Sonic agencies of climate change refers to the relational fluxes of human and nonhuman agencies sounding and musicking the climate crisis. This article discusses what understandings of Indigenous onto-epistemologies of the nonhuman in commercial music can contribute to the notion and vice-versa. In Greenland, site of the rapidly melting North Polar Ice Cap, popular song lyrics in Inuit Greenlandic or Kalallissut as well as their music videos and album cover art engage nonhuman aspects of human internal experiences and societal coming-to-terms around global heating. Sonic agencies of climate change is used here to investigate how emotion, affect, protest, and debate through musicking—which music scholarship tends to approach anthropocentrically—navigate the nonhuman as well as human-nonhuman relationalities. Relevant Greenlandic musical contents pose alternatives to an epistemology behind climate change, while their commercialization relies on environmentally destructive industries. Sonic agencies of climate change may be politically, ideologically and otherwise complex and contradictory.

This article examines the role of showcase festivals and music export organisations (MEOs) in shaping international music careers amid the digital era’s paradox of access and visibility. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Europe, it explores how these institutions have become central, interdependent actors within a global music export ecosystem that promises opportunity yet often reproduces existing hierarchies. While MEOs provide support through funding, training, and networking, and showcase festivals offer exposure through curated programming, access remains uneven and shaped by structural inequalities. Despite these challenges, the ecosystem offers a relevant, if imperfect, framework for enabling mobility, professional development, and artistic circulation. Its value lies not in guaranteeing outcomes, but in offering a visible and adaptive platform through which careers can be imagined and pursued. By reassessing institutional norms and broadening support mechanisms, this evolving infrastructure holds the potential to promote more inclusive and sustainable pathways for international music development.

Spot the Difference is an album issued by the British rock band Squeeze in 2010, consisting of fourteen strict re-recordings of tracks, mostly found on their 1982 compilation Singles 45s and Under. Squeeze’s output is considered from both a ‘formalist’ and ‘physicalist’ aspect: songs, performances, recording, re-recording. Re-recording is motivated by Squeeze’s becoming a ‘legacy’ act, as concert performances became tied to the 1982 compilation, even as new work was being produced. Close musical analysis (of voice, words, chords, and of sound recording) is eventually centered on the track ‘Tempted’; interviews with key players are included. Evaluation of the album leads to a sharpening of ideas around strict replication in the process and dissemination of sound recording.

Electronic dance music is usually produced and played at fixed tempi. However, tempo modulation occasionally appears within a recorded track or DJ performance. This article explores tempo modulation in electronic dance music production and performance, maps out how the technique operates, and explores the technique’s wider potential. Pivot mixing, where a tempo shift is created by reinterpreting a pivot loop as different note values, can be particularly effective in an electronic dance music context when the pivot is expressed as repetitive material carried across the tempo shift. Many modulations between familiar dance music tempi are possible with conventional note values and can serve as DJ tools yet are largely underutilized. Tempo modulation is not a prevalent characteristic in electronic dance music but when it does occur the technique is highly effective and temporally engaging. Pivot mixing expands the temporal vocabulary of electronic dance music from beatmatching in temporal unisons to temporal intervals.

In this paper, we take a participatory approach to the study of Disabled DJs’ experiences of navigating dance music culture. In collaboration with Drake Music – a leading UK charity on disability, music, and technology – we report on empirical research conducted with Disabled DJs, including media diaries and interviews, and consider our results in relation to dance music and disability scholarship. We show that being Disabled can both enrich and pose barriers to DJing, including experiences of hyperempathy for the dancefloor, conflicted feelings about dancing, and destabilising notions of DJ authenticity. DJing offers a role through which Disabled people can participate in the social and creative practices afforded by dance music culture, away from the crowd and through the music. In this way, this research challenges key essentialisms in dance music scholarship and disability research, including the centrality of dance and body movement and the social deficits of neurodivergence.

The transnational region of Karelia is divided between Finland and Russia, two countries that differ in myriad ways. Karelians have negotiated questions of identity and belonging throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. However, current events, such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and increased contemporary discourses on minority identity as well as cultural appropriation, have made identity questions increasingly salient. Karelian metal music has become an important site for identity negotiations in multiple languages and with the incorporation of sources from history and folklore. This article considers four lyrical themes – belonging, history, folklore, and nature – and how these contribute to identity negotiations. Karelian lyrics are compared with the help of distant reading and thematic analysis to better understand the differences and similarities on both sides of the border. The East-West divide can be discerned from the database, with Finnish Karelian bands more likely to adapt material related to the West, whereas Russian Karelian artists more regularly invoke the East.

This paper examines Kawasaki City’s innovative cultural policy development, which strategically integrates hip hop culture into city-building initiatives. Long recognized as an industrial hub, over the last decade Kawasaki has reimagined its urban identity through youth culture and creative expression, positioning hip hop as a key driver for cultural regeneration and social cohesion. By supporting local hip hop practitioners, such as dancers, musicians, and visual artists, Kawasaki has fostered a dynamic creative ecosystem that supports arts on the periphery, linking the city’s history of progressive politics to hip hop’s iconically urban and forward-looking swagger. This article highlights key initiatives, including the International Street Festival Kawasaki and the Kawasaki Mural Art Project (KMAP), which reflect the city’s commitment to cultural inclusivity. Through the critical analysis of policy frameworks alongside first-hand and archival interviews with practitioners and government officials, this study highlights how Kawasaki City incorporates hip hop’s traditional four artistic elements – breaking, rapping, deejaying, and graffiti writing – into its urban planning in ways that satisfy hip hop community-centred goals. As part of the ERC CIPHER project’s study of global hip hop knowledge flows, we argue that Kawasaki’s model of incorporating hip hop into city-building processes is a transferable one, offering valuable insights into how cultural policies can achieve social inclusion, foster creative economies, and contribute to progressive civic engagement.

Pete Townshend is a rock musician, and around him and the Who there is an important literature. However, his religious universe has been less studied, and it constitutes a fundamental part of his music and personal life. This article focuses on its three main dimensions: voluntary religion, unconscious reflections, and becoming a divinity to fans. The search for identity seems to underlie all three, in either individual or collective processes, as seen in Townshend’s songs, performance rituals, and fans’ devotion. Pete Townshend addressed God in deep and heartfelt prayers, through a medium as secular and aggressive as the Who’s rock, in the struggle to find who he was.