Ammar Kalia

Great art can emerge from any residency. A staple of jazz through the decades—from Ornette Coleman’s 1959 series at New York’s Five Spot to Steam Down’s raucous weekly jam at London’s Matchstick Piehouse today—the residency provides a simultaneously safe and challengin...

The laser-gun-like, pitch-modulating burst of the electronic tom is a cartoonish staple of 1980s music, cropping up everywhere from Duran Duran’s chart-toppers to Prince’s melodramatic rock and even Herbie Hancock’s jazz fusion. Their punctuating fills serve as a const...

Modern fandom can seem an alien concept. Gone are the teens penning heartfelt letters to their favourite pinups. Today’s fans – or “stans”, named after the Eminem song about an obsessive stalker – are an online army ready to take on anyone that might threaten the objec...

These days we’re marinated in news all day long – meaning that Marion Stokes was way ahead of her time. For more than 30 years until her death in 2012, the Philadelphia resident recorded the news 24 hours a day. More than 70,000 tapes of footage were amassed, covering...

The glass-walled, high-rise walkway of Your Rainbow Panorama, Olafur Eliasson’s installation in Aarhus, Denmark, is an otherworldly experience: panels of glass slowly change colour to reveal a new hue to the vista and a new perspective. It is this idea of multiple pers...

Pat Thomas & Kwashibu Area Band – Obiaa!

Ghanaian highlife music has never been a single statement of artistic intent. Birthed from the indigenous rhythms of Akan music and incorporating western instrumentation such as electric guitars and horns before being played in t...

When 36-year-old Justus Parmar decided to propose to his girlfriend, Elisia, he knew it had to be two things – “unforgettable and big”. Less than a week later, he flew Elisia from their home in Vancouver, Canada, to the UK, where he proposed in a capsule of the London...

There is seemingly no end to Drake’s adoration of UK rap culture. Beginning with his impromptu features at Skepta’s London shows in 2015 and an effusive back-and-forth on social media, the Canadian rapper was soon bringing up obscure references to smoking a blem and we...

There is a quality to pianist Abdullah Ibrahim’s music that makes it sound like a slow, sad goodbye. That may be because he spent the majority of the 1960s to the 1990s in self-imposed exile from his home country of South Africa – a protest against the racial segregati...

Tinariwen: Amadjar

There is a hazy expansiveness to Tuareg band Tinariwen’s music that recalls the desert setting in which it was created. Fuzzy guitars are rhythmically picked over undulating rhythms and gravelly baritone vocals; it is almost as if you can hear a sand-...