Cal Cashin

UK-based music critic and historian, exploring weird and beautiful music.

Interviews

All of my published interviews to date.

Loud And Quiet •

Madra Salach for everyone

During the mid-20th century, the Tunnel Tigers were a group of elite emigrant labourers from Ireland who carved out the infrastructure of modern Britain. These diggers from the counties of Donegal, Wicklow, and Carlow excavated the tunnels for the London Underground and the Dartford Tunnel – they also set a Guinness World Record of 170m in seven days, after being tasked with digging for the St Fillans section of Perthshire’s Breadalbane hydro scheme.To do this, they had to deal with horrific wor...
The Line of Best Fit •

Posdnuos from De La Soul's personal history in 9 songs

Their debut 3 Feet High and Rising – a heady brew of Prince Paul’s fiercely original sample-heavy beats and the trio’s joyously charismatic bars – was an instant classic, one of hip hop’s first global-smash albums, but that was only the beginning.
With a timeless debut and its distinct, flower-powered aesthetic, the group had seemingly stumbled upon a formula for success alarmingly quickly. Audaciously charismatic rhymes over super playful, funky beats that had the same warmth as ‘60s psychedel...

Sonemic Interview: Lee Ranaldo

Lee Ranaldo has been at the very eye of the storm for almost half a century.

After moving to New York as a noise-curious Deadhead in 1979, he rose to notoriety as one of the most creative shredders in New York's volatile No Wave scene. After the dissolution of his first band, The Flucts, he played on The Ascension, Symphony No. 1 (Tonal Plexus), and more, as part of Glenn Branca's legendary Experimental guitar ensembles, before forming Sonic Youth in 1981 with Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon.
The Line of Best Fit •

Haruomi Hosono has a message from the heart

The first solo record in seven years from Haruomi Hosono – one of the most influential figures in Japanese music – is a stripped-back, sentimental sojourn through the sounds of Brill Building pop, bossa nova, and Beethoven but, as he tells Cal Cashin, his head is firmly in the present. Over half a century into an iconoclastic career, Haruomi Hosono has nothing left to prove. But that doesn’t mean there are no new roads to travel down.

He was still a sociology undergrad at Rikkyo Uni...
The Quietus •

The End of the World According to Whom?: Hesse Kassel Interviewed | The Quietus

With a population of almost 7 million crowded into a large Andean basin, Santiago is a metropolis isolated by the world’s longest mountain range. If you look up from the Chilean capital’s main drag, you will see a sky pierced by a patchwork of mountains and skyscrapers – but all the more remarkable is the tremors from below: the sound of the underground.


There are very few music scenes more exciting or inexplicable than what has been dubbed La Nueva Escena Chilena (“The New Chilean Scene”), a...
The Quietus •

The Highs are Higher: An Interview with Curbside Lambsear

As caroline's Magdalena McLean and The Umlauts' Annabelle Mödlinger announce their dazzling debut EP as Curbside Lambsear and gear up for this year's Green Man, they tell Cal Cashin about pre-destiny, self-education, and the vulnerability of venturing out from large ensembles The Umlauts’ Annabelle Mödlinger and caroline’s Magdalena McLean will be familiar faces to anyone attuned to the frequencies of London’s many underground music scenes, but their latest project is a delightful left turn. As...

Sonemic Interview: Lucy Liyou

A masterful pianist, composer, and collagist, Lucy Liyou is an avant-garde force for the post-post-Internet age. Now based in California, she weaves together grand Electroacoustic tapestries, mixing virtuoso piano and bizarro samples with charismatic vocals and deadpan text-to-speech. Her music pulls in all sorts of Experimental directions; buzzing digital soundscapes, needling classical solos, and, increasingly, towards the dramedy and theatrics of pop music—a lot to get your head around, but so very worth it.
The Quietus •

A Different Beast: Abigail Snail Interviewed | The Quietus

Abigail Snail capture lightning in a bottle and Rad Berms is one of the best debut albums you will hear this year. Cal Cashin speaks to Stef Kett and Will Glaser. Photographs by Alex BonneyThey may have chosen to name themselves after an entirely different denizen of the garden, but it is the zigging and zagging of a pair of butterflies that the vital new free rock duo Abigail Snail evoke so emphatically. Their debut album Rad Berms is all manic elegance and fluttering interplay – an antsy, fran...

Sonemic Interview: Marissa Nadler

The very prolific Marissa Nadler shows no sign of slowing down, and her music shows no sign of speeding up. Knotty, imaginary Folk dreamworlds, her songs feel like growing, organic, living things. She spins ethereal sound fields from complex fingerstyle guitar, and adorns each track with beautiful vocal performances – often under a shroud of otherworldly reverb and glacial echo.

She has been an underground staple since her Sacred Bones Records breakthrough July, and continues to perfect her craft. New Radiations is her eleventh solo album (alongside a litany of collaborations and covers albums), and it is possibly her finest work to date. It sits on the apex of Americana, Dream Pop, and Contemporary Folk, and every song sounds like it would be the perfect way to close an episode of Twin Peaks: The Return at The Roadhouse.
Loud And Quiet •

After Party: Cameron Picton follows Black Midi with maximalist baroque folk half-band

One of the brightest, most beloved, and most imitated bands of the last ten years, it was little surprise to many when Black Midi burnt out after a stellar triptych of incendiary records. After the extensive, exhaustive Hellfire world tour, the band called it quits in 2024 with a series of innocuous social media posts. Landing with a bmbmbm but taking off without as much as a whimper.“I think it probably went on a bit long,” Cameron Picton tells me, calling in from New York. “But that happens… I...

Sonemic Interview: Charles Hayward (This Heat)

There are very few bands from their era that have aged as brilliantly and boldly as This Heat. The London trio, active from 1975 to 1982, were true outliers from the Punk / Post-Punk / Hardcore and Post-Punk scenes that raged whilst they toiled away in their own quarters. Whilst they did share traits with their contemporaries — dismembered guitars, abstract political commentaries, and numerous sonic experiments — the end result was truly singular.
The Quietus •

Direct Action Gets the Goods: An Interview with Leather.head

Off the back of an incendiary debut record that was one of 2025’s best rock albums, Leather.head speak to Cal Cashin about the importance of keeping things political, uncompromising collaborations with poet Zia Ahmed, the reclamation of emo and moreLeather.head’s Mud Again, their incendiary self-released debut, was one of the finest and most fully realised rock albums of 2025. The real deal. 


Across its 37 minutes, the South London rascals’ fractured collage of blasted Slint guitars and explo...
The Quietus •

tQ Subscriber Release: Ex Agent

At the forefront of an underground British guitar scene that's thriving against all odds, Ex Agent have delivered an idiosyncratic, ever-shifting, and excellent new EP exclusively to tQ subscribersNever did we think it could get this bad. Alongside the frankly evil cost of living, prohibitively expensive rehearsal spaces, and the fact that even finding a grassroots venue in which to make strange noise can be an arduous task, it is a very bleak time to be a young band in the UK. And yet, against...
Loud and Quiet •

O: "Most drummers would be able to pick up juggling" | Loud And Quiet

O golly, O gosh, O boy, O wonder. O can perhaps be compared to contemporaries like Sons of Kemet, who mix their jazz training with thunderous songcraft to create music that is more about momentum and motion than melody and harmony. Indeed, despite connections in London’s fertile jazz scene, O have more in common with dozens of other genres than they do with jazz.  “I did a lot of stuff that I’d say was more in the jazz world,” Keary says, having cut her teeth as part of the Tomorrow’s Warriors i...
Loud and Quiet •

Wu-Lu: community spirit, post-genre creativity, and rose-ringed parakeets - Loud And Quiet

Wu-Lu is Miles Romans-Hopcraft, producer, multi-instrumentalist, tamperer, but he doesn’t make all the music on his own. He’s the head chef, with a cast of chefs de partie in the wings. “Sometimes,” he says of his compositional style, “it will be me, in my bedroom, with the MPC, getting all close. That might transpire into something I’ll show to the band – they might play on top of it, or incorporate it into our set.“Or,” he continues, “I’ll get together with the guys, hang out, chilling and jam...
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