work of one of my favourite photographers, Beuford Smith.

Rico Ace and Wiley both announced new tapes. Rico only has a handful of solo releases under his belt, so I’m curious to see how this one takes shape. And Wiley announced Tunnel Vision 7, due April 6th. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Saturday

I went to the Horse Hospital’s Palestine and Lebanon fundraiser. I’m not sure I got there at the right time though, because nothing really caught my eye in the way I was hoping. Maybe the best things had already gone, maybe I just wasn’t in the right headspace. Either way, the chocolate cookie was excellent, so no complaints. Oh, and Celeste came up to me and said she liked my hat!!

Sunday

One of my favourite writers, Archie Forde, covered the Xaviersobased show for Crack Magazine. He has a really distinctive voice, very considered but never stiff, and this piece is a good one.

And I reviewed Riz Ahmed’s latest show, Bait. It’s a really interesting piece of TV. I had a lot of thoughts, which is always a good sign. If you disagree with me, let me know…

Until next week,
Sik

P.S. Put me on!

Ahmed once wrote “the reality of Britain is vibrant multiculturalism, but the myth we export is an all-white world of lords and ladies.” Bait is about the gap between those two things and what happens when a man from multicultural London tries to squeeze himself into the myth. We are living, on both sides of the Atlantic, through a period of accelerating nativism: Reform rising, ballooning Islamophobia, the ever-increasing normalisation of anti-immigrant rhetoric... There has rarely been a more urgent moment to tell these stories. Whether urgency is enough is a different question.

In The Good Immigrant, Ahmed described three stages of representation for ethnic minorities. Stage one: the two-dimensional stereotype: minicab driver, terrorist, cornershop owner. It tightens the necklace. Stage two: the subversive portrayal, still on “ethnic” terrain but aiming to challenge the clichés. It loosens the necklace. Stage three: the promised land, where you play a character whose story is not intrinsically linked to his race. “There, my name might even be Dave. In this place, there is no necklace.”

Bait is deliberately caught between stages two and three. More precisely, it interrogates whether stage three is even possible and asks, if it is, whether it’s desirable. Whether it is, in fact, a trap. Bond is the purest expression of this dilemma: the pinnacle of British cinematic aspiration, a franchise that, as the Patrick Stewart-voiced pig’s head reminds Shah, sells “watches, cars, and the British secret service.” Shah’s reply cuts to the heart of it: “I guess I just always thought I was someone who represents us to them, not fucking them to us.” The tragedy is that he can no longer tell the difference. In one scene, he offers to take down “the videos of [him] online fucking pissing on the British flag.” He has been too willing, for too long, to sand down his edges to fit the role.

The title earns its intelligence. In London slang, bait means obvious, naff, conspicuous, the person who can’t keep it cool. In its older sense, it means lure, food for the trap. Shah is both: too visible to disappear into the role, and too hungry to refuse it.

Much of the cultural territory Bait covers is familiar. The slippage between Urdu, Arabic, MLE, and RP is beautifully rendered, but it’s well-documented terrain, explored by Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith, and, for that matter, Man Like Mobeen, the show that made Guz Khan a star. The “one in, one out” logic of the British film industry is a tale as old as Equity cards: the Dev Patel mistaken-identity gag, the carefully placed cameos from Himesh Patel, Nabhaan Rizwan, Sagar Radia… the show knows exactly what it’s doing with these. The racist hate, while real and necessary to depict, draws from a catalogue of online slurs and childhood skinheads familiar from dozens of British-Asian narratives. The sell-out anxiety, too (seen in Yasmin’s line that Shah “joins a long line of brown men who think that, by becoming our oppressor, he’s somehow liberating all of us”), is a critique with a long and distinguished history.

Bait knows all this. The question is what it does with it.

What it does is refuse the grammar. The standard register for the South Asian-British protagonist is wronged dignity. Shah is given none of that. He is selfish, unreliable, hollow at the centre, so thoroughly colonised by his own aspiration that he passes off dialogue from his acting roles as his own thoughts. At a gala, he disowns Zulfi (Khan), his oldest friend, to appease the establishment guests. Moments after beginning a speech of anti-colonial sentiment, he tackles an actual anti-colonial protester to the ground, becoming the enforcement arm of the very institution he was just critiquing. Shah is not allowed the grace of being right and good simultaneously.

His internalised racism is dramatised through the pig’s head (a Yorick’s skull-cum-shoulder-devil, voiced by Patrick Stewart), which externalises Shah’s mental architecture. The pig’s head calls the mosque “Taliban HQ” and its worshipers “savage little ewoks.” These are Shah’s own thoughts, routed through a borrowed symbol of anti-Muslim violence. Internalised racism is difficult to dramatise without either condemning or excusing; Bait does neither, and simply holds it up for inspection. The chase sequence that follows a visit to the mosque - skinheads, a protester, Muslim uncles accusing him of being Mossad, an auntie insisting he’s not Dev Patel - culminates in Bond-Shah hunting the real Shah through the streets. His enemy is his own ambition. This is psychologically more sophisticated than almost anything in the British-Asian canon, which tends to locate the problem outside its protagonist.

The representational critique is equally precise. A dream sequence sees Shah’s agent Felicia (Weruche Opia) inform him that “making a difference means paying minimal tax, maybe you buy a couple of holiday homes, you can hire a few assistants who look just like you,” a surgical dismantling of what representation has been distorted into. This from the man who coined the Riz Test. Ahmed is parodying his own public discourse, undercutting his own persona, and he knows it. When Shah tries to justify the Bond role to Yasmin (phenomenally embodied by Ritu Arya) - “if I played him, he wouldn’t be white,” she replies without hesitation: “Yeah, but you would be.” The logic of the institution deracinates him before he can deracinate the role.

Around the show, Ahmed told GQ that his life felt “like it was taking place in completely different genres at the same time.” Bait’s formal answer to this is tonal multiplication: family sitcom, spy thriller, surrealist nightmare, operating simultaneously. The soundtrack, featuring Jorja Smith, Arooj Aftab, Jai Paul, SOPHIE…, refuses to settle into a single cultural location, which is its own kind of argument. South Asian-British life is not one genre.

Whether the show resolves its argument is another matter. The ending, Shah receiving the Bond role and puncturing the audition with “The name’s Shahjehan,” is satisfying in the moment but somewhat evasive in retrospect. He asserts his identity at the exact moment of institutional capture. The structural critique the show has spent six episodes building, that the institution co-opts regardless of what you say at the podium, is not answered by this gesture. The show risks letting itself off its own hook.

Ahmed told Esquire that his ambition was honesty rather than novelty: “if we can be honest about who we are, that might empower and give others confidence to do the same.” This is admirable. But the show critiques the machinery of representation while inevitably functioning as representation. It cannot fully escape the logic it interrogates, and it doesn’t quite reckon with that contradiction, which is perhaps the one honest thing it refuses to say aloud.

The question “does it say anything new?” is, as Bait would recognise, a symptom of the very problem it diagnoses. It is the demand that South Asian artists in Britain perpetually justify their presence, do cultural work, and carry the weight of a community’s story. But it is also a necessary question, because it is the question Shah is asking himself, and because any show made by a Brown British artist today will be received as representation whether or not it wants to be.

Bait is a diagnosis of Shah, of Ahmed, of an industry, of what “making it” costs and what it means. Its intelligence lies in its refusal of comfort: Shah is not vindicated, representation is not celebrated, the Brown Bond is not straightforwardly a victory. The show bites the hand that feeds it, though it leaves Amazon, footing the entire bill, conspicuously out of the crossfire.

At the end of it all, Bait says: The name’s Shahjehan. Make of that what you will.

This is the world Beuford Smith dedicated his life to documenting - African American life in New York, in all its grief and joy. Smith taught himself the art of photography after encountering Roy DeCarava’s work in The Sweet Flypaper of Life, a book about life in Harlem. It opened his eyes to what photography could do for Black people, and he never looked away.

In 1965, Smith joined Kamoinge Workshop (derived from the Kikuyu word for “a group of people acting together”), a collective founded to create a shared space for Black photographers at a time when mainstream outlets were closed to them. As founding member Louis Draper put it, they sought “to nurture each other,” operating as “a forum of peers who would view our work with honesty and understanding.” It was during his early years in Kamoinge that Smith truly came into his own, alongside photographers like Ming Smith and Anthony Barboza.

In 1973, he co-founded the Black Photographers Annual with Joe Crawford, which was published four times between 1973 and 1980, featuring essays by Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, and poems by Gordon Parks. Sitting at the intersection of the Black Arts Movement and the Civil Rights Movement, it showcased everyday African American life in all its mundanity, insisting on its own terms of representation at a moment when the mainstream press largely refused to engage with Black perspectives at all.

Jazz photography runs as a second current through Smith’s work. For African American New Yorkers in this era, the music carried enormous weight; many artists were infusing Afrocentrism and political pride into their sound, and the art form had become as much a site of cultural assertion as of performance. One of Smith’s most famous jazz photographs features bassist Paul Chambers and saxophonist John Coltrane, both captured in full motion, their figures almost entirely blurred. Chambers’ suit, body, and bass all bleed into the same dark grey register; he is present as mass and gravity, just like the low frequencies of his instrument. Coltrane, on the other hand, is almost coming apart. The blur fractures and radiates him outward as he disintegrates into the music. The saxophone catches the light as it moves, creating an almost angelic luminescence; it’s the only thing that truly glows in an almost entirely black frame.

Both photographs - the weeping man, the jazz musicians - are predominantly shadow, with light breaking through at specific and meaningful points: in one, a human face; in the other, a musical instrument. Both vessels of human expression.

Despite being a documentary photographer, Smith’s work is not cold or detached. He approached his subjects with love, seeing, through DeCarava, what photography could do for African American life, and dedicating himself to that project. Whether through the Kamoinge spirit of collective nurturing or the pages of the Annual, his practice was always about creating outside the mainstream, on his own terms. Like bebop, his photographs ask something of the viewer, and give back more than they demand.

Welcome back to the Editor’s Log - late again, I know… sorry everyone.

Monday

We got our first glimpse at the branding direction for the 2028 Olympics. It draws on the “superbloom” phenomenon in Southern California, those bursts of wildflowers that take over the landscape, and translates it into bright, almost neon palettes and loose, abstract graphics. I actually think it works really nicely. It feels flexible, recognisable, and built to move across formats.

The Face released what might be its final Introducing section, featuring some of my favourites like Mya Nicoll and 3Stacks. As ever, the curation was spot on. And, while we’re here, feel free to revisit my interview with 3Stacks…

Tuesday

Mr Benn is set to return in a live-action film directed by Kirk Jones. I’m equal parts intrigued and cautious, it’s one of those properties that feels quite delicate, but I’m definitely curious to see how they approach it. Casting starts later this year, with filming slated for 2027.

In the evening, I went to an intimate Saint Harison show at The Lower Third. His voice is incredible, really rich and controlled, but the music itself isn’t quite for me.

Wednesday

The final album from Lee “Scratch” Perry, made in collaboration with Mouse on Mars, is due out in June. I’m usually a bit sceptical of posthumous releases, but this one feels like something he wanted to put out there. I still need to pick up a copy of the Black Ark book as well.

Riz Ahmed’s new show Bait is out now. I watched it across two sittings, and it’s funny, slightly surreal, and pretty sharply written. It follows Shahjehan, a struggling actor trying to land the role of James Bond. Definitely worth your time.

Hurvin Anderson was interviewed by Zaineb Abelque for EE72, coinciding with his major survey now open at Tate Britain. I love his work, and while the interview doesn’t necessarily reveal anything radically new, it does a great job of situating his practice.

Later on, I went to the premiere of Guvna B’s short film at Curzon Mayfair, which accompanies his upcoming album. It tackles some heavy themes, especially addiction, and while parts of the writing felt a little flat, the intent is clear and sincere. I’m still really looking forward to the album itself. Also properly met Deema for the first time, who’s lovely.

I was meant to head to Amzzino’s headline show afterwards, but logistics got in the way. London transport strikes again…

Thursday

Christopher Kane is set to take over at Mulberry, with his first collection due at September’s London Fashion Week, the brand’s first runway showing in nearly a decade. He’s one of the more interesting British designers of the past couple of decades, so I’m keen to see where he takes the brand.

The MOBOs! Highlights: Jim Legxacy winning Best Male Act (and accepting it with a bottle of Henny and no speech), Olivia Dean’s sweep, SHERELLE’s first win, and Wiley’s performance. No invite for me this year, maybe next time.

In the evening, I went to drinks for Ablondi, then the Kindred x Carhartt showcase featuring Lauren Duffus and Jawnino. Both sets were short but good. The venue was a church in Stoke Newington; I don’t think I’ve ever seen Jawnino perform in a normal venue. Also met Danny L Harle properly for the first time, really nice guy.

Friday

Lulu Bullock curated a list of her favourite designers for The Face. As expected, great taste: Jacek Gleba, Ewusie, Ellen Poppy Hill, Aminat Seriki (who I hadn’t come across before, but now very much on my radar), and more!

And then… The Face announced its closure.

It’s hard to overstate how much that magazine has meant to me. The team consistently backed interesting people and ideas, and they were the first major publication to really take a chance on me. Being published by them, then featured in print… those were huge moments for me. I won’t drag this out, but yeah… that one hurts. Long live The Face. It’s shaped more of what I do than I probably realise.

Saturday

I went to the House Against Hate protest rave in Trafalgar Square. It was packed, and honestly quite moving to see. Ben UFO and Celeste were the standouts for me.

After that, I stopped by the National Portrait Gallery to see the Lily Allen cover in person, and spent some time with the Claude Cahun works they have on display; I love their work, so that was a highlight.

I ended the night at a Tempa party at Gaffe in Tottenham, a huge, slightly intimidating space tucked away in an industrial estate. Proper soundsystem, proper energy. It was my first Tempa night, and hopefully the first of many. Met a lot of good people, including Carré, and heard some favourites exactly how they’re meant to be heard.

Sunday

Kept it low-key. My friend Nav launched a pizza collab, so I went down and had a few slices. His work rate is kind of insane.

Until next week,
Sik

P.S. Who would you want to see me write for, work with, or interview next?

Welcome back to the Editor’s Log! Sorry I’m late, life got in the way.

Monday

Guvna B has announced his new album. I’m a big fan - The Village Is On Fire was phenomenal, and the lead single Rest My Head is already sounding strong. Really looking forward to this one. (And, ideally, an interview…)

I went to the Ken Carson show. Honestly, I didn’t love it. He barely interacted with the crowd (didn’t even say “London” once) which always makes a difference. I did meet him afterwards though, and he seemed nice enough. It’s not really my sound, so maybe I’m missing something.

Tuesday

John Galliano has been tapped for a two-year partnership with Zara, where he’ll be “re-authoring” their archives. I’m not entirely sure how exciting Zara’s archives can be, but Galliano’s Galliano… we’ll see.

A major report also dropped: Black music accounts for roughly 80% of UK music revenue. Not exactly shocking, but still important to see it quantified like that.

On a much darker note, India is moving to roll back the rights of its transgender population. The proposed bill would significantly undermine protections for non-binary and trans people more broadly. Really disheartening to see.

Wednesday

Dylan Law, one of the Green Party’s deputy mayoral nominees, was interviewed by Jason Okundaye for i-D. He’s only a couple of years older than me and comes across well; thoughtful, grounded... Good on him.

15 years ago, XLR8R released its final print issue. Mad to think about. A publication that literally helped coin “dubstep” just quietly disappeared and most people didn’t clock it. I wonder who’ll be next to go...

The Femcels also linked Gymskin. At a time when the incel/manosphere conversation is everywhere, Gymskin feels like a much healthier counterpoint.

Thursday

Lily Allen’s West End Girl cover is now in the National Portrait Gallery. I wrote about the album through its cover last year, so I definitely need to go and see it in person.

V&A East has announced its inaugural exhibition, The Music is Black, opening April 18. It’s set to explore 125 years of music, style, and community in the UK. Really excited for this, especially to see what Jacqueline Springer does with it.

Friday

In another blow to trans rights, the state of Kansas is requiring IDs to reflect “sex at birth,” effectively invalidating the licences of thousands of trans drivers. It’s difficult to overstate how damaging policies like this are.

Homme FC, a transmasc football team, got their first magazine feature in The Face (written by Tiffany Lai). What they’re building is really exciting, and I hope we see more initiatives like this!!

Youngsta also has new music on the way via Tempa. It’s named after Plastic People and features the club on the cover, so you already know it’s built for the dance.

And Gabriel Moses shot his girlfriend for EE72. It looks incredible. I need someone to love me like that.

Saturday

Wellcome Collection is opening a new exhibition, Tenderness and Rage, on May 29. It explores HIV/AIDS through protest, care, and lived experience: from the UK epidemic in the ’80s and ’90s to the present. Definitely one for the list.

In the afternoon, I went to the Medmo x Mura x Hooded pop-up. There’s a lot of potential there, some really strong ideas, but parts of it felt slightly underdeveloped. Didn’t end up buying anything, but definitely ones to keep an eye on.

Sunday

Finally, Travs Presents is celebrating its fourth birthday at Colour Factory next month. I can’t make this one, so I’m delegating attendance to all of you.

Until next week,
Sik

P.S. I’m exhausted.