John Doran

1 week ago | thequietus.com | John Doran |Daryl Worthington

Kevin Drumm’s music draws attention to the act of listening, perhaps even the workings of our ears themselves. Since the 90s, he’s moved through uncompromising extremes. Some of his records are ferocious, others barely audible. Some zoom in on harsh minutiae, others are glacially beautiful. Yet the Chicago-based artist never seems to venture to the edges purely for the sake of it. His fiercest tracks aren’t sheets of noise but richly layered and fluctuating.

1 week ago | thequietus.com | John Doran |Daniel Spicer

A half-hour taxi ride inland from Nice on the Côte d’Azur, in the southeast of France, brings you to La Fondation Maeght, an art gallery and museum of modern art perched on a hill overlooking the town of Saint-Paul de Vence. Its interior is spacious and cool. Outside, you can wander among the silent sentinels in the sculpture garden or get lost in a marble, bronze and concrete labyrinth designed by Joan Miró.

2 weeks ago | thequietus.com | John Doran

“Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day”, maintains Paul McGann’s character near the start of Withnail And I. He plays Marwood – the ‘I’ of the title – in a drunken and druggy but decidedly unpsychedelic cinematic glimpse into the late 1960s. The film initially flopped in cinemas at the height of 1980s yuppiedom, only to find cult adoration (and over quotation) via subsequent release on video. Everything has its right time in the end.

3 weeks ago | thequietus.com | John Doran |Fergal Kinney

What do you do when the most exhilarating moment of your musical life has already risen and fallen by the time that you are just fourteen? For Jack Bowes, the electronic producer who operates under the name of Rainy Miller, this was the explosion of mid-00s grime in the Lancashire city of Preston. “Fifteen years down the line,” he says, eyes looking away and still visibly awed at the memory, “I’m still like, that’s the sickest thing that’s ever happened in my entire life.” It was, he says, insane.

3 weeks ago | thequietus.com | John Doran |Stevie Chick

“Were we cyberpunk?” asks Brainiac guitarist/vocalist John Schmersal, who, since 2023, has led his fellow bandmates on a series of tours to honour the music they made with frontman Timmy Taylor, who died in 1997. (They’ll be spending much of this month touring the US as guests of Mogwai.) Schmersal’s tongue is firmly in-cheek there: a hackneyed cliché like “cyberpunk” does not do justice to the wild, haywire wit and invention that coursed beneath Brainiac’s frenzied surface.