In this month's essay, Jim Gibson unpicks the cultural myths of the idyllic British countryside as he reflects on Duane Hopkins' 2008 film Better Things in the context of his own life in a rural working class community
The scandal of artists paying DJs for radio plays might seem a relic of the past but, says music biz expert Eamonn Forde, news that influencers might demand a percentage of artist royalties in return for exposure gives this corruption a grim contemporary twist
A long-term fixture on Beirut’s underground experimental music scene, the latest from Sary Moussa is caught between the political and the personal, the whisper close and wide-open space. Wind, Again is an album whose contradictions make it all the more compelling, finds Kirsteen McNish
In this month’s antidote to the algorithm Puja Nandi celebrates five pioneering artists, from Asian Dub Foundation (pictured) to Osmani Soundz, who enriched the soundtrack of the pre-millennial UK by mixing drum & bass and electronica with the sounds of the Bengali diaspora
Genre purism be damned – there is no surer evidence of jazz’s immortality than the enduring influence of Expansions, Lonnie Liston Smith’s ecstatic, eclectic and resolutely non-denominational call to spiritual arms, argues Stevie Chick