The Guardian looks into the issue of more and more tours being canceled - Santigold canceled her holified tour, Animal Collective cancelled their UK and Europe tour, Sampa the Great is rescheduling her forthcoming European shows, the Avalanches cancelled their remaining North American tour dates, the UK rapper Stormzy nixed his upcoming Australia and New Zealand tour, Justin Bieber once again postponed his world tour. Also, a staggering number from Australia - between 1 July and 31 August last year, 32,737 Australian gigs were cancelled. The G gives several reasons - the skyrocketing cost of gas, flights, and hotels; a flooded market of delayed tours, leading to overbooked venues and audiences; and the risk of infection, alongside general exhaustion and poor mental health.

King Princess is the latest featured artist on Song Exploder with her song 'Let Us Die' which she wrote in a special place on a lake, while having relationship issues. Mikaela Straus breaks down the song, along with two of her collaborators on it: co-producer and co-writer Ethan Gruska, and multi-Grammy winning producer Mark Ronson. The song features Foo Fighters' Taylor Hawkins on drums, who died afterward. Also, Straus' father Oliver, gave the key engineering advice.

Musician, producer, DJ, director, and author Questlove has released season 2 of his Shorty Award-winning YouTube series 'Quest for Craft', where he talks to creatives about their creative process and the way they’ve honed their craft. In the new season, he talks to ballet dancer Misty Copeland, author Fran Lebowitz, and Kenan Thompson. In episode 5 he talks to producer Mark Ronson about finding your voice as a craftsperson and an artist, as well as composer and musician Kris Bowers about expressing emotions.

Rita Baghdadi's documentary 'Sirens' intimately chronicles the lives and music of Slave to Sirens, the only Lebanese female metal band, "whose burgeoning fame is set against the backdrop of the Lebanese revolution. Its members wrestle with friendship, sexuality, and destruction as their music serves as a refuge to Beirut’s youth culture". Critics give it favorable scores, with NYC Movie Guru describing it as a "moving, intimate and provocative".

'Woman Life Freedom' is a song released by the Iranian-born Netherlands-based musician Sevdaliza which she wrote for "oppressed women around the world. I stand proud as an Iranian woman and I am supporting the fight of my sisters who shed their blood, hair, hearts and brains to give us all the hope, that one day, we will be free. At a young age I became aware of the systematic means of forcing women into obedience through violence and intimidation. To persuade women that their minds, bodies, and freedom do not belong to them. Our humanity demands we stand up against the oppression of women. Now. And forever. We must continue to speak up and fight institutions that condone oppression, violence and murder. We must face the people that deny the dignity and respect for all of us women. We are so tired of being told how to be, what to be".

Russian soldiers have shot dead Ukrainian conductor Yuriy Kerpatenko in his home in Kherson after he refused to take part in a concert in the occupied city, Classic FM reports. The concert on 1 October was intended to feature the Gileya chamber orchestra, of which Kerpatenko was the principal conductor. “The tragic irony of this is that talk about the superiority of Russian culture, its humanism. And here they murdered someone who is actually bringing beauty to people’s lives. It is sickening" - said the conductor Semyon Bychkov from Paris, where he was performing as music director of the Czech Philharmonic. The St Petersburg-born conductor left Russia as a young man in the 1970s. Kherson is a port city in Ukraine, and was the first to fall to Russian troops at the beginning of the war. Kerpatenko was one of the city’s residents who refused to leave. From February to May 2022, the conductor posted public messages on his Facebook profile, speaking out against the Russian invasion.

"Critiquing masculinity while maintaining his position within the enduring hierarchies that put those bad boys on top, he's the one you love to roll your eyes at. He's a dirtbag, baby, in a long line of antiheroes who interrogate the shapes of male privilege from the inside, even as they benefit from its persistence" - NPR's Ann Powers writes in a great text about Matt Healy, and his latest album with The 1975, 'Being Funny in a Foreign Language'. She questions the "dirtbag": "When it comes to creating alternatives to the patriarchal status quo, men actually have to surrender some privilege, not merely question the effect an elevated status has on their own souls. This can be a painful realization, a disappointment. But it also opens up new possibilities, pointing toward a life that might be less damaging to others, and less lonely".

The members of BTS will start performing mandatory military service in South Korea, with Jin (29-y-o) initiating the process as soon as his schedule for his solo release is concluded at the end of October, the ET reports. Other members of the group plan to carry out their military service based on their own plans. The group will reconvene around 2025, after each members’ respective drafts are over. Under South Korean law, all able-bodied men are required to perform 18-21 months of military service. The band has already been granted a two-year extension on their government-mandated military service, with top-performing athletes and musicians occasionally granted exemptions.

"'ILYSM' spends less time staring down death and unabashedly embracing life than it does in a liminal space of illness — not necessarily cancer, but some kind of sickness, whether it’s depression or COVID or even just a nasty hangover, something to live through with the promise of reentering real life at a later date" - Ian Cohen writes in the Stereogum review of Wild Pink's new album (the album was written as frontman John Ross was treated for cancer). NPR has another perspective on the album: "In lingering, in asking the listener to linger too, to pause and take stock of the softest strums, the goldfinch and nuthatch, Ross dilates the seconds into minutes, minutes into expanses to which entire records could be devoted. If one loses a moment's edges, for an instant, they can have it forever".

Dan Runcie talks to New York Times music reporter Joe Coscarelli about his new book, 'Rap Capital', in the latest Trapital's podcast. The key, Coscarelli believes, is Atlanta rappers' adoption of modern tech: “I love to see when art lines up with the technology of the moment. These Atlanta rappers were in the perfect place at the perfect time to take advantage of that explosion". Also, the reporter sees broader liberties: “Artists have found freedom…your audience is going to find you. You can still have as much of a footprint but not in the same everybody-knows-the-same-10-people way. It’s almost healthier for some of these artists to say ‘I’ve seen what happens on the fame side and I don’t want that part. I just want to make my music and play for my fans.’ That’s become more and more of a possibility without having to play the game with the gatekeepers”.

"I’m sorry to break the first cardinal rule of Berlin nightlife—you don’t talk about Berghain—but when I pull up to the club and see a factory line of black silhouettes wearing the exact same BDSM harnesses from Amazon.com … biiiiiitch! I cannot resist going in. I mean, come on. That shit looks like a meme" - clubs&drugs lover Michelle Lhooq writes in her latest Instagram about the famous club. "I hit the Berg three times during my trip, and every occasion felt like a hollow simulation, like taking a soulless ride through techno Disneyland. It was as if a meta-level of self-consciousness was hanging over the club - an acute awareness that THIS IS BERGHAIN. Half the dancefloor looked like they stepped off the Balenciaga runway, and the bug-eyed models stomping around on designer amphetamines were actually terrifying. Dabauchery didn't look like an act of debasement but a way of fitting into a proscribed lifestyle".

“Just having money in general, especially when you’re showcasing cars or things on your body, you’re obviously a target. Hip-hop often tries to sell wealth and success on social media. But at some point, you’re just giving somebody a list of potential victims” - Rapper Glasses Malone says to LA Times after the recent killing of PnB Rock. He's just the last one in a string of the city’s black music community losses over the last couple of years. The LA daily sees a change - more security and less public flamboyance among local rappers.

Jamaica's broadcasting agency has banned music that "glorifies illegal activity" - such as drug and gun use, the BBC reports. The ban covers TV and radio and lists specific topics that are off-limits - scamming, drug abuse and the illegal use of firearms. Swearing or "near-sounding" replacements are also banned. Some artists who argue music is a reflection of life have criticized the ban.

Party and drugs specialist Michelle Lhooq discusses the changing landscape of drugs in the New Models podcast - from legalization grifts to “spectrum sobriety”, They also discuss nü party paradigms, emergent synthetics, and the gentrification of club drugs like K, MDMA, and 3-MMC. Additionally, Lil Internet fills in some context with fascinating explainers on Berlin’s Telegram drug delivery services. Listen to the podcast - https://ravenewworld.substack.com/p/techno-disneyland.

"The scripts are sharp, pacy, funny and cleverly structured to provide each key player in the story with a voice. The performances are great without straying into bluster or scenery chewing, and there's a constant motion in the narrative that keeps you utterly captivated". TechRadar reviews the new Netflix series about Spotify. Guardian says it's worth watching: "A worthy exercise about how much the tech industry loves to corrupt good intentions".

WRTI shares a lovely text about "viral jazz" describing it as "aesthetic rather than a set of quantifiable viewer metrics". DOMi & JD Beck, and Louis Cole are two of the acts from the new movement, which The New York Times Magazine has described as "both radically sophisticated and full of jokes, a combination of qualities you find in both the 20th century's jazz greats and the 21st century's extremely online teenagers".

An American artist or an academic can't get nominated for MacArthur Fellows award, and the pool of candidates is a tightly-held secret. It's also a sweet cash prize. This year's 25 Fellows will each receive $800,000, a "no-strings-attached award to extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential". This year's class of so-called 'geniuses' includes three musicians:

Martha Gonzalez of Scripps College is a musician, scholar and artist/activist "strengthening cross-border ties and advancing participatory methods of artistic knowledge production in the service of social justice"

Ikue Mori of New York, N.Y., is an electronic music composer and performer "transforming the use of percussion in improvisation and expanding the boundaries of machine-based music.

Tomeka Reid of Chicago, Ill, is a jazz cellist and composer "forging a unique jazz sound that draws from a range of musical traditions and expanding the expressive possibilities of the cello in improvised music"

"An entire history of innovations in recorded music could be told through the lens of so-called musical mistakes. Do they even exist? At the level of intention, are errors ever actually errors?" - Piotr Orlov writes in a beautiful essay about 'Dilla Time', the new biography of legendary Detroit hip-hop producer James Dewitt Yancey, Jr. (aka J Dilla or Jay Dee) by journalist and NYU professor Dan Charnas. "What might the musical future look like when its supposed mistakes and proficiencies are based primarily on sets of data? ... Aren’t what previous generations’ power brokers dictated as errors turning out to be some pretty decent guides to a mindful development of th

WeTransfer presents artists who have put down roots in the deserts of the world – including Tinariwen, Cate Le Bon, Mdou Moctar, Imarhan, and Itasca – to find out how the landscape has shaped their sound and altered their perspective. Algerian desert rock quintet Imarhan's frontman Sadam has an interesting perspective: "In the nostalgia there is hope because you would always hope to find again what you miss. The space in the desert gives a lot of room for nostalgia. The wind specifically is an element that brings nostalgia. It makes you travel in your mind. You will feel carried by the wind, even if you are surrounded by people.”

Country superstar Kane Brown's manager Martha Earls shares some interesting thoughts in an MBW interview about signing musicians based on their viral TikTok videos. "People are signing moments – 15 seconds of a song being popular — without a plan to develop a long-term career for the artist they’re signing. That’s troublesome to me because that implies these artists are disposable people. ‘Oh, you had a hit, we’ll sign you. You don’t have another one? Whatever, we’ve moved on.’ Are you really giving them everything they need to have the most successful career possible? I do have some concerns with that".

Okkervil River's Will Sheff is about to embark on the US tour, and he estimates that he’ll lose approximately $5-7,000 end on his East and West coast tours. He expects to lose double that in Europe. He shares his thoughts in the Stereogum interview: “These tours feel like you have to charge in with the bayonets and cannons. You already know from the manager telling you and every other band telling you, ‘It’s a tough climate, there’s no money – go out and fail!'”. On the other hand, Animal Collective have cancelled their UK/EU dates, citing "inflation, currency devaluation, bloated shipping and transportation costs and much much more",

based singer-songwriter and guitarist Meg Baird has shared a video for 'Will You Follow Me Home?'. It's from her new album 'Furling', out January 27, her first solo record since 2015’s 'Don't Weigh Down the Light'. The mysterious London collective Sault have returned with a brand new single ‘Angel’, produced by SAULT frontman Inflo, featuring vocals from Jamaican artist Chronixx.

Music writer Ted Gioia opens a question on the role of conductors with an interesting take on the double meanings referring to both music and traveling. "When we refer to the movement of a classical work or a favorite track on a playlist, or even to structural forms such as the fugue (etymologically linked to the verb to flee). Take for example, the ancient Greek word oimê, signifying song, which is connected to the similar word oimos, designating a road or path".

“Today, in wartime, our community is starting to make itself visible again. New parties awaken memories of a long-forgotten phenomenon: life” - Kyiv-based photographer Arthur Vovchenko and Anna Lukash told Mix Mag after STEZHKA, queer party, was held on the first weekend of October. “We are going through very dark times, so parties are valued differently now. I feel that the community needs this space, we need to see each other, kiss, talk, and dance in order to support each other and ourselves” - Arthur says.

"Among Kanye’s West’s defenders, the thinking goes like this: He is a genius, a freethinker, an elevated conscience" - The New York Times' opinion piece goes. However - "Kanye is just a Black man who discovered Black conservatism and thinks it’s enlightenment. There is nothing complex or mysterious about it. He’s a Black man parroting white supremacy, while far too many brush it off, continue dancing to his music, and wear his clothes. West is a Black man sampling vintage anti-Black racism, remixing and releasing it under a new label: the tortured Black genius".

Radio pioneer Art Laboe, who spent seven decades behind a microphone, brought rock 'n roll to the West Coast and coined the phrase "Oldies but Goodies", died at age 97 on Friday at his home in Palm Springs. The radio legend is credited with pioneering industry standards such as audience requests and song dedications, and he is believed to be the first DJ to play rock 'n roll tunes on Los Angeles radio. He was also among the first DJs to play music by both Black and white artists, and he built a major following among Latino communities across the region. Laboe’s last show was produced last week and broadcast on Sunday night, two days after he died. LA Times shares a lovely story about their co-citizen.

"Sometimes, there are musical ideas so complicated that they wind up being not just physically impossible, but conceptually impossible as well. But did Brahms write one of those? Well... It's complicated" - an interesting new music theory video by 12tone about Johannes Brahms' composition Variations on an Original Theme, opus 21, number1, which is supposedly just impossible to play.

Protests in Iran over the death of 22-year-old Iranian-Kurd Mahsa Amini entered a fourth week in defiance of a bloody crackdown. Amini died on September 16, three days after she was arrested by “morality police” for an alleged breach of Iran’s strict dress code for women. The nonprofit Iran Human Rights estimated that at least 154 people, including children, have been killed in the protests. Pitchfork points out to the de facto anthem of protests - 'Baraye', written by the 25-year-old singer Shervin Hajipour. The song’s lyrics are composed of crowdsourced social media posts from Iranians - “For my sister, your sister, our sister ... For dancing in the alleys ... For terror when kissing ... For women, life, freedom” - with each line beginning with “Baraye,” which translates to “Because of…” or “For…” in Farsi.

An interesting interview by The New Cue with Paul Heaton from The Beautiful South and The Housemartins, on several topics, including money: "I have seen that the more money you make, the more it controls you. They move to bigger houses, with bigger fences and bigger gates. The higher the gate, the more safe they feel, but I always think that’s really unsafe. I live in plain sight. I live on an ordinary street. You come up to the door and I answer. There’s no barrier between me and other people, because I think if there is it promotes a them-and-us thing. If I have someone stalking me I know straight away. I’m not a curtain twitcher but I know everybody on our street. So if someone tried stalking me, they’d be stalked back".

The Spectator introduces 'Industry', the British-made TV drama about young bankers: "More and more bankers are shirking expensive bottle-service clubs for those which can be considered ‘cool’ – venues such as Fabric, Fold and Oval Space, many nestled in the half-gentrified warehouse districts of east London. These play techno, house and other strands of electronic music which eschew the sugar-rush build-ups and bass drops of commercial dance. Many bankers treat this more in-the-know kind of clubbing as social camouflage: escaping the stigma of a boring corporate job with a night under strobe lights".