We Got It from Here… Thank You 4 Your Service is both a reunion and a tribute, arriving just a few months after the death of Phife Dawg, whose lyrical interplay with fellow MC Q-Tip was the backbone of the group for much of its history and who contributed to the album before succumbing to complications from diabetes in March. In that way, the album is a throwback, the first true collaboration between Tip and Phife since the group broke up in 1998. But within its first few tracks, We Got It from Here announces itself as a product of its moment.

“The Space Program,” a treatise on black unity, kicks off the album with an instructive spoken-word sample: “It’s comin’ down hard. We’ve got to get our s*** together.” A head-snapping snare and kick drum introduce “We the People,” in which Q-Tip details an America hostile to African-Americans, Mexicans, Muslims, gays and the poor. The opening verse of “Whateva Will Be” could be the height of Phife’s lyricism on any ATCQ track ever. “So am I ‘posed to be dead or doin’ life in prison? / Just another dummy caught up in the system,” he begins, examining society’s expectations for him as a black man before finally proclaiming, “F*** you and who you think I should be, forward movement.”

Sonically, We Got It from Here picks up where the best of Tribe’s work, in particular the winning streak of People’s Instinctive Travels, The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders, left off. At a time when James Brown samples were ubiquitous in hip-hop, Tribe’s early albums gravitated instead to outlier sounds: snippets of Jimi Hendrix, Ron Carter and more obscure 1970s jazz. “Can I Kick It?”, one of the most essential songs of the ATCQ oeuvre, samples the famous twin bass line of Lou Reed‘s “Walk on the Wild Side”– a move that attracted rock fans like Jack White to the group’s fan base. We Got It from Here features White’s guitar playing on “Lost Somebody” (a Phife dedication by Tip and Jarobi) and the superlative “Ego.” Elton John, the kind of artist that the Tribe of the early ’90s could only have conjured by sampling, appears in the flesh on “Solid Wall of Sound,” interpolating his own lyric from 1973’s “Bennie and the Jets.”

White and John are only two of a packed list of guests. Kanye West delivers the hook on “The Killing Season,” which also features Talib Kweli, and André 3000 trades electric verses with Q-Tip on “Kids…”. Observant fans will recognize those rappers as part of a lineage, all direct descendants of the ATCQ style in one way or another. On “Dis Generation,” Q-Tip hat tips Joey Bada$$, Earl Sweatshirt, Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole as other “extensions of instinctual soul,” and Lamar himself shows up on “Conrad Tokyo.” Consequence and Busta Rhymes, both of whom guested on Tribe records in the ’90s, go toe-to-toe on “Mobius.” “Movin Backwards” features the modernist Anderson .Paak, whose brilliant sophomore album, Malibu, might be We Got It from Here‘s only competition for hip-hop album of the year.

Perhaps the most stunning revelation here is Jarobi White’s evolution into a stand-up MC. On People’s Instinctive Travels, he was a master of ceremonies, hosting the album in a running musical skit. He backed away from the studio after his rhymes for The Low End Theory didn’t make the final cut, and eventually chose culinary school over a rap career. Now, on “The Space Program,” “The Killing Season” and “Movin Backwards” in particular, he makes a vital, impressive return.

Groups have largely faded from view in rap music, and so the mere existence of We Got It from Here, a true team effort, feels vintage. Even the way Q-Tip repeats Phife’s rhymes underneath him on “The Space Program” sounds as old-school as the Cold Crush Brothers. And on “Solid Wall Of Sound,” with Phife flexing his Trinidadian roots with patois-inflected lines, you can hear Tip flipping his usual flow (“Like marauders on a mission when we killin’ dancehalls,” he offers) in order to keep up. Though he’s always been the group’s main producer and its most visible member, thanks in part to a matinee idol aura that landed him roles in films by Spike Lee and John Singleton, Q-Tip takes an egalitarian approach on this album, ceding the mic entirely on some songs to showcase his partners.

Even so, he grants himself the last word on “Ego,” technically the penultimate song but a stronger conclusion than closing track “The Donald.” “This is the last Tribe and our ego hopes that you felt us,” he says, indicating that with this release, A Tribe Called Quest may truly call it quits. If so, long live A Tribe Called Quest.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

If Gone Til November itself offers no major revelations as to either prison life or the rapper himself, it does come at an interesting time to consider Lil Wayne. When he began serving his sentence, Wayne was buoyed by the massive creative, commercial and critical triumph of 2008’s Tha Carter III, plus a couple of highly solid mixtapes and a flood of feature appearances. (He was shining so bright that fans even forgave the critical flop Rebirth, the “rock” hybrid released while he was in prison.) And things were about to get even bigger; he had just signed both Drake and Nicki Minaj, the acts that would make it a global powerhouse, to his Young Money Entertainment subsidiary.

The Wayne of late 2016 is in a much different place. Just about five years after his release from actual prison, he unleashed the now-infamous stream of tweets declaring himself a “prisoner” to Cash Money and to Bryan “Baby” Williams (a.k.a. Birdman) in particular, the label co-founder whose role in Wayne’s life had been as much surrogate dad as boss. The fallout from his repudiation of Cash Money has dominated Wayne’s public self for two years now, from the rapper’s ongoing $51 million breach of contract suit (filed in New York, withdrawn and refiled in Louisiana) to both veiled and overt lyrical potshots taken at the label and its owner.

The break between Cash Money and Wayne is big news, of course, due to the wattage of fame and amount of money involved, but it’s also shocking because for so many years, Lil Wayne was Cash Money. In 1992, when Baby and his brother Slim slapped the label together out of sweat and hustle, it was just one of many scrappy indies putting out rap tapes and CDs in New Orleans. Much of its initial roster — Kilo G, Pimp Daddy, and UNLV’s Yella Boy — became casualties of New Orleans’ record-setting mid-’90s murder rate before the label saw big-time success. Others, like Lil Slim and Cash Money’s only two female signees, Ms Tee and Magnolia Shorty, were either cut loose or left before the brothers signed their landmark, career-making distribution deal with Universal Music Group in 1998, launching the gritty little outfit from the Third Ward onto a national stage.

Wayne, barely into his teens, was a big part of that ascension. The Hot Boys, the quartet that comprised him, B.G., Turk and a slightly older, already-known Juvenile, were the sound that had piqued Universal’s interest, along with Juvenile’s solo work. He’d gone fairly quickly from being a talented kid who acted in plays at a magnet middle school and left unsolicited bars on Cash Money’s answering machines to being one of its hottest properties. The youngest of the Hot Boys – he was 12 when he and B.G. recorded their Cash Money debut as the B.G.’z – Wayne cleaved hard to the label. At the turn of the millennium, when B.G., Juvenile, and mastermind producer Mannie Fresh each in turn left Cash Money acrimoniously, citing financial disputes, he doubled down and stayed. Not for nothing, Wayne – the child of an absent dad and deceased stepdad – made his pseudo-filial relationship with Baby a big part of his public brand, from song and album titles to the infamous kiss photo. That image made it even more poignant when, in a HipHollywood interview last week, promoting the prison memoir, Wayne said of Baby: “His last name isn’t Carter, baby, he’s not family.”

Up until the stint at Rikers Island, Wayne’s star only went one way – up – ascending until he was New Orleans’ most successful pop-music export since Fats Domino. A DJ on the New Orleans community station WWOZ, interviewing Dave Bartholomew – who discovered Fats and steered his career – apparently thought he was tossing the music impresario a softball during a recent on-air interview, when he made a disparaging comment about Wayne’s music representing the city. It turned out that Bartholomew, who turns 98 this coming Christmas Eve, religiously tracked Wayne’s chart positions in Billboard; anyone who repped New Orleans and made hits was worth his interest.

In August 2015, eight months after Lil Wayne lashed out at Cash Money, New Orleans was the site of a long, strange, exhausting series of events pegged to the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. There were parades, panel discussions, conferences, exhibits and a critical mass of local and national media to parse it all. The actual 10-year anniversary weekend at the end of August, with its climactic frenzy of commemorative activity, felt like it took over the city the way Mardi Gras does – a surreal, unavoidable, totally disruptive experience. Lil Wayne chose that weekend to throw a party called Lil Weezyana Fest in Champions Square, a 7,000-capacity outdoor space next to the Superdome, which sold out well in advance – mostly on the promise of the reunion of the Hot Boys, minus an incarcerated B.G. Packed out and electrified by the tweaky madness of the anniversary-weekend climate, the show felt cathartic: a blissfully nostalgic celebration where a beaming Wayne trotted out one old-school underground legend of local hip-hop and bounce music after another, from Fifth Ward Weebie to Ms Tee to DJ Jubilee to Master P, even, representing Cash Money’s old rival No Limit.

The music that made Lil Wayne — those artists who survived Cash Money’s unlucky first generation or were recording at the same time, hand-to-mouth — was largely music made by and for the population hit hardest by the aftermath of Katrina, and the show was an affirmation that they, and it, had made it through. Maybe only those acts, on that weekend, to that crowd in that city could make a surprise appearance from Drake feel extraneous – nice lagniappe, but not the point.

The last weekend of August 2016, the 11th anniversary of the storm’s landfall, passed quietly in comparison to last year’s fervor. The year prior had marked the city’s progress toward recovery, considered how much is yet left to be done and, most importantly, honored the dead and displaced. But it had also for many been one nonstop trigger – a fresh reawakening of trauma everywhere you looked, while the whole world was looking at you.

Without the strangely festive setting, there was no way that the 2016 edition of Lil Weezyana Fest wasn’t going to feel somehow smaller, and in the lead-up, it did. Tickets went up on Groupon, with the Superdome box office itself offering two-for-one deals. It did sell out in the end, and separated from the crazy experience that people in New Orleans referred to as K10, it was easier to see Lil Weezyana Fest as an extension of, well, Lil Wayne.

From the outside, his relationship with his home city had seemed complicated since the storm. Immediately in its wake, Wayne was ridiculously prolific, ratcheting up critical interest with increasingly great work – Carter II, Dedication and the landmark Dedication 2 – the last of which included the searing, masterful protest track “Georgia… Bush,” which he performed live for the first time at the inaugural 2015 fest. But he and what was left of Cash Money (and what would become the Young Money juggernaut) also moved shop to Miami. The move seemed to leave New Orleans conflicted about Wayne, but – judging by the response to the initial Lil Weezyana Fest, announced soon after the public break with the label that raised him – that split, and the festival, swung local opinion back into his corner. And the capacity crowd at this year’s event was as hyped as the K10 crowd, for aspects of both new Wayne – surprise guest Chris Brown and Collegrove collaborator 2 Chainz – and old, represented by ’90s-vintage New Orleans acts like Partners N Crime, Mystikal and most amazingly, the Showboys, the New York duo whose 1986 track “Drag Rap (Triggerman)” is the foundational sample of bounce music.

After his term in Rikers, Wayne’s wild ascent stuttered and paused; compared to anyone else, of course, he was insanely prolific and successful, but compared to mid-’00s Lil Wayne, it was an ebb. Gone Til November itself is fairly light and prosaic, but his erratic resume between his release and the book’s publication tells its own story: less easily flowing work, the escalating battle with Baby, and the decision to excavate his creative history onstage with Lil Weezyana Fest’s unusual lineups, back in his hometown.

Wayne’s most recent feature, for Solange’s “Mad,” is some of the most powerful, and even most personal-seeming, work he’s done. In half a dozen lines, it’s arguably more of a revealing memoir than Gone Til November. On “Mad,” the often-cryptic rapper seems to be talking bluntly about the conflicts of his whole career; the isolation of fame, the conflict between pride in his skill and success, and irritation with the way those things attract the needy, greedy and/or disloyal (“It’s hard when you only got fans around and no fam around / and if you do then their hands are out / and they pointing fingers”).

For a chunk of his career, Lil Wayne was essentially a child star, with — if the claims he’s made about shady business practices at Cash Money are true — all of the attendant struggle that comes with that narrative. Now 34, he’s been a professional recording artist for almost 25 years; he could put in another quarter-century and still not hit legal retirement age. Was it the Katrina anniversary that prompted Wayne to book a deep dive into his creative roots? Or was it the wrenching exit from the Cash Money monolith that had been home for more than half his life? The former appeared to be the impetus for the hometown festival in the first place, considering its timing at the peak of 10th-anniversary hoopla. But once that particular noise faded away, what was left was Wayne, celebrating the vibrant, eccentric city that had shaped his vibrant, eccentric talent, and looking toward whatever might come next, too.

Gone Til November, if maybe by its timing more than its actual content, is a reminder that over the past five years or so, Lil Wayne has been through the fire. He isn’t out of it yet, but the festival – which plants his flag back in his town, and in his history – might be a sign that he’s getting closer. So is the end of his appearance on “Mad,” which, after all the anger and sadness and swagger, ends with Wayne exhorting himself – or somebody – to “let it go.”

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Although Hval is a true individual, her own show suggests a version of communion. At last night’s Norwegian live premiere of her sixth album, Blood Bitch, she was flanked by three dancers who undertook a variety of tasks while she worked through the record in order. They enacted a workout routine inspired by b-movie actress Linnea Quigley’s zombie-themed exercise tapes, daubed messy pastel portraits of the gamine Hval on individual easels, and cycled their legs in the air while they writhed in an inflatable paddling pool filled with jelly. Halfway through the show, the cosmic, shadowy music stopped, and the performers climbed out of the glistening slime. They joined Hval behind a table at the back of the stage and enjoyed a lurid pink feast, slurping rosé through straws and munching on hunks of watermelon while chatting unselfconsciously among themselves, paying the crowd no heed. The smell of sugar steadily overpowered the venue’s inbuilt beery hum. After five minutes, the performers resumed their positions and embarked on the show’s more frenzied second half.

Her blonde eyebrows still stained orange from stage make-up, Hval is thrilled with the performance, which is never likely to be repeated. (Even jelly and table decorations stretch the budget.) Despite resembling a staging of the Last Supper by deviant video artist Ryan Trecartin, there was no determined narrative or symbolism; it was just a chance for her and her collaborators to “explore our friendship and the ideas that come about when we hang out,” she says in her Australian-tinged accent, a lasting trace of her time spent studying for an undergraduate degree in creative writing and performance art in Melbourne. She calls being on stage with them her safety net as a solo artist. “It can be really tough to be bold, but working with other people that understand you and give you self-confidence can make things a lot more bold and clear, and that I really enjoy.”

It’s hard to believe that Hval has ever had problems being bold. Her worldview was fully formed on To Sing You Apple Trees, her 2006 debut under the name Rockettothesky, the product, she says, of having honed her voice as a cultural critic for several Norwegian newspapers and author of two novels. Her work has always turned the body and desire inside-out, and no article written about her has ever failed to mention her provocative lyrics: She arrived in town “with an electric toothbrush pressed against my clitoris,” as she sang on “Engines in the City,” the opening track from 2011’s bodily Viscera, her first album under her own name. The title track of 2013’s surface-obsessed Innocence Is Kinky opened with a similar admission: “At night I watch people f****** on my computer.” Amidst critiques of the crooked paths women are offered to so-called empowerment, last year’s comic treatise Apocalypse, girl asked, “What is soft dick rock?”

Critics attempted to boil that particular question down into a definitive ideology, flattening and essentializing Hval’s complex work, as if she thought 10 songs could unseat decades of cock-rocking bombast. It changed her experience of the material. “I think it’s kind of unfortunate, but I also think that it’s no single person’s fault,” she says. “That’s how things are reproduced and reduced with how the Chinese whispers of Internet works now. In Norway we call it ‘sharpening’ — like sharpening a pencil, that’s the tabloid way of writing. We need to reduce it in order to really say something because it needs to sell, and I wonder, why do we let that happen?”

Beyond concern for the state of journalism, the prurient attention made her anxious that she would never have had a platform if not for those lyrics. “There are occasions where avant garde art meets tabloid media and it’s a perfect fit,” she says, recalling an Oslo show where the North Carolina performance artist Liv Ann Young pulled blueberries from her vagina — considered the cleanest part of the body — and asked the audience to taste them. “That show was quoted in a tabloid newspaper then it was all over. It’s unfortunate — I’m certainly not writing those lines in order to get recognition in that way. I find it very problematic. I wonder, if I hadn’t said ‘cunt’ even once, would I even be reviewed anywhere? You can do whatever you want as long as you say something that seems sharpened.”

Hval wrote Apocalypse, girl to exploit the spotlight she received following Innocence Is Kinky, boiling the artist down to (what she calls) a one-dimensional political commentator to see how it felt. “What is it to take care of yourself? Getting paid? Getting laid? Getting married? Getting pregnant? Fighting for visibility in your market?” she sang on “Take Care of Yourself,” sounding more ecstatic with every question. Although she still enjoys performing the songs, doing so became harder because it was “so self-conscious” — the writing was always present. Hval pauses to check a text from her partner about the neighborhood drug dealers pulling up outside their place again. “Looking down at them on the street from the second floor, it’s a little bit like being on stage sometimes,” she says. “And that’s an aspect that I still struggle with, this idea that you’re higher.”

With Blood Bitch, Hval wanted to be less present in the music “to be more present in it.” She started writing a month after the release of Apocalypse, girl, using a newly acquired Arp Odyssey synthesizer. Like its predecessor, it’s a collaboration with Lasse Marhaug, a noise artist whose lack of familiarity with the elements of pop allowed them to have more abstract, philosophical conversations about the production. “I really wanted to let the recording process almost dictate what the lyrics came out to be,” she says. “I wanted the words to be lost in the music, and that was something I’d dreamt about making for a long time. I didn’t want to make a commentary; whenever I had to speak something, we decided that I was gonna confide in someone or write a letter, not be the narrating voice of [Apocalypse‘s] ‘Kingsize.'”

The effect is weightless but haunting, like the night sky refracted in the ocean’s depths. “I’m so tired of subjectivity,” Hval sings on “Female Vampire,” her voice sweet and disembodied above the Arp’s flared arpeggiations. Despite Hval jettisoning self-consciousness, Blood Bitch is her most intimate album. The melodies feel as shadowy and precise as a mushroom’s gills, each song working as a complete functioning organism. “Like capitalism/It works like unrequited love that way/It never rests,” she sings on “The Great Undressing,” as a soft techno beat pounds ever onward. In “Period Piece,” greyed-out dub soundtracks the opening of another dimension: “In the doctor’s office/The speculum pulls me open,” she recounts blankly, “spacing the space/Accidental sci-fi/Regulating my aperture.” And a heart seems to beat beneath “Conceptual Romance,” the artery that pumps blood around the album.

That song’s title and chorus — “Conceptual romance is on my mind/I call it abstract romanticism” — both come from Chris Kraus’ acclaimed 1994 novel I Love Dick, which Hval says has been a huge influence since she discovered it in 2012. As she was writing the music, she started reading from the copy she keeps on the studio shelf. (She calls it a “very sloppy version” of Kate Bush’s interpolation of James Joyce’s Ulysses on “The Sensual World” which was part of her MA thesis on Bush’s work.) Initially she intended to rewrite the whole thing, but ended up leaving some of Kraus’ words behind. “To me that’s very personal, because I love her work and there’s nothing that my brain wants to do more than get closer to what I love,” she says warmly. “It’s like a conceptual romance in that way, the song itself.”

The song is as much about her relationship with art as it is romantic love: Both depend on the kind of infatuation prior to consummation, the energy that fuels I Love Dick. “Me being a very shy person, those before-situations have been most of my life, because I was too shy to say something,” says Hval. “So I have this strong connection between the idea of myself and the idea of conceptual romance. Then there’s the idea of Chris Kraus’ conceptual romance with Dick, which is pure rejection, but she keeps going into this really interesting idea: What if it doesn’t stop there, what if it goes on? What is infatuation, and what has it to do with feminism, art, the voice, literature, and everything that we reject because it’s considered poor?”

The thought overhauled and inverted Hval’s thinking, and inspired her obsession with imperfect, “bad” art. On Blood Bitch, she became obsessed by the human feel of the technical failures in Jess Franco’s low-budget ’70s horror films, which she admits are mostly thinly veiled rape fantasies. If she had any worries about the themes, it was that they didn’t affect her enjoyment of the movies. “I think you have to let go of certain things if you can, and that is different for every artist, but to be able to work with art is to be able to see things beyond the political, because if you just see things from the political then quickly your brain becomes about the censorship of many things that actually have a lot of artistic value. And I’m not saying that about the most horrible, racist black metal lyrics, but with these films, it’s a very limited way of watching movies.”

Blood Bitch has been billed as Hval’s “vampires and periods” album, which is admittedly an appealing prospect. Both themes appear — most notably on “Untamed Region,” where she expresses her surprise at awaking to blood on the sheets, feeling ageless: “I feel old in this hotel / As if surprised I still have it in me / And yet so young / Hollow / Unsure if from young or old.” But this time, she’s made sure that the record can’t be boiled down to a single thesis. She’s happy that the word “blood” is in the title, because she thinks of it as an act of giving, though that generosity is counterbalanced by the loneliness in the record, which was partially inspired by her touring experiences. Hval isn’t interested in being part of the mainstream movement to “normalize” menstruation; rather, to preserve the mysticism of the body, “the spirit, the way you hear things, the way you see the world, and that adds to our everyday lives and so many of things we experience, even if they’re trivial, also have enormous power. There’s so much of human experience that’s not possible to contain in sensible language and realistic stories.”

“I need to keep writing because everything else is death,” Hval sings on “The Great Undressing.” With Blood Bitch, rather than forge a conscious theme, she aimed “to make something that creates a state where for a short moment it’s okay to die. So on the one hand, wanting to reach those moments that are a consummation, absolutely, but also there’s this need to long for something in order to write. If I don’t long for a sound when I’m making music I won’t make anything.”

More surprising than anything regarding periods or the undead is the apparent anxiety on the record: Hval’s lyrics repeatedly return to failure, abjection, unrequited love and loss of voice — the antithesis of Apocalypse‘s confident pronouncements. “I must find some kind of art form where I can call my tongue back from the underground,” she sings on “Period Piece,” while the final two songs on the record confront the need for precise language to express desire. Fizzing like a vintage MC Solaar track, “Secret Touch” is a death drive through illicit experiences, “and later we regret it, because we have no language to express that it was both ravishing, destructive, and most of all, absolutely necessary!” Hval sings in raptures. The mood drops with the eerie twinkle of “Lorna”: “No-one ever asked me, how do I desire?” she asks mournfully. “I don’t think anyone ever talked to me using the word desire at all. No-one ever told me or taught me how to contain it. It kept existing, but there was no language / Does anyone have a language for it? Can we find it?”

The lyrics don’t relate to the romantic specificities of Hval’s own life, but her relationship with her work. In an age where we praise the gentle radicalism of middlebrow entertainment like the Kardashians and The Great British Baking Show, and so-called subversion is a marketable aesthetic, where does that leave artists like Hval? “It seems so fashionable to be radical that I don’t understand what it means,” she says. “Now anything can be experimental, it’s not something you are, it’s something you do, so to me it’s very strange to always have to say, ‘No, I do pop music; listen, it has two choruses, it’s amazing!’ But it’s not a very interesting discussion because the words are all gibberish now so I don’t know what anything means.”

Her mission now is to unearth a form of expression that can exist outside of the capitalist machine: Avant-garde art is often censored in its original form, but then appropriated as strategy by politicians: “Untamed Region” features a sample from an Adam Curtis documentary about Putin’s advisors doing just that, to keep the country in a perpetual state of confusion. “What kind of language can we have that is outside, that is our own?” asks Hval. “That could also be on a personal level — how can I say things and it’s really from me? How can I say things and it really represents my desires? Those moments where you say things you didn’t know that you’d say, and you feel like they’re coming from your burning body or something. It’s a moment of wanting uncertainty to discover something that is personal. That, to me, is very much to do with the art that I do.”

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Commissioned by San Francisco Tape Center in the early 1960s, the Buchla 100 was an attempt to make music accessible to everyone, allowing participants to pick and choose parts of the instrument (“modular”) to create sound. Morton Subotnick’s 1967 masterpiece, Silver Apples Of The Moon, was arguably the first electronic album, breaking from academic tradition to anticipate techno with something rhythmic and tuneful, all performed on and made possible by Buchla’s inventions.

While arena-rockers used Robert Moog’s synths to excess in the ’70s, those drawn to Buchla’s instruments understood these were not only machines to make sound but also a way to understand the world. Just released on Friday, Sunergy pans generations of Buchla synths between Suzanne Ciani (Buchla 200e) and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith (Buchla Music Easel). The former studied with Buchla in the ’70s, while the latter is still relatively new to the instrument, discovering new and exciting waves to ride. They share not only their memories of the man but also how Buchla’s creations guide their lives.

Suzanne Ciani

He has been an integral part of my life for almost 50 years, so you can imagine the sense of loss I’m feeling now. From the time I first met him in Berkeley in 1969, his vision of a performable electronic music instrument guided and inspired my artistic and professional life. I worked at his “factory” after graduate school and my only goal was to own one of those expensive machines. I went to NYC in 1974 specifically to perform a live Buchla 200 concert and stayed for 20 years, using the Buchla on Madison Avenue to make the money I needed to launch my recording career. The “Coca-Cola Pop ‘n’ Pour Logo” sound was pure Buchla.

His instrument gave me wings in all directions. After I moved again to Berkeley in 1992, we reconnected as friends and tennis partners until he tempted me once again to get re-involved with the Buchla, this time the 200e. I’ve dropped everything these last several years to once again perform on the Buchla, feeling a sense of commitment to his vision, which I represented and worked to communicate for a dozen years in the early days, until the impossibility of fixing it brought me to the brink of a “breakdown,” so identified was I with that instrument.

So now my mission is to carry on his vision, which I have long-shared, and to make sure his legacy is kept alive. I loved him dearly.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith

Don Buchla made it possible for me to share the way I hear and connect with the world using a language that I couldn’t find in any other instrument. His instruments have life in them. They are breathing electricity that you can sculpt. What makes his work so special and different from others is that every instrument he designed presents an opportunity to create an ecosystem. You can watch its behavior unfold the way you would craft a terrarium and let it have a life of its own while simultaneously being the observer and the creator. They talk back. They are conversational and offer the same mental stimulation any good friend would — engaging you to be in the moment and ready for spontaneity.

Even after months of working on a composition, or performing it hundreds of times, the wild Buchla continues to surprise me and give me the rare sensation of being an audience member to my creation. There is never a dull moment when I am in front of one of his instruments and I never feel at a loss for creativity or inspiration. I enter a space where I am comfortably riding the line between logic and emotion, listening and communicating from both the brain and the heart.

I find meditation with his instruments. They have taught me patience, inspired me to seek innovation, and to persist in problem solving when faced with challenges. These lessons have translated into my daily life and have taught me to seek to understand something first before asking for something from it.

I didn’t get the chance to know Don in depth personally. I met him a few times. From what I did gather, he seemed to be as thoughtful, witty, playful, and full of potential as his instruments. A genius to say the least. I am forever grateful to him.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Price was known for taking no prisoners when he got on the microphone. His was principled aggression and his presence was alpha. His rhymes were often dazzling, and he was impatient with mediocrity, though he did have a soft spot for puns.

“He was really one of the most genuinely funny people that I knew,” says the New Jersey born producer known as Just Blaze, who was cracking jokes with Price on Twitter the day before he died. He remembers Price’s very dry humor, his inclination to say outlandish things in a way that was so witty you couldn’t help but laugh. “You know a lot of rappers have fake charisma? Where they can turn it on when the cameras are on, but that’s not really them? He was just the same dude all the time.”

He was the same dude from the early ’90s through today. Sean Price got his start in hip-hop as half of the duo Heltah Skeltah, which produced two classic albums. They were also part of the supergroup of New York rappers called the Boot Camp Clik. And Price made a name for himself as a solo artist who collaborated with the contemporary generation of rappers and producers.

“Aside from what I feel,” says Just Blaze, “the hip-hop community in general, we’ve lost a legend. I mean, this man did what he did, did it over the span of almost two decades, and consistently got better.”

Sean Price’s writing and character were widely admired — the hip-hop community flooded social media with tributes and personal stories this weekend.

“Obviously, he’s a street dude, came from a rough environment. But at the same time, still kind of had those same nerdy or geeky tendencies that I had. You know what I mean? There’s actually a lot of dudes like that, but you would just never know because they keep that guard up so much. There’s plenty of dudes who come from the street who are the hardest of the hardest street dudes, who go home and read comic books.”

Sean Price leaves behind his wife and three children. His latest project, Songs in the Key of Price, is due out later this month.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Prior to Fischer’s emergence in the early 1980s, heavy metal centered on theatricality and escapism, bands creating larger-than-life personae, but in addition to sounding as imposing and aggressive as the genre demanded, Fischer brought a unique sense of tortured introspection that reflected his troubled upbringing as a youngster in Switzerland. In that regard it’s easy to understand why Kurt Cobain was a huge Celtic Frost fan in the 1980s, and his pained, string-bending riffs on Nirvana‘s albums (“Heart Shaped Box” a prime example) can be traced directly to Fischer’s own similar guitar style a decade earlier. With a fearless approach to songwriting, constantly thinking of ways to challenge what was permissible within metal’s stylistic boundaries, Fischer’s music would teach a new generation that there was a lot more to heavy metal than a pentatonic riff and cartoonish lyrics about the Devil. A visionary and metal auteur nonpareil, Fischer is revered today, and his latest album, the colossal Melana Chasmata by his current band Triptykon, is generating some of the most rhapsodic reviews of any metal album in 2014 thus far.

It wasn’t always like this for Fischer. Despite his musical innovations, Fischer’s career trajectory is rockier than some neophytes might expect. For all of its boasting about being fertile ground for musical creativity, heavy metal has always been surprisingly conservative, and the restless Fischer has provoked metal listeners for more than 30 years now, daring them to think outside the box, to broaden their musical horizons, to see the beauty in ugliness and the ugliness in beauty.

Going back to the dreary, dismal surroundings of Black Sabbath’s Birmingham, heavy metal at its most innovative has always been a reflection of the artists’ environments, and in many cases, the product of a burning desire to create despite lacking the knowledge and expertise to do so via conventional means — to make music by any means necessary. Having grown up poor and owning the cheapest guitar he could get, the teenaged Fischer simply worked with what he had when he created the band Hellhammer. Directly inspired by Newcastle band Venom, whose aggression, overt staged Satanism and complete disregard for nuance immediately set it apart from the rest of the burgeoning New Wave of British Heavy Metal, Hellhammer played faster, sounded grimier and was all the more unique thanks to Fischer’s primitive yet evocative guitar sound and his bizarre, almost alien vocal phrasing.

What set Hellhammer apart was how Fischer turned the focus inward with striking poeticism, his lyrics almost Whitman-esque, a barbaric yawp sounded over the roofs of the world. Metal was never supposed to be about vulnerability and introspection; it was supposed to sound monstrous and empowering. But while Hellhammer did indeed transform Fischer into a colossus on record, the way he balanced outward power, inner torment and musical primitivism predated the equally ragged sounding Norwegian black metal — Darkthrone and Mayhem especially — and greatly informed Cobain’s more atonal adventures with Nirvana. On “Triumph of Death” from the Apocalyptic Raids EP he wrenches every ounce of pain from his guitar, which carries over into the anguished wails that dominate the entire nine and a half minute song. “In moments of reflection / It all unfolds to me,” Fischer mutters on “Massacra”. “I walk down through my mind / And feel a bittercold fear.”

It was with Celtic Frost, however, that Fischer truly made his mark. Formed in 1984 with Hellhammer bassist Martin Ain, his goal was to free himself of the musical constraints his former band had imposed upon itself. Morbid Tales showed enormous improvement in both musicianship and production. While “Dethroned Emperor” displayed a new command of dynamics, the song “Procreation of the Wicked” is where Fischer started to come into his own, that bent-string riff, the gloomy atmosphere, the authoritative barking of his lyrics all becoming hallmarks of the man’s music for decades to come. The template is set in these four minutes, extreme metal history changed forever.

If Morbid Tales was Fischer’s “eureka” moment, where he found his voice as an artist, 1985’s To Mega Therion was where the ominous, cathartic music and dark poetry established on the debut bloomed in startlingly beautiful fashion. His great leap from primal, no-frills metal to jaw-dropping Wagnerian majesty — reflected in the iconic artwork by H.R. Giger, who embraced the young band — the album boasted the awesome “Circle of the Tyrants,” the closest Celtic Frost would come to having a hit song, which blended the speed of thrash, the measured, lumbering pace of doom, the savage musical attack of nascent death metal, and stunning operatic arias that would foreshadow the rise of symphonic metal a decade later. Nothing like that had ever been created in heavy metal before, and was greeted with as much rapture as bafflement.

Typical of many musical geniuses, Fischer’s work was at first grossly misunderstood and critically reviled — most famously by influential underground zine Metal Forces — before the tide turned and the accolades began rolling in. But both critical hatred and lofty expectations only goaded to Fischer into pulling the rug out from under his audience: Celtic Frost’s third album, created over the course of a full year amidst internal strife, recording problems and quarrels with its record label, could have been the first clue that Fischer works exceptionally well when he’s least comfortable.

The wildly eclectic Into the Pandemonium became one of the most talked about metal records of 1987. After all, leading the album off with audacious and downright buoyant cover of Wall of Voodoo’s “Mexican Radio” will do that. Once you get past that admittedly fun red herring, however, you discover a band trying to push a genre’s boundaries as far outwards as possible, practically trying any way to upset the status quo. There are dalliances with gothic rock (“Mesmerized“), recitations of Baudelaire poetry by a woman (“Tristesses de la Lune“), R&B background singers (“I Won’t Dance“), and even electronic music similar to that of Ministry at the time (“One in Their Pride“).

It was a marvelous achievement for Fischer to dare his young fans to broaden their musical horizons, but typical of many provocateurs, he took that can-do-no-wrong hubris too far with an album that not only was a commercial failure, but would reduce Celtic Frost to pariahs and send Fischer’s career reeling. Continuing with a band of hired hands after the departure of Ain and drummer Reed St. Mark, 1988’s Cold Lake was greeted with universal scorn by the metal scene, its glam metal production and teased hair on the back cover was too much for a conservative fan base to take. Although it remains one of the most universally panned albums in metal history — Fischer himself has disowned it — it’s largely misunderstood. It’s greatly flawed, yes — “Dance Sleazy” is unforgivable Mötley Crüe smarm — but parts do have merit. “Cherry Orchards” is a gaudy satin purse among a collection of sow’s ears, a brilliant, subversive co-opting of pop metal aesthetics to create something dark and oddly poetic. However, people couldn’t look past the preening band they saw in the video, and the album quickly fell into notoriety for all the wrong reasons.

Looking back at the failure of Cold Lake, one can easily say Fischer’s only fault was being happy for once in his life. In 1987 he felt he had more important things to sing and write about than the usual miserable poetry. He had a girlfriend, was in love and started spending more time with her than his longtime best friend Ain. In the remarkable 2008 documentary A Dying God, Fischer candidly admits the primary reason Cold Lake failed was because he was happy in his life, and happiness had no business being expressed in Celtic Frost’s music, which was originally formed as an outlet for his misanthropy and malevolence.

Therein lies the troubling crux of Fischer’s aesthetic. You can’t wish for bad things to happen to a person who makes pleasing art, but throughout Fischer’s career it’s been hinted that he makes his best music under bleak circumstances. “What is still the driving factor is the darkness that I became accustomed to when I was in my childhood,” he tells metal writer Jonathan Dick. “The darkness rising from the daily conditions of my youth, which directly led to the kind of music I liked. I wasn’t attracted to happy music or to lively music … That kind of darkness, of course, is still powering me today.” For a person as private as Fischer, he understands that conflict of making a career out of baring his tortured soul, cashing in on his misery by making it public, yet at the same time is thankful to have such a rewarding outlet. “I always wonder what would happen if I didn’t have a valve — violence, drugs?” he tells Justin M. Norton in the excellent May cover story in Decibel magazine. “What are the other valves that are available? It could be a million dollars in psychiatry bills.”

Typical of many 1980s metal innovators, Fischer spent the ’90s doing some musical soul searching. Celtic Frost quietly dissolved after the middling 1990 album Vanity/Nemesis, and he eventually created the electronic/industrial project Apollyon Sun in 1995. With major label support and the help of former Swans drummer and Björk producer Roli Mosimann, the 2000 album Sub was a bold reinvention of Fischer’s sound — even including a daring new interpretation of the Hellhammer song “Messiah” — but it failed to find an audience on either the electronic or metal sides of the fence.

While Fischer’s new music struggled to get a footing in the 1990s and early-2000s, the legacy of Hellhammer and Celtic Frost only grew more. Legend has it Nirvana listened to Celtic Frost obsessively prior to the recording of the Bleach album. Industrial innovators Godflesh owed a great deal to Celtic Frost’s influence. And of course, the early-’90s wave of black metal, which burst out of Scandinavia and spread worldwide, was so indebted to Fischer’s early work that he should have received royalties. Above all else his 1980s music had mystique, even the notorious Cold Lake, and in a genre with as obsessive a following as heavy metal has, the more silent Fischer was, the more his stature seemed to grow and the more towering his recorded work became. And, conveniently, the more lucrative the offers to reunite became.

What Fischer’s alienated fans stubbornly wanted from him, was a full-on return to metal. After that 1990s period of musical experimentation, during which Fischer came to terms with his legacy in his well-received autobiography Are You Morbid?, audiences got what they craved in a huge way as he underwent an astounding transformation and creative rebirth. His post-millenial work with Celtic Frost and Triptykon is a perfect distillation of his best 1980s work, a sublime yet horrific hybrid of brute force and staggering beauty. Much like Michal Gira has accomplished with the current incarnation of Swans, Fischer has gone on to create new music that not only honors the trademark sounds he created 30 years ago but elaborates on them further, informed by the wisdom and experience of middle age, yet sounding as mercurial as ever.

Celtic Frost’s magnificent and harrowing album Monotheist shook the metal world to its core in 2006, Fischer and Ain exploring the more doom-oriented side of the band’s oeuvre, at the same time incorporating more gothic influences. Fischer adopted a haunting, Peter Murphy-style singing voice on the standout “Obscured.” It remains a comeback album for the ages. However, the stress of the band’s world tour and unresolved issues within the band would lead to its sudden implosion in 2008 when Fischer announced he had severed all ties “due to the irresolvable, severe erosion of the personal basis so urgently required to collaborate within a band so unique, volatile, and ambitious.”

Triptykon was formed with the intention of giving a voice to the ideas Fischer envisioned for the follow-up to Monotheist, and indeed, Triptykon’s two albums and one EP are obvious extensions of that baroque Celtic Frost sound. 2010’s Eparistera Daimones remains just as harrowing as Monotheist, treading the exact same territory but with Fischer digging deeper into his disturbed psyche (“Abyss Within My Soul“). The most interesting development in Fischer’s current incarnation, though, is his development as a more melodic songwriter. Using Leonard Cohen’s old trick of countering a ragged male voice with sultry female singing, he’s learned to add color and richness to his otherwise blunt style, which was executed beautifully on 2012’s “Shatter” and continues in gorgeous fashion on the new album Melana Chasmata.

Equal parts extreme and exquisite, and once again featuring stunning artwork by Fischer’s good friend, the recently departed H.R. Giger, Melana Chasmata touches on various aspects of Fischer’s long career, from primal energy (“Tree of Suffocating Souls“) to that unholy marriage of power and theatricality (“Breathing“) to mournful epics (“Black Snow”). The Crowley-referencing “Boleskine House” is the highlight of this stunning new album, an immaculate balance of power and melody, sensitivity and harshness, sex and violence. Fischer veers from fluid, majestic melodies, to pummeling, gnarled riffs and snarled vocals with the grace and skill of the master of metal form that he is.

Melana Chasmata might initially feel like a well-rounded look back at more than three decades of groundbreaking heavy metal, which in most cases would leave audiences satisfied, but even better yet, it is a profound statement by an artist who is nowhere near through bringing innovative new ideas to heavy metal. Typically restless, Fischer has already expressed his dissatisfaction with the new album, stating on Triptykon’s official forum, “Melana Chasmata might be the most deficient post-Celtic Frost reunion album I have been involved in … I personally am utterly puzzled by the extremely favourable opinions the album has garnered.” Whether audiences disagree with him or not, the mere fact that Fischer insists his work is nowhere near finished is a testament to his desire for perfection and transcendence through his art, a sign that his days of provocation through music are far from over.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Harden was found unresponsive in a Chicago apartment on Saturday afternoon, according to Chicago police officer Janel Sedevic. Drug paraphernalia was found at the scene, and a toxicology report by the Cook County medical examiner was scheduled for Sunday.

It’s a tragic ending to a slow-burning career that had only recently been recognized on an international scale. Over the past four years, Harden’s frenetic footwork productions evolved from a local Chicago staple to the go-to rhythm of a new generation of dance music producers. His final two full-length albums, 2012’s Teklife, Vol. 1: Welcome To The Chi and 2013’s Double Cup, were celebrated on numerous year-end lists by dance and pop music critics alike.

“I was honored to release music from Rashad,” said vanguard producer Kode9, who released Double Cup on his Hyperdub Records label. “I’ve only known him for around three years, but he had become a good friend and one of my biggest musical influences. He was one of the funniest, most positive people I’ve ever met and a true innovator.”

Harden’s early recordings borrowed from ghetto house, a raunchy sped-up spin on house music popular in Chicago and Detroit during the mid-’90s. But soon, Harden, his friend Morris Harper (a.k.a. DJ Spinn) and other young producers took the tempo even higher, upwards of 160 beats per minute, and added crazy rhythms that dared dancers to keep up. This evolution eventually became known as juke, then footwork, because of the breakneck dancing that it inspired.

Juke and footwork music grew in popularity throughout the 2000s in Chicago, but it wasn’t until around 2010 that the rest of the world started to notice. By the time Harden appeared on the style’s global introduction, Bangs & Works, Vol. 1, his discography was already approaching 200 tracks. Last year, he performed at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago and toured with Chicago’s Chance the Rapper.

“Rashad was a kind soul that left an indelible mark on the music world as the torchbearer of footwork and juke,” said his manager, Wes Harden, in a statement released Monday. “Rest assured that all of those close to him will make sure that the legacy lives on for a great man whose life has been cut far too short.”

Rashad Harden, born Oct. 9, 1979, was a dance music lover from an early age. He began performing with Chicago dance crews when he was in 7^th grade, and made a name for himself as a DJ for high school students at weekend parties. He released his first commercial record, “Child Abuse” (the single was mistakenly credited to DJ Thadz) in 1998 on the internationally respected label Dance Mania.

“Since he was a kid, he’s been doing this,” his father, Anthony Harden, told the Chicago Sun-Times. “He knew what he wanted to do, and a lot of us don’t get a chance to make our dream come true.”

Harden’s latest recording, an EP called We On 1, was set to be released on vinyl today. He leaves behind a 9-year-old son, Chad, and his parents, mother Gloria Harden, and father, Anthony Harden.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

It’s like Debussy or Satie for the dance floor. Whereas most club mixes accentuate hardness to drive dancers to the floor, Knuckles did the truly daring, inspired thing and made this one actually softer. The original may have been a ballad, but Moore sings Knuckles’ rendition more tenderly (she recut the vocal in his studio, following his directions to sing it at a club-friendly tempo), more like she’s having a secret talk with God, as if she’s praying that this time, heaven allowed, things are going to work out. She’s singing as if she’s asking to be blessed.

Not everything he made was this eloquent, but Knuckles, who died on Monday at his home in Chicago at the age of 59, made dance music at a spiritual level for nearly four decades. Born Francis Nicholls on January 18, 1955, in the Bronx, he started out as a DJ in Manhattan at the Gallery, one of the earliest gay discos, and the Continental Baths, the same gay bathhouse where Bette Midler and her accompanist Barry Manilow launched their careers. Another musician who started at both of those places was his pal Larry Levan, the DJ often cited as the greatest-ever, who soon moved on to the Paradise Garage, the late ’70s/’80s downtown club routinely tagged the greatest-ever. [I sometimes danced there. Both were more phenomenal than there’s space to get into here.]

“When Larry started the Garage, Frankie didn’t know what he was gonna do with himself,” says Knuckles’ manager, Judy Weinstein, of Def Mix Productions, who at the time also ran one of the first record pools, For the Record. “Then somebody in Chicago said, ‘We have a club for you.’ That was the Warehouse.”

Like the Garage, the Warehouse was patronized by a private membership of mostly gay black (and to a lesser degree gay Latino) men. And like the Garage, the Warehouse was so popular that the so-called death of disco — one most historians pinpoint as starting in Chicago’s own Comiskey Park during rock radio DJ’s Steve Dahl’s notorious “Disco Demolition Night” promotion on July 12, 1979 that turned a normal baseball double-header into a full-blown riot — didn’t diminish its following. In fact, both the Warehouse and the Garage got more popular after disco supposedly went kaput. At the Warehouse, the crowd got whiter and straighter to the point that its owner gave up the membership system that protected its gay clientele, and Knuckles abandoned ship to start his own club, the Power Plant.

Like the Garage, the Warehouse was known for a particularly soulful strain of disco, one that maintained its connection to R&B via Philly soul’s lush strings and pulsating rhythms. And just like Levan, Knuckles modified the records to suit his crowd, and mixed the soul with synthesizer-based productions from Europe and edgier cuts from the New Wave scene. In New York, that combination was called “Garage music.” In Chicago, that exact same combo was called “house music.”

And while there were songs that came out of the New York scene that were specifically designed for the Garage, some of those were so musically savvy that they became national R&B radio and club hits, like Taana Garner’s “Heartbeat,” which Levan himself remixed. What came out of Chicago, however, was significantly cruder and even more leftfield than most Garage-bound tracks. There was no way that early house tracks like Jack Master Dick’s “Jack the Dick,” for example, was going to be confused with any other genre, and so the house tag stuck in a way that Garage didn’t. Even more than Garage, House at this stage was black gay ghetto music and although it got played on Chicago’s dance music station WBMX, it wasn’t going anywhere.

Or so it seemed. England adores music precisely like this. In the ’70s, Northern England fell in love with Motown-sound flops of the ’60s and resold them as “Northern Soul.” This time, London got in on the action faster and sent its music critics to Chicago in the mid-’80s to write about the underground house scene just as it would send writers to Seattle just a few years later to write about grunge. But Chicago didn’t have a Kurt Cobain to sell papers. Instead, it had a bunch of mostly black, mostly gay DJs.

What Chicago had were loads and loads of records that were recorded, pressed, and licensed for export quite cheaply. The first one to go pop in the U.K., Farley “Jackmaster” Funk’s “Love Can’t Turn Around” featuring Darryl Pandy, is a literally screaming 1986 remake of Isaac Hayes’ “I Can’t Turn Around.” No American major label would touch a record like it. The second major hit, Steve “Silk” Hurley’s “Jack Your Body,” topped the U.K. charts for two weeks in early 1987. For the next several years, English labels went on a house spree, licensing Chicago tracks so obscure that some of them hadn’t even been pressed back home, so American DJs had to buy the imports in order to get the music that was originally designed for them.

One of the better singles to get released in Chicago in 1987 was issued under the mysterious name “Frankie Knuckles Presents.” One side held the song “Baby Wants to Ride” and the other had “Your Love” — Jamie Principle was the unnamed singer on both. Both were also among the sexiest things that ever happened to a sex-centric genre. In 1991, a British DJ mixed the instrumental intro to “Your Love” with an a cappella version “You Got the Love,” an obscure record by soul/gospel singer Candi Staton, and the result went to No. 4 on the U.K. pop chart. Six years later, yet another remix went to No. 3. In 2004, that remix perfectly soundtracked the final two minutes of HBO’s Sex and the City.

When Knuckles eventually scored his own pop success, it was once again in the U.K. Buoyed by a string of remixes in the late ’80s and early ’90s for Electribe 101, Inner City, Adeva, Lalah Hathaway, Will Downing and Lisa Stansfield, Knuckles was signed in America and abroad to Virgin Records (which of course was founded by a Brit, Richard Branson). This was at a time when acts like C+C Music Factory suggested that house was going to crossover big time in America as it did in England. That didn’t happen. Knuckles’ “The Whistle Song,” was an instrumental in 1991 when instrumentals weren’t played beyond smooth jazz stations. In England, it went to No. 17 and even appeared in a Nestea commercial. Here, that song still gets played in the early morning to ease folks down off their high. Like a lot of deep house, it’s simultaneously sad and joyous, as if it’s so full of emotion that it seeps out every which way.

“He loved work more than he loved himself,” says his manager, Judy Weinstein. “Not that he didn’t love himself, but that was really how it went.” The morning after Knuckles died, Weinstein shared that Knuckles had played his last gig the previous Saturday night at London’s Ministry of Sound, a club so modeled after the Garage it sought to duplicate elements of its sound system. His tour manager helped him get to his plane Sunday morning and Knuckles made it back to his home in Chicago that night, but didn’t call when he landed like he was supposed to, and didn’t return calls on Monday. At 5:00 p.m., his longtime business partner Frederick Dunson went to his home to find that his best friend had died.

“He went to the Winter Music Conference in Miami,” Weinstein recalls of Knuckles’ activities the previous week. “Maybe it was written in the stars somewhere, but we were all together as a family. [DJs] David [Morales] and Frankie and Hector Romero and Quentin Harris, we were all there together for what now could be called the final lunch. He played at the party we had at Vagabond on the 23rd. Monday he went to a big pool party at the National Hotel, The Three Kings of House, with David, Louie [Vega] and Tony Humphries. Everybody was yappin’ with him. He was in good spirits, and Wednesday he got on a plane to go to Ministry of Sound. I saw something in his face that wasn’t right, but he said he was fine. He cut his set a little short because he wasn’t feeling 100%. His tour manager put him on the plane Sunday morning. He got home. And I guess when he sat on the edge of his bed when he got home, it all caught up to him.”

He went out on the road, as Weinstein recalls, with one prosthetic leg and another one that was starting to have problems. He was getting into DJ booths in crutches, and needed help getting up and down stairs because he couldn’t put weight on his still-functioning leg. He DJed while seated on a stool, and had been in the hospital for much of January with a flu that turned into an infection.

“He knew that he had to slow down,” Weinstein recalls, “not so much the DJ-ing, but the traveling, and be in the studio rather than an airplane.”

Knuckles had been working on new material with Eric Kupper, the keyboardist who wrote “The Whistle Song,” under the name Director’s Cut. He was also compiling a House Masters collection of his mixes and productions for Defected Records, the same U.K. dance label that in 2007 released Def Mix, a three-disc collection of mixes by Knuckles and his peers, David Morales, Hector Romero and Satoshi Tomiie, that remains the best place to take in Knuckles’ smooth but substantial approach to house, one that’s a million stylistic miles from today’s aggressive EDM.

Of course, Knuckles’ music was created through largely electronic means, and, as Weinstein points out, the same schism once existed between fans of orchestral disco and generally far leaner house music. That distinction largely vanished under Knuckles’ light touch. In 1998, Knuckles finally won official recognition for that precision by winning the first Grammy for Remixer of the Year. Chicago itself went further when the street where the Warehouse stood was changed to Frankie Knuckles Way on August 25, 2004, Frankie Knuckles Day, in a ceremony overseen by then-Illinois state senator Barack Obama.

“Deep house” is a phrase that was thrown around in the late ’80s and early ’90s to distinguish soulful house music from more aggressive or commercial permutations, and it’s a phrase that’s made a comeback to distinguish Knuckles’ lineage from much of today’s EDM. What he did was most often deep. If I had to sum up Knuckles’ tender, supple sound with one song, it would the 1991 mix he and his pupil Morales did for Alison Limerick’s “Where Love Lives.” It starts with the kind of piano that makes real club people dance, and continues for several bars without a single drum beat. Then the rhythm machines enter, ensuring that every DJ capable of matching beats could smoothly mix in from the next record if they didn’t dare to start with the bare piano. As the track progresses, the sound ebbs and flows as if it had been orchestrated with real instruments, as if disco hadn’t died at all. “I’ll take you down, deep down where love lives,” Limerick growls in a way that doesn’t leave any place for doubt. That’s where Knuckles’ spirit resides, in that place where love lives, a place designed to live on as long as hips feel that impulse to sway.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Band manager Jack Flanagan has issued the following statement:

“It is with a saddened heart, that I confirm my dear friend Dave Brockie, artist, musician, and lead singer of GWAR passed away at approximately 6:50 PM EST Sunday March 23, 2014. His body was found Sunday by his band mate at his home in Richmond, VA. Richmond authorities have confirmed his death and next of kin has been notified. A full autopsy will be performed. He was 50 years old, born August 30, 1963.

“My main focus right now is to look after my band mates and his family. More information regarding his death shall be released as the details are confirmed.”

Brockie formed GWAR in 1984 as a joke side project to his Richmond band Death Piggy. With the help of several co-conspirators, the group became an outlet for Brockie’s wildly creative and outrageous imagination. Band members dressed in elaborate and grotesque latex costumes, took on stage names (Brockie was known as Oderus Urungus) and created elaborate shows that saw characters eviscerated and audiences spattered with fake blood. Brockie’s music with GWAR didn’t so much touch on taboo subjects as wallow in them like pigs in filth. Bringing a refreshing sense of levity to heavy metal at a time when the genre was awash in negativity and self-importance, GWAR may have seemed like a joke, but the group’s trajectory over the last quarter-century has been extraordinary.

After the 1988 debut Hell-O, which leaned in a punk rock direction and was produced by New York institution Mark Kramer, GWAR switched to a more metal-oriented style on the 1990 follow-up, Scumdogs of the Universe. Aided greatly by the heavily-played video for “Sick Of You,” the group was quickly embraced by the metal crowd and Scumdogs went on to become the band’s biggest-selling album. The broad humor appealed greatly to teenagers — lyrics were gleefully, cartoonishly obscene and violent — but underneath it all was something a lot smarter: a keen, savage sense of satire that followed in the footsteps of Alice Cooper, addressing taboo subjects with tongue firmly in cheek.

Exposure on the hit TV series Beavis And Butt-Head only heightened GWAR’s profile in the early 1990s, and the band would go on to be a mainstay in the American metal scene for the next two decades, drawing legions of white t-shirt-clad fans eager to be drenched in alarming amounts of fake blood pumped out of various stage characters, and most notoriously, Oderus’s foam latex phallus.

In the wake of the death of longtime collaborator Corey Smoot in late 2011, GWAR rebounded with its 13^th album Battle Maximus, its strongest effort in years, and plans were underway for the fifth annual GWAR-B-Q festival in Richmond this coming summer. A popular interview subject, appearing on everything from Jerry Springer to Fox News, Brockie always maintained a strong public profile, whether offering commentary for numerous publications or displaying his tremendous wit on this Twitter account @TheRealOderus. The metal scene will carry on — it always does — but the genre will be a lot less fun without Brockie’s inimitable presence.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

NPR Music’s Ann Powers was in Austin for the keynote, and she filed this report.

Enclosed in a garbage-bag bridal ensemble seemingly designed to remind us she’s wedded to her art, Lady Gaga sat in conversation with longtime music-television personality John Norris Friday morning, pouring forth a stream of strong statements about stardom, artistic freedom and her number-one value, the truth of the inner self. During an hour-long South by Southwest conference keynote event, the platinum-dreadlocked queen of arena-rock transgression shed a tear or two as she exhorted the crowd with inspirational catchphrases and feisty rejoinders to the corporate forces who took her recording career to the top (and more lately, might be dragging her down). As always with Gaga, the interview offered plenty of warm support for anyone struggling with self-definition, and it occasionally turned daring, though not in unexpected ways. Mostly it proved a poignant illustration of just how difficult it is for even our most innovative mainstream stars to steer clear of the fundamental confinements and contradictions of corporate pop.

“I will retire from the commercial market if I have to be something other than myself,” Gaga insisted, after explaining why she agreed to allow the snack-chip corporation Frito-Lay to aggressively brand her Thursday night showcase at Stubb’s BBQ, down the street from the Hilton where the keynote took place. That decision was denounced by some and accepted with a raised eyebrow by others. Gaga argued that partnering with Frito-Lay’s Doritos brand offered an escape route from corporate slavery, because sponsorships allow freedom, while record labels do not. “Without sponsorships, we won’t have any more artists in Austin,” she said, clearly meaning Top-40 artists, not the kids who sleep in their vans to play bar shows during SXSW. Continuing to develop her anti-label, pro-brand rhetoric, Gaga ultimately landed on a catchphrase that expressed both her own confusion and the music industry’s: “Don’t sell out. Sell in.”

“Sell in,” of course, doesn’t mean anything obvious. It does, however, echo the exhortation to “lean in” that serves as a title for Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s best-selling book, and which has become the mantra for feminism’s current full embrace of corporate capitalism. Lady Gaga seems an unlikely figure to take this message to the pop world — Beyonce got there first, for one thing, and for another, Gaga has always stood for the outsiders whose proud queerness or neck tattoos or basic social awkwardness would prevent them from selling or leaning in if they wanted to do so.

Yet it’s not a shock, especially given the career dip Gaga has taken since her latest album Artpop failed to sell as well as expected, that Gaga is struggling to figure out how to maintain the influence that allowed her to become the patron saint of outsiders in the first place. She’s done powerful things in that role, including working for causes like marriage equality in impressively concrete ways. But perhaps Gaga has not always been aware that, like any beneficiary of music-industry promotion, she was always constantly compromising.

How else to explain Gaga’s insistence to Norris that “I don’t know what f— all I have to do with Katy Perry,” despite the fact that both chart-toppers are signed to subsidiaries of the Universal Music Group? Or her advice to young artists to “stop taking selfies, because that won’t make you a star,” when a brilliant and challenging image is so integral to Gaga’s own success? Or her conviction that she’d be happy going back to the underground clubs of New York’s Lower East Side, when those clubs, like underground culture in Manhattan in general, have been pushed out by the corporate forces of gentrification?

The boldness Lady Gaga displayed in her discussion with Norris was that of a dreamer, not a doer: She seemed like someone testing out challenges that might help her make new moves, rather than realistically pointing herself or anyone else toward new ways of being. It was heartfelt, yet her words felt scripted, recalling nothing so much as the dialogue uttered by Hayden Panettiere as the embattled country music ingénue Juliette Barnes in the nighttime soap Nashville.

Perhaps this critique seems too harsh. Lady Gaga remains one of pop’s most fascinating and powerful characters. She’s done real, impactful work for the social causes she embraces, especially marriage equality, and as an artist she remains far more interesting than ninety-five per cent of what mainstream pop produces. And her truth-telling can be powerful. Noting that she’s won Grammy awards, toured the world multiple times, and succeeded in making albums that represent her own true sensibilities, she told Norris that her corporate handlers still valued her looks over her accomplishments. “We just want you to look beautiful,” she said, echoing what she had been told.

“Is it all back to tits and ass?” Gaga wondered. “That’s so sad.”

It is sad that a major industry player would still be required to put her looks above her creative work. Speaking out against this fact, Gaga exposed how limiting mainstream stardom can be, even for those women whom fans idealize as remarkably subversive or at least independent. Yet the most powerful thing about this keynote conversation wasn’t Gaga’s insistence on being herself, but her ambivalence about what that self is really made of. Once she was determined to remake the pop machine from within. Now she’s allowing us to witness her struggle to dismantle it — or perhaps to simply find a way to take apart the creation it made of her.

“Nobody put me in a weird machine and popped me out: Gaga,” she told Norris. The awareness Gaga showed during this conversation intimately illustrated how even major stars are facing a reckoning as the music industry continues to fall apart. Can Gaga reclaim some semblance of the realness she so values through these new assertions of independence? To do so would be a bold mission. Then again, partly because of her, “Bold Mission” is now a well-known Doritos slogan. Between the act and the brand, Lady Gaga — like pop itself — is trying to find her way.

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