Lottie Brazier

.You know Transparent as the audio brand challenging the unsustainable tech industry, dreamed up by its chief executive officer Martin Willers and chief designer Per Brickstad. But the truth is, they got here through a lot of hard work, and a little bit of fate. The two co-founders of Transparent (and friends before that) were working at Stockholm design studio People People for 10 years, before they hit upon a concept that would be the beginning of Transparent.

Sit with me in Purple Rain for a moment. Hear the solitary electric guitar, the enriching gentle chorus effect. A single, first chord – an isolated strum, not dissimilar to The Beatles’ opener in A Hard Day’s Night; soulfully melancholic, almost hesitant, tense. But soon enough, the track unfolds: the pace of a drum machine, Prince’s androgynous vocals lightly echoing across the stereo image. Drama is brewing. A perfectly timed, sad yelp in the chorus elevates us in this title track, as a fan...

During World War II, Steve Reich traveled by train between his parents’ homes in L.A. and New York. Years later, it occurred to the composer that if he had spent his childhood in Europe, he may have been riding a train to a concentration camp instead. This revelation would inspire the three-movement “speech melody” piece Different Trains, with its string section ricocheting off sampled anecdotes from Holocaust survivors and screeching train brakes as if they were all from the same fragmented ...

“You shouldn’t let poets lie to you,” Björk concludes, in a Sugarcubes interview from 1988. She’s just finished exploring the true workings of her television - information that was previously hidden from her by an Icelandic poet who had a more metaphorical (and slightly judgemental) explanation for how a TV works. Björk takes the back off the television to demonstrate how it actually works, how it can put “her into different situations” - such as programmes about the art of Iceland. It is abu...

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Graphic designer Rick Banks and DJ historian Bill Brewster’s new book Clubbed explores the way that dance music looks
According to award-winning graphic designer Rick Banks, the look of clubbing is just as important as the sound. From the construction site aesthetics of 1980s Haçienda nights to the futuristic trance posters of the 90s, each era of club culture was brought to life by its corresponding imagery, which constantly responded to changes in media communication, design technology, and...

“We do put a show on but we don’t perform. We’re not actors. There are bands that find it easy to get on Top of the Pops and prance about,” Cocteau Twins bassist Simon Raymonde remarks in an interview for Japanese television. It’s a stereotypical response from a band who’d much rather talk about what their music wasn’t about rather than what it was.

How the youth culture mutated and spread across the borders of the conservative state
In 1978, the Turkish rock musician Tünay Akdeniz informed the country’s press – to subsequent horror – that his band were “punk rock.” Akdeniz was mostly sporting a bad boy image to push record sales rather than to make political history (his music was probably closer in style to glam or hard rock), but his words nevertheless made a huge impact. Before then, no musician in Turkey had dared describe their ban...

Somerset House Studios’ ASSEMBLY aimed to mix up the rules of ballet and “high” dance culture but this was simply part of an emerging trend in 2018 says Lottie Brazier. All photographs by Anne Tetzlaff
All Embryogenesis photographs courtesy of Anne Tetzlaff
Somerset House is well known for holding artist residences in its warren-like space, particularly PJ Harvey’s Recording In Progress sessions where she worked on material live, surrounded by instruments, in front of audience separated from ...

Last month, industrial performance artist and provocateur Genesis P-Orridge performed her final concert at London venue Heaven. It wasn’t just a farewell to her audience, but also a means for Genesis P-Orridge to bid farewell to herself. Recently she told the New York Times that the course of her chronic myelomonocytic leukaemia meant that she had “less optimistically, a year, maybe six months. And then I’m on the downward slope to death”. As with the Fall’s Mark E Smith in January this year,...

Electronic music is a pretty broad church these days. What is deconstructed club music, you might be asking? Who knows for sure, but word is it’s dance music for people who have had enough of straightforward house and techno. There’s so much more to the genre as well than EDM or house, which often get the spotlight when perhaps there’s more deserved artists out there which should. For example Low, who just released their excellent Double Negative album last week, marking a dramatic break from...

Experimental label Slip Imprint’s co-head Laurie Tompkins first started releasing music during his composition undergrad in Manchester, handmaking micro-runs of avant acoustic and electronic music on CD-R alongside fellow students, as Slip Discs. “Our first Slip Imprint release proper was Joe Snape’s Brittle Love, in 2015,” Tompkins says. “Up to that point I’d worked on Slip Discs from 2012 until 2015, but with a shift of gear in what we were all working on—plus, us all moving from Manchester...

Rocket-building is a major part of Ukraine’s history, particularly for the city of Dnipro. Previously closed to foreigners outside of Ukraine because of its space program, Dnipro was, during Soviet times, known as “the rocket closed city,” and evidence of this past can still be found in its retro-futuristic architecture that has now been left abandoned. Four years ago, these spaces inspired Katya Rusetska and Andrey Palash to launch Construction Festival, an appeal to push new creative approa...

Berlin’s favourite non-binary northerner on the emancipatory magic of melody
Revelling in back-catalogue track names like ‘Misogyny Drop Dead’ and ‘Patriarchy Over & Out’, it’s plain to see that Planningtorock (aka Jam Rostron) has long considered the battle against gender norms something of a crusade. But the British producer and musician – preferred pronouns they/them – has a new album, Powerhouse, that looks inwards as much as it punches out. And, in doing so, reveals much that’s poignant ...

“He strikes me as so self-contained—” I start to whisper to my friend next to me in the balcony stalls. We are about three songs through Moses Sumney’s set at the Southbank’s grand Royal Festival Hall, but these illusions of the LA-based performer shatter as he announces drily that his next song is about “snogging”. His band are warming up to play ‘Make Out In My Car’ from Sumney’s 2017 debut album Aromanticism, an album based around the idea of someone unable to fall in love.
Despite this th...