Music

For the sixth and final film in the Design Matters series with Bang & Olufsen, Berlin-based musician Laurel Halo talks about drawing inspiration from different musical lineages, reacting to the materiality of Berlin and using texture as a challenge

Xenophobia has escalated to ‘emergency’ levels but the most watched music video on Italian YouTube is by a Tunisian-Italian artist

Found first in the pages of NME, an homage to the critic who brought an antic traduction of high French theory to the study of contemporary pop

The beloved angst-ridden musician makes a lively turn with her new album, Be the Cowboy

In the unashamedly populist ‘Rip It Up’ at the National Museum of Scotland, the joy of fandom resounds but questions about the future are avoided

Knussen’s music laid out each component as ‘precarious, vulnerable, exposed’ – and his conducting similarly worked from the inside out

Previously unheard music on Both Directions At Once includes blues as imposing as the saxophonist would ever record

Sir Simon Rattle and the LSO bring Stockhausen’s Gruppen für drei Orchester to the Tate’s cavernous space, 50 years after its London debut

An art historian explains what the Carters’s takeover of the Paris museum says about art, race and power

On the eve of a major show at the National Portrait Gallery, considering the legacy of MJ in light of ‘Apeshit’ and fraught debates on Blackness

A new history of grime, Dan Hancox’s Inner City Pressure, details the rapidly shifting London landscape out of which it emerged

Sophie Fiennes’s new film Bloodlight and Bami reveals a personal side of the singer as yet unseen 

To experience the music of the composer, who passed away last week at the age of 69, was to hear something tense, physical, almost pugilistic

To celebrate the 30^th anniversary of the Second Summer of Love, Gucci and Frieze present new films exploring the cultural impact of acid house

Paul Rekret surveys ‘chill wave’, the mellow pop, sepia-toned indie and tropical dance tropes in new music releases 

With ‘David Bowie Is’ at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Glenn Adamson on the evolution of the music video – a genre Bowie ‘essentially invented’

At this year’s platform for experimental music in Bergen, laughter was the most striking sound 

An interview with Frieze Music artist James William Blades

From Ragnar Kjartansson’s Italo-pop-infused The Sky in a Room to Matt Stokes’s happy hardcore recitals: the organ’s profane potential

Two controversial events suggest a precarious relationship between China’s culture industry and the state’s soft power project