The Quietus Radio

Here's your latest trailer for The Low Culture Podcast, one of the regular perks enjoyed by subscribers to The Quietus – these wonderful people fund all our work. You can find out more about subscriptions here.

Sunn O)))’s original name Mars tells you something, it being both the name of a massive planetary body but also a piece of music by Gustav Holst which is a an Ur-text in the history of heavy metal, given that it is the direct musical influence on ‘Black Sabbath’ by Black Sabbath. And this is what the band did, guiding heavy metal to an irreducible, super heavy core of skull crushing riffs stretched out to absurdity and beyond. Boris are a transcendent experimental heavy rock band from Japan, named after a track by the Melvins, who have spent most of their career as a three piece. Sunn O))) take one mode and wrench infinite variety from it; Boris have used a bewildering number of genre styles while it’s more something spiritual or philosophical that remains constant. Both groups are committed collaborators so it was only right that they made a kind of yin yang album together, Altar, which was released on Halloween 2006. And, as we hope will become clear, the album signified a huge sea change for both cultural and personal and professional reasons here at the Quietus. From the confusion of early encounters at ATP festivals, to barging into incredibly loud gallery shows, then on to changing the face of our culture permanently, this is a sound that represents a journey from rupture to healing taking in Miffy the Rabbit, getting spannered on a pirate ship, a coffin made from salt and an old woman giving birth to a sturgeon along the way.

As promised last month, here's a clip from the latest Low Culture Podcast, one of the many perks received by the subscribers who enable us to keep providing the antidote to the algorithm. This monthly show features tQ founders Luke Turner and John Doran discussing a cultural artefact that they love, from albums to films, TV shows, books... and even shoes. You can find the full archive here.
The most recent podcast saw John and Luke discussing 1977 telly drama Children Of The Stones, a masterpiece of "cosmic horror" about a scientist and his who son arrive at a village in a henge that closely resembles Avebury, intending to investigate the science behind the presence of the standing stones in the landscape. Very quickly, they learn that in this unusual village, all is not as it seems. Tune in to this clip as your tQ editors discuss the dread term 'folk horror', the drama's relationship to other telly from the time, Julian Cope, and the spinning throne as signifier for evil.
If you like what you hear, you can help support the work of The Quietus in providing the antidote to the algorithm by becoming a subscriber here. You can sign up with a month free to explore the huge archive of these podcasts, plus further essays, playlists and much more.
Thanks to Alannah Chance for editing this trailer, and for producing The Low Culture Podcast

It's been a while since we've regularly updated our Quietus podcast feed, but that's about to change. Many of you will be aware that the site is now pretty much entirely funded by our readers, with these exalted subscribers getting sent a host of perks, including what we call the Low Culture Podcast. This monthly show features tQ founders Luke Turner and John Doran discussing a cultural artefact that they love, from albums to films, TV shows, books... and even shoes. You can find the full archive here. We're going to be giving you tasters of these pods via this main feed, with a bit of a smorgasbord of shows from our archive to kick things off. So tune in to listen to excerpts from Luke and Doran praising the transcendental joy of Alice Coltrane's Journey In Satchidananda, while critiquing how its been a little coopted by gong bathers; discussing queer cruising in Joe Orton biopic Prick Up Your Ears; our love of Dr Martens boots; and there is of course some chat about The Fall. This trailer concludes with a version of the latest Low Culture Podcast, on Suicide's debut album. If you like what you hear, you can help support the work of The Quietus in providing the antidote to the algorithm by becoming a subscriber here. You can sign up with a month free to explore the huge archive of these podcasts, plus further essays, playlists and much more.
Thanks to Alannah Chance for editing this trailer, and for producing The Low Culture Podcast

The last episode of our series made in collaboration with 20ft Radio explores music trends post-Maidan and being “a rhizomatic thing” during wartime.

Why do we need labels nowadays, especially in Ukraine? Especially when the manufacturer pulps most of your vinyl debut release before it’s even left the factory? A good question, answered in part by the guests in the final Memory Leaks episode: Acid Jordan and Tofudj, from the “horizontally structured and ever-morphing” Pepe Gaffe collective in Kyiv. 

Pep Gaffe release adventurous electronic music (but not only). They once stated they were “a collective of enthusiasts who are bound to devote their lives to the grand idea of developing a music community and aspire to create a platform for sterling interaction between artists and cultural operators.” According to Acid Jordan and Tofudj, the text was “a hoax, an in-joke, and we hated it. But it all came true.”

Being music enthusiasts, producers, event curators and friends from way-back in Poltava, Acid Jordan and Tofudj are possibly the best guides you can find to the left-field sounds of contemporary Ukrainian music, and the pitfalls many currently encounter in just doing their thing. The pair talk of pulling off live events with war as a constant backdrop, and if alternative music organisations could be more decentralised, or is Kyiv still the magnet? Other topics include feeling isolated, and niche labels as “culture vortexes”, as well as the general, post-Maidan trends in alternative Ukrainian music.

In the latest instalment of our collaboration with Kyiv's 20ft Radio we hear tales of taxi drivers horrified by music, “Baroque pop”, paying tribute to Twiggy Pop, and ask what is an Independent label, in Ukraine

The fifth Memory Leaks episode is a trip to the south of Ukraine in the 2000s and 2010s. We talk to Dmytro Vekov, a man with a “penchant for pseudonyms” and someone who admits to “keeping teenagers awake after midnight”, listening to their radios. Dmytro is host of the cult radio show Atmosphere and founder of the Cardiowave record label. Atmosphere has been on air every Thursday at midnight for more than twenty years, and played a vital role in helping younger Ukrainians find obscure or marginal music before the internet took hold. 

‘Imagine, a taxi ride just after midnight in Odesa in the late 90s. Just after a hit like Macarena has finished, and suddenly the sounds of Einstürzende Neubauten, Swans, or Coil start to screech through the speakers. The tired taxi driver stops and whispers to his passengers in horror: “I’m not going anywhere, anymore.”’.

Dmytro’s other enterprise, the Cardiowave label, emerged, like many underground cultural phenomena, out of chance meetings with like-minded people (including, it seems, lots of Cure and Cocteau Twins fans). Cardiowave is Dmytro’s name for the “chamber folk, or Baroque pop” trend in the 2000s, driven by the successful band Flëur, though, as Dmytro says, “clearly, it doesn’t explain very much at all”. The band and label began to influence Odesa’s local music scene during the following decade, with its penchant for “poetic, grotesque, sombre and ethereal” sounds and forms. We also learn of the late Maria Navrotskaya, from Twiggy Pop.