A new and very strange kind of pop music has bubbled up over the past half-decade plus. It’s internationalist, rooted in both underground electronics and the most populist styles, bound up with playful but sometimes terrifying ultra high definition psychedelic aesthetics, and dominated by female and non-binary musicians.
It’s been a decade, more or less, since The Rolling Stones opened up their From the Vaults series with The Brussels Affair, AKA Bedspring Symphony, taken from the 1973 European tour following the release of Goats Head Soup. It’s one of the most thrilling live sets any band ever released. And this at a period when it is hard to ascertain exactly how many times Keith Richards was arrested, crashed his car, set his place on fire, or had his blood changed.
Tricky, the bruised, self-proclaimed "mongrel" from Knowle West, South Bristol’s depressed suburb, has created a language of his own: dark and minimalist, with emotions at once raw and blurred.
“If I was a better dreamer, you’d be a dream come true” sings Kristin Hersh over the opening bars of Throwing Muses’ new album, Sun Racket. It sets the tone for a distorted and woozy disc that could easily be the soundtrack to a folk-horror tale set in the woods of the band’s native New England.
The Turnamat is a type of washing machine made by AEG. In the composition titled “Turnamat”, Seventies-type synths, wobbly keyboard lines and hard-grooving drums give way to a brass-led interlude suggesting an acquaintance with the compositions of Lalo Schifrin. It’s as if a jazz-inflected soundtrack from 45 years ago has been shoved into a blender rather than a washing machine, then reconstituted and given a major buff-up.
"The gateway to the invisible must be visible." So intones Patti Smith on the third and final journey in sound with Stephan Crasneanscki and Simone Merli, AKA Soundwalk Collective, musical psychogeographers and field recorders whose journey for this evocation of French spiritual-surrealist writer Rene Daumal’s posthumous 1952 cult classic Mount Analog took him to the peak of Nanda Devi in the Himalayas, the former Beatle hangout of Rishikesh, India’s "spiritual capital" of Varanasi,
Ellie Goulding steps coolly out of the Medieval and Renaissance gallery, in amongst monster-slaying Greek statuary, where a string section waits. Deprived of audiences for now, she has opted for an elegantly filmed showcase at the Victoria & Albert Museum, her red dress the sensually bright centrepiece of blue-lit tableaus.
Katy Perry occupies an odd position. By some measure the biggest pop star in the world over the last decade, with streams in the billions, she’s always been an awkward mix of old-school razzle-dazzle showbiz hucksterism, knowing sass and awkward vulnerability.