Music Life

Columbian spiritual pop artist Elsa y Elmar is joined by Will Joseph Cook, Soko and Jules Crommelin to discuss why musicians have negative thoughts while working alone, and how to preserve the unpredictable magic of the demo recording process.Now based in Los Angeles, French singer-songwriter, model, and actress Soko makes moody, sultry indie-pop music. After a musical hiatus, she returned in 2020 with her third album Feel Feelings, which tackles themes of queer love, therapy, toxic relationships, and motherhood. Jules Crommelin is lead singer and guitarist of Parcels, a funk-pop band based in Berlin, and formed in Byron Bay, Australia. Their debut electro-pop EP Clockscared caught the attention of French techno giants Daft Punk, with whom they collaborated on 2017 single Overnight. UK pop artist Will Joseph Cook taught himself music production and is a huge presence on Tiktok, where he posts videos on everything from how he crafts his music to songs he’s written about his favourite films.

Joel Culpepper, Mysie, Anaiis, and TYSON discuss navigating your own voice, knowing who you are, and the importance of not thinking about the mainstream or making music you hate.Joel Culpepper grew up in South London, where he was introduced to gospel music at church from a young age. He’s renowned for being one of the best and most consistent singers coming out of the UK, and has earned fans including Stevie Wonder, Paloma Faith, former Music Life guests Tom Misch and Kojey Radical.Mysie is a London-based artist with Ugandan roots. Her intimate brand of indie soul won her the 2020 Ivor Novello Rising Star Award. Drawing on influences from soul and hip-hop to contemporary R&B, she says her latest work is “about my relationship with love itself and wearing my heart on my sleeve”.TYSON grew up between London, Stockholm, Spain and New York. She’s from a musical dynasty which includes her mother Neneh Cherry, grandfather trumpeter Don Cherry, and sister Mabel.Anaiis is a French-Senegalese singer who spent time living in Dublin, Dakar, Brazil and the US, before finally settling in London, . Her music combines traditional Senegalese percussion and multi-linguistic vocals, with lyrics that explore her journey of self-discovery in life and art.

Heba Kadry, Sarah Davachi, Marta Salogni and Faten Kanaan discuss why limitations can push creativity, how instruments can be an extension of the body, and why sounding “human” is better than pure perfection.Egyptian-born, Brooklyn-based mastering and mixing engineer Heba Kadry has worked with the likes of Beach House, serpentwithfeet, the Mars Volta, Yaeji and former Music Life guest Mykki Blanco. She also collaborated with Bjork on the iconic Utopia album, and worked on a number of film soundtracks, including the Oscar-nominated biopic Jackie.Grammy-nominated engineer, producer and mixer Marta Salogni started out as a live sound engineer in her home town of Brescia, Italy, before moving to London in 2010. She has since worked at some of the city’s most renowned studios with artists including Bjork, M.I.A, fka Twigs and Frank Ocean. She was nominated for a Grammy in 2019 for her involvement in Bon Iver’s i,i album.Inspired by cinematic forms and folklore traditions, Brooklyn-based composer and producer Faten Kanaan builds cyclical patterns in her music that she uses to tell stories. Having immersed herself in New York’s electronic scene during the late 2000s, her most recent release, the spellbinding A Mythology Of Circles, is inspired by classical mythology and medieval music.Canadian-born, LA-based composer and performer Sarah Davachi “builds temples out of tone”, and is best known for her minimalist electroacoustic sound. She has held residencies around the world and collaborated with artists such as William Basinski, Ariel Kalma and the London Contemporary Orchestra.

Cakes Da Killa, UNIIQU3, Shaun Ross and Jubilee talk about how to tell if the track you’re working on is really hitting the mark, the spaces they’re creative in and what they look like, and their best – and worst – collaborations.Rashard Bradshaw, better known as the Brooklyn-based rapper Cakes Da Killa, blends ‘90s grit with club beats, dipping into electronic and house genres. His lyrics are witty, unapologetic, and promote Black excellence and LGBTQ+ visibility in the hip-hop world and the wider media.Shaun Ross is an LA-based singer-songwriter born and raised in New York. After studying dance and posting Voguing videos to YouTube, he caught the attention of a model agent and started his fashion career at the age of 16. He has appeared in videos by Katy Perry and Beyoncé, collaborated with Lizzo, and has teamed up with house music icon Duke Dumont. As a gay Black man with albinism, he has advocated for difference and representation across all avenues of his career, and last year he dropped his highly anticipated debut album SHIFT, inspired by all the music he loves including R&B, disco and pop.UNIIQU3 is the queen of the Jersey club scene. She brings together influences from house music, hip hop and breakbeat, and has established herself as one of the most in-demand producers.Jubilee is a DJ and producer from South Florida who says she’s been staying up all night for as long as anyone can remember. She spent her youth raving, soaking up influences including electro, drum and bass and Miami hip-hop.

Mad Professor, Suzanne Ciani, Matthew E. White and Georgia Anne Muldrow discuss how listening to music lets you travel through time, packaging their work into album form, and which part of the music-making process they enjoy the most.Matthew E. White is a singer, songwriter, producer, and arranger from Richmond, Virginia. He blends folk, gospel, AOR, rock, disco, and psychedelic sounds. He’s also worked with the likes of Sharon Van Etten, Bedouine, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, and Slow Club.Suzanne Ciani is a Grammy-nominated composer, musician, and sound designer. In the 1970s, she invented the world famous ‘pop and pour’ sound effect for Coca Cola. In 1980, she was the first woman hired to score a major Hollywood feature when she composed the music for The Incredible Shrinking Woman. She’s also a recipient of the Moog Innovation Award for her work with synthesizers, and is a former host of this very show.Georgia Anne Muldrow is an influential part of Los Angeles’ hip-hop, jazz, and soul scenes. She’s released more than 20 albums, and has appeared on tracks with Erykah Badu, Blood Orange, and Robert Glasper. Mos Def is a fan, saying “she’s something else… like Roberta Flack, Nina Simone, and Ella Fitzgerald”.Mad Professor is a legendary dub reggae producer and engineer. Born in Guyana, he was nicknamed Mad Professor due to his fascination with electronics, and when he moved to London he collected mixing and recording equipment to make his first studio in his living room. Since then he’s released hundreds of recordings and worked with artists including Lee “Scratch” Perry, Sly & Robbie, Grace Jones, Massive Attack, and Sade, before setting up the largest Black-owned studio complex in the UK.

Qur'an Shaheed, Dr Adam Zanolini and Ben LaMar Gay join composer, improviser, clarinetist, and pianist Angel Bat Dawid to discuss the importance of not conforming, the struggle to find money to do what you love doing, recognising what your gifts are, and the experience of being diasporic African and its influence on your music.Qur'an Shaheed is an experimental pianist, poet, singer and songwriter based in Los Angeles, whose music blends jazz, neo-soul, RnB and neo-classical. She started her musical career with her mother and grandmother at the age of four, has composed for film, and is a member of Jimetta Rose’s gospel choir The Voices of Creation. Dr Adam Zanolini is a flute player, saxophonist, oboist, percussionist, double bassist, ethnomusicologist, and arts organiser. A pivotal figure in Chicago’s music scene, he’s part of the cross-generational Great Black Music Ensemble, “which fuses the expansive sounds of traditional Black American music with styles from across Africa and its diaspora.” Composer, multi-instrumentalist, improviser, poet and singer Ben LaMar Gay's latest LP is Open Arms to Open Us, released at the end of last year, which blends jazz, blues, R&B, tropicalia, and hip-hop, and explores thermodynamics, rhythm as an inheritance of information, and the idea that improvisation is “the one freedom that we all have access to”.

Matthew Herbert, Kate Carr, Nwando Ebizie and Matmos's Martin Schmidt discuss making music from 'found sound' and field recordings, and the ethical, social and political implications that arise when you push music to its extreme. What happens when you record the sounds of a surgeon performing plastic surgery and turn it into an album? How can the sounds of a traffic intersection become music? Are there some sounds that you simply can't make music from?Matthew Herbert is an artist based in the seaside town of Margate, south-east England, who is a close collaborator of Bjork and has remixed everyone from Quincy Jones and Serge Gainsbourg to Gustav Mahler. He is renowned for taking ordinary sounds and turning them into music; his 2011 record ONE PIG followed the life of a pig from birth to plate, and his 2019 album The State Between Us explored what it means to be British, featuring samples of everything from swimming in the English Channel, to a trumpet being deep-fried.He is joined by Martin Schmidt, one half of the ground-breaking Baltimore-based duo Matmos, who have made electronic music out of everything from the sounds of brushing hair to throwing aspirin tablets at a drumkit. Matmos have worked with the likes of Yo La Tengo, Oneohtrix Point Never and Bjork, and their latest album, The Consuming Flame, came out in 2020. Kate Carr is a field recordist and sound artist from Australia, based in London. She has recorded sounds everywhere from fishing villages in northern Iceland to the wetlands of Mexico, and runs her own sound art label, Flaming Pines.Nwando Ebizie is a multi-disciplinary artist based in northern England, whose practice brings together music, performance art, and dance from the African diaspora. Her latest project, The Swan, will be released in 2022 and is an exploration in Afrofuturism, featuring layers of "dance-inducing polyrhythms, call-and-response chants and Afro-Cuban drums".

Bass players Laura Lee, Blu DeTiger, Karina Rykman and Adeline discuss what the low end brings to music, why playing for an audience is an unbeatable experience, and how where they’re from inspires their sound.Laura Lee is the bassist in Khruangbin, formed with guitarist Mark Speer and drummer DJ Johnson Jr back in 2009 in Houston, Texas. Their music blends everything from rock, psych, funk, surf, and dub influences from across the world.Blu DeTiger is a bassist and DJ from New York. She started playing bass when she was seven years old, inspired by her brother who was playing drums at the time, and rose to fame after videos of her playing during lockdown went viral on social media. Karina Rykman is a member of jazz-rock musician Marco Benevento’s band, and describes herself as a “genre fluid bassist”.French-Caribbean singer, producer, and (of course) bassist Adeline blends Funk, R&B and vintage soul and was originally the front woman for the nu-disco band Escort.

Nordic pop superstars MØ, Sigrid, Tove Lo and Alma discuss writing songs on your holidays, which elements work best for their songwriting, and why Scandinavians are so good at making pop music.Karen Ørsted, better known as Danish singer and songwriter MØ, is an electro-pop star who blends different genres to make a sound that’s uniquely hers. She grew up listening to punk music and this is definitely something that’s influenced her most recent work. She’s worked with the likes of Iggy Azalea, Major Lazer and DJ Snake, Charli XCX, Justin Bieber and superstar producer Jack Antonoff, and supported artists including Years & Years, AlunaGeorge and Sia on international stages.Sigrid is a Norwegian singer and songwriter who has toured with the likes of Maroon 5 and George Ezra, and her latest single Burning Bridges is a taste of what’s to come from her second album. Tove Lo has been dubbed “Sweden’s darkest pop export”. Known for her grunge-infused pop sound, she has released four albums and has had global success with tracks like Habits (Stay High), Cool Girl and the Grammy-nominated Glad He’s Gone.Alma went from performing on Finnish talent show Idols to achieving platinum-selling singles in just five years. She shot to fame in 2017 with the release of Chasing Highs, released her debut album Have U Seen Her? in 2020, and has collaborated with the likes of Charli XCX, Tove Lo and MØ. Beyond her own music, she has written for pop heavyweights like Miley Cyrus and Ariana Grande.

Kae Tempest, Porridge Radio's Dana Margolin, Lottie Cream of Goat Girl and producer Dan Carey discuss letting go of the idea of who you are, going in hard onstage, unlocking time through repetition, being bad at singing, and mistakes on records..Lottie Pendlebury, AKA Lottie Cream, is part of the post-punk band Goat Girl, whose latest album, On All Fours, was released earlier this year. Lottie says they use their music to “explore global, humanitarian, environmental and mindful wellbeing, through psych-rock, grunge and post-punk. The band has been through a lot this past couple of years, but being a part of Goat Girl is what brings us the most joy.”Kae Tempest is a spoken-word artist, poet, author, and playwright from South London. One of the UK’s greatest wordsmiths, they’ve released three albums to date, as well as writing five poetry collections, three plays, and two novels. Dana Margolin is the lead vocalist and guitarist of indie-rock band Porridge Radio. She formed the group in order to truly express herself, drawing inspiration from the sea.Dan Carey is a producer, remix artist, and songwriter who’s worked with the likes of Grimes, Hot Chip, Lianne La Havas, La Roux, Kae Tempest, Kylie Minogue and Goat Girl. In 2013 he founded the record label Speedy Wunderground, and has received four Mercury Prize nominations for his productions.