Moon Safari (Air)

Boards of Canada have created some of electronic music’s most distinctive and strangely familiar sounds: music that seems to evoke memories you’re not quite sure you ever had. We explore their mysterious world of faded childhood imagery, analogue textures, warped melodies and unsettling nostalgia, and ask: why does their music feel so much like a memory?

Artificial intelligence is suddenly everywhere in music: writing songs, generating voices, creating performances and raising uncomfortable questions about creativity, ownership and what it means to be an artist.But is AI really the unprecedented disruption it appears to be? Music has always evolved alongside technology, from synthesisers and drum machines to sampling, Auto-Tune and digital production.In this episode of Low Noise, we consider the arguments, the anxieties and the possibilities. Is AI a threat to musicians, simply another creative tool or the next stage in music's continuing evolution?

David Crosby is one of those musicians whose life story can sometimes obscure his music.The Byrds. Crosby, Stills & Nash. Laurel Canyon. Drugs, prison, fallouts, extraordinary excess and, eventually, an equally extraordinary late creative revival.It's quite a story.But take all of that away and something much more interesting remains.Because David Crosby made some very strange music.His guitar tunings didn't always behave as expected. His songs could seem to drift rather than progress. Harmonies appeared in unexpected places. And when much American songwriting seemed to be heading towards increasingly definite forms, Crosby was often interested in ambiguity.Nowhere is that more apparent than on his 1971 solo album If I Could Only Remember My Name — a record populated by some of the most celebrated musicians of its generation, but which somehow feels less like a collection of songs than a place you temporarily inhabit.And then, remarkably, decades later, Crosby began making some of the most adventurous music of his career.So beyond the mythology, the arguments and that unmistakable moustache, what made David Crosby musically different? And have we perhaps underestimated him?

What makes The War on Drugs sound so familiar, yet so completely their own? Drawing on the widescreen sweep of classic American rock, Adam Granduciel and his band transform guitars, synthesisers and repetition into something hazy, hypnotic and strangely timeless. We explore the music, influences and atmosphere of The War on Drugs — and ask how heartland rock became a dreamscape.

Can an album be nostalgic for a future that never arrived?