Asad Raza

Laura Marling live paints a vivid scene of loveliness

Live performances have been reimagined in the Coronavirus crisis: gigs and concerts have formed into archival footage and live streams. Whilst Laura Marling's latest performance falls under the latter, the intimate video and isolated vocals make for a show worth watching.
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Posted Jun. 24, 2020

Lo-fi: music made in the bedroom, for the bedroom

Lo-fi is certainly one of the more avant-garde genres to emerge from the technological age: combining distortions and errors in music tracks, it recycles these flaws into a palatable and study-friendly stream perfect for late-night cramming sessions.
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Posted May. 21, 2020

Defining the Political Climate: can music help explain how we feel?

We sometimes find ourselves resorting to music to explain how we feel, or relate in words we understand when things are tough. Can we do the same for the political climate? With Brexit looming, a new PM, climate change pressing and so much more, some of our writers chose their top pick of songs to relate to the disarray of the current world.
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Posted Aug. 20, 2019

Hip hop and its uneasy relationship with popular culture

Hip Hop has always had an uneasy relationship with popular culture. Despite the genre’s prevalence and popularity within mainstream music, it is treated with a fundamental suspicion. The message the music carries is seen as inherently violent and corrosive, even leading Fox News reporter Geraldo Rivera to claim that “hip-hop...
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Posted Apr. 4, 2019

LeBron James and the issues with his NBA season

Is the King dead? This is perhaps the fundamental question left to us in the dying embers of the NBA regular season. This hasn’t been the LeBron we’re accustomed to seeing, the relentless warrior-robot that consumes elite competition with the ease that most of us usually reserve for mundane things,...
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Posted Mar. 10, 2019

Authors are raising awareness of environmental issues

Adam Appich, one of the central characters in Richard Powers’s The Overstory, says: “Humankind is deeply ill. The species won’t last long. It was an aberrant experiment.” As a phrase, it captures the inescapability of our condition, and of our deeply problematic, almost pathological relationship with the environment. In climate...
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Posted Feb. 20, 2019

Learn from Literature: South American politics

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez wrote a foundation myth. He reconfigured reality, weaving a tale that encompassed the history of a continent, shaping the identity of the Columbian people. In a country riven by division, García’s melding of the fantastic with the mundane helped create a...
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Posted Jan. 30, 2019