It makes me feel proud, simply because of the specific time we're in right now. It definitely takes a lot of courage for kids my age to represent their culture. Anthony Benitez, an 18-year-old violin student born in the United States to Mexican immigrants, expressed how the academy provides a meaningful outlet for cultural expression amid punitive immigration enforcement affecting Latino and immigrant families across the country.
R&B in the 21st century has been in a constant state of flux, tugged between safe traditionalism and blurry attempts at progression. For the last decade-plus that "progression" has seen R&B music become more indebted to trap records and the moody atmospherics of alternative bands like Radiohead, Coldplay, or My Bloody Valentine.
Our eyes—which we usually think of as purely visual organs—spontaneously dance to the rhythm of what we hear, says study co-author Du Yi, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Using a high-speed eye-tracking system, Du and her team were stunned to discover nonmusicians instinctively blinking in sync with the beat structure of Bach chorales.
Oumy is a leading figure in contemporary Senegalese music. Her style, which blends hip-hop, African R&B and global pop, makes her one of the most exciting artists on the country's urban scene. Beyond her music career, she has also been involved in social projects within her community, participating in cultural festivals and campaigns related to the environment and equality.
There is a specific high that comes with outrunning your own limiting beliefs - a chase that has previously landed me in an Austrian fasting clinic, on a half-marathon start line in Madrid, and sitting ten days of silent meditation in the English countryside. But even I, a glutton for punishingly offbeat wellness trends, would have laughed you out of the juice bar had you told me a year ago that I'd soon be yodelling my way to self-improvement.
When Norman Sylvester was 12, long before he garnered the nickname "The Boogie Cat" or shared a stage with B.B. King, he boarded a train in Louisiana and headed west, toward the distant city of Portland, Oregon. He'd lived all his life in the rural South, eating wild muscadine grapes from his family's farm, fishing in the bayou and churning butter at the kitchen table to the tune of his grandmother's gospel singing.
Tim Zha is looking for the soul in the machine. While some might hear Auto-Tune as masking a singer's humanity, the London-based artist filters his vocals to highlight technology's inseparability with our notions of self. This is ground well-trodden by Afrofuturist techno pioneers, Atlanta trappers, and PC Music hyperpoppers; for Zha, Auto-Tune represents what he calls the "coincidence of human subjectivity and the networked machine system."
For the study, a team from the Italian Institute of Technology played J.S. Bach's piano compositions for an audience of 49 sleeping newborns. This included 10 original melodies and four shuffled songs with scrambled melodies and pitches. While the babies listened, the researchers used electroencephalography - electrodes placed on their heads - to measure their brainwaves. When the babies showed signs of surprise, it meant they expected the song to go one way, but it went another.
We both live in maybe the most impractical place if you want to be a successful DJ, laughs Alice Marie Jektevik, one half of Article 3, a Sami female DJ collective. Jektevik, 36, and her collaborator, Petra Laiti, 30, reside in a rural village in the far north-east of Norway. But living in Sapmi the region across northern parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia traditionally lived in by Sami people has proven to be central to their success, providing the inspiration for much of their work.
Take the title of The Spiritual Sound as a kind of syllabus, and you'll find a heady list of musical reference points that Agriculture aim to exalt. The jarring intros of black metal songs that make you feel like a portal to Hell has opened inside your headphones. The sound design on later Scott Walker arrangements meant to conjure a Biblical plague. The slow, majestic build of post-rock epics that hold back their climax for maximum transcendence.
Wooden spoons as microphones, siblings spinning in socks across the floor, a mother laughing as Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" fills the room for the third time in a row-this is love. Long before children understand romance, they learn connection this way, through synchronized movement, shared joy, and the safety of familiar songs. Research on rhythm and social bonding suggests that moving in time together can regulate the nervous system and strengthen feelings of connection.
In early January, at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, a concert benefit for Palestine and Sudan conjured all the fury of an acoustic night at the local coffee shop. Musicians played stripped-down songs on a stage decorated with rugs, floor lamps, and couches. Members of the audience, mostly 20-somethings and teens, leaned in and filmed intimate performances by their favorite cult artists.