Latest news with #RoxyMusic
The Verge
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Verge
Windows 95 chime composer Brian Eno denounces Microsoft for its ties to Israeli government
Artist and musician Brian Eno — who also composed the iconic Windows 95 operating system startup chime — called on Microsoft today to 'suspend all services that support any operations that contribute to violations of international law,' saying the company plays a role in 'surveillance, violence, and destruction in Palestine.' It's the latest high-profile instance of the tech giant being pressed on its contracts with the Israeli government. 'I gladly took on the [Windows 95] project as a creative challenge and enjoyed the interaction with my contacts at the company,' Eno wrote on Instagram. 'I never would have believed that the same company could one day be implicated in the machinery of oppression and war.' The musician — who was a member of the influential rock band Roxy Music and has also had a long, storied solo career — specifically called out Microsoft's contracts with Israel's Ministry of Defense. Microsoft acknowledged last week that it has contracts with the Israeli government for cloud and AI services, but claimed that an internal review conducted found 'no evidence' that its tools were used to 'target or harm people' in Gaza. Microsoft has been taken to task in recent weeks over its business dealings with the Israeli government specifically. The outcry over Microsoft's contracts with Israel relates to the ongoing bombardment of Gaza following Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7th, 2023. Human rights groups, including commissions at the United Nations, have accused Israel of war crimes and genocidal acts in its military operation that has killed thousands; as of this month, the Gaza Health Ministry reported more than 52,000 deaths, though some researchers say that number could be as high as 109,000 people. Some of Microsoft's fiercest critics are its own employees opposed to the company's ties to Israel. Earlier this week during Microsoft's developer conference, multiple onstage events were disrupted, including CEO Satya Nadella's keynote speech on Monday. During the event, Microsoft employee Joe Lopez interrupted Nadella, yelling, 'How about you show Israeli war crimes are powered by Azure?' The following day, a protester described only as a 'Palestinian tech worker' disrupted another executive 's presentation. In April, Microsoft employee Ibtihal Aboussad disrupted a 50th-anniversary event, calling Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman 'a war profiteer.' Another employee disrupted a second Microsoft event the same day. The acts of protest were organized by the No Azure for Apartheid group, which calls for Microsoft to terminate contracts with the Israeli government and endorse a permanent ceasefire, among other demands. Aboussad was fired from the company; the second protester, Vaniya Agrawal, was dismissed early after putting in her resignation. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Eno, a longtime critic of the Israeli government who's backed pro-Palestine efforts, said on Instagram he would use his original earnings from the Windows 95 startup chime to help 'the victims of the attacks on Gaza.'
Los Angeles Times
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In Los Angeles, Enrique Bunbury found his latest muse
It's a breezy spring morning in Topanga Canyon, where Enrique Bunbury sits in his spacious home studio doing something entirely unexpected, even a bit subversive: instead of complaining about Los Angeles, the Spanish rock star is effusively singing its praises. 'One of the most beautiful things about Los Angeles is that it contains so many different cities in one,' he says, leaning back on a sofa next to a freshly assembled drum kit. His band is currently rehearsing for an upcoming international tour, which includes a June 15 stop at the Kia Forum in Inglewood; his set will include songs from his latest album, 'Cuentas Pendientes,' which came out April 25. 'You can experience a wide array of uneven realities in this place,' he says of his adopted home. 'They coexist in parallel lines. Before settling in Topanga, we spent 10 years in West Hollywood. I loved it there because it offered a strategic point from which to explore other fascinating areas like Silver Lake, Los Feliz and Santa Monica.' At home in Spain, Bunbury would probably be mobbed by euphoric fans eager to cheer on the hits that he recorded with his iconic rock en español outfit, Héroes del Silencio — or the carnivalesque, Fellini-meets-García Márquez universe of solo masterpieces in his trendsetting record from 1999, 'Pequeño.' Like other legendary artists, he cherishes L.A. — not just because it's one of the epicenters of Latin music worldwide, but because it allows him the respite of a normal life. 'I will be forever grateful for that,' he assures me. And it's true: when Roxy Music played the Kia Forum in 2022, I noticed Bunbury sitting a few rows behind me, flanked by his wife (award-winning photographer Jose Girl) and his longtime publicist. As far as I could tell, no one else in the venue had recognized him. But Los Angeles has done more than provide the comforting cloak of anonymity. It also inspired 'Loco,' the most gorgeous track on his new album, which he dedicated to the city's homeless population. 'In the past, whenever I toured Latin America, the promoters would take me to a rock club after the show,' he explains. 'At one point, I asked to visit the cantinas and ballrooms instead. No one recognized me in those places, and suddenly I had a privileged viewpoint of a deeper reality. I did this in Peru, Colombia, Chile, Argentina — everywhere I went, I frequented the venues where a brawl can break up at any minute, and the liquor on offer is not for the faint of heart.' I asked Bunbury if he would dance in the seedy South American ballrooms. He tells me that he preferred sitting down and observing the scene. Those experiences evidently had a profound effect on him, informing the title of his 2011 covers album 'Licenciado Cantinas' and awakening an interest in traditional Latin American genres. To record his new songs, he recruited a cadre of Latin musicians and made affectionate nods to genres like cumbia and ranchera. 'My intention was never to be more ranchero than José Alfredo Jiménez, or a better bolerista than Armando Manzanero,' he clarifies. 'The idea was to nurture myself and employ the instrumentation of foreign genres as new colors in my stylistic palette. When it comes to music, I don't believe in purity. All genres, to a certain degree, are the result of different cultures getting together. The songs go back and forth — they arrive and depart. I gravitate towards those meetings. I like returning to them time and again.' From the intoxicatingly psychedelic cumbia of 'Te puedes a todo acostumbrar' to the organ-laden folk of 'Las chingadas ganas de llorar,' Bunbury's new album finds him in a sweet peak of inspiration. Like its predecessor, 2023's 'Greta Garbo,' it was recorded at El Desierto Casa Estudio, an enchanting space located in a nature park outside Mexico City. 'I look for residential studios — places where the recording experience is extreme and profound,' he says. 'Places where you wake up in the morning, have breakfast together with the musicians, chat about the world and everything happening in your life. The process becomes a catalyst for ideas, the collective notions of the specific group of people who reconvened to make the album.' 'I asked [drummer and co-producer] Ramón Gacías to send me recordings in advance, but he told me that Enrique preferred a workshop setting where everything is done from scratch,' says Chilean guitarist and frequent Mon Laferte collaborator Sebastián Aracena. 'On the first day together, we had coffee and biscuits, and then Enrique played us rough demos of the entire album — just his voice and a few chords. It was like a poetry book; no intros, solos, or melodies. During the summer, it rains every day in Mexico City. We cozied up indoors, working on all those songs together.' Bunbury was born in the Spanish city of Zaragoza in August 1967. He found school boring but enjoyed a positive connection with his literature teachers, and soon he developed an obsession with writer Hermann Hesse and his mystically inclined 'Siddhartha' — a book that he has continued to revisit throughout the decades. Between the ages of 13 and 16, he played various instruments in a number of groups, but his rich, textured baritone had yet to emerge. That was until the vocalist of Zumo de Vidrio — the band he shared with future Héroes del Silencio guitar hero Juan Valdivia — stopped attending rehearsals. After hearing Bunbury sing David Bowie's 'Rock'n'roll Suicide,' Valdivia asked him to take De Vidrio's place in the band. 'He told me that I should sing, and that was the beginning of Héroes del Silencio,' Bunbury recalls. 'Some people can imitate other artists. If I knew how to sing like Billie Holiday, I would order a pizza singing in her style. But I only have one voice — mine — for better or for worse.' In recent years, the voice, unmistakable to millions of Latin rock fans, threatened to sabotage his career. Unaware that he was severely allergic to glycol, a chemical component for the stage smoke used in concerts, Bunbury was forced to cancel his 35th anniversary tour in 2022. For a while, he considered quitting concerts altogether. 'I felt sand in my lungs, a compulsive cough,' he says. 'But then I could sing an entire album at home. We thought it was psychosomatic. I felt no bitterness about it. I can state proudly that I performed in many of the world's worst stages, and a few of the best ones too. A number of live recordings can attest to that. We may feel a certain affinity for our profession, but our identity is not defined by it — just like it's not defined by our country of origin, gender or eye color.' Just before I leave, Bunbury invites me to step into a large wooden balcony overlooking the sprawling greenery of Topanga Canyon. It is a lovely view, seeped in nature and serenity, ideal for someone who spends his days songwriting and crafting paintings destined to remain on the second floor of the studio, unseen by his wife and daughter. 'Look at this,' he murmurs appreciatively. 'It's like we're in the middle of nowhere.' I tell Bunbury that his music has frightened me at times. I approach it with caution, weary of the deep sadness in the melodies, disturbed by the impossible sense of nostalgia that emanates from every single song. Is there a specific fragment of his soul where all that beautiful melodrama stems from? 'Looking at the world around me, I find plenty of motives to favor drama over comedy,' he says. 'There's something in me that is naturally drawn to a certain sense of darkness. I've never made music that felt hedonistic, or transmitted an extreme sense of happiness. Maybe because those private moments of joy didn't inspire me to pick up a guitar.' He gazes at the lush landscape outside, then adds with a wry smile: 'As a listener, I've always gravitated more to Robert Smith than to Kylie Minogue.'
Wall Street Journal
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Dan's Boogie' Review: Destroyer's Songwriting Stays Sharp
Canadian singer-songwriter Dan Bejar has been sharing thoughts about the world outside his window for 30 years. Early on as the frontman of Destroyer, which oscillates between a solo project and a band, he wrote songs that touched on the Vancouver music scene, politics and the perils of romance, spicing up his stories with literary and musical allusions and quirky diction. As he's aged, Mr. Bejar's wry observations have grown broader, and details from his life often serve as punchlines to his setups. He's found a comfortable place as an indie-rock institution. His audience is modest but loyal, and they love hearing from him on new records every couple of years. Mr. Bejar's songwriting voice is specific to him and doesn't change much from one LP to the next—he strings one funny line after another about the people and places he encounters, and these lines almost magically assemble into complete statements that are both clever and touching. What varies is Destroyer's musical setting. Early on, the project was rooted in folk, with Mr. Bejar frequently delivering his lyrics over acoustic guitars. More recently, he's experimented with a sax-driven ambience that dances between early-'80s yacht rock and the new romantic balladeers who followed in the wake of Roxy Music. The title of the new Destroyer album 'Dan's Boogie' (Merge), out Friday, is characteristically self-referential and suggests we could be in for a bluesy, hip-shaking record. But this time, Mr. Bejar opts for a survey of favored styles from the past, while his writing remains as sharp as ever. The fake-out of the title sets the stage for an album that creates expectations and then subverts them. Once again working with producer and multi-instrumentalist John Collins, Mr. Bejar indulges his fascination with artifice, experimenting with how a song's arrangement can convey gnawing disappointment and puncture pretension with wit. 'The Same Thing as Nothing at All' opens like a rapidly rising curtain, as a wall of synthesized strings and horns delivers a cheap, knock-off version of grandeur. The singer's voice is processed to sound like it's echoing upward from the bottom of a well, and he sounds exhausted and slightly irritated as he delivers lines like 'The chandelier struggles to light / Up the night.' The following 'Hydroplaning off the Edge of the World' is a huge, electrifying buzz of a song, with 'ba-di-ba' backing vocals and a rush of synth drone. It's an oddly catchy and even hypnotic number that instantly ranks with Mr. Bejar's finest creations. He delivers a cluster of images and sensations detailing a world that's gone mad—as he wanders the streets, he encounters a priest who mistakes him for a fellow man of the cloth, and then bumps into someone who wonders if Mr. Bejar might be a professional basketball player. Such cases of mistaken identity are common in his music, where all and sundry are trying desperately to know themselves and figure out their place in the universe.
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Bryan Ferry and performance artist Amelia Barratt share new video for title track of upcoming art rock album Loose Talk
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Roxy Music frontman Bryan Ferry has teamed up with performance artist, writer and painter Amelia Barratt for the very art rock Loose Talk album, which the pair will release through Dene Jesmond Enterprises on March 28. The duo, for which Ferry creates the music (it's the very first time he's created new music for another writer's words), have just shared a video for the abum's title track, which features Ferry's Roxy Music bandmate Paul Thompson on motorik drums. 'The whole experience of making Loose Talk has had an interesting newness about it," Ferry says. "It seems to have opened a whole new chapter in my work. There's a really strong mood to the work that Amelia does and I was very conscious of not getting in the way of her words. Hopefully, together, we've created something neither could do on our own. "The nearest I ever got to doing pieces like this before would maybe be back in Roxy with In Every Dream Home A Heartache, and Mother Of Pearl. To some extent, those are kind of spoken monologues. I'm pleased that when we've played Loose Talk to people, they've said, 'Oh, this sounds really different.' That's what I've always wanted with everything I've done, or been involved in, to be: different. Different to what you've heard before, or seen before. That's the whole point of being an artist: trying to create a new thing, a new world.' 'Loose Talk is a conversation between two artists: a collaborative album of music by Bryan Ferry with spoken texts by me," adds Barrett. "It's cinematic; music put to pictures. "There's possibility for experimentation within a frame. And there's a freedom in knowing exactly what my part to play is, then being able to pass a baton, stretching out creatively and knowing there is someone on the other side to take it further. Nothing feels off limits.' Loose Talk will be available digitally, on CD, black vinyl, green vinyl and clear vinyl. Pre-order Loose Talk. Amelia Barratt & Bryan Ferry: Loose Talk1. Big Things2. Stand Near Me3. Florist4. Cowboy Hat5. Demolition6. Orchestra7. Holiday8. Landscape9. Pictures On A Wall10. White Noise11. Loose Talk
The Guardian
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Bryan Ferry and Amelia Barratt: Loose Talk review
There comes a point in every august artist's career where they're forced to make an accommodation with their own past, a tacit acknowledgment that anything new they release exists in the shadow of their own back catalogue. In recent years, Bryan Ferry has done just that, tending his legacy via vast box set retrospectives of his solo work; reconvening Roxy Music for a 50th anniversary tour; and releasing a cover of Bob Dylan's She Belongs to Me that seemed to discreetly reference the subtler moments on Roxy's eponymous debut or 1973's For Your Pleasure. Anniversary tours, deluxe box sets, slyly referential cover versions: these are the things almost all artists of a certain vintage and standing indulge in. But Ferry has also taken a more idiosyncratic parallel approach to his history. On 2012's The Jazz Age and 2018's Bitter-Sweet, he reworked his back catalogue in the style of late-20s jazz, replete with knowing references to standards of the era: Love Is the Drug in the style of Duke Ellington's The Mooche; 1977's This Is Tomorrow appended with a reveille that nodded in the direction of Louis Armstrong's West End Blues. Now there's Loose Talk, ostensibly Ferry's first album of new music in 11 years, but more an act of exhumation. The instrumental tracks are based on unreleased demo recordings from throughout Ferry's career, with the earliest examples dating from the early 70s. These demos were then refined and reworked in the studio, including with fresh contributions from musicians including Roxy drummer Paul Thompson. Presumably the recordings of piano and electric piano on Big Things and Landscape, wreathed in tape hiss, are from the 1970s. Indeed, there's a certain pleasure to be had in trying to work out what era the original recordings hail from. Was Stand Near Me's strange blend of funk bass and noodling, occasionally atonal synth once intended to be brushed up for 1979's Manifesto? Were the eerie ambient electronics on Pictures on a Wall a staging post en route to Avalon's instrumentals India and Tara? Happily, the music on Loose Talk has value beyond a guessing game for Roxy/Ferry nuts. The album is a collaboration with visual artist and writer Amelia Barratt after they apparently met at a gallery opening. She provides texts and narration, in a cool, unemotional RP voice. Their first collaboration – a track called Star that appeared on the aforementioned career-spanning box set – was based on piece of music by Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor and his regular film score collaborator Atticus Ross, and a certain soundtrack-y quality clings to the music here. Florist drifts moodily along; the more strident closing title track boasts an appropriately end-credits feel (and it opens with a clatter of drum-machine handclaps, a sound so familiar from 80s pop, and so completely absent from it in more recent years, it has a weirdly Proustian effect). There are certainly points where Ferry's contributions fade into the realm of the characterless – Demolition or Florist could be the work of anyone – but Loose Talk is liberally studded with genuinely haunting moments, frequently when the old demos yield a snatch of vocal, as on Landscape or Cowboy Hat. Ferry's melodies are beautiful, the fact that these vocals are either wordless place-filler or rendered incomprehensible by the lo-fi sound gives them a strange quality, like memories you struggle to recall in detail. Sign up to Sleeve Notes Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week after newsletter promotion In a sense, Barratt's texts are vague, too. There's plenty of visual detail in her writing, but what's actually going on is usually unclear. If the sunny vignette of Holiday or the depiction of a tailor at work in Cowboy Hat seem straightforward enough, more often it feels as though something has happened out of shot, and it sounds like bad news: the narrator of Florist ends up in tears; the relief solitude provides on the title track feels unsettlingly overwhelming. Occasionally, Barratt alights on subjects her collaborator might have written about. There's something quite Ferry-esque about the vengeful siren of Stand Near Me, applying perfume before exacting some nameless retribution, or the narrator of Big Things, watching a barman flame an orange peel, a distraction from the sight of the bar's 'dreadful carpet'. But more often, the sense of imprecise dread or menace that infects a lot of her writing gives Loose Talk a noticeably different emotional – as well as musical – cast to anything Ferry has attempted before. If the end results aren't quite as holistic as the 'duet' both parties have claimed it as, it still works. Barratt's texts are striking enough that the listener doesn't long for an instrumental version; Ferry's approach is intriguing and impressively original. It's a diversion, but one that transforms his past into something fresh. Loose Talk is released on 28 March Neal Francis – Broken Glass The singer-songwriter heads towards the post-punk disco dancefloor in the company of Brooklyn trio Say She She, with entirely fabulous results.
