Month: June 2023

   Aphex Twin has announced that his new EP, Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / in a room7 F760, will be released next month via Warp Records. The EP features artwork by Weirdcore. The electronic composer accompanied the announcement with the release of the first track from the EP, ‘Blackbox Life Recorder 21f’. The track pairs soft synths with unrelenting percussion. The four-track release will also feature a remix of the single, ‘Blackbox Life Recorder 21f [Parallax Mix]’, alongside tracks ‘zin2 test5’ and ‘In a Room7 F760’. The EP marks Aphex Twin’s first music release in nearly four years, following on from the 2019 EP, Peel Session 2. His last full-length release was the 2014 album Syro. Since his last venture into music, Aphex Twin has worked on a synth plugin with ...

Speaking to Conan O’Brien at Tribeca Festival, Paul McCartney reflected on his time with The Beatles while discussing his new photo book, 1964: Eyes of the Storm. During the conversation, he noted that his late bandmate John Lennon had “a really tragic life”. As McCartney joined the bill for an hour-long slot for Tribeca’s Storytellers series, host O’Brien displayed some photos featured in the Beatle’s new book. “It’s so lovely for me to see these memories and just remind me of where we were, what we did in those days,” McCartney said while discussing the memories the images evoked. 1964: Eyes of the Storm boasts a collection of 275 photos, many of which haven’t been made public until now, taken between 1963 and ‘64 during the band’s meteoric rise to global stardom. McCartney had, f...

Paul McCartney was always an unlikely bass hero. The left-handed musician occupied many roles in his music career spanning over 60 years, including composer, arranger, remixer, and producer. As a member of The Beatles, McCartney has been hailed as one of the greatest singers and songwriters of all time, responsible for iconic tracks like ‘Hey Jude’, ‘All My Loving’, and ‘Get Back’. But being a bass player never seemed to be at the forefront of McCartney’s mind. In fact, by his own admission, he wasn’t terribly keen on playing the instrument in the first place. “We couldn’t have three guitars and no bass. Nobody wanted to be the bass player in those days because it was always the fat guy playing bass,” McCartney explained in his book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present. “There seemed to be s...

Following Paul McCartney’s revelation about The Beatles‘ upcoming final song being enhanced by artificial intelligence, Sean Ono Lennon has explained how they used the technology. During an appearance on The Today Show on BBC Radio 4, McCartney was asked about AI and explained how they’ve been able to use this technology finish a composition by The Beatles. “We were able to use that kind of thing when Peter Jackson did the film Get Back, it was us making the Let It Be album. He was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette and a piano,” he said. “He could separate them with AI. They tell the machine, ‘That’s a voice, this is the guitar, lose the guitar.’ And he did that, so it has great uses. So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles record it was...

Towards the end of the 1960s, George Harrison was getting increasingly fed up with the rest of The Beatles. Despite becoming one of the greatest songwriters of his generation, Harrison was often put on the side compared to his bandmates, with John Lennon and Paul McCartney being more content to work on their collaborative songs than give their guitarist the time of day. All the while, Harrison was stockpiling for what would become his first breakthrough as a solo artist, All Things Must Pass. Across the album, Harrison sounds like he’s finally free from The Beatles’ dream, finally making songs with little regard for whether it would appease his bandmates. Though most songs demonstrated a certain weariness about the group, ‘Apple Scruffs’ became a loving ode to the people that loved the ...

Few bands have completely changed the landscape of popular music quite like The Beatles. Emerging from Liverpool in the early 1960s, the Fab Four challenged the public’s perception of popular music, amassing a legion of devoted fans unlike anyone else before. Beatlemania swept the nation, quickly reaching other areas of the globe, with young fans screaming so loud during concerts that their music was barely audible. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were dedicated to experimenting with new genres and recording techniques, and by the end of the 1960s, they’d released 12 acclaimed studio albums. Their first record, Please Please Me, contained multiple rhythm and blues covers and easily accessible pop songs, like ‘Chains’ and ‘Love Me Do’. However, within a ...

The Surrealism movement was led by Andre Breton, who sought to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality”. Inspired by Freudian psychoanalysis and the prominence of the unconscious mind, various forms of Surrealist art emerged during this period, beginning in the 1920s, from writing to painting. Although music was never a primary focus of Surrealism – Breton even wrote negatively about the medium in Silence is Golden – the movement still inspired many musicians. Composers like Erik Satie and Edgard Varèse drew inspiration from Surrealist methods, such as dreams, as reflected in the latter’s piece Arcana. After the initial wave of Surrealism ended, its influence remained, and it continues to inspire artists, filmmaker...

In April 1970, The Beatles finally split up, leaving the music world to mourn the divorce of rock’s most influential luminaries. For some fans, this news came as a shock. In retrospect, we know tensions were reaching a boiling point in the late 1960s, but at the time, public word of such friction was limited and subject to conjecture. Over the years since, some fans blamed the all-consuming nature of the relationship between John Lennon and Yoko Ono, while others blamed overcrowding of talent and a battle of the ego. As Paul McCartney claimed in a recent interview with Conan O’Brien at the Tribeca Festival, Lennon “had a really tragic life” and cited a number of extremely personal events that shaped the budding musician’s own personality traits. McCartney continued: “As a kid, his m...

Widely regarded as one of the greatest songwriters of all time, Paul McCartney has written his fair share of hits, both for his own projects and for others. From Cilla Black to Rod Stewart to Charlotte Gainsbourg, the Beatles legend has generously contributed his talents to other musicians throughout the years. But McCartney also gifted songs closer to home, including one to his bandmate, Ringo Starr. In 1973, three years after the Beatles broke up, Starr released his third full-length solo effort, the self-titled LP Ringo. The record featured some of his biggest hits as a solo artist, including lead single ‘Photograph’. But the album also included a song penned by McCartney and his wife, Linda, titled ‘Six O’Clock’. The song pairs bold piano with soft guitar strums and quirky synt...

It was always difficult for George Harrison to get a word in throughout The Beatles’ tenure. After being labelled as the ‘Quiet One’ for the majority of his career, Harrison was always more reserved about showing his talents as a songwriter, often having to fight against the songwriting machine of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. As he started to delve into his songs later in their career, there was one in which Harrison decided he didn’t need the rest of the Fab Four. Once The Beatles decided to leave the touring life behind after 1966, they were in limbo, wondering where to go next. By the time Lennon came back with the beginnings of the song ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, a new era for the group had begun, with them perfecting their material and becoming lab rats in the studio working w...