I came across the book in one of the final pages of a recent The Wire magazine. It plays with the name of one of the best soul records ever (that had been played with in another book context too), and proposes a journey through contemporary (urban? digital?) music. But the lives and careers of Devonté Hynes, FKA Twigs, Daniel Lopatin, Earl Sweatshirt and SOPHIE give way to much more: it's also a book on how modern music gets enacted, the relationship to the Internet, how what we listen to now stands on the shoulders of what came before; it describes itself with the subtitle The New Icons of the Internet Age. A wonderful resource, then, for the curious minds, and to those who rejoice in paragraphs such as:

It’s there in full effect on the first song, ‘By Ourselves’. As with any decent piece of musical theatre, the first instrument we hear on the record is the piano. One hand taps a melody, the other presses out the rhythm. This refrain is actually from the first few seconds of a Charles Mingus improvisation called ‘Myself When I Am Real’. Out of the hundred or so albums Mingus made, that LP – Mingus Plays Piano – is his only solo performance, and the only one on which he set aside the upright bass and sat at the piano instead. When Devonté heard that part for the first time, he rushed to the studio and clipped the MP3, knowing that it was special. He later removed Mingus’ hands and played the part himself, rewriting the notes towards an apex which wasn’t there in the original, and wrapping a vocal melody around them – turning one melodic moment from a jazz improvisation into a pop song.

Chapter 1: Devonté Hynes / Blood Orange