Andrew Lopez explains just why Glastonbury is best festival there is to offer, and who to look out for at this year’s festival. The daddy. The don. The big cheese. The best. If you have anymore superlatives, add them on and we’re still not close to describing the phenomenon that is the Glastonbury Festival of [...]

What makes an ‘epic’ song? Guy Rimay-Muranyi examines  ten songs that make the grade. Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ is, objectively, an ‘epic’ poem. In fact, there is an ‘epic’ for almost every medium, apart from music. Whether it be in the instrumentation, lyrics, or the sheer crushing power of the wall of sound created, the following ten songs [...]

Stones Throw Records have been at the forefront of a recent indie hip-hop renaissance as a response to the ever-present obsession with sales and celebrity. The label was initially founded with the intent of releasing DJ Peanut Butter Wolf’s collaborations with murdered emcee Charizma in San Jose. They had left their previous label before the [...]

As I write, I am developing a blinding headache. I blame this on my choice of listening matter: Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. The question which inevitably arises in relation to this controversial album – is this music or noise? – is answered fairly definitively for me when I am forced to turn off my speakers [...]

Do young bands these days play to cyber-publics? This question sprung up when I was considering my time as a guitarist in a small band formed with my friends. We were called Alnegator and mostly performed and practised in York. Making music with close friends,  performing mostly in front of close friends and their close friends [...]

You may not have heard of him, but Pierre Boulez is probably the most eminent living composer in Europe, so his visit to Birmingham last Month took place with a reverence usually reserved for royalty. After hearing a concert of his music the previous evening the French-born Boulez, also a highly successful conductor, took an [...]

Music is always played harmoniously alongside the bleakness of warfare. Whether it is the marching music used to maintain the rigour of the soldiers’ step, regiment bands, patriotic and nationalistic songs sung by soldiers fighting or those left to defend home, there seems to be a definitive framework to categorise warfare songs of the late [...]

My regard for Sibelius as the-greatest-composer-that-ever-lived really only began last summer, following a rousing performance of his Second Symphony in Ripon Cathedral. Usually I find that to be fully captivated by a performance I need already to know the piece inside-out, but with this it was different. It was, in fact, love at first listen. I was [...]

We are told heaven has a beautiful soundtrack: usually harps, the odd trumpet and a heavenly choir are on the bill. Few have mentioned silence in heaven – perhaps it is less than ideal. Meanwhile, back here on Earth, music has rarely been an overt exploration of utopian ideals. The easiest medium in which to [...]

The music of Alice Coltr ane just needs to suggest a place name to transport the imagination elsewhere. Pieces such as Journey in Satchidananda, Galaxy in Turiya, Stopover Bombay or Lovel Skyboat allude to Hindu philosophy in a way that connects names of places or people with flights to almost otherworldly states. No surprise, then, that [...]