"A voice is inherently communal. I learned how to use my voice by mimicking the people around me through language, through centuries of evolution on that, or even vocal styles. A pop music vocal is often you're kind of emulating something that came before and then performing your individuality through that kind of communal voice. So I wanted to find a way to kind of reflect that communal ownership" - experimental musician Holly Herndon says to The Fader about her audio deep-fake AI Holly+. Herndon encourages her fans to upload audio files so they can be sung in her voice. She goes into the metaphysics of it: "I mean, we've been able to kind of re-animate our dead through moving picture or through samples, but this is kind of a brand new kind of field in that you can have the person do something that they never did. It's not just kind of replaying something that they've done in the past. You can kind of re-animate them in and give them entirely new phrases that they may not have approved of in their lifetime or even for living artists that they might not approve of. So I think it opens up a kind of Pandora's box".

Seventy percent of India’s musicians practice folk, but they earn only 2% of the industry’s revenues. Indian nonprofit Anahad Foundation stepped in to help them, bringing the music of unsung folk artists to the urban mainstream. Anahad provides them with free residencies with established bands, and also helps artists create a digital portfolio on their website, complete with new music videos, and teaches them entrepreneurial skills. Today, the site lists groups that include more than 1,000 artists. Christian Science Monitor reports on the issue.

Last Thursday Kanye West had an album-release party, and the day after his 10th album 'Donda' was to be released. It didn't come out. Vice explores "how quickly could 'Donda' - or any other record, for that matter - actually hit streaming services after it’s finished? The answer depends on who you ask, and who you are".

"The practise of ticket touting is once again an issue for the dance music industry — this summer, tickets are on sale for more than 10 times their original price on reselling sites like Viagogo" - DJ Mag points out, and investigates how can promoters, venues and artists create meaningful change on this issue.

Drums really can be used to convey speech - an award-winning new study published in the journal Frontiers in Communication shows. It proved Dùndún drumming, an oral tradition among the Yorùbá peoples of Western Africa which involves a special type of drum that, when used properly, can mimic the unique patterns and sounds of Yorùbá speech. So close is the resemblance that the instrument is sometimes referred to as the “talking drum”, Cosmos Magazine reports.

Canada established a government-funded, Christian church-administered boarding school system in the late 1800s, with the goal of forcibly removing Indigenous children from their “savage” parents and impose English and Christianity. Some 150,000 Indigenous children attended these schools before the last one closed in 1997. The mortality rate for those children was estimated to be up to five times higher than their white counterparts, due to factors including suicide, neglect and disease - nearly 38,000 sexual and physical abuse claims from former residential school students were reported, along with 3,200 documented deaths. Guardian presents Canadian rappers coming from the indigenous communities who are using their music as a tool of recovery for themselves and their communities.

The United States Government sold the sole copy of Wu-Tang Clan’s 'Once Upon a Time in Shaolin', previously owned by the pharma executive Martin Shkreli, NPR reports. He was sentenced to seven years in prison for securities fraud in 2018, and was ordered to forfeit the album along with several other assets in order to fulfill a $7.36 million forfeiture judgment. The forfeiture judgment has been fulfilled with the sale of the Wu-Tang Clan album, sold to an undisclosed buyer. Shkreli's lawyer believes anonymous buyer paid at least $2.2 million.

Inspired by the recent success of late Pop Smoke, whose both posthumous albums reached the top of the Billboard 200 chart, Guardian chose "the best records from those lost too soon". Their choice includes Prince's 'Originals' as it gives a "tantalising glimpse into a restless genius’s artistic process", Joy Division's 'Closer' as it "oozes claustrophobia, Curtis’s sepulchral lyricism augmented by Martin Hannett’s haunted production", Janis Joplin's 'Pearl' as it "captures both her startling vocal prowess and electric live energy", and other forever-living albums by the ones gone too soon.

Joey Jordison was a founding member of Slipknot in 1995, played the drums on the band's five first albums, staying until his departure in December 2013. He later revealed that he suffered from transverse myelitis, a neurological disease that limited his the ability to play the drums. Not only was he one of metal’s premier drummers, he was a key songwriter in the group, responsible for co-writing some of Slipknot’s best-known songs, Blabbermouth reports.

"Even space itself was once brimming with sound"- US filmmaker John D Boswell explores, where sound is possible. 'The Sounds of Space: A sonic adventure to other worlds' - takes you "on a journey back in time and to the edge of our solar system and beyond, to discover what other worlds of sound are lurking beyond Earth's atmosphere".

"Some people say kids can't feel the blues. I feel like kids can. You don't necessarily need to leave your woman or nothing like that – folks have got dramatic stuff that happened in their life all the time" - blues guitarist-singer Christone "Kingfish" Ingram says in the NPR interview. He played his first official gig at age 11, sneaking out of the bed (he's 22 now).

Graham Coxon has announced a new graphic novel titled' Superstate', which will be accompanied by a soundtrack of original music written and recorded by the ex-Blur guitarist. "I started writing that when David Bowie died, so it has a sort of David Bowie tinge" - Coxon says in The New Cue interview. However, "this isn't really a Graham Coxon album", he says, adding that "playing different characters helped with my singing. If I was pretending to be somebody else, I could actually say what I wanted to say. I just found I could be a little more honest if I was playing another character".

Billy Reeves was best known as a singer-songwriter who had worked with Sophie Ellis-Bextor in a band called theaudience. After he quit, he made an album worth of music when in a traffic accident he suffered severe brain injury and subsequently amnesia - "there’s a whole three-year chunk of my cultural memory missing – I don’t remember any of the music or TV shows from 1999 to 2001". He also forgot all about his recent music - "I was hearing songs that I had written but had no recollection of. I didn’t know what the lyrics were about, what I was thinking, who they were written for", as Reever wrote in a beautiful piece for the Guardian. He decided however to put it out, calling the record 'The Helicopter Of The Holy Ghost' - "I’m not religious, but it’s like the songs were written by a ghost because I don’t remember anything about writing them".

"Last week, Kanye West hosted a 'Donda' album listening party for 40,000+ fans at the Mercedez-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. Kanye sold 40,000+ tickets for this event on three days' notice. Tickets were $20 or $50. He gave away around 5,000 seats, but still, he likely made at least $1 million from paid tickets. Plus merch sales. Plus the record-breaking Apple Music livestream. And all he did was press play and walk around the stadium. Only a handful of artists can pull this off" - Dan Runcie looks back at the release party of the album that wasn't released.

Mega Bog "exists in a universe both familiar but foreign. I do not always understand what her songs are about but I am drawn to them all the same and find myself quoting lines" - Brooklyn Vegan writes about the latest album by the experimental pop artist. "Musically, 'Life, and Another' is the most inviting Mega Bog album yet, with jazzy chording, dreamlike synths, and impressive playing all around... It's loaded with instantly likeable songs".

A great video by music theorist 12tone where he analyses a month-old video by another music theorist, Rick Beato who did a livestream called 'Why Today's Music Is So BORING. The Regression of Musical Innovation'. Beato attempted to argue that modern music was no longer doing interesting things. 12tone argues Beato's wrong. 12Tones' argument is also beautifully illustrated.

"What do musicians who blend fact and fiction owe their real life subjects?" - NPR's Ann Powers writes exploring "self-referential musicians making waves in 2021 not only because so many notable current songs tread this ethically shaky ground between self and other, true and imagined, but because that's what songwriters who perform their own work have been doing for at least a half-century... What unites these artworks is a thrilling immediacy that comes at the risk of their makers' dignity and their close companions' right to anonymity". A clever text about the sensitive issue.

Revolver asked a number of musicians "which scream stands alone as the greatest out there". The Black Dahlia Murder's Trevor Strnad, Coheed and Cambria's Travis Stever, Testament's Alex Skolnick, Incendiary's Brian Audley, and more select Tom Araya, Bruce Dickinson, Chino Moreno, and others.

"Very little of the present, internet-wise, may survive. The paradox of today is that we chronicle mundane existence to a degree that no human beings have ever done before, but we do so on phones with short lifespans and via platforms that will one day be bought, folded into each other, and shut down" - freelance writer and blogger Chris O’Leary says in Music Journalism Insider interview. "The 2000s already are full of holes—there are so many dead websites, ghost message boards by now... You see this play out all the time on YouTube—one day you’ll have every musical performance on David Letterman on there, then two months later, half of those videos have been pulled. Maybe they come back, maybe they don’t. It’s all sandcastles, really".

"Tokyo has shaped the sound and image of songs all the time, and this Tokyo emerging in 1964 is the one that shapes ‘70s “new music,” that provides the glitzy excess of “city pop” and other ‘80s offerings (not to mention the fake memory of the capital latched on by people today), the continent-hopping cool of Shibuya-kei in the ‘90s and even the more glum post-Vocaloid hits of now" - Make Believe Mailer writes introducing part one in a series of texts about music from Japan and the Olympics.

Looking for some quality experimental music? Tone Glow writers chose 32 albums from the year’s second quarter that they enjoyed. Their selection includes various albums: there's vocal jazz and Mongolian long song on Enji's 'Urgal'; Vanessa Rosetto's 'Legends of American Theatre' recorded from artist's New York window showing "a theatre deprived of curtain calls where people-watching persists"; Naoko Sakata's 'Dancing Spirits' characterized by "wilderness"; Neupink's 'Seaweed Jesus' which just might pass as hard-core hyper-pop; and plenty more unusual music.

Pop Smoke has two albums to his name, both of which were released posthumously, and both of which have reached the No. 1 on Billboard 200 albums chart, according to Billboard. 'Faith' debuts at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart this week starting with 88,000 equivalent album units earned. 'Faith' features more than 20 guest stars, including Chris Brown, Future, Dua Lipa and Kanye West. Pop Smoke previously topped the Billboard 200 with his debut album 'Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon' last July. Pop Smoke was killed on Feb. 19, 2020, at age 20, after being shot during a home-invasion robbery in Los Angeles.

Splice is a cloud-based music creation platform that sells downloadable collections of vocal hooks, drum sounds, instrumental riffs and other sounds creators can use to build songs, Billboard reports. Splice subscriptions start at $9.99 a month and let users access over 2 million riffs, beats and sounds, all royalty-free, so creators who use them, own their work. It's growing big - in 2019 the platform had 250,000 subscribers. Two years later, that number had more than doubled, and during the pandemic daily downloads increased almost 50% amid “a pretty extreme explosion in new users”. In February, Splice raised $55 million in series D funding led by Goldman Sachs, on a valuation of close to $500 million, and the company is approaching $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

"Ultimately you must be totally prepared but you must also be empty. Empty of pre-conceived ideas on what you practice or study at home. You can use these ideas which you practice and study but only if it serves the music at hand at the necessary moment. It's not much different from theater acting in that way" - corneter and composer Graham Haynes said in 15 Questions interview about improvising. His collaborative album 'Echolocation' witch producer Submerged is out now.

"Woodstock ’99 was the hedonistic, capital-drive fantasy of a fratty rape culture, one with all the privilege in the world but a surfeit of anger for which there was no outlet" - producers of the 'Woodstock '99: Peace, love, and rage' argue in their documentary. Consequence doesn't disagree completely, calling it "a case study for the confluence of white millennial entitlement and Boomer nostalgia, it’s certainly gripping, a disaster movie in documentary form". Rolling Stone counts down 19 worst things about the fest, including late-July timing of a fest situated on tarmac and concrete, overcrowding, lack of available water etc.

Sony Music Entertainment has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against fitness apparel brand Gymshark, valued at approximately $1.3bn, Music Business Worldwide reports. Sony claims that Gymshark “has achieved its success by infringing sound recordings and musical compositions belonging to a number of different content owners on a massive scale”. According to the filing, Gymshark has “largely eschewed traditional advertising” and has instead promoted its products in videos posted to the likes of Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. This may be an important case, because it highlights the place where platform-wide licensing deals for use of music in user-generated content meet the world of sync licensing. Regular users can use music in their videos, but rules change when it comes to brands and influencers paid by those brands, which is a commercial activity.

Kanye West announced his latest album 'Donda' for this weekend, although it wasn't released at the end. He did however throw an album listening party at the Atlanta football stadium, which impressed Music REDEF's Matty Karas: "It *looked* amazing. It wasn't a live performance so there was no stage. And there was no one sitting on the field which was covered in some kind of white material, over which Kanye roamed, in a red puffer jacket and WATCHMEN-like mask, while the album played. He would stand or sit in place for long stretches and then resume roaming, not saying a word, often raising one or both arms as if to give himself an amen. A lone, silent prophet wandering on what you might imagine was a cloud, surrounded by fans but also at a distance from them. It was less-as-more taken to its logical conclusion, and as arresting a music visual as I've seen in a long time".

After that awesome detour into jazzy club music with Moses Boyd, Alewya goes into the dark clubbing mode with ‘Spirit_X’; avant/hip-hop artist Moor Mother goes psychedelic on ‘Shekere’ featuring Lojii; ‘Superstate’ is a new graphic novel with 15 new songs from Graham Coxon, ‘Yoga Town’ is the first taste from it; Jamaican dancehall artist Skillibeng goes aggressive and dark on ‘Pull Up’, a collaboration with UK rapper Dutchavelli; Japanese post-metallers Mono rip it up on (khm!) ‘Riptide’; Homeboy Sandman shares an intense and jazzy ‘Lice Team, Baby’, featuring Aesop Rock.

Paul McCartney becomes decades younger via deepfake technology in the music video for 'Find My Way', his collaborative song with Beck from the McCartney remix album 'McCartney III Imagined'. The video shows the de-aged McCartney emerging from a hotel room, dancing in the hallway, and being whisked away to different dream-like environments. The clip was directed by Andrew Donoho, choreographed by Phil Tayag, and co-produced by Hyperreal Digital, a company that “specializes in the creation of hyper-realistic digital avatars”.

'Mr. Soul!' is the award-winning documentary about the public television variety show 'Soul!' and its host Ellis Haizlip, coming to HBO Max August 1st. Produced and directed by Melissa Haizlip, the documentary chronicles how her uncle, enigmatic producer and host Ellis Haizlip, created the influential show which was ahead of its time. 'Soul!' was a celebration of black music, politics, literature, dance, and poetry during a tumultuous time for black Americans (1968-1973), featuring countless performances by and interviews with the era’s luminaries like James Baldwin, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight, Patti LaBelle, Al Green, Mavis Staples, Harry Belafonte, Roberta Flack, Kool and the Gang, Max Roach, and many more. Watch the trailer below.