The reissue of Sleep's Dopesmoker shows musicians with the nerve to really stretch a song and take listeners on a journey The three-minute pop song is an undeniable design classic: short enough to fit on one side of a 7in, long enough to turn a repeated chorus, melody or hook into an insanely addictive earworm. But greatness can also occur when an artist changes their game up from sprint to marathon, breaking past the 180-second barrier as far as their creativity will take them. I'm talking specifically about tunes that rely on their uncommon length for their effect ...

In that context, he's something of a throwback to a simpler time, before the advent of slumped-shouldered, indifferent indie hip-stars who go out of their way to ignore the audience with dollops of you're-lucky-we're-even-performing contempt.

Calling the split “amicable but lamentable to say the least,” Averse Sefira have sadly called it a day. The long-running Austin black metallers are survived by a stellar discography — see Advent Parallax or Tetragrammatical Astygmata for the incontrovertible evidence — as well as a very entertaining, sporadically updated blog that explored the band’s occult [...]

Since the mid 2000s electronic musicians and DJs have turned their gaze to traditional Gypsy and Balkan sounds. With the advent of acts such as Shantel and Gogol Bordello crossing into the mainstream, its time to focus on the some the musicians and bands who have sprinkled these traditional sounds with gold dust and muscled their way onto dancefloors. Part of the worldwide phenomena “future folk” this music has become part of the evolution of sound that has pushed even further into contemporary music forms. The second part of the show brings a live recording of a band that has ...

LA's genre-bending funkmaster Harlan is back with another video, this time utilizing a medium which has fallen into neglect with the advent of/increasing viability of "CGI" animation (computers, you guys). The video is claymation, and it was directed and animated Jessica Jule, about whom we have no information, but we'll assume...

LA's genre-bending funkmaster Harlan is back with another video, this time utilizing a medium which has fallen into neglect with the advent of/increasing viability of "CGI" animation (computers, you guys). The video is claymation, and it was directed and animated Jessica Jule, about whom we have no information, but we'll assume...

. . . While no conclusive source exists on the matter (that I was able to locate), it’s believed that the advent of the fade-out correlated with the symbiotic development of both pop music and radio in the ’50s and/or ’60s. A fade-out ensured that singles wouldn’t overextend their welcome, allowing DJs to create a [...]

It’s like Passion of the Weiss … for metalheads! Invisible Oranges : While no conclusive source exists on the matter (that I was able to locate), it’s believed that the advent of the fade-out correlated with the symbiotic development of both pop music and radio in the ’50s and/or ’60s. A fade-out ensured that singles wouldn’t overextend their welcome, allowing DJs to create a familiar and predictable momentum that facilitated the interjection of advertising. By doing so, it blurred the worlds of art and product and encouraged a realm of sound that could be easily remembered yet instantly ...

American black metal titans Averse Sefira has officially disbanded. The band formed in 1996, and went on to make their mark through Europe and the Americas, performing with other notable black metal groups like Dark Funeral, Gorgoroth, Watain, Marduk, 1349, Absu, Antaeus, and Secrets of the Moon. The band gained a respectable following despite a fiercely independent stance that garnered them a complex reputation in the underground. They achieved wider exposure with their signing to Candlelight Records in 2007 and the release of their highly-rated fourth LP, 'Advent Parallax', the following year. Over the last decade, they also appeared in ...

When the pioneers at MTV traded in music videos for reality television, the fate of the professional music video seemed ambiguous at best. Thankfully with the advent of Youtube in 2005 (and the slew of similar flash-based video sites that cropped up afterwards) there was a new platform for hundreds of people looking to showcase [...]

Ten readers tell us about their most loved music shops Earlier this week our critics wrote about record shops that shaped their lives – and now our readers do the same, in celebration of Record Store Day on Saturday. Following the previous piece, many readers posted below the line with their formative music-buying memories. We've taken those comments and made this interactive map, to which we'll also add these readers' panel contributions, and any record shop memories posted in the thread below. Stephano Bentos on Rex Records, Ipswich When I arrived in Ipswich to study my degree in the ...

I am clearly on the other side of a generation gap and the internet has a lot to do with it. I'm part of a generation who sort of get the 'internet' (in the sense of internet culture as opposed to a practical understanding of the ways in which the web is functionally useful) but who also remember what life was like before it. The ways in which my teenage self differed from today's tumblr-teen are profound. Almost unimaginably different, I'd say. Like if I were to transplant a modern adolescent's brain into my teenage body ...

Turn Me On, Dammit! Dir. Jannicke Systad Jacobsen [New Yorker Films; 2011] by Robert Hershorn Rating: It is rare that a film’s title fully encapsulates its tone and ethos, but Turn Me On, Dammit! does the trick. It’s a command, not a come-on: a restless demand for affirmation, and a challenge at that. The insistence on sexual stimulation carries the expectation that other fires will be fanned, as well. One could perhaps find this naïve and overly optimistic; it makes sense when we take into account that the movie is about a teenager. Fifteen-year-old Alma (Helene Bergsholm) lives ...

A star-studded show celebrating the 50th anniversary of the advent of the Marshall amplifier takes on greater resonance in the wake of Jim Marshall's passing on Thursday

There was a time in my life when, in retrospect, my love for music had dwindled considerably. Music was no longer the all-consuming passion it had been a few years earlier. I no longer sought out the new, the daring and the ground-breaking. Years of listening to mainstream and going to clubs which were dominated by mainstream sounds had somewhat deadened my appetite and enthusiasm for the sort of music I listened to before the mid eighties, and after 2002. Prefab Sprout epitomise that phase in my life. Marriage loomed, stability beckoned. Somehow I felt as if I had to ...