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Pay me to make nice words, please.
Ratking's incendiary - and only - album not only captured the sound of a fertile rap scene in flux, but seared a path for unrelenting experimentation
We speak to producer, mentor and hip-hop icon DJ Premier about hip-hop, the universe, and everything. DJ Premier is at the very core of hip hop's history. J Dilla, Madlib, Kanye, Nas, Jay-Z, Biggie, Rakim, every iconic artist you can name has been influenced by his style or put in work over one of his beats.
On first listen, you might mistake 100 Gecs' music for a joke. A jumble of internet humour, absurd lyrics and deliberately over-the-top stylistic clashes, the pair's sound is challenging to even the most open-minded of listeners.
Original release date: 29 June 1999 Label: Roadrunner Records At the height of his powers, James Brown would push his band - still considered one of the greatest ensembles of all time - to their limits, while he vamped and ad-libbed on tracks for well over ten minutes at a time.
Enlisting the help of Bon Iver and Poliça on his new album, cult hero Swamp Dogg has emerged from the muck of the music industry with one of the best albums of the year.
Binker Golding and Moses Boyd, London's friendliest jazz revolutionaries, are nestled in the upstairs of a Covent Garden pub. Boyd is dressed casually in all black, including the hat still pulled down over his ears as protection from the late March snow outside.
If 'Exmilitary' began the cult of Death Grips, then 'The Money Store' was its New Testament. We revisit the Sacramento-formed group's incandescent debut full-length on its 11th anniversary
"Being a strong woman, especially a small strong woman, is weird to people" There's a deliberate timelessness to Vera Sola' songwriting. Full of gothic imagery, Morricone-esque guitar and lingering vocals, there's a sense that the songs on the singer and multi-instrumentalist's debut album, 'Shades', could have been written anytime between the first wagon arriving in the west and Trump's election.
It feels trite to say that the last year has felt as if much of the world has been living inside a Godspeed You! Black Emperor album. Anyone familiar with the Montreal collective's proclivity for anarchism-inspired transmissions of doom can draw parallels between the group's prophecies of a society wrecked by neoliberal capitalism and the chaos that fills our Twitter timelines, governments and streets on a daily basis.
And the band least restrained by the genre's sometimes elitist rules It's Valentine's Day, and the South Bank branch of Pizza Express is packed with an unsettling mix of couples sneaking in a lunch-break date, and groups of children on school trips to the BFI. I'm here to meet and eat with Ezra Collective.
A sonic revolution is sweeping the capital. Drawing on London's rich rap culture and other genres long-ignored by traditionalists, young musicians are bringing jazz to a new audience - here, we meet those at the front of this exciting movement
From Nubya Garcia to Sons Of Kemet, expect nothing but UK jazz greatness.
Rural Tuscany is as far from a pop music hub as it's possible to get in western Europe. Plagued by unreliable internet and accessible only via long winding roads that would intimidate any non-Italian driver, it's the last place you'd expect someone like Jerome Hadey to start a record label.
So Kanye has found God. Having teased a pivot to Christ with his mysterious Sunday Service performances - viewable on that most holy of platforms, Kim Kardashian's Instagram stories - Ye's new album Jesus Is King serves as his confirmation; an official renouncement of the devil, new dresses and all his other works.
For the next few weeks, we'll be running pieces about what 2016 holds for the UK music scene: which artists possess the power to make it tick, what scenes are approaching boiling point, and what issues we need to fix before we can move forward. You can find all the content so far, right here.
After a damp beginning, the clouds lifted as George Ezra took to the stage at Sunday's V Festival - with a set so joyous that even the on-site police could not resist having a dance to, ironically, Listen To The Man.