Tag: Laila Sakini

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In the year of 2023 artists from Tyla, Bad Bunny and NewJeans to Vagabon, Tems and Sofia Kourtesis continued to redefine the borders of contemporary pop, while Cassandra Miller covered Beethoven's 'Heiliger Dankgesang' and Arvo Pärt looked back a couple of centuries to a 'tiresome footling little Anglican parson' as the Estonian minimalist reworked his Littlemore Tractus. Familiar faces...

Four years in the making, for her first full-length on New Amsterdam Records the composer and vocalist Mingjia Chen presents a collection of through-composed songs which still carry the discursiveness and formal spontaneity of recitative or more melismatic arioso, as half-scrawled thoughts and ribbons of reflections stack together in a manner at once reminiscent of the opera or Broadway,...

This was the year of sliding doors as live venues reopened from the coronavirus pandemic, when Béyonce and Drake almost single-handedly salvaged the safe spaces and sweaty traces of house music, and where Latin figures from Bad Bunny and Rosalía to Lucrecia Dalt and Mabe Fratti stretched out at the experimental borders of pop. This was the year of...