Category: Music
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MARINA HERLOP: MUSIC THAT REFUSES TO BECOME CONTENT
With Dja Dja, released on 9 October 2026, Catalan composer Marina Herlop has produced one of the year’s most adventurous albums: a dazzling, occasionally bewildering collision of classical composition, experimental electronics, invented languages and Balinese gamelan. Three years in the making, it arrives with an unusually pointed argument about the state of contemporary music. At…
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GOD SAVE THE QUEENS: THE WOMEN WHO INVENTED PUNK’S FUTURE
Fifty years after punk erupted into British cultural life, a landmark exhibition at London’s Museum of Youth Culture challenges one of popular music’s most persistent historical distortions. Through previously unseen archives, photography, fashion and fine art, God Save the Queens restores the women who shaped punk to their rightful place: not at the margins of…
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What’s So Special About the Romantic Piano?
The piano is the most democratic and the most intimate instrument in the history of Western music — democratic because it found its way into the parlours and drawing rooms of the emerging middle classes, intimate because it is the one instrument on which a single person, alone, can produce a complete musical world without…
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What’s So Special About New Order
New Order made the most unlikely record in the history of popular music. Three people whose previous band had defined the outer limits of post-industrial English despair, whose singer had hanged himself eight months before the recording sessions began, whose entire artistic identity had been built on darkness and weight and the refusal of consolation…
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What’s So Special About Joy Division
By Bergotte Joy Division made two studio albums and a handful of singles between 1978 and 1980, and their singer Ian Curtis hanged himself in his kitchen in Macclesfield on the eve of the band’s first American tour, at the age of twenty-three. It would be easy — it has been easy, for forty years…
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What’s So Special About Kraftwerk
By Bergotte Kraftwerk did not remove human feeling from music. They did something stranger and more difficult: they found the human feeling inside the machine, and made it audible. The four men from Düsseldorf who spent the 1970s building synthesizers in a converted railway building and slowly, methodically, without apology or explanation, inventing the sonic…
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What’s So Special About Fela Kuti
By Bergotte Fela Anikulapo Kuti built a nightclub in Lagos, declared it an independent republic, married twenty-seven women simultaneously, recorded nearly eighty albums, was beaten, imprisoned, and raided by the Nigerian military so many times that he began to treat the violence as material, and in the process created one of the most original and…
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Sophia Luna Portra
Encounters · No. 8 Snake Skin, Warm Blanket Sophia Luna Portra makes sculptures from muslin and coffee, sings gothic folk songs about transformation, and thinks about clothes the way a philosopher thinks about the self. She is at the beginning of something. By Bergotte A note on this essay: the preceding pieces in this series…
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What’s So Special About Miriam Makeba
By Bergotte Miriam Makeba was exiled from her country for thirty-one years. She was stripped of her passport, banned from attending her mother’s funeral, and prevented from returning home to South Africa by a government that understood, correctly, that her voice was more dangerous to apartheid than most weapons available to the opposition. She responded…
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What’s So Special About Mulatu Astatke
By Bergotte Mulatu Astatke went to music school in London, studied jazz in Boston, played vibraphone in New York, and then went home to Ethiopia and made something that had never existed before. He took the pentatonic scales and ancient modal structures of Ethiopian music — a tradition reaching back centuries, untouched by the Western…
