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It’s been a long time coming, but we’re thrilled to share some significant improvements to our mobile app as well as a brand new web-based version of Cantilever.

Mobile updates

Offline-downloading

Our most requested feature - you can now download albums so that you can listen to them on the go! Either download albums one at a time, or set the entire app into auto-download where each new release will be downloaded when you open the app. When albums are rotated out of the platform after 30 days, the downloads will be auto-removed.

Two toggles, one to download everything as soon as it comes on the app, one to use cellular data. Find both in settings.

Tracklist in listening tab

We’ve introduced a tracklist toggle in the “listening tab” making it easy to select tracks in distraction free album listening sessions.

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Website

Play Cantilever albums from your browser

Search our entire archive

Everything we’ve ever published (now just over 100 albums!) will be readable in our archive. Archive albums are not streamable - but follow the links to buy a copy or stream elsewhere.

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Sharing

Link directly to an album and article.

Gifting

Another frequently requested feature, 6 month and 12 month gift cards now available!

Cantilever website

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Note on launch:

The idea that Cantilever is a “music magazine you can listen to” is something that I have repeated many times… but I think it finds an even fuller form on our new website. For now, we’re choosing to hard paywall everything — users can start a free trial of course, but there’s no “free” version of this site, or set number of articles you get to read for free. Media consistently goes through revenue generation shifts — print magazines went to free online content funded by advertising. But it’s clear in the era of Substack that there’s an audience out there that’s willing to pay for well-crafted, thoughtful online media experiences. So, with this particular online music magazine we’re doing two things — ensuring the writers who contribute to Cantilever are fairly paid for their contributions, and making sure that the artists who are featured on our platform are also fairly paid for their streams. So, please do check it out, share it with people you think might be interested, and let us know what you think! - Aaron

Timings:

20:00 - Doors

20:45 - Shaking Hand

21:30 - 1000 Rabbits

22:15 - Evelyn Gray

23:00 - Dana Margolin

23:30 - Poppy Richler (DJ)

1:00 - Curfew

Please arrive early to guarantee entry! RSVP essential.

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Tickets

Please join us at the Cantilever launch party, presented by Minor Attractions’ Summer Sessions. 30th of May 2026.

St. Moritz Club, 159 Wardour St, London W1F 8WH

Dana Margolin (formerly of the Mercury Prize nominated Porridge Radio) headlines, performing new material.

Plus Evelyn Gray (formerly of the band Tapir!), 1000 Rabbits (newly signed to Young Records), and Shaking Hand, whose excellent debut album Cantilever had a limited preview for back in January.

DJ sets from Poppy Richler of Rhythm Changes - party and panel talk series doing important work + the Cantilever team until 4AM.

Free to all.

Doors at 20:00 - click the link below for more info and tickets.

GRAB A TICKET HERE

Dana Margolin

Subscribe to Dana’s substack for updates.

Dana Margolin

i am writing with no end

Evelyn Gray

1000 Rabbits

Shaking Hand

Tickets

Forwarded this email and not sure that this is? Check out our intro post below or head to our website / app store / play store to start your free trial.

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Cantilever

A new model for music streaming

Cantilever started as a blog in 2023, somewhere to share my music writing. While Substack is great for setting up paid subscriptions, I wanted to keep the blog free, with the idea that any paid version would also pass some value over to artists…

Read more

10 months ago · 76 likes · 23 comments · Aaron Skates

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In-app subscriptions

We’ve added the ability to purchase your subscription in the app itself. Hopefully this will put an end to any confusion around sign-up and get people streaming more easily!

Current subscribers, you don’t need to do anything at all. But if you signed up via our site (which is everyone up until now) you will need to go back to the site (cantilever-music.com) to update your subscription, billing etc. and won’t be able to do this in the app — the two payment systems are entirely separate.

If you’re interested in exactly why we didn’t do this from the beginning, you can read this article titled “Apple’s 30% commission unfair, Spotify claims” in The Guardian.

Home page ordering

You can now switch the order of albums on the home page to lead with the album with the least amount of days remaining — an oft-requested feature.

More feature updates coming very soon, stay tuned via this newsletter and let info@cantilever-music.com if you have any suggestions for where we can improve.

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Streaming now on Cantilever

Rival Consoles - Persona (Erased Tapes, 2018)

…considered from another angle, the Rival Consoles project’s focus on sound design puts him in league with the neoclassical cohort, just through a different set of sounds and modalities. In fact, since the release of Persona, West has gone on to score a number of projects in a number of other mediums, including the ‘Black Mirror’ episode ‘Striking Vipers’, choreographer Alexander Whitley’s contemporary dance performance ‘Overflow’, and action-adventure video game ‘MindsEye’. But this feels like the record on which he fully developed the blueprint for what was to come. A beautifully crafted sonic reflection of an artist thinking deeply about how space, sound and internal states interact with one another.

Alice Costelloe - Move On With The Year (Moshi Moshi, 2026)

Writing this record, I was completely immersed in childhood and the past. A lot of the songs are about exactly that. I spent a long time thinking about how I'd grown up, how I'd been involved with creative projects, and what it would look like to do something entirely by myself that was true to who I am. It did feel a bit like returning to being a child — that particular quality of independence.

Panda Bear & Sonic Boom - Reset (Domino, 2022)

Both artists maintain a kind of geographic outsider status: Spacemen 3 were based out of Rugby, Warwickshire, a town of fewer than 100,000 people, “we always felt that we were better off developing in isolation than being in a big city and part of some scene”, Kember said in a relatively recent interview. Animal Collective, on the other hand, were scene leaders in a large city - namely the New York noise scene of the early 2000s which also included Black Dice and Gang Gang Dance. Yet Lennox relocated from New York to Lisbon, Portugal exactly as the band were gaining traction in the mid 2000s, explaining that he preferred a slower pace of life in which to write and release music. For his part, Kember would move to Portugal in 2016, which was where the pair first connected and began collaborating: "The area I live, which is outside of Lisbon", he explained, "is magnetic towards people who like that [psychedelic experience], there is something about the place, which is magical, beautiful and a relatively unspoiled environment."

Youniss - Good Effort! (Self release, 2026)

Starting his career mainly as a producer, Youniss has steadily grown into a songwriter and vocalist across his previous releases Youniss (2020) and White Space (2023). Much of Good Effort! was written in the margins of other projects from the Belgian alternative scene – particularly Youniss’ collaborations as a producer for Antwerp-based songwriters such as Porcelain Id and Pitou (who make appearances on Good Effort!) and his production work for electronic legends Borokov Borokov. As the listener moves through the tracklisting, this constellation of collaborators appears along the way, turning the album into a conversation rather than a monologue. The rhythm of late evenings and nights after long studio days quietly permeates Good Effort!. Many of its songs feel suspended in nocturnal hours, when the city slows down and reflection becomes inevitable. “When it gets dark outside it’s the only time things don’t feel mundane”.

Start your free trial here or go straight to the app store / play store on one of the buttons below.

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Streaming now on Cantilever

Able Noise - High Tide (World of Echo, 2024)

The second of our albums curated by Dig That Treasure! festival — read our interview with festival organiser Will Hall from a couple of weeks ago here — this piece is an interview with Able Noise by Kiran Leonard, whose own album Real Home (2024) was streaming on Cantilever in January.

“The songs on High Tide are propulsive, clear-eyed, conceptually precise. They could be described by way of Fluxus-like instructional texts. For example: Begin by recording yourself playing one chord with straight backbeat for around four minutes on cassette. Play the recording back and change the tape’s speed when you want to change chord. Play along to the tape as you do this, changing chord and speed in time with the tape. Or: Record the sound of an oven ticking in Holland. Imitate the ticking on a drum set in Greece. Meanwhile, make the sound produce its own opposite, rising the drum mic faders to make lowing waves of feedback.”

Tim Reaper & Kloke - In Full Effect (Hyperdub, 2024)

“Both Kode9 and Hyperdub quickly became central figures in UK electronic music, combining theory, futurism, and sound system pressure with rare coherence. As Kode9 told Dazed in 2024, “‘Hyperdub’ was also a word I used [in my own head] to describe jungle and its aftermath.” Despite this conceptual overlap, and despite the label’s deep roots in jungle’s aftershocks, Hyperdub had never released a jungle record, until 2024’s In Full Effect by Tim Reaper and Kloke.”

Clémentine March - Powder Keg (PRAH Recordings, 2026)

“If I could summarise, it’s really a document of a renaissance of the post-covid years. I met with a younger scene of people who showed me a new way of making music. Many of these artists have big statements about what they’re making and I was in need of that. I needed someone to tell me I could do that.”

The Golden Dregs - On Grace & Dignity (4AD, 2023)

“The idea – and this is reflected in the artwork – was that all the songs could be playing out on a night or on a timeline. For example, on ‘Vista’ there’s a house burning, and on ‘Not Even the Rain,’ a couple witnesses the same fire. So there’s these bits of crossover where it could all play out, and that’s what I wanted to create with the artwork: Edie Lawrence made this diorama of a model village that had all the songs within it. It felt like creating the model brought everything into this self-contained Cornish world.”

More great independent record labels join Cantilever

We’re thrilled to be working with City Slang, Mexican Summer and Secretly Distribution. The list of incredible records from these labels and their constituent parts is endless. I’ve recently enjoyed reading the Substack blog of Jagjaguwar (Secretly Group) founder Darius Van Arman, especially “The Struggle for Independence in the Modern Age” and “Rise of the Music-Making Machines”, recommended reading for anyone interested in the business side of independent music. Equally — watch an entertainingly polemic viral clip of City Slang’s Christof Ellinghaus discussing how recorded music is “kaput” and the future of a “healthy music ecosystem” here.

Three years to the day…

On the 6th of March 2023, this Substack blog (then as now called Cantilever) sent its first email (to exactly 2 recipients, but with a 100% open rate!) in which we recommended live shows by Lou Terry, Uh, Avalon Emerson & The Charm, Grove, Denzel Himself and more. Great to still be championing excellent music here three years later (albeit with a few false starts.)

We’ll be making some significant changes to the Cantilever app before the end of this month — while we’re in this phase of development we want to hear your feedback more than ever. What’s working, what’s not working, what do you want to see and hear? Drop a line to info@cantilever-music.com and let’s chat!

cantilever-music.com

Also worth a read if you're thinking about music and AI — my recent piece here.

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Dig That Treasure! festival is happening in London between the 1st and 4th of May 2026 between the venues Cafe Oto and IKLEKTIK. Back when Cantilever was a live music blog, we’d cover the programming at these venues frequently. The festival itself is also co-produced with Baba Yaga’s Hut, who I interviewed for this blog roughly a year ago. So it’s nice to feel this project — which has changed a lot since then — having a kind of circularity.

The festival, now in its third year, is a celebration of multiple different music cultures — different backgrounds, different nationalities, different genres. Recently, Cantilever has teamed up with Dig That Treasure! to provide some curation to our music streaming app — selecting one record a month in the lead up to this year’s festival. A couple of these are not on mainstream streaming services at all.

Cantilever is lucky enough to work with some established names in independent music — but it matters just as much to me that we're connected to the grassroots, to the real music culture that exists between people. Will M Hall, Dig That Treasure! festival organiser, interviewed below, is someone who believes 'there is good music in every nook and cranny of every culture.' So it made perfect sense to ask him where to look.

Will, how did Dig That Treasure! Festival get started, it was a radio show first is that correct?

12 and a half years ago I took a year off before going to university. I am a very restless person and I needed something to fill what I thought might be an empty year. I’d been planning to start a music blog for a while, because I thought there was a gap in the blogging scene for more obscure stuff. Within about two weeks I decided it should be a radio show. So I took a punt and emailed Resonance FM, because that was the most left-field radio station I was aware of. I didn’t and still don’t listen to much radio — besides Resonance sometimes! — so I’m not even sure what the options are or were. I’d listened to some stuff on Resonance and thought: I could do that. I’m not a great talker, I’m not particularly confident.

I got over-excited and decided to put on a gig a year in. I got in contact with Laetitia Sadier of Stereolab and I booked her for a gig at Cafe Oto. It’s funny because people talk about the idea that it’s hard to get a gig there. But I was 19 and just emailed them out of the blue… She wanted to have Jane Weaver supporting. Then I booked Let’s Eat Grandma who hadn’t released anything. And now all three of those artists have gone on to be even more well known in the intervening years.

I then did three compilation albums. I emailed various people: I got Woo who are one of my favourite ambient groups, The Go! Team who were my favourite band growing up, Laetitia Sadier again, lots of different people were happy to give songs for the sake of charity. We did a couple more gigs.

Fast forward to 2023 and the real truth is I got sober. My brain cleared up and I had a new lease of life. That, combined with my lack of impulse control, led me to decide to put on four gigs in a row and call it a festival, despite having only ever put on five gigs previously, ever. But I thought why not do four in a row!

I put it together on my own. It all sold out and was a really, really good event. Though it wasn’t quite as ambitious as I wanted it to be. The next year I applied for Arts Council funding and really pushed the boat out, booked a load of international acts. That one didn’t quite sell as well, but it was better in terms of my vision. This year is the true distillation.

Those compilation albums were all for charity is that correct? And they were all digital only?

They were. As much as I’m obsessed with physical ephemera, I wanted to maximise the money going to charity. One was for Refugee Council, one was for Campaign Against Living Miserably. One was for Resonance FM actually, which is a registered charity! All charities that in that moment felt important.

How does one apply for arts council funding?

It’s gruelling! It’s really gruelling! The first time I did it I took three days off work and worked at it in a cafe, hours and hours and hours. You have to be very accountable. You have to have the names of the artists, their email addresses, the names of the venues, the number of people who are going to come. All of it is speculative as well. I applied quite early and so the line up wasn’t actually what it turned out to be. I ended up booking quite different acts. I was completely surprised when I got it the first time.

This is where Baba Yaga’s enters the picture. I got it in 2024, then I applied again for this edition and was rejected, despite thinking I had a great pitch. I was ready to bin it, to be honest, I had all the plans, but I didn’t have the funds to be able to do it.

Last year, I went to see Eric Chenaux, which was a Baba Yaga’s gig. I’ve known Anthony for a couple of years, just through gigs, he was asking about how the festival was going. I explained about how the ambitions of the festival far outstripped the financial situation. He’s not investing any large chunk of cash or anything like that, but the infrastructure he has made it possible to do the festival. It’s almost the PR element of it.

If you were to describe what the curation at DTT is, what would you say?

I can’t really describe it in terms of genre. But everything is underpinned by the idea of rejecting monopolies in music — whether that be major labels, or even just the zeitgeist in independent music. Or the effects of major labels and Spotify and so on. My core belief is that there is good music in every nook and cranny of every culture. Music made by children, music made by the learning disabled, music made for video games, to pick just a few of the endless examples. I’ve always rejected PR lists.

Broadly though, Dig That Treasure! is melodic, avant-garde music, melodic experimental music. Not a whole lot of improvisation. I like a hook — even if it’s warped or very subtle.

Then there’s always an international element. The first year I had a Sudanese group, the next year I had a Cape Verdean group. This year I’ve got Kurdish, Somali, Belgian, Italian, various other nationalities. I don’t want it to just be the acts that you will find in London on a weekly basis. It’s not going to be anything that you could regularly see for the rest of the year. It’s a risky strategy! But more than a genre, it’s just things you might not expect to see.

One artist that caught my eye from the line up is a collaboration between “young people with Down’s Syndrome and professional musicians from Oslo’s improv scene”, could you tell me a little bit about DNA? AND?

I’ve taken quite a lot of inspiration from three things in terms of booking artists with disabilities, which is very important to me.

The first one is my day job — when I started this festival I was working in special needs schools. Now I’m a social worker. Secondly, I volunteered for a charity called Heart N Soul, which is an amazing charity, out of which came Dean Rodney Jr. It also has connections to Robyn Steward, who does Robyn’s Rocket. She is the third thing. She does nights at Cafe Oto, and now elsewhere.

Her thing is: you go to a gig and it’s the same people, almost like following a social code that just isn’t inclusive. It doesn’t necessarily make sense outside of the social contract that exists in that situation. Subtle things, for example she puts a timetable on the stage so you can see when the next act is going to come on — for some, it gives reassurance. She gives badges which you can turn a certain way to say if you’re happy to chat. Acts will spill into the audience. There’s all the accessories that people might need to make that show accessible to them. It’s not a monoculture. It’s a major inspiration.

With DNA? AND? I actually saw them play at Le Guess Who festival. They’d been booked by Jenny Hval, both are Norwegian. I went to see them because I thought — this can’t be bad! And it was really, really, really good. In the run up to that, part of the promise of my press access to Le Guess Who, I contacted DNA? AND? and they contributed a half an hour thing to my radio show at the time, then it was a no brainer to put them on one of my compilations.

It’s been difficult getting them over to play. There’s quite a lot of them, plus carers, assistants and so on. A party of 15 people at least. I thought I’d just take a punt! If you lose money on something that’s really special and very meaningful to a group of people then who cares. Most of these people won’t have been to London before, and they’re going to play and gig and it’s going to be great.

Have there been any particular shows from any of the festivals which have stood out as a highlight?

Two acts from 2024. Two acts that showcase people with special needs or disabilities. The Wild Classical Music Ensemble, a Belgian Group, supported or co-headlined with Dean Rodney Jr. & The Cowboys. It wasn’t the best sold gig, but it was the most life affirming best thing ever. Wild Classical Music Ensemble all live in institutions in Belgium for those with sight impairments or learning needs. It was their first time visiting the UK and they played the best gig ever. That’s what usually comes to mind.

Mohammad Syfkhan’s album I Am Kurdish is currently streaming on Cantilever. How did you first encounter his music?

I saw that Mohammad was playing a gig a couple of years ago at St. Pancras Old Church. He’s grown a little bit in repute since then. His record is out on Nyahh Records which is the same label that does some of the Lankum side projects such as One Leg One Eye. Apparently the live show is just killer! When I teamed up with Baba Yaga’s Hut, he’d also been looking to book Mohammad so it all made sense.

In terms of this year’s festival — and they’ve all loosely been like this — but this one is very intentionally divided into thematic strands. The first night is Migrant Communities, which is Mohammad and Canab Marwo. The second night is “deconstructing the rock band” which is Able Noise, DNA? AND? and Jemima. The third night is “traditional musics”, Eric Chenaux who is very much a play on the traditional folk singer, jazz singer and so on plus Harry Gorski-Brown who does Scottish traditional music, but gone awry, and Ensemble Irsahm, who play Hildegard Von Bingen and stuff. Then the final night is Standard Issue, Abul Mogard and Rafael Anton Irissari, grouped under “deep listening”.

So live shows, artist recommendations, are there any other methods by which you’re finding the music you feature?

Canab Marwo is someone I just found on YouTube. I messaged the YouTube account that uploaded the video and they gave me her Whatsapp. She’s a Londoner, but she doesn’t really play outside of the Somali community. Events that aren’t really publicised outside of the London Somali community. She’ll play parties, weddings, special occasions or cultural presentations. But they’re not “gigs” on the circuit as some might know them. You’re not going to see her play unless you’re really in the know.

Before the internet decided it was no longer fun, there was a blogspot boom where people would upload zip files and you could just take a punt on a recommendation. Half of the time it was terrible, half of the time it was amazing. Then there are YouTube accounts I follow, or certain rabbit holes I know how to get into. Then Wire magazine in terms of print media.

You’re not someone who is exclusively into the avant-garde though, from what I understand?

100%! Everything I listen to has a different purpose. I’ll typically have three or four pop bangers on heavy rotation, while I spend most of my listening time with ambient or drone-y music, and I’m the most excited by the avant-garde or experimental stuff. That’s my rotation. I don’t know why anyone would want to listen to one thing only!

I think that literally anyone could come to any of these four gigs and really enjoy themselves. It’s not actually about accessibility or inaccessibility, it’s about: the experience is going to be really good and the music is going to be really good. I want people to see Able Noise — who are Wire magazine darlings — play with DNA? AND?, who are of very low profile, but engage the disabled community, and then Jemima who are a duo I just happened to stumble upon.

You’re working full-time as a social worker right now. Is there a sense to which the idea of being a regular promoter just doesn’t really appeal?

Creatively, if I were to try and do something like this full time I’d end up having to book things I don’t want to book, in order to make a living. I’m picky! More broadly, there’s very little money in this. Some people have smashed it, but it’s a small space. I spent years trying to work in music, but I found it depressing. Having this project that’s sometimes active, sometimes not, it’s a great way to be working in it. I need to work with human beings though. I’ve worked with children forever. I need to work with children to keep my soul good!

Dig That Treasure! Festival Tickets

Streaming now on Cantilever

Mohammad Syfkhan - I Am Kurdish (Nyahh Records, 2024)

“Mohammad Syfkhan is a Kurdish/Syrian Singer and Bouzouki player who began playing music in 1980 while he was in college studying nursing. When he got his degree in 1983, Mohammad moved to the city of Raqqa, Syria where he started his own band, The Al-Rabie Band, which played concerts, parties, weddings and festivals. Their live sets included Kurdish, Arabic, Turkish and some Western songs as well as Mohammad’s own original material.

When the war broke out in Syria, one of Syfkhan’s sons was tragically killed by Isis and the family were forced to leave their home and seek refuge in Europe, some emigrating to Germany while Syfkhan, his wife and young daughter settled in Ireland, splitting the family apart. Quoting Nyahh Records:

“Mohammad has spoken at length of his confusion and despair with fundamentalists and how their message is a far cry from the teachings of love and understanding that he considers the true message of Islam.”

A recently arrived refugee in County Leitrim, Ireland, Syfkhan connected with Nyahh Records label manager Willie Stewart, asking him if he could plug his bouzouki into Stewart’s mixing desk while the latter was DJ-ing a local event, celebrating the culture of new international communities in County Leitrim. Soon enough, Syfkhan was being booked for shows and connected with musicians in the Irish traditional and experimental scene, including landing a support slot with Lankum in County Cork.

This story of collaboration — how one culture can support the traditional music of another and assimilate it into its own — is a great example of how folk music is always on the move, how it is never fixed nor finished.”

Hen Ogledd - DISCOMBOBULATED (Weird World, 2026)

An interview with Dawn Rothwell from the "Scottish-Welsh-Geordie-Lancashire-Australian supergroup".

“There’s a combination of things — there was a particular ballad I’d been listening to that talks about a horse. The story is basically a mother questioning her son who has blood on his sword, he deceives her and says it’s the blood of his horse, but it turns out to be the blood of his brother. So there was this folk ballad element to it, and I felt like I could really imagine somebody naively riding a horse through a landscape.

Then, similarly, we started to talk about the horses out at Clara Vale, where Richard and Sally live. Clara Vale used to be a mining village, and there’s a fire burning underground. Sometimes in old mines you get these spontaneous fires that happen through gases.

So, in that landscape, there’s always this idea of danger lurking underneath the ground. The place itself – Clara – was the name of the main mine owner’s wife.

So we kind of had this idea of a girl called Clara riding her horse, naively through the countryside, having a nice time — meanwhile you’ve got the pit ponies and the miners underground dragging out all the coal, and then she falls into a massive hole in the ground.”

deathcrash - Somersaults (untitled (recs), 2026)

An essay by Kaye Song (partner at Turner Prize-winning collective Assemble), the artist behind the record’s cover. Somersaults is streaming exclusively on Cantilever until this Friday the 27th.

“The artwork for Somersaults is a reconfigurable stage set, designed to move through multiple iterations. Assembled from scrap paper, cloth, and wood, only a thin coat of white paint veils how crude it really is. It’s a fragile construction clamped with clips or suspended from string, lasting only long enough to photograph. Like the album itself, it hovers between lightness and weight. Dismantled within minutes, it’s the images of these ephemeral spaces that endure. What it is exactly is a quiet mystery.”

cantilever-music.com

Other Cantilever news

• Cantilever feature in der Freitag alongside other streaming platforms offering an alternative model — “Genug vom Musik-Fastfood? Es geht auch ohne Spotify!” by Kristoffer Cornils — full piece here.

• More incredible independent record labels have joined Cantilever over the past month, but I’m saving that for the next issue. Until then!

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On a recent episode of the No Tags podcast titled “Will the AI Slopwave Ruin Music for Good?”, the hosts incisively delved into the AI music generation app Suno. The thing that struck me the most from their analysis were the “nuggets of conventional wisdom”, that they saw being shared on the forums related to the app.

“Suno's like a Swiss Army knife”, begins one user on the Suno forum, “lots of tools, but do you know how to use them all? Bottom line: if people doubt your music, keep working, learning, and experimenting.”

“When it’s 4am after 10 hours straight struggling with extensions to finalize a hidden gem, go to bed, don’t release it yet.” Another commenter on the forum replies, “wait until the morning to listen and decide if it’s any good or not.”

Surely the same kind of conversation is happening all the time on the forums attached to standard digital audio workstations like Ableton Live and Logic. And before this — putting speed of release aside for a moment — it’s conventional wisdom that could be shared between musicians in a recording studio. Stop stressing, go to bed, see how it sounds in the morning.

Will Suno and other AI music generation tools simply become the new digital audio workstations? Will they resemble the synthesiser, the drum machine, Ableton, Logic and other kinds of tools – with varying degrees of autonomy – which musicians simply use as part of their arsenal?

It’s possible that some music fans may not mind if the artists they like use AI in some form. The artist Holly Herndon recently expressed views to this end, claiming that “the human / AI binary is not going to hold, and will become a matter of superficial optics.” A swift movement from noteworthy to unremarkable is common for new technologies. As tech analyst Benedict Evans cogently points out, no one uses the term “automatic elevator” anymore as the idea of a manually operated elevator has simply disappeared into the distant past: “When it works, it just disappears. We don’t see it anymore, it just becomes software.”

But will the optics be superficial? And is some level of AI orchestration on top of an already largely human-made track really the issue here? Or is there something more fundamental to be concerned about?

Something qualitatively different about AI music generation tools vs. current digital audio workstations is the scale at which they can produce complete tracks. According to their own investor pitch deck, Suno produces “an entire Spotify catalogue’s worth of music every two weeks”. If you could make a couple Lo-fi Beats to Study and Relax To a day on Ableton perhaps, now you can autogenerate a constant stream of them, likely hundreds at a time in parallel. For some, as Tom Lea says on No Tags, Suno may be “the latest in a list of ways for people to try to make money online with minimum effort.”

At the same time, the major labels and Merlin (who represent the digital rights of a large chunk of the independent sector) have recently signed licensing agreements which allow Suno and competitor Udio to train their models on licensed works, so long as the constituent labels and artists have specifically opted-in. These deals involve the rights holders receiving the royalties of any music output trained on their licensed data.

So long as he is opted-in then, Drake will see the revenue next time an AI track, trained on his music, goes viral. It’s hard to deny that having control over how and where your intellectual property is exploited is better than simply having your IP stolen and remunerated without you seeing any return, which is how Suno was operating prior to these deals. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that it’s better than not having it exploited at all. Plus, in an AI licensing landscape, established catalogue — which takes up the vast majority of listening on streaming services (over 70% by some metrics) — no longer just persists but actively compounds. While it remains to be seen if fans will actually want to do this; what will the long term effects on trying to break new music be if firm favourites can be endlessly iterated upon?

Post-licensing, users paying for the higher-tier of Suno will receive better outputs, trained on real artists, but be unable to see the revenue. Those on the lower tier are already blocked from monetisation. Suno creations can only be monetised if they are trained on copyright you personally control. These distinctions lead to big questions about what the end goal of most Suno users actually is: will it primarily be used as a fun gimmick? A digital audio workstation augmentation tool, as Holly Herndon might be pointing towards? A generic content-farm? Or the audio equivalent of fan-fiction? It seems too early to tell.

By way of antithesis: Bandcamp recently announced a zero tolerance policy towards AI-generated music. While considered a positive symbolic gesture for many fans, it strikes me that Bandcamp is already structurally resistant to the worst effects of AI music, because the platform has centred “money, rather than attention, as the basic unit of exchange”, to quote Andrew Thompson’s recent piece for Components (which is actually referring to Substack, but seems applicable here).

If Bandcamp were to be suddenly flooded with substantively-AI artists — as is currently happening on mainstream streaming services (Deezer says 34% of the songs uploaded to its streaming service - about 50,000 per day - are AI-generated)— what would actually happen? Given Bandcamp doesn’t pay for streams, only purchases, it’s not possible for background engagement with the platform to cannibalise revenue that should be paid to real artists. On platforms like Bandcamp where users typically buy from artists that they already know and trust, or are pointed towards new artists by thoughtful, well-researched editorial, the likelihood of substantively AI artists resonating with users enough to generate purchases seems slim. There are humans in the loop too; the platform will be self-policing, they say:

“If you encounter music or audio that appears to be made entirely or with heavy reliance on generative AI, please use our reporting tools to flag the content for review by our team. We reserve the right to remove any music on suspicion of being AI generated.”

If AI will enter into digital music services, it will primarily target those where “attention”, not a direct exchange of money, remunerates the creator. It will be used in the hope of remaining un-noticed. In the most pernicious use of AI, the optics won’t be superficial but at once substantive and covert.

The coming years may spell the end of human-made lean-back listening. If people weren’t really paying attention to background Perfect Fit Content anyway (music commissioned by streaming platforms to suit a particular mood or setting, paid out at low or no royalties to the creators) how would they know and why would they care if this kind of music were made by AI? AI will make generic, functional music more or less free and certainly abundant. If they weren’t already, those artists making playlist-friendly music for Spotify, with little genuine audience to speak of, are in a very precarious position. Or maybe Suno will save them by virtue of scale.

Over the coming years, knowledge about the provenance of the music we listen to may be what separates potentially “superficial” optics into separate categories, valued differently. Knowing that the artists we are listening to are real may become an increasing user demand, either by explicit labelling on mainstream streaming services, or, as Deezer have implemented, using tools that filter out the stream of AI slop. The wholesale AI artist cannibalising streaming revenue and AI being used in the creative process by real artists is a sliding scale of course, but here again is where the context and provenance of the music — a substantive part of the Bandcamp experience — will become increasingly crucial.

As if in assent to the “minimum effort” requirements of the platform, on a recent podcast, Suno’s CEO claimed that “a lot of people don’t really enjoy the time they spend making music… it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of time they spend making music.”

I’m not going to take the bait here to lambast the Wall-E-esque universe that he clearly envisages. But one crucial detail he’s missed out, is that (for many) a lot of the enjoyment of making music comes from making it with other people. I too have been fatigued by making electronic music alone on Ableton; the endless list of options and my own disappointing results can make it feel like more “screen time”. Making music in a room with my peers though? It’s a qualitatively different experience.

Similarly, in my view, there is a qualitatively different experience to listening to music on algorithmic playlists because I like the sound and the vibe, and listening to music made by musicians who I definitely know (by virtue of context) have played live shows, collaborated with other musicians, and participated not just in the creation of sound, but in music culture more generally, of which recorded music is just one small part. As now, not all listeners will care, but those who do will care more and more.

cantilever-music.com

For what it’s worth, Cantilever has a no-AI policy for all music featured on the platform.

Streaming now on Cantilever

Jerkcurb - Night Fishing on a Calm Lake (Handsome Dad Records, 2025)

“I think I used to be a lot more subliminal with where I was coming from. The difference is in the speed at which I wrote the lyrics. I used to change little bits, I’d write the same lyrics for months and months changing bits around. But this time, the first thing I said was often the lyric, which isn’t necessarily the most poetic thing, but felt the most real.

I want to be a character, but I have to confront what’s real. For the first time I really couldn’t hide. I think recording this album was the most confrontational time in my whole life.”

Dry Cleaning - Secret Love (4AD, 2026)

Florence Shaw was an arts lecturer before being approached to join the band, and her sensibilities as a visual artist clearly inform the often-cryptic, collage-like lyrics at the heart of the project. Hers is a found-object approach akin to Tracey Emin, Lorna Simpson, and Marcel Duchamp: it incorporates pre-existing written, spoken, overheard elements into new, mosaic assemblages. While her lyrics for the band’s early music "recycle[d] material from newspapers, YouTube comments, advertisements, conversations", Secret Love finds her scoring deeper into the peculiar “brainrot” of our current techno-political moment.

Wilma Archer - A Western Circular (Domino, 2020)

Inspired by the writing of American author John Fante and his paranoid, claustrophobic novels known as The Bandini Quartet, Archer crafts a string-heavy sonic narrative ostensibly centred on a week of his life; a week when, he explains, he was thinking about mortality, and the cyclical nature of life and death.

Clara Mann - Rift (The state51 Conspiracy, 2025)

“People have to lean into it and make an active step towards you to listen, to understand,” says Mann. “It’s not something that can be passively absorbed.” And that’s the case whether listening on headphones at home or standing at the barrier. Mann recalls frequent skirmishes with live sound engineers who confuse quietness with weakness, confounding the artist and the art.

“When I’m playing shows and the sound engineer is like, “God, you’re so quiet with your acoustic guitar,” I’m like, “That’s the whole point! Don’t turn it up.” You know?”

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International Cantilever

Cantilever is now available in the US and EU on iOS and Android. Please check the app store for your local availability.

We know some signed up for a free trial without being aware that we were UK only. If this is you, please drop us a line directly at info@cantilever-music.com and we will reset your 30-day free trial.

Our plan is to be available globally and we will continue to push to be in more locations throughout 2026.

Head to our website to start your free trial now, make an account and receive the app download link!

www.cantilever-music.com

App Updates

We have updated versions of the app for both iOS and Android, resolving issues around favouriting, text clipping and updating Android to the latest UI changes — see our previous substack post for a recap of what these are. Click the links below to update.

iOS

Android

Streaming now on Cantilever

These New Puritans - Crooked Wing (Domino, 2025)

Lewis Todd on the fifth album from Essex auteurs These New Puritans.

“Since 2013’s Field of Reeds, their work has shifted markedly away from the beat-making side of their interests, and instead towards a highly structured mode of composition more associated with chamber or film rather than rock or sample-based music. In this context, Crooked Wing represents their most ambitious and highly mythologised piece of work yet, and one in which the labours of the Essex autodidacts are realised in their most accomplished form.”

Lucinda Chua - YIAN (4AD, 2023)

on FKA Twigs session Cellist turned solo artist Lucinda Chua.

“Rather than offering answers, YIAN returns again and again to questions: “who do I run from, who do I run toward?”, “who do I turn to when I’m not part of you?” - allowing them to remain unanswered. There is something deeply human in this repetition and in the refusal to arrive at clarity or closure. Chua’s music acknowledges uncertainty without attempting to resolve it, allowing in-betweenness to remain as part of an ongoing process of growth and change.”

Shaking Hand - Shaking Hand (Melodic, 2026)

An interview with the Manchester three-piece. A Cantilever exclusive (for two more days…)

“When I first joined the band I remember listening to the demo of "Cable Ties" and walking through Manchester. It felt like walking through a dark city and seeing a warm window in a skyscraper. A warm window in the coldness of the city.”

Real Home - Kiran Leonard (Memorials of Distinction, 2024)

Henry Young on the latest album from the acclaimed folk-adjacent singer-songwriter.

“The verse lyric “My heart longs to bring you news of something else” alludes to American modernist poet William Carlos Williams and his ‘Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.` It’s a profound reference. The same poem famously contains the line: “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” It is also apposite. Williams was famous for the maxim: “No ideas but in things” – a pursuit to ground abstract concepts in concrete objects, which is consistent with Leonard’s desire to make “songs like stones.”

King Geedorah - Take Me To Your Leader (Big Dada, 2003)

Toye Oladinni runs through MF DOOM’s incredibly prolific early 2000s period.

“Take Me To Your Leader has the five minute "Monster Zero", a mash up of dialogue from eight separate movies and TV shows, all over a woozy, cinematic Idris Muhammed loop, and cartoonishly heavy drums. (“So don't fuck around, the X ain't glued tight / Oh, yeah, I'll tell ya somethin', your drums ain't cued right,” DOOM rapped once as Zev Love X). Everything comes together to lay the album’s concept bare: a three-headed monster - Geedorah, a pastiche of Japanese kaiju Gidorah - arrives from space, first to assess the world, and then to conquer it. People flee; there are sightings on Lagos Island. Like the album as a whole, the track is polyvocal, playful, political, apocalyptic, a product of a Hip-Hop / Japan crossover so seminal that the artform, in the early 80s, reached Tokyo before the West Coast.”

https://www.cantilever-music.com/

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App updates

I’m pleased to say we’ve been working hard recently to push a number of updates onto the app. These are now available on iOS and will be on Android very soon.

• Favourites: now work…! (And please continue to let me know if they don’t.)

• Scrolling: a number of listeners have mentioned that they spent a long time scrolling on the app, we have now made the articles collapsable so you can more easily access the track-listing. Simply hit the arrow above the article to open and close it. There were some other glitches on the article view which have been resolved.

• Autoplay: a number of users got in touch to say that they wanted to come to the app, listen to one album, and then leave again. With this in mind, you can now turn off autoplay in settings. It will remain on as standard, but the option is there.

• Push notifications: for every time a new album comes onto Cantilever. If a push notification every three days is too much for you, simply turn it off in your settings or hit “deny” when the pop-up shows.

If you haven’t started a free trial, head here first and you will see the latest version linked.

https://www.cantilever-music.com/

If you have started a free trial, or are a paid subscriber, head here to download the updated version.

iOS

Android users, update soon!

Streaming now on Cantilever

Ikonika - SAD (Hyperdub, 2025)

An interview with the dubstep pioneer, who contributes vocals to every track on their Amapiano-inspired fourth solo album.

“What I love doing these days is taking a very low fee and playing a show that really matters where I can find all of my audience. And for me, that means playing more to my community, my queer community, my trans community, to POC nights. It keeps me making music.” — Ikonika

Protomartyr - Relatives in Descent (Domino, 2017)

Henry Young on the political underpinnings of the Detroit post-punk band’s fourth record.

“On opener “A Private Understanding”, Joe Casey, who’s the son of a Detroit Water and Sewerage Department construction inspector, addresses the then-ongoing Flint Water Crisis, where the financially-stricken Michigan city changed its water source from Lake Huron to the corrosive Flint River, causing some 100,000 residents to be exposed to elevated levels of lead, a potent neurotoxin.”

Clarissa Connelly - World of Work (Warp, 2024)

Lottie Brazier teases out the various mythologies and influences behind this spellbinding record, including the philosophy of Georges Bataille which gives the record its title.

“The emotional and sonic picture that World of Work creates is potent with these ideas of magic and desire. Connelly was born in Fife, Scotland and moved to Copenhagen as a child. And so, influenced by both countries, Connelly’s album comes with a rich backdrop pre-Christian Nordic and Celtic mythologies.”

Makaya McCraven - Off The Record (XL / International Anthem, 2025)

Lewis Todd on this mammoth live recording project, an assemblage of 4EPs of spontaneous jazz composition.

“Born in 1983, in Paris, to musical parents, McCraven developed an omnivorous spirit early on. His mother, Ágnes Zsigmondi, was a touring musician in the Hungarian folk group Kolinda, and his father a jazz drummer who played with luminaries like Marion Brown, Yusef Lateef and Archie Shepp. The family moved back to Massachusetts before McCraven was five, and shortly thereafter he joined his father’s drum ensemble.”

Maria Somerville - Luster (4AD, 2025)

Alice Boyd on the importance of landscape to Maria Somerville’s second LP.

“Its soundworld is defined by sweeping drones that feel like the larger elemental shifts of the west coast, from the slow turn of the seasons to the push and pull of the tides. Against these broader movements, Somerville creates small, precise changes in her production, such as a sudden shift from double-tracked harmony to a single lead vocal, or a phrase submerged in reverb and then brought into focus, echoing the hour to hour changeability of the landscape she’s drawing inspiration from.”

cantilever-music.com

If you would like to write for Cantilever, we are actively seeking submissions. Drop us a line with a suggested record and a link to some example writing (doesn’t have to be published, doesn’t have to be about music!)

info@cantilever-music.com

All of the contributors who have written for Cantilever over the past two weeks are also musicians. Here’s some links to their profiles / music.

Alice Boyd

Lottie Brazier

Big Huge New Circle (Lewis Todd)

Sports Team (Henry Young)

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Loraine James - Gentle Confrontation (2023)

Loraine James is an electronic producer from North London who has been putting out a steady stream of releases since her exceptional debut For You and I (2019). While she also works under the loosely ambient moniker Whatever the Weather, the Loraine James sound palette is defined by abstraction: off-kilter sampling, glitching, and a loose rhythmic phrasing that places her out-of-step with any electronic producers working exclusively in the confines of the digital grid.

Liz Pelly’s book Mood Machine put forward the argument that major music streaming services of today — especially Spotify — prioritise an anodyne version of ambient music, a far cry from its 20th century radical roots, while simultaneously making all music a kind of ambient, background experience. In response to the book, I wrote a blog post about Loraine James, highlighting her as an artist deliberately putting a kind of messiness or bricolage sound into her ambient productions, directly in opposition to the direction in which a particular version of “ambient music” more broadly, is going.

So it’s a real thrill to have Loraine James’ music now streaming on Cantilever after bringing the Hyperdub record label onboard as our latest partner. Hyperdub label manager Marcus Scott was kind enough to provide some generous personal reflections on Gentle Confrontation, available to read now on the Cantilever app.

Make an account here

Followers of the Cantilever blog will know it would frequently reference cultural critic Mark Fisher, who himself was a huge fan of the future-oriented sound of Hyperdub (in fact, they released a very intriguing audio documentary curated by him called On Vanishing Land, on the Flatlines sub-label).

I was pleased to find a short blog post from Fisher from 2003, where he discussed the value (or lack thereof) inherent to MP3s with Hyperdub founder Steve Goodman aka Kode9, which feels increasingly prescient in the streaming era.

Fisher begins by referring to the idea of “sign value” – not how much something costs, nor it’s use value – but, perhaps more mysteriously, the prestige that we give to a particular object.

“Does the mp3 have sign value?” Fisher asks, “My conjecture is that, lacking the allegedly supplementary features of the record or the CD (the cover, even the materiality of the disc itself), reduced to pure functionality, the mp3 lacks those elements in which sign value could be invested.”

The “sign value” Fisher was referring here is summarised by the CD or record collection: “show me your record collection, and I’ll tell you who you really are”, goes one aphorism. The physical objects — immediately recognisable — instantly say something about your identity, something lost when a music collection was concealed on iTunes, or a digital screen, not on display in your house. The digital collection is merely useful then, it doesn’t say anything about you as an individual, it doesn’t signify anything, so the argument goes.

Hyperdub’s Steve Goodman, on the other hand, disagreed. He suggested that the MP3 could have “sign value”. As Fisher explains: “Steve pointed out that the mp3 is an audio object, and that there is no reason to assume that only visual objects have sign value.”

I agree with Steve. That is to say: under the right conditions, MP3s and digital music more broadly can mean more than just what they cost or their usefulness. Often, though — and I would say that this is what Liz Pelly is arguing — these conditions aren’t met, or are even deliberately not optimised for.

The conditions to prestige digital music, regardless of its usefulness or monetary value, and maybe — though of course it’s in the ear of the beholder — give it a kind of “sign value”, are exactly what we have set out to achieve with Cantilever.

https://www.cantilever-music.com/

Network notes

I spoke at length with the brilliant about new approaches to music streaming, why we made a standalone app (as opposed to just a monetised substack) and independent record labels. You can read the full interview below (it’s in two parts).

Network Notes

🔵 "Build a sustainable business and get value over to musicians and journalists"

Cantilever was a service that caught my attention a couple of months ago, for a couple of reasons. First, it was so reductive and simple in its aim, that it amounted to a huge breath of fresh air. As platforms try to shoehorn more and more ‘stuff’ into their offerings, it is refreshing to see a service that just Does One Thing, and does it rather well…

Read more

9 months ago · 11 likes · 4 comments

Obligatory reminder

It’s encouraging to see more people join Cantilever each day. We don’t require you to input your card details when you make your free trial, but as we near the end of month one, this is your reminder that to keep streaming, you must add a payment method. Click the button below to do so!

Cantilever Subscription

International Cantilever, when?

We’re still UK only for now, but coming (hopefully!) very soon to a country near you. Please bear with us and keep subscribing to this newsletter for an announcement.

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A quick reminder

No one likes to sign up for a subscription service, realise it’s not for them, then be hit with a bill at the end of the month because they forgot to cancel. We don’t do this — if it’s not for you, your free trial will simply come to an end and you won’t be charged. However, if you do want to keep using Cantilever — and judging by the emails I have received at least some of you do! — please head to https://www.cantilever-music.com/subscription and input your card details.

And a further reminder that, in order to access the full content on our app (currently ten great albums to stream!) you must make an account on our website first:

cantilever-music.com

Streaming now on Cantilever

Daniel Avery — Tremor (2025)

An in-depth interview with the techno producer who has “always struggled to make straight up techno” where he reflects on how the music of his formative years has directly inspired his latest project:

“My first real loves in music were things like industrial rock, metal, shoegaze, a lot of 80s British indie music. To go specific: let’s say Joy Division, Cocteau Twins, Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine of course, moving into Deftones, Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails. And then I was discovering things like Aphex Twin, Autechre, Portishead, Massive Attack. At the time, I wasn’t delineating between these worlds. It all just felt like exciting, shadowy, atmospheric music. I wasn’t thinking: that’s an electronic artist and that’s a rock band. It all just felt like one extremely exciting world. I wanted to create my modern version of it with Tremor.”

Lankum — Between the Earth and Sky (2017)

One quiet Saturday a few years ago, I purchased Lankum’s album Between the Earth and Sky (2017) from Dash the Henge records in Camberwell. I went in, spoke to the guy at the counter and explained a bit about what I was listening to at the time. “You should try this”, he said, pulling out the record.

I’d never heard of the band before, and played the LP from start to finish when I got home, eagerly reading the liner notes, which explained that their traditional folk interpolations had come from as far as the Irish Traveller community “What Will We Do When We Have No Money”, to a song written in a concentration camp in 1933 as an act of resistance, “Peat Bog Soldiers”.

It’s up there with my personal favourite records, and while I paid money for it, it felt more like a gift from the guy at the counter. So I’m really passing on someone else’s recommendation here. And I’d strongly suggest you head to Dash the Henge if you’re ever in south London.

Sorry — COSPLAY (2025)

“Ever since their live debut on an underground boat party in 2016, London-based band Sorry – then known as Fish – have thwarted attempts at categorisation.”

Written by Vartika Rastogi, this write up gives the background on Sorry: a band often described as having a “mercurial” or changeable sound.

“Poetry is everywhere on Cosplay: “Echoes” was inspired by a poem about a little boy shouting into the void, and “In The Dark” references the Japanese poet Yukio Mishima, whom Lorenz and O’Bryen happened to be reading at the time of recording.”

cantilever-music.com

More record labels…

I’m thrilled to say that both Erased Tapes and Partisan records have joined the other fantastic record labels we’re working with.

Erased Tapes are a London-based label whose roster includes longstanding experimental collective Penguin Cafe Orchestra, contemporary classical composer Ólafur Arnalds and electronic producer Rival Consoles. Erased Tapes’ curated, quality over quantity approach allows these genres to sit together harmoniously.

The Partisan catalogue is full of pioneering artists who have had a profound impact on music culture — Fela Kuti, DJ Rashad — as well as extremely prominent active artists — Geese, PJ Harvey, Ezra Collective. Their status as one of the most important independent record labels of the last two decades is undeniable.

It’s a thrill to be working together. Expect some exceptional records from both of these to be on Cantilever in the coming months.

Guardian feature

I spoke to The Guardian about what we’re building.

“It’s a totally different thing. I don’t expect anybody to cancel their subscription [to Spotify or Apple] and just have this – it’s an additional thing that tries to give additional value that wasn’t there before.”

Albums last on our platform for just one month, and we only feature one album by an artist. In our app, we link out directly to where people can buy a physical copy, get a gig ticket, or stream an artist’s work elsewhere, so they can continue their journey with an artist they may have found through us. We don’t compete with other platforms, but like traditional music press, add value to them and to music culture in general.

Case in point, here’s an email I received on Monday morning:

“Firstly, I wanted to say how much I’ve been enjoying the service the past few days since the Android app launched. I’ve found each album I’ve listened to more than worthwhile, some I’ve been aware of but never got around to listening or wasn’t sure would be for me so having the focus was useful. I actually ended up buying a ticket to see Richard Dawson live next year almost immediately after listening to the album - something I certainly wouldn’t have done without the service.”

Full article here: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/nov/11/spotify-music-streaming-companies

cantilever-music.com

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Hi all,

Thrilled to say that Cantilever is now available on Android! Head to our website via the link below to start your free trial and download from the Play Store.

Any issues, please let me know: aaron@cantilever-music.com.

start your free trial

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Hi there,

It’s been a great week at Cantilever — uptake on our curated music streaming service has been even better than we’d hoped, thanks to everyone who has checked it out so far!

I’ve been really enjoying getting feedback from subscribers to this newsletter about their experiences with the app — so if you have any issues, queries, suggestions, please send me an email directly at aaron@cantilever-music.com and I will try my best to sort it out.

If you’re outside of the UK, or an Android user, we’re still working on getting our app available for you as a top priority. I will update you via this newsletter as soon as I can.

cantilever-music.com

Streaming now on Cantilever

John Maus - Later Than You Think (2025)

Speaking to John was fascinating. On the one hand he speaks (very quickly!) with a kind of gnomic wisdom about the concepts that guide his work, for example:

“Any time the claim is made to realise within history what can only be realised beyond it and the eschaton. That’s the spirit of antichrist.”

But at the same time, he was just as engaging when speaking about the down-to-earth foundations of the punk rock that inspired his brand of direct electro-pop and visceral performance style. “The truth is”, he said:

“coming up in the early 90s, the punk rock, the hardcore, all those guys were my reference point for what giving a show actually is. Outside of the normal comings and goings of life, you go into a room and there’s these people there who are just totally at the limit at what they’re physically capable of doing. It’s not the limit of some choreography, it’s just a guy punching himself in the head. That sort of thing. So it’s crude, it’s pathetic, it’s ridiculous, but that’s my milieu. Just guys smashing their instruments.”

If this sounds like your thing, John Maus plays O2 Kentish Town Forum tonight!

Tickets

Nabihah Iqbal - DREAMER (2023)

One of my major gripes with mainstream music streaming services (some are better than others in this department) is the lack of context you receive when you find a new album.

The context behind Nabihah Iqbal’s DREAMER is arguably very important.

In early 2020, her London studio was burgled and all her work was lost, including her forthcoming album. Soon after, she went to Pakistan after a family health emergency, before the pandemic forced the world into lockdown. Removed from her regular compositional processes and home city, she bought a harmonium and an acoustic guitar, going back to basics and making music in a more “patient” way. She explains:

“Normally, when you’re an electronic music producer, you go into the studio, switch your computer on and start working on Ableton or Logic. Whereas, I decided not to go near all that for ages. Instead, I had to let the ideas develop in my head.”

It makes you wonder what the album we would have heard if the burglary hadn’t occurred would sound like (reminder to any musicians reading this to store all of your work on the cloud!) And, given the majority of tracks on the record veer towards dream pop and electronica, it also makes me wonder exactly how these acoustic compositions ended up in such a radically different form, or whether the “patient” process was less the genesis of the actual tracks, and more of a guiding principle.

Either way, the idea of being more “patient” as a listener chimes with me. I am completely guilty of repeating a single track by an artist ad infinitum (I certainly did this for a long time with Iqbal’s track “Zone 1 to 6000” in 2017, absolute banger!) but what I personally enjoy about Cantilever is the gentle nudge it gives me to go into a body of work from the beginning and really sit with a record. This album in particular really rewards that experience. As it brings in different genres, moods and textures, it speaks to the album sequencing as a craft in and of itself — unsurprising given Iqbal’s DJ residencies on NTS, The Lot Radio and various BBC stations.

I listened to DREAMER on multiple evenings last week, jogging around the perimeter of Ruskin Park in Camberwell. It’s a very London record, fitting of a gloomy October London view.

Stereolab - Margerine Eclipse (2004)

Written by Lottie Brazier, best known for her writing in The Quietus, this piece critically re-examines early 00s Stereolab, a time when the music press claimed the established avant-rock group were lacking new ideas. Lottie draws out the subtle innovations they were making in this period, especially the details of their “dual mono” approach to recording on Margerine Eclipse:

“Since the invention of stereo, mono recordings drastically fell by the wayside. Some bands like The Beatles preferred the original mono sound, most moved on. Mono, essentially, is to hear a sound as if all parts of the mix are coming from one central location – you hear the same sound through left and right speakers. With stereo, you hear different recordings through the left and right, which usually gives the sound a much more open and dynamic feel.

But instead of considering mono as a relic, Stereolab saw the creative potential of “dual mono”. On Margerine Eclipse, the band would record two different versions of the same track, with different arrangements. In its entirety, one recording of the song can be heard from the left speaker and the other from the right. The band couldn’t have used this in a more creative, explosive, and fascinatingly coherent way.”

Full feature, of course, on the Cantilever app.

There are no music videos from this album or period, but I was very interested to stumble across this video of Stereolab playing “Vonal Declosion”, Margerine Eclipse’s opener, at The Windmill, Brixton in 2008 - a famously just 150-cap venue. If there is anyone reading this who was there, I’d love to know the genesis of this show! Video below.

Stereolab tour the UK in December, much of which sold out very, very quickly. If you’re in Manchester or Wolverhampton, you can still get a ticket. If not, waitlist only. Website on the button below to check:

Stereolab tour

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Today we’re launching the next evolution of Cantilever, which is our attempt to do just that.

Cantilever is a new music streaming service, priced at £4.99 / $5.99 / €5.99, the same level as a Substack paid tier.

We will provide users with a highly curated selection of albums to listen to — both new releases and intriguing catalogue. Each album lasts on the platform for one month, creating time-bound moments of community listening. Every few days a new album is put on the service and an old album is taken off. A bit like MUBI, Criterion, or BFI Player, but for music.

On Cantilever, albums are presented with deep contextual details — interviews with the artists themselves, or the why, the when, and the how written by engaging music journalists. Just like Cantilever the Substack, but with fully-licensed streaming built in.

In this way we can do two things: split royalty payments between a very small number of rights holders plus we can pay music journalists a fair amount for their contributions.

We pay artists on a user-centric basis. So your subscription fee only ever goes towards what you actually listened to. If you only listen to one album in a month, that artist gets their share of your full subscription fee.

Unlike many popular music streaming services of today — where artists compete with 100 million tracks to get heard and get paid — Cantilever prioritises deep engagement, independence, human curation, real music by real musicians, and fair remuneration.

We’ve signed licensing deals with many leading independent record labels including Warp Records, Ninja Tune, Partisan, Erased Tapes, Domino, XL, Matador, 4AD, Rough Trade, Young, state51, Memorials of Distinction, Untitled (recs) and more. We’re also going to be working with independent artists — with some astonishingly good records lined up for our first few months from this pool. All of our editorial is run by freelance music journalists who choose what they want to write about.

This newsletter will continue, while recapping what’s been featured on Cantilever each week.

In my view, this is an opportunity to shape what fairer music streaming could be like in the future, starting from the ground up. Any users of the app I would love you to email me directly with your thoughts and feedback: aaron@cantilever-music.com

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Hello again! Long time no speak.

Some of you have already received news of the new direction Cantilever is taking and the forthcoming “paid tier”. I’m excited to share the news with the rest of the readers here very soon.

I caught up with Isabelle Thorn aka Dear Laika a little while back, before planning the next phase of Cantilever took up all my time. I’m excited to share that enlightening interview below.

Isabelle Thorn aka Dear Laika came to our attention in 2021 with her album Pluperfect Mind — a release by US label NNA Tapes, with UK physical variants on Memorials of Distinction (the label and management company behind caroline, Porridge Radio, Kiran Leonard and much more excellent music). The album is a compelling and theatrical mix of electronic sound design, piano compositions and an almost operatic quality to the vocal performances. It’s fair to say it was very highly praised critically, and has garnered something of a cult following.

Particular standouts include “Guinefort’s Grave” — a song narrated from the perspective of a St. Guinefort; a greyhound venerated as a folk saint for saving a child from a snake attack — (you can read the story here). Here are the lyrics to that song — compact imagistic poetry that does a lot with very few words:

Inauspicious daylight
Your infant son a viper's prey
I do my duty
On your return, I greet you
With dewy reds and fatal jaws
Myopic impulse
You take up your sword

Put me down
Put me down
In vengeance, kill your faithful hound
Lay me down
Lay me down
Regret enshrines me underground

They venerate me
Make invocations falsely
And offer salt
All that separates their children
From wildland sickness and the fauns
Is a candle's fire
The breadth of a thumb

Recently, Dear Laika has been taking to London stages again with a newly put-together live band. She plays her third headline show since Pluperfect Mind at The Horse Hospital on October the 1st, which we would strongly encourage you to grab a ticket for — link at the end of this interview. We caught up to talk about upcoming performance, compositional processes, prog, and the “inhuman”.

C: It’s been about 4 years since your previous album, what has been taking up your time since then?

DL: Piano teaching’s been a main focus. It’s been super rewarding, at least whenever I haven’t been overworked. Theatre tech work, contract work, more private creative endeavours… Getting my life back together after teenage meltdown and occasionally writing songs along the way, though now I’m focusing more deliberately on songwriting. I also went on two little tours with my friend Rian [Maria BC], which were so incredible.

C: Does it feel hard listening back to Pluperfect Mind given the context? Sounds like it was written under some potentially unsettling conditions.

DL: No, not really. I’m proud of that album, considering I wrote it all when I was 21. I was just expressing what was going on in my head and making the music I wanted to hear at the time. The emotional trajectory of that album was very positive.

C: Could you describe what’s defining the music that you’re working on now? Any particular blueprint or set of values in mind?

DL: I think I’m pretty deliberate in my ethos nowadays. I want Capital-S Songs. I didn’t really write any music with performance in mind before 2020, because I was still recovering from a bit of agoraphobia. So I’m thinking more practically now, writing and arranging for a band. I’m super lucky and grateful to have Ted [Mair], Ollie [Chapman], and Dave [Adsett] on board, who are all so enthusiastic about the songs and willing and able to navigate their weirdnesses.

I want the songs to be deeply satisfying and engaging to perform for all of us. Even though I know the most brilliant pop can just use a few chords in 4/4, my impulse is always to go in more complex directions. I want push and pull, contraction and de-contraction, flow and interruption, in harmony, rhythm, and melody... But I always want to prioritise the emotion rather than complexity for the sake of it.

The songs come from emotional tension and complicated feelings, pushing up against difficult things, and I hope the difficulty of the music goes some way to help express that. I want focus rather than sprawl.

C: To me as a listener of Pluperfect Mind any complexity in the time signatures — for example of “Guinefort’s Grave” — just recedes into the background. You don't notice complexity as long as you feel the thrust of the song.

DL: Yeah, that one and “Black Moon, Lilith” were the songs I was most personally satisfied with, so I wanted to do more in that vein. I’m also especially proud of the title track, which was more of a “piece” than a “song”.

Sometimes you can tell when an irregular time signature has been thrown in gratuitously, like in certain strains of prog rock or math rock. Of course, certain rhythms are going to feel more intuitive to one person and less to another.

I was trying to write stuff in all kinds of irregular time signatures as a kid because of the music I played and listened to. I discovered Mike Oldfield when I was 11 because I heard a trance remix of “Moonlight Shadow” on a YouTube video. I hadn’t heard anything like it before, so I bought “Tubular Bells” on iTunes. Of course, it sounded entirely different!

C: To what extent do you feel like you participate in this British tradition of “prog” which might include things like the interpolation of traditional folk music, for example, or science fiction and literary themes?

DL: When you put it that way, there’s some overlap, but I don’t think I’m working within any specific British prog-rock idiom. My friend Juno suggested “ultraprog pop” as a tongue-in-cheek descriptor for press material, but maybe it’s less apposite than we thought!

My favourite classic prog band is definitely King Crimson; the 80s Crimson dream team especially, which was half-American. I’m less keen on the more folky, fantasy, self-consciously English side of prog like Genesis, but there are some “medievalisms” in my music, for sure, so I can understand if people project those things onto the songs. I’m mostly informed by bands like Extra Life and Cardiacs in that respect.

“Prog” has this messiness to it. Kiran Leonard — I owe so much to Kiran, personally and artistically — has talked about the “prog tide”, which I take to mean being swept up in this adolescent drive of additive, accumulative composition with limited depth. It’s more nuanced than that, I’m sure, but it gets at this unreflective gratuitousness. The word itself — “progressive” — has a teleological overtone which implies it’s a more advanced, superior form of music, and inevitably so. The prog tide moves in one direction, unthinkingly. And when all these old prog rock signifiers — changing time signatures, orchestral sounds, quasi-symphonic suites, technical virtuosity — are derived from a certain idea of classical music, you can see the unfortunate implications of that.

With regard to the literary aspect, my number one biggest pop inspiration has been Kate Bush ever since I was a kid. Ollie, who plays bass for me right now, referred to my songs as “math-glam”, even though they sound nothing like math rock or glam rock, I guess because there’s these tricky rhythms combined with this literary, gothic, melodramatic, even camp aspect to the lyrics and performance, like Kate Bush.

Never For Ever is kind of glam like that, but I’m really inspired by each of her 80s albums. I’m conscious that my voice sometimes pushes into Kate territory, and the bass lines I write unavoidably emulate John Giblin and Eberhard Weber sometimes. She also frequently writes from the perspective of different characters, and that inspires me as a way of expressing difficult emotions and ideas.

C: What kinds of emotions and ideas?

DL: Distressing, challenging experiences I’ve had, but also morbid fixations. Wrangling with the inevitable death of everything, both in an individual and overarching sense, both real material death and apocalyptic feeling. The dangers of fantasy and desire… How the idea of something can override the actual thing and destroy it…

The word which has really become a throughline in writing all of these songs is “inhuman”, something outside of the human but nonetheless contained within it, or immanent to it. Not necessarily “anti-human” or “non-human”. It’s a lot to get into… There’s a little philosophical movement of “rational inhumanism” out there critiquing humanism while sidestepping both vitalism and nihilism. Maybe they’re onto something, but I’ll leave that to them. I’m not trying to write songs to be “correct”.

Every pop song is just a narrative, no matter how ostensibly autobiographical it is. I’ve amassed this mutable cast of characters — mostly derived from collaborative storytelling with close friends — to follow transient thoughts and feelings through to their limits, where they get away from me and become horrific. The extremity of it wraps around into being kind of liberating expressively, grotesquely beautiful and nasty at the same time, or at least that’s the idea. I’m taking cues from horror authors like Ligotti, for sure. I got on a big horror kick. B.R. Yeager, Gary J. Shipley, Kathe Koja…

But yeah, if you take “Guinefort’s Grave”, that song is from the perspective of a dog but still grappling with human emotions… It’s kind of a silly, anthropocentric thing in retrospect, singing from the perspective of a dog, as if it has an analogous subjectivity to my own...

In these new songs, I’m taking on more ambiguous identities where the human and animal —among other things — are blurred.

Sometimes humans can be made to feel inhuman by their circumstances, and usually it’s marginalised people who feel it the hardest. There’s also thoughts and feelings which feel out of your grasp or control, and all the organisms and dead things that are part of our physical constitution and even our consciousness. You can vacillate between feeling so very alive and so very dead in the same hour sometimes.

C: It seems to me that while Pluperfect Mind was very unique, it’s also full of very of-the-moment electronic textures. It sounds like focusing on “Capital-S Songs” as you say, would mean disowning that angle a bit, opting for something a bit more classic?

DL: A friend of mine referred to what I’m doing as “classicist”, which is quite funny. But in terms of classical music, my songs are informed least by the actual Classical era, Schubert being the exception. One of my pet peeves is when popular music does mediocre pastiche of Baroque or Classical styles, usually with stock orchestral and choral MIDI. Symphonic metal is a prime offender, though it can loop back into being kind of charming in its silliness. Honestly, it’s the unimaginative use of the orchestra and choir to evoke “epicness” that I really can’t stand.

I’m mostly drawing on 20th-century composers in France and England, some of whom took an interest in older, pre-Baroque musical forms, like Messiaen and Howells. It’s all deep in my musical bones. There’s a sense of austerity and sacredness in their music, but also excessiveness and eroticism, even. It seems contradictory at first blush, but it’s often said they’re inextricable sides of the same coin…

When it comes to sound design, I was super into Arca as a teenager — all her 2010s releases before the Kick stuff — and her 2017 Roundhouse show blew my mind all over again. On Pluperfect Mind I was really inspired by her use of chorus, sampling, and time-stretching mostly… Those dark, wandering atmospheres that touched me so deeply. A lot of my samples were of classical music, but I’d take harmonic or melodic material from those transformed samples and that would provide crucial material for the rest of the song. I still do that — motivic transformation — to make a song or a collection of songs feel more cohesive. And I still “sample” classical music, in a way, interpolating musical material into these songs, but I’ve just flipped my approach.

C: How far away do you think you are from finishing these current tracks you’re performing? And what's the process from now? Where do you see this new stage of the project going?

DL: I told myself to only start recording once I’ve written all of the songs for the next album, though I am already thinking ahead to the sounds I want. Right now, I have seven completely written, but I want ten for balance and flow. I’m also more open to getting friends involved in recording and producing this time: I love collaborating and they all have skills to lend which I lack. I don’t want the record to just sound like the live band, as delighted as I am with how the band’s sounding. But I’m especially excited to record Dave’s drums; that’ll happen before the year is out!

C: Are these new songs already incorporated into the new sets you’ve played?

DL: Oh, our sets are mostly these new songs, yeah. The only song we’ve played so far from Pluperfect Mind is Guinefort’s Grave, but we have another one prepared now for The Horse Hospital… And there’s also new iterations of songs I’ve performed before, all intended for the next album.

C: Something that’s new for those who have seen you before is that you’re no longer playing piano live, but stepping into much more of what we traditionally think of the role of a pop singer.

DL: It’s simply more difficult to sing and play the piano at the same time than just doing one or the other, though some performers do it brilliantly. I was feeling quite secluded behind the piano and electronics in previous shows, and I felt my performance wasn’t engaging enough for me or the audience. So, I’ve handed keyboard duties over to Ted, who’s doing a wonderful job, and I’m trying to make more of a show of things, more melodrama, though there’s no choreography or costume changes or anything!

I’m less afraid of looking or sounding ridiculous or self-indulgent, because pop music is all that anyway, so I’m pushing my expressive range further. I’m also embracing the androgyny I was taking pains to avoid on Pluperfect Mind, now I’m more confident and less precious about gender. Zac Pennington — we got to support his current project Popular Music at The Shacklewell Arms in June, which was a dream come true! — has had an outsized influence on my vocal and physical performance, and much more besides…

C: You described yourself earlier in our conversation — and maybe this isn't the case now — as having some occasionally reclusive and introverted tendencies. Do you find performance to be a way to escape from that and inhabit a very different way of thinking?

DL: I have historically, just through shit circumstances, been both quite geographically isolated from other people and prone to self-isolation, which is not good… “Introversion” can have an unfortunate tendency to feedback-loop when you internalise it as part of your personality. But performance is just super invigorating for me. I performed a lot as a kid and so I basically never get stage fright. It’s one of my favourite things to do, and I relish every opportunity I get, whether it’s playing music or acting. I’ve also started to dress up a little bit: the red gloves are significant to me and help me get deeper into that performance headspace. The songs are mostly quite dark so I want to have fun with them and draw out their intensity if I can.

Tickets to Dear Laika @ The Horse Hospital, 01.10.2025

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caroline’s debut album was one of the most exciting releases of 2022. The self-titled record achieved its power through repetition while tying together folk textures, minimalism and something you might vaguely call ‘emo’. Live, the 8-piece performed the album in an open horseshoe that invited the listener into the fold, where an uplifting collectivity seemed to emerge from the rousing chorus of voices and instruments.

Earlier this year, I was excited by the first sounds coming out of caroline’s follow-up on Rough Trade Records — archly titled caroline 2 — which appeared to take what was essential about their debut and develop it in multiple complementary directions. The album, released a few weeks ago now, simultaneously pushes the experimentalism — with wild and unique studio effects throughout — while opting for more clear-cut pop songwriting in the harmony and vocals, including a feature from pop zeitgeist extraordinaire Caroline Polachek.

As it moves further towards both the pop and the experimental, caroline 2’s power is in deftly retaining the thread of collectivity and sentimentality that underpinned the first album; if album one was defined by developing one idea at a time to an emotive fever pitch, caroline 2 asks what happens when multiple of these ‘caroline’ ideas interact simultaneously.

I spoke to the warm and thoughtful Mike O’Malley and Casper Hughes from the band last week to discuss caroline 2, performing the album live and the intersections between popular music and performance art. For those who haven’t yet seen caroline live, their current tour is now sadly concluded, but I’ll include some links below so you can keep up to date. Onwards!

You’ve just concluded your tour - how has it been translating the songs from caroline 2 live?

Part of the process is making a case by case decision; what studio enabled things are so integral to the song that it’s going to be strange if you don’t include them. For example we realised when recording the bass clarinet that it’s not actually a very bass-y instrument in terms of its frequency range. But then if you use hardware to generate further sub-harmonic bass frequencies it can sound like the most enormous thing you’ve ever heard in your life! We realised we’d need to find a way to do that live, or it just wouldn’t have the power.

We have a touring sound engineer for the first time — Syd Kemp — and there’s a lot of choreography he’s doing on the desk, bringing down big clusters of instruments together and bringing up big clusters of instruments. It kind of implies the ‘moving between rooms’ thing you can hear on the record. The result is different because nothing is left to the imagination when you’re hearing it, because you can really see what everyone is doing. On the record, it conjures up a different experience.

Something that was spoken about of your first album was that it was composed via these long jam sessions in the upstairs of a pub. This kind of became the myth of the album — that the where of the project was somehow very important. Is there a where for this new album?

The first album actually was about playing above the Five Bells in New Cross and playing things on repeat. Casper would normally have these really nice riffs, five seconds long, that you could loop. It felt really radical to all of us. I had been in bands and I was interested in writing what was essentially pop music. When we did this project and it wasn’t supposed to even be a band. It was extremely un-inhibited by what we thought other people would think sounded good. It wasn’t to do with playing shows or anything public. It was a private thing for an unusually long time in a way that really benefited the project.

In terms of the “place” that’s associated with the second album: the point of it is that it’s multi-place. It’s meant to switch and move. It’s meant to cut quite drastically between different environments. That mirrors the process of writing the album, it was partly written in Scotland, partly written in our studio, partly written in this barn in Essex, we did a week in France. There was no one place we retreated to to write it. Every place we went to there was a feeling that emanated from it and in some way we transplanted those environments into the record, whether directly by actually recording in those places or maybe more abstractly.

One of the most unique things about this album is these moments where two songs seem to be playing at once. There’s a club track playing underneath the “song” in ‘When I Get Home’ and on ‘Coldplay Cover’ there are very clearly two different pieces happening simultaneously. These moments made me feel like this is a record about the experience of listening to music, is that fair to say?

I think that’s an aspect of it, definitely, but I wouldn’t say the record is about just that. We’ve talked a lot about listening as an experience. Living in a place, the environment around you. And there’s lots of different versions of listening you can do in different environments.

What we’re trying to do is to make music that includes all of the things that we think sound good, which is not exclusive to “band plays in room and records their songs.” For example: hearing a band through a studio door. It can be found sound in your environment or sound you make with your instrument, but the boundaries of what sounds good are huge and endless in fact. Our explorations of field recording, zoom mics, moving them around, are very inspired by that feeling. Sound is everywhere; that’s the maxim.

Of our first record, there were a few people independently from each other who said “this is the sound of walking through a building and there are multiple bands practicing in different spaces”. It’s interesting because that wasn’t what we were trying to do on the first record. But for some reason people were attuned to that conceptually. On this record we more literally tried to make it sound like that. Reading that multiple times about our music before at least encouraged us to do that kind of thing more viscerally.

Incidental sound, that’s what we’re interested in. Stuff that wasn’t purposeful. To organise the non-purposeful. And the organising is something that happens whether you like it or not — the listener organises it.

What’s the genesis of the Caroline Polachek collaboration?

The vocals are much more foregrounded in this record. For the first version of ‘Tell Me I Never Knew That’ the prompt was: you’re at a sleepover and you’re singing into the hairbrush. It used to be sung really differently because we can’t sing like pop singers, so it was really over the top. The way the melody moved and the intervals, we thought it sounded like a Caroline Polachek melody. We knew that she liked our music because she’d posted it before on Instagram. We just said: this would sound amazing with you singing it. She replied very quickly saying she was happy to give it a go. She’d written a load of harmonies and tweaked the lyrics to be more comfortable.

Some recent reviews of your work have foregrounded a political angle to the music which is not necessarily immediately apparent, what do you make of that?

A friend of ours read back all our early interviews and there’s so much conflicting information amongst them all. He told us: “wait, that’s not true about you! It says you got into politics when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party but I knew you when you were into politics before then!” These things, they just congeal into different truths and perspectives.

This new record, I wouldn’t say it’s explicitly political. It’s the culmination of some friends’ relationship and collaboration and pursuing certain concepts or ideas about sound and space that we thought were really interesting on their own terms. At least one song on the first album was about hope and the conditions of contemporary capitalism and life being miserable and that the only way to change that was in a collective way. I still fundamentally believe that that is true. But part of the reason why that isn’t the focus is because that sense of hope that sense of tangible systemic change was within our grasp but that’s now a long way off. Hope has been extinguished for the time being, not forever though!

I think that there’s a current in some art where what the work is actually about is really interesting things to do with texture, space, time, abstract universal themes that can be explored through our different artistic practices. Our work is focused on that. People often retroactively make there be a big-P Politics to it that wasn’t in the original conception of the work. Or they feel the need to say it is in order to validate it somehow.

There can and there must be works of political art and some people do it very well! But I think there’s a trend — especially in contemporary art — where there’s a feeling that there has to be a politics to it for it to make sense in a world that is very unjust and unequal. That leads to quite a lot of confused messaging about the work and what it actually is. It’s an interesting time for art and the relationship between art and politics and what’s actually true to one’s own practice and what’s window dressing.

caroline — and Caroline Polachek for that matter, who recently achieved the feat of being played on Radio 1, 6music and Radio 3 — feels like it straddles both "popular music” and contemporary art. Is this something you would agree with?

I feel like a lot of pop music is kind of exploring the intersection of those things. There’s a lot of really forward thinking pop music.

When we were reflecting on the album when making it we were thinking it’s both more experimental — mic moving techniques, a collaged way of approaching band music, genuine experimentation — but also the songs are really poppy and catchy. We were interested in it being both those things. I’m really pleased that it’s been taken both ways.

We also have aspiration to do a stage show, a performance that goes beyond just sound, something more performative, more choreographed, that is both performance piece and musical piece. We’re interested in more than just writing albums as a band. What our music touches upon, what it explores, is more than just an album you can listen to on Spotify or a live show where you can hear those songs. There’s more we want to do in our creative lives. A stage show that is more theatrical, that’s performance based. There’s potentially plans to do that in the works.

Our recorded music is about trying to capture what it’s like to capture music and create music in space. To make it sound three dimensional in some respect. The next step is to bring that out into physical space. The ‘Coldplay Cover’ video is a good example of that approach. It’s still in its early stages.

caroline - bandcamp

caroline - mailing list

This week’s playlist

caroline 2 and caroline, back to back

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Nala Sinephro - Royal Festival Hall, 07.11.2025

The Japanese concept of “Ma” refers to the prioritisation of negative space. Paintings in this tradition are as much about the areas where nothing is depicted as about the imagery itself. For example, The Pine Trees Screen, a late 16th century artwork by Hasegawa Tōhaku, is comprised of six vertical panels, two of which are almost entirely blank, and two of which contain just a very faint trace of an image. Ma, to my mind, seems to be a kind of question and answer — a call and response — where the answer, the response, is not an answer at all, but is instead silence and thoughtfulness.

In 2021, electronic musician Floating Points collaborated with jazz legend Pharoah Sanders on what I would call a work of musical Ma. The album Promises — released on David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label — combines keys, modular synthesisers, saxophone and the strings of the London Symphony Orchestra to make a breathtaking composition in nine movements. A seven-note refrain on keys opens the piece, followed by a unit of silence that lasts almost exactly as long: it’s this structure — a call and a response of silence — that anchors the work, appearing in every movement. The Ma provides the platform for Sanders to add colour and richness on the sax. When the strings reach their symphonic climax on ‘Movement 6’, there remains a steady flow of Ma beneath.

Just a few months after Promises, Nala Sinephro’s debut album Space 1.8 appeared with many commenting on their similarities — although the latter album was composed some years before release. Both feature jazz elements combined with synthesisers and symphonic instrumentation, although they’re really very different albums texturally. There's far more improvisation, far more recognisable jazz in general on Space 1.8, which also uses drums to great effect where Promises has none. Space 1.8 uses negative space in a multitude of ways; the extremely slow piano chords of ‘Space 2’ evoke something akin to Promises structure, while the extended ambient sections in the track listing move quickly into more frenetic rhythm-led tracks and back again, setting up shades of light and dark — a kind of figure-ground relationship that underpins the album.

Another key textural difference between the records comes from Sinephro’s harp playing, which punctuates many of her tracks. When it comes to jazz harp playing, it’s hard not to think about Dorothy Ashby, who continues to enrapture contemporary listeners — New Land Records recently issued a box set of her first six albums (1957-1965) along with a comprehensive accompanying book, which has helped shine a new light on her work and inspired critical reappraisal including an excellent profile in The New Yorker. Ashby positioned the pedal harp as a lead jazz instrument, which could hold its own elegantly over full-band arrangements. Sinephro’s harp playing, however, tends not to carry the tunes. In this way, she’s more akin to Alice Coltrane’s use of the instrument. Where Ashby takes the front-and-centre band-leader approach — Coltrane and Sinephro use the harp in a primarily textural way, consistently incorporating its built-in glissandos to embellish their ethereal sound worlds.1

As a composer and band leader then, I would argue that Sinephro’s main strength is her introduction of space, of Ma. This facet of her compositions is made extremely clear on her latest record — Endlessness (2024) — which will be performed at the Royal Festival Hall in November as part of the Pitchfork Music Festival. On the album, Sinephro’s collaborators, including Sons of Kemet drummer Natcyet Wackili, Black Midi drummer Morgan Simpson, and saxophonists Nubya Garcia and James Mollison of Ezra Collective, play with a good deal more space than we’re accustomed to hearing them.

Where Ezra Collective’s extroverted party music feels intended for dancing, or heavy rotation on BBC Radio 6, here Mollison plays sparingly, you could say introspectively; a gentle descending statement on the opening track comes and goes, in and out of the ether. Where Black Midi’s frenetic rock is backed up by Simpson’s busy, thunderous drumming, on Endlessness he plays with a light touch. Here he often shifts into different rhythmical modes, starting a new phrase halfway through a previous one: in these moments it’s as if he’s playing along to a set of instruments we can’t hear, that have been taken away somehow, a negative rhythmic space.

Endlessness builds upon its predecessor, heavily incorporating the lush string arrangements that made Promises so enticing. But where Promises was a one-off collaboration, Sinephro continues to extend this shared sound palette into a full jazz band setting that suggests much more experimentation and collaborations to come. Where the London jazz scene is so often lauded for its heat and hyperactivity, Sinephro is quietly bringing something more spatial — something more Ma — to the forefront.

Royal Festival Hall, 07.11.2025 tickets

This week’s playlist

Featuring all the songs mentioned above plus more jazz harp work and other similar compositions.

Website update

We’ve added events in August, September and October to the Cantilever website, — a quick and easy way to see what’s coming up in live music in London. In August, there’s a very limited amount of MJ Lenderman tickets left + huge Gunnersbury park shows from Smashing Pumpkins, Khruangbin and The Libertines, all with tickets remaining. In October you’ve got the option of Billy Woods, Billy Nomates or Mahavishnu Orchestra’s Billy Cobham. Much more besides! Click the button below to have a browse. DICE, but just the good bits… let me know if I missed something: info@cantilever-music.com

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This week’s playlist

PinkPantheress — Brixton Academy 16 - 17.06.2025

PinkPantheress makes what you might call Short Form Music. She’s said — to the disdain of some — that she doesn’t listen to albums, only individual songs. Supposedly, early single ‘Just for Me’ took just 4 hours to write, record and complete. And of the ten tracks on her debut To Hell With It (2021), only three are longer than two minutes.

Both the music and its presentation rely on speed, responding positively to the same demands of contemporary platforms that many artists baulk at. Spotify demands short music (don’t bore us get to the chorus) — PinkPantheress provides. She was also one of the first artists I can remember who employed the process of posting unfinished material or works in progress onto TikTok, to then release them when they gained traction (which of course, they always did). Although with PinkPantheress, these were usually the finished articles — the snippets were the songs.

Despite this palpable sense of contemporaneity, To Hell With It leaned heavily on 90s and 00s samples — Adam F, Sweet Female Attitude, Linkin Park — bringing these varying anachronisms together into something coherent and mesmerising. The Y2K nostalgia act extended to uploading the video for ‘Just for Me’ to YouTube in a low-quality file, giving the impression of a relic from a time of lower bandwidth. Perhaps the most contemporary thing to do is to yearn for the past.

Musically, the early PinkPantheress formula relied on an emotive yet detached vocal style which sat on top of the frenetic beats. The songs were self-consciously cute, but also kind of sad, uncanny even. In this way, they put me in uneasily in mind of theorist Sianne Ngai’s claims that today, the ‘cute’ is about the “aestheticization of powerlessness” in the face of capitalism. Although maybe PinkPantheress is actually inverting this thesis, showing what power can be claimed by fully leaning into the current platforms of distribution.

Her latest ‘mixtape’ Fancy That (2025) is a comparatively confident affair; a sort of post-Brat house and DnB party album where songs seamlessly sequence into one another. The hooks are still precision engineered and the beats uncannily early 2000s, but there is a palpable sense of looseness and fun, where the earlier work had a hard to place eeriness.

Additionally, by incorporating the Red Phone Box and Crown Jewels on the front cover of Fancy That, PinkPantheress is the latest in a recent lineage of UK-based pop artists — including Stormzy, Central Cee, Nia Archives, Charli XCX and A.G Cook — deploying Britpop-era, UK-oriented imagery (mostly Union Jacks) in the 2020s, just as the international prestige and stream share of British pop music continues to decline. More aestheticization of dwindling power against impassive market forces.

PinkPantheress plays two nights at Brixton Academy in June, with the Friday now sold out.

Tickets

Outbreak Festival — 13.06.2025

Outbreak Festival began life as a hardcore punk event, started by two fourteen year olds in a community centre in Sheffield. It has now grown, much like festival headliners Turnstile (who first played Outbreak over ten years ago), from the grassroots into an expansive force: branching out to London for the first time in 2025.

The bill in Victoria Park in a few weeks departs from the hardcore formula in multiple complementary directions, placing alternative bedroom-pop (Alex G) next to frenetic indie rock (Feeble Little Horse), original emo (Sunny Day Real Estate), and danceable art-rock (Model / Actriz), while the heavier side of things is covered off by post-hardcore (Turnstile), metalcore (Knocked Loose), and the jacked-up hip-hop of Danny Brown. An extremely welcome new entry onto London’s day festival scene.

Tickets

Deftones — Crystal Palace Park, 29.06.2025

In 2023 the New York Times asked “Are You Ready? The Nu-Metal Renaissance is Upon Us”, claiming that young people were finding and engaging with Nu-Metal music — specifically the music of Deftones — on short form video platforms.

Nu-Metal was a turn of the millennium phenomenon. At the time, the record sales would clearly indicate that many of its leading artists — Korn, Limp Bizkit, Deftones, System of a Down, Linkin Park — were some of the biggest bands in the world. The Nu-Metal sound was defined by combining elements of metal or alternative rock — drop-tuning guitar riffs, screamed vocals — with some surface effects from hip-hop: rapping, turntablism, sampling. The bands synthesised this genre melding into a shiny pop package: in 1999 MTV played Limp Bizkit videos almost as frequently as those by Britney Spears or The Backstreet Boys, in response to the demands of an angry frat contingent who wanted to see more of themselves represented on the screen.

The Nu-Metal genre arguably peaked — and imploded — at the Woodstock 99 festival, where many of its prominent artists played. Woodstock 99 was an installation of the Woodstock franchise, 30 years on from the original iteration. But where the original Woodstock has been remembered as a countercultural force, carrying a kind of peace-and-love political message, a template for all left-field musical utopianism, Woodstock 99 — which took place on a disused airbase — ended in rioting, violence and arson.

For their part, Deftones — who declined to play at Woodstock 99 — distanced themselves from the Nu-Metal brand, disowning the genre label. It’s true they incorporated very little of the hip-hop influences that would define their peers. Of the track ‘Back to School’ — which stands out in their discography as having rapped verses — vocalist Chino Moreno explained that it was made to appease the desires of the record company to have a hit single on the record:

“And so I rapped a hip hop part on that song, we shortened it and half an hour later, the hit-single was ready to roll on. “When this version came out, a little part inside all of us felt like: 'Fuck! We just totally compromised.' And I know that a lot of our fans felt bad about it too.”

It’s a classic music industry story; genre is legible, sellable, and amplified wherever possible, even where it may not actually exist.

Deftones’ discography in fact goes far beyond ‘Back to School’ or the now viral ‘Change (in the House of Flies)’. At times, it’s more post-rock influenced — ‘Minerva’, ‘Anniversary of an Uninteresting Event’ — and others more classic metal — ‘Swerve City’, ‘Romantic Dreams’. In fact, the band have explicitly stated that they derive significant influence from British music of the 80s, especially the New Romantic movement. Accordingly, they’ve released covers of The Cure, The Smiths, Duran Duran and Japan. New Romantic music is a far cry from the band’s heavier tracks, but once you hear echoes of David Sylvian’s oblique songwriting and affected vocal style in Deftones music, you can’t un-hear them.

Per the NYT article, it does seem that Deftones have experienced a rise in popularity, or at least a rise in mainstream acceptance recently, especially here in the UK, be it TikTok related or due to their consistency and endurance among a dedicated fanbase — they’re now in their fourth decade of releasing music and touring. They quickly sold out their Crystal Palace park show (a few resale tickets remain, link below) and will play a prominent slot at Glastonbury the following day in late June. For its part, Glastonbury very rarely programs heavy music, more Woodstock — at least in its own self image — than Woodstock ’99.

Tickets

(Also see Cantilever’s piece on Glastonbury from 2023 here)

Ephemera

Peasant zine issue 1 out now ‘Music Emerging from the Soil’ - a musical spin-off from including writing on Daisy Rickman (see our take here) and perhaps taking its title from the incredible Richard Dawson album? (again, our take here). Long live print media!

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This week’s playlist

@ - ICA 21.06.2025 / Moth Club 14.08.2025

The band with the worst Search Engine Optimisation since !!!, recent 4AD signees @’s nominative obscurity may or may not account for their increasing word of mouth popularity. At the very least though, the name is suggestive of a very online aesthetic. Today, when we type an @, we’re usually ‘tagging’ someone. We’re saying: this is for you, you’re in this. Who are @ tagging?

To my mind, on @’s debut album Mind Palace Music, they’re tagging the American indie-pop-folk music of almost exactly 20 years ago. Listening to the acoustic guitar playing, harmony and vocalisation on tracks like ‘Parapet’ or ‘Friendship is Frequency’, it is difficult not to think about Animal Collective’s 2004 album Sung Tongs and their collaborative EP with Vashti Bunyan, Prospect Hummer (2005), while the understated pop songwriting recalls Grizzly Bear’s intimate Horn of Plenty (2004). I also hear Dirty Projectors and a hint of Lucky Dragons. This lineage leaves me questioning: if this is “hyperfolk”, as the artists themselves describe it, what, if anything, is “hyper” — from the Greek huper, meaning over or beyond — about it?

Write-ups of @ all reference the fact that Mind Palace Music was composed through iMessage: with snippets of songs sent back and forth and composed remotely by its two members, living in different cities. A compelling post-internet mode. Although the remote collaboration angle once again goes back at least 20 years: pop band The Postal Service derived their name from their method of composition, sending stems back and forth in the mail. Slower than iMessage, sure, but not so different in spirit.

Moreover, when it comes to @, I don’t hear any digital disjunction at all in the music; their folk-pop songs are coherent and fully-realised. Mentioning the iMessage history at all is, in my view, a way of distancing the project from its immediate sound-alikes: it’s saying “It’s not what you think.” This isn’t just 00s-indie-folk revival, but something of now. If this is true, in what way is it true?

In @, I think we hear a subtle inversion of what Mark Fisher called The Slow Cancellation of the Future. For Fisher, we have “an excessive tolerance of the archaic.” “Anything can come back” in our consistently retro-obsessed culture industry. It’s not just that artists simply look to the past for inspiration - retro-ism has been present from the beginning of popular music - but that in the 2000s, so Fisher claimed, we were given nothing but retro-ism, there was of now to compare the retro to.

It was, ironically, exactly the period of 20 years ago, at which Fisher levied a kind of musical End of History: “What is the sound of 2005?”, “What is the sound of 2008?” he asked in a lecture, implying that — of course! — there wasn’t one.

Although, clearly, there was.

In fact, there were many — too many perhaps…

This very multiplicity was part of the problem for Fisher; the contemporary artist not only has their immediate peers to take inspiration from, but also the readily accessible archive of global recorded music history. “What the internet provides is an oppressive weight of the past”, he said.

But what if, instead of an “oppressive weight”, artists take the ability to instantly and seamlessly interact with the “past” as a creative potential; what if it is in fact liberating?

This charge of future potential, found in the past, is exactly what Animal Collective themselves were channeling when collaborating with Vashti Bunyan on Prospect Hummer — her only previous album, Just Another Diamond Day, having been released in 1970. Or when making the later Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009) and Fall Be Kind (2009), records so clearly brilliant that to express admiration towards them has become its own cliché. This was not a “revival” but something very different: with ‘My Girls’s interpolation of Frankie Knuckles, and ‘What Would I Want, Sky?’, using the first ever licensed Grateful Dead sample as its basis, Animal Collective convened with multiple sounds and genres from the past to make completely future-sounding music.

Merriweather Post Pavilion was not ‘futuristic’ — a term often used in an ironically regressive way, an image of the future stuck in the 1980s — but was something that truly sounded of the future. Something that, when I was a teenager, genuinely blew me away with its riveting newness: the exact experience that Fisher tells us no one was having in 2009.

Accordingly, an experience of stunning newness is exactly what listeners are finding when listening to Mind Palace Music. So how can it feel both new and revivalist simultaneously?

What is compelling about revivals — or to be more accurate to what @ are doing, convening with an older sound and taking it somewhere new — is that the thing being revived had to, at one stage, be considered irrelevant: in the eyes of the incredibly fickle culture industry’s demand for novelty, it had to be considered trash, fallen by the wayside. To jump straight from one overly referenced leftist thinker to another then, for Walter Benjamin, the very essence of the “poetic mind”, was to be found in the appreciation of that which the mainstream culture considered trash, which he summarised in the image of the rag picker:

“Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. […] refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of Industry.”

The rag picker cares not that the city has discarded its trash, seeing instead the residual value in the trash that others had forgotten or neglected. This value is necessarily future-oriented: it “will assume” a new shape.

"History must have a dustbin, or history will be a dustbin, a gigantic, sprawling garbage heap", Simon Reynolds said in Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past (2010). But history always already was a dustbin. As Benjamin said in Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940):

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. […] The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Only the person who can legibly sort through the “debris” can really tell us where we’re going next.

I hear Benjamin’s imagery obliquely paraphrased on @’s ‘First Journal’, where guitarist / vocalist Victoria Rose sings:

You are the junk in my screen

You are the junk in my dreams

And I never thought I’d leave you

And I never thought I’d need you.

In the “junk”, the thrown away culture of the extremely online world, ever amassing more and more material and mediated through the “screen”, there is still “dreaming” — still productive imaginative work — to be had. What we “leave” we may once again “need”.

@, like Animal Collective, come from a position where popular music — and perhaps culture more broadly — is not a series of fixed points in a linear progression, but more a constellation, from which new forms and new sounds can constantly arise, beyond or over their origins. This is what is hyper about it.

ICA tickets

MOTH Club tickets

@ - Bandcamp

Mohammad Syfkhan - Oslo Hackney, 17.05.2025

Mohammad Syfkhan’s album I Am Kurdish (2024) combines traditional bouzouki playing with electronic drum machines to create a kind of ecstatic dance-oriented traditional music. It’s a full, compressed kind of sound, one where you can easily lose yourself in its mesmeric rhythms.

Some tracks have been crafted specifically with dancefloors in mind — ‘Do You Have a Lover or Not?’, ‘I Am Kurdish’, while others have a distinctly sombre feeling to them — ‘A Thousand and One Nights’, or ‘Wasted Years’. It’s fitting that this record — consisting mainly of new arrangements of popular songs from the Middle East and North Africa — should have sonic shades of light and dark, as its genesis is a story of both great tragedy and uplifting collaboration.

Mohammad Syfkhan is a Kurdish/Syrian Singer and Bouzouki player who began playing music in 1980 while he was in college studying nursing. When he got his degree in 1983, Mohammad moved to the city of Raqqa, Syria where he started his own band, The Al-Rabie Band, which played concerts, parties, weddings and festivals. Their live sets included Kurdish, Arabic, Turkish and some Western songs as well as Mohammad’s own original material.

When the war broke out in Syria, one of Syfkhan’s sons was tragically killed by Isis and the family were forced to leave their home and seek refuge in Europe, some emigrating to Germany while Syfkhan, his wife and young daughter settled in Ireland, splitting the family apart. Quoting the Nyahh Records write up for I Am Kurdish on BandCamp:

“Mohammad has spoken at length of his confusion and despair with fundamentalists and how their message is a far cry from the teachings of love and understanding that he considers the true message of Islam.”

A recently arrived refugee in County Leitrim, Ireland, Syfkhan connected with Nyahh Records label manager Willie Stewart, asking him if he could plug his bouzouki into Stewart’s mixing desk while the latter was DJ-ing a local event, celebrating the culture of new international communities in County Leitrim. Soon enough, Syfkhan was being booked for shows and connected with musicians in the Irish traditional and experimental scene, including landing a support slot with Lankum in County Cork.

This story of collaboration — how one culture can support the traditional music of another and assimilate it into its own traditional music culture — is a great example of how folk music is always on the move, it is never fixed nor finished.

Syfkhan continues two living traditions then, the vitality of Kurdish festival music that develops with his drum machine rhythms and playing, and Irish Traditional music, which now, given his place in Irish culture, finds a new sound that perfectly shares its values of collectivism and community.

“I thank everyone who has stood with me and supported me. And I especially thank the Irish people who have engaged with my music in such a wonderful way. I consider myself lucky to have come to this wonderful country that has welcomed me and all refugees. I thank God for everything, and now, thanks to this wonderful country, I am a musician and have a safe home. Thank you to the Irish government and people for giving me the honour of calling this country my home.” - Mohammad Syfkhan

tickets

Syfkhan plays Oslo Hackney on the 17th of May and a handful of UK festivals over the summer.

Nyahh Records, for their part, have a fascinating and eclectic approach to releasing music and recently put out a retrospective of the music of Roger Doyle, who has been catapulted from obscurity after Caroline Polachek covered his piece ‘Spring is Coming with a Strawberry in the Mouth’, a great write up of which by can be read here:

Anois, Os Ard

Spring Is Coming With A Strawberry In The Mouth

“Cinders always remain where there once was a fire…

Read more

2 years ago · 37 likes · Eoin Murray

Nyahh Records - Bandcamp

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This week’s playlist

Featuring multiple artists playing “FIGURA presents Seeing in Dreams” this weekend (discussed below) and more besides:

Tim Hecker — HERE at Outernet, 09.05.2025

Live, Tim Hecker is fantastically loud. His brand of electronic composition - a warp and weft of overlapping ambience - is cranked up to the limit of the bearable, where sound isn’t so much heard as it is felt or experienced. It is, for some, just too much.

It is important to note, however, that in these performances loudness is not a gimmick, nor a kind of sonic bravado. Hecker has studied the implications of extreme volume extensively and wrote a PhD thesis on the “megaphonic” in the long 19th century, taking the word — which essentially means anything extremely loud — from a short but frenetic essay by literary critic Steven Connor, who said:

“Noise forces hearing to spill across into the other senses: we do not merely apprehend noise, we undergo it; shaken and scattered, we become ourselves noised, or noisy. We start to hear with our skin and skull and teeth. Noise is the jeopardy of the ego.”

Jeopardising the ego is chief among Hecker’s concerns. In his thesis, he writes about “moments of liquidation of the self, of the dissolution of ego, or of bone-rattling de-subjectivation” emergent from the megaphonic.

Both Hecker and Connor’s statements of this kind are effectively a contemporary spin on the Romantic concept of The Sublime. In Edmund Burke’s landmark 1757 treatise on the concept — A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful — he variously discusses the “greatness of dimension” that makes the human being feel small, awestruck and moved, be it in a landscape, or other inhuman scene. When it comes to sound, Burke said this:

“Excessive loudness alone is sufficient to overpower the soul, to suspend its action, and to fill it with terror. The noise of vast cataracts, raging storms, thunder, or artillery, awakes a great and awful sensation in the mind, though we can observe no nicety or artifice in those sorts of music.”

This last point of Burke’s helps provide the key to Hecker’s music, who consistently asks what might happen if “nicety or artifice” were, in fact, combined with the overwhelming invisible forces of The Sublime. In recorded music of course, there really is a limit to the loud. A good deal of “artifice” is therefore necessary to achieve the desired effect.

Accordingly, Hecker is at his best when he takes a set of organic tones and contrasts them with something more clearly immense and synthetic. For example, the piano on the closing section of Ravedeath 1972 (2011), or follow up Dropped Pianos (2011), a chorus of voices on Love Steams (2016), and a Japanese Gagaku ensemble on Konoyo (2018) and Anoyo (2019), placing these tones in contrast with waves of feedback, distortion and looping ambience. The sublime machine — intimating a kind of enormous invisible force — is placed against a very human musical language that appears small, delicate and vulnerable in comparison, often becoming enveloped in or overwhelmed by the all-encompassing synthesis of sound.

In Hecker’s music of this kind, we hear an effect of scale that goes back to some the real classics of Sublime art. See, for instance, J.W.M Turner’s Rain Steam and Speed (1844) where the new technology (the steam train), hurtles towards the viewer in a picturesque landscape. The older technology — the boat with a figure in it, beneath and to the left — pales in comparison to the scale of the coming wave, pushing us into an uncertain future.

To achieve the full Sublime effect, when Hecker plays live, an enormous sea of fog is pumped into the space through haze machines, making the entire venue appear like a Turner painting, obscuring the figures inside as they succumb to the music of machines. At the end, when you watch Tim Hecker, you witness a rare near-perfect synthesis of concept and execution.

Hecker rarely plays in London, so this is a good chance to see if what I have said here (true of his last forays) is consistent. Given all of the above, though, I would remind any prospective audiences to bring ear protection. Your hearing is a gift and should be looked after!

Horse Vision — HERE at Outernet, 10.05.2025

Stockholm’s Horse Vision are the latest in a run of contemporary artists to deftly interpolate, rather than simply perform, a certain kind of musical sincerity.

For example, here is Horse Vision’s recent single ‘Chemicals’:

And here’s American band Freelance Whales’ track ‘Starring’ from 2008:

The choruses are remarkably sonically similar, there’s something “cute” or whimsical about both melodies, the sonic palette is at least significantly echoed. And yet Freelance Whales could easily be decried as a pre-eminently parodiable example of turn of the 2010s Brooklynite hipsterism: the “hey!” choruses, the banjos, the glockenspiels, the embroidery on the cover, the heartfelt earnestness of the whole thing.

Horse Vision, on the other hand, are released by conceptual record label “indadvertent.index”, whose first release (a mix tape) is self-referentially titled “Guitar Music” - featuring shoegaze, dream pop, cyberfolk with a digital sheen - and whose website links off to various obscure philosophical or conceptual areas of interest. It’s a more self-aware music, shot through with a kind of post-internet literacy. Very much of the moment.

00s electro-folk is clearly present on Horse Vision’s Another Life (2025), but it’s far from the only influence woven in. The extremely dry and close guitars on ‘Segundi Garinasso’ sound uncannily close to slowcore band Duster’s album Stratosphere (1998). There are also samples from electro-pop in The Knife (‘Heartbeats’) and M.I.A (‘Bad Girls’) that creep into the record, making a kind of patchwork or bricolage effect, echoing, at the level of the album, our contemporary playlist culture in which many different sounds from different musical sources may be united in, reigning term of the moment: “vibe”.

Like P.C Music head honcho A.G Cook’s statements on his love of pop music, I would expect that, if pressed, Horse Vision would claim that their interpolation of these sounds is decidedly not cynical nor ironic, but that it comes from a genuine engagement with and enjoyment of the tones that they incorporate. That is to say, Cook’s version pop is not parody, or postmodern self-referentiality, but is itself sincere. Whether this statement is true or not is, of course, in the ear of the beholder. But at the very least, as Horse Vision twist and digitally process the sincerity of the recent past, they raise questions about what it might mean to make music in earnest, and what it might mean to stray from it.

Still House Plants — HERE at Outernet, 10.05.2025

The Glasgow-formed and now London-based Still House Plants make a lot out of a limited range of sounds: just drums, guitar and vocals. No bass. And very often, no other embellishment of any kind, save a few effects here and there. The instruments speak for themselves, and Jess Hickie-Kallenbach’s vocals — an expressive vaguely R&B style — are left raw, unprocessed.

Of other contemporary artists, Moin would stand out as a comparison point: both make a kind of minimalist rock music that incorporates subtle hints of multiple genres simultaneously - hip-hop, emo, jazz. Yet in Still House Plants, we hear far more improvisation, more structural freedom, and something altogether more strange.

Drummer David Kennedy remarked a while ago that the absence of drum fills in Still House Plants’ music had the effect of creating “a continuous phrase that never finishes.” I would say that this holds true for the project at large. It is deeply recessional.

Often, a single phrase is sung repeatedly, or started and restarted again and again. Songs don’t so much conclude as collapse, lurching into new sections while somehow retaining their forward momentum. Across albums, there is little clear differentiation in key or tonality, only choppy rhythms and new phasing: to listen is to move towards a vanishing point that never quite arrives.

John Berger once likened the experience of listening to music in general to Zeno’s paradox of motion, like an arrow in flight: neither truly here nor there. You can’t grasp it in any given moment, except through pausing, and thus terminating the experience itself.

The majority of musical works, I would say, want us to forget this fact; they let us lose ourselves in the flow and joy of decorated time. In the work of Still House Plants, however, we’re invited to pay close attention.

“A musical composition, since it uses time, is obliged to have a beginning and an end”, Berger said elsewhere, “a painting only has a beginning and an end in so far as it is a physical object: within its imagery there is neither beginning nor end.”

It seems to me that Still House Plants push against, as much as is physically possible, Berger’s dichotomy between the musical and plastic arts. They want to break time, to make sound a physical object with no beginning nor end. Live, you’d be hard pressed to deny that what they create is in fact something substantial, something almost sculptural.

All three of the artists in this week’s newsletter are playing Figura - “Seeing in Dreams”, a new festival of experimental music, on May the 9th and 10th @ HERE at Outernet, including Andy Stott, TAAHLIAH, Slauson Malone 1, Upsammy, James Massiah and more. Full line up here: https://ra.co/events/2050432

Figura have been kind enough to offer Cantilever subscribers a handful of free tickets to the full festival.

Simply email “info@figura.world” with the subject line “Cantilever Guest list - [name]" and await confirmation.

First come first served!

Website update

We’ve updated the listings on our website including the fantastic line ups of Outbreak festival & Massive Attack at Victoria Park, two nights of Deerhoof at Bush Hall, and no less than Stevie Wonder at Hyde Park, as well as many more great grassroots shows to get stuck into. Check it out on the button below:

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