The Charlatans frontman’s songs of love and life after Covid range from driving pop to Sparks-ish electronica, sumptuous arrangements and modern psychedelia
Ryan Alexander Diduck
, April 15th, 2021 08:46
Collaborations with Nik Void, Gazelle Twin, Simon Fisher Turner, and Astrud Steehouder make the latest project from Alexander Tucker all the more essential, finds Ryan Diduck
Information in the post-COVID world has assumed a curious characteristic of meaningless equivalency, one chart – one graph, one statistic – taking on seemingly no more nor less significance than any other. This latest fact attack is in addition to the regular broadcast news and social media cycles that plague our consciousness with unwanted and unnecessary infotainment: billionaires’ babies’ names, Royal families’ antics, dispatches from the vacant crania of celebrities’ children and grandchildren, stock selloffs and sports scores edging against today’s human death toll. (Up next, the weather.) In an attention economy, what we pay attention to is no longer relevant, so long as we pay rapt attention to
Patrick Clarke
, March 15th, 2021 10:30
With his new modular project Microcorps, Alexander Tucker blurs the lines between human and humanoid as he investigates how language can shift our perception. He tells Patrick Clarke the story of new album XMIT
The algorithms that dictate so much of our consumption – the next song you listen to, the next film you watch, the next person you go on a date with – are now so complex that they are approaching the point where not even their creators can comprehend them. “One of the biggest sources of anxiety about AI is not that it will turn against us, but that we simply cannot understand how it works,” wrote the Harvard Business Review in 2019. Algorithms now make so many decisions without consulting the people they effect, wrote Towards Data Science in a lengthy essay on the need for increased ethics in the field, that “they have become the decision makers, and humans have been pushed into an artefact shaped by technology.”
Scientific American
Aerodynamics, androids and fly larvae feature in our curated collection of top indie tunes inspired by science
It’s been 10 years since the first
Scientific American rundown of science songs, and a great deal has changed in that time. Books, art and music are now under the strict control of the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx, under the auspices of the Solar Federation, and … oh sorry, hang on, that’s just the plot of Rush’s
2112 album. In any case,
Scientific American has carefully curated even more killer science-related tunes into a playlist on our new Spotify channel. It includes songs by Wire, Slowdive, Pixies and Thomas Dolby (I wasn’t going to include “She Blinded Me With Science” but my editor made me, but we also have a much better Thomas Dolby song!) I’ve noted a few of the highlights here; you can also listen to the entire playlist below or on our Spotify channel.