Alongside this week’s interview with our guest Hamley Jenkins - more on her shortly - by scrolling down you’ll also get some articles I’ve read these past couple weeks that I found appealing for different reasons and that you might enjoy too, plus our 4th mixtape with 7 new tracks: I’m 100% sure you’ll find at least one you love in there. The band Guillotine is on the cover of this one.

That’s what you get with every issue of How We Listen, by the way: an interview with a guest who absolutely loves music, exploring the (very cool) things they do, how they ended up doing that, and the ways they discover music. And the aforementioned recommendations. If you haven’t yet - I strongly suggest you check out last issue’s interview with Joey La Neve DeFrancesco of musicians’ union UMAW. It’s my favorite one so far.

I’ll try not to mention it more than once in this article, but if you like what you’re seeing here - you can start getting these issues straight in your inbox by subscribing for free.

I just turned thirty last week, by the way. If you feel inclined to give me a birthday present, sharing the newsletter with a friend (or friends, plural!) is more than plenty.

It’s that time of year: the mornings are rainy in London, and today we welcome Hamley Jenkins as the guest of How We Listen’s fourth issue. If your Instagram algorithm has gathered that you like jazz, the name might sound familiar. If you’re a regular at jazz shows across London in particular, you will probably have spotted her in the past. Hamley is a British artist who draws wonderful sketches of musicians in their element, when they’re live and on the stage. Since being asked to attend and sketch at Wilderness Festival a little over a decade ago, Hamley has developed a unique and recognizable style, and her work includes drawings of Jacob Collier, The Banger Factory, and many others.

She was kind enough to meet me in a café in Shadwell on a late Summer day to tell us how she got started in art, learning to draw on the go, the importance of giving people a chance, and how she listens.

Hamley is pictured above in a self-portrait she made, and was kind enough to send over other drawings of hers to add some spark to this newsletter. You can reach out to her for commissions or to purchase prints via her website.

Hello Hamley, and welcome to How We Listen! Very happy to have you here. Tell me a little bit about your journey with art and drawing - when did you start?

I started painting between 2005 and 2007, somewhere around then. It was my passion. At that time, I had two roughly 5-year-old girls to look after. Once they started going to state school, I had more time, and I started going to drawing sessions.

The main teacher there had an opportunity to sketch at Wilderness Festival. I was doing the drawing because I wanted to get better at painting. That is the skeleton in a painting, the composition and the drawing are the skeleton that you hang the painting off. The rest is extra – volume and tone. If you can’t draw, in the sort of painting style I was doing, it’s very difficult to become very good at it.

So I get this opportunity to sketch at Wilderness Festival as their sketch artist. Fortunately for me, it lasted 5 years, so I went 5 years in a row. I would sketch for a week, and it was mainly people who were moving. Nobody was sitting still, like they would do in my class. Each time I went, by the end of the festival I had got a lot better. But I wouldn’t do it for the rest of the year! By the time we got to year four, I was like, “I need to keep this going”. So I started trying to find places to sketch.

I began, first of all, in comedy clubs, because it was free to get in. Although as they say, when they pass around the bucket, it’s not free to get out! And also, when they saw me sketching in the audience, they would often stop their routines and say, “are you drawing?” I didn’t like the fact that I was sucking away from the show. I like being the observer.

I had been to this jazz club which was around the corner from me, the Jazzlive At The Crypt in Camberwell. And I’d loved it. I’d been going because when I was pregnant with my firstborn, I was told that if you listen to either jazz or classical music whilst they’re in the womb, it can help their language skills. So, I was like, “oh, there’s a real jazz club around the corner, and real music is better, so let’s do that.”

Was jazz a part of your life before then? Or did your love for it start at The Crypt?

My first ever boyfriend was a trumpet player and had an absolute passion for Miles Davis. My family were into classical and pop music like ABBA, which I know word for word, but I didn’t know anything about jazz. As far as I was concerned, jazz was Miles Davis. And I loved it!

When I started going to the club, I was being introduced to more and more different types of jazz. One of the things I realised of watching jazz music live [is that] it is so much better than just listening to it. Some of the stuff I couldn’t listen to, but I could watch it, because you see the skill in performance.

I started going back to this jazz club because they had a free jam session and I wanted to draw. One of the things that really struck me was the courage of the musicians. They were often quite young, some of them still studying, some of them not studying but just very talented, natural musicians, if there is even such a thing. They were going up and they were performing without knowing what they were going to perform. That just blew my mind, because I’d done a lot of theatre and I wouldn’t dream of getting up on the stage without knowing what my lines were.

I couldn’t get over it, and it really inspired me, because I also couldn’t take the drawings home and work on them after. I was looking at the drawings I’d done of these people, and thinking, “they’ve got up there, they didn’t know what they were going to do, and they just went with it.”

The guy who set up the club, Russell Occomore, who I found later was a graduate of the Camberwell School of Art, was very pro-artists. [The place] is a charity, he set it up with a number of other people, but it’s really become his space. It was always his passion and a dream, with his twin brother, to open a jazz bar. And I believe having a sketch artist was part of the vision – I didn’t even know that was possible.

He said to me, “do you want to come back?”, and that’s why I ended up going there so often, because he gave me the opportunity. And you really need people like this, who give art a chance. You need opportunity, and people manufacture opportunity, it doesn’t just happen by itself.

When you started at Wilderness Festival - did they already have others sketching there?

I think the opportunity was there because they knew of my teacher, Alex Cree. What they did have [before] was what they called “roaming players”: people who had skills like juggling, or singing, or magic. So I received free tickets and a stipend to turn up and draw.

What would they ask you to sketch? The artists, or the crowd?

I had no brief whatsoever. They said to just come and have a great time. And for me having a great time means that I draw people. I was very inspired by the musicians who were wandering around in small groups. I started drawing them. I had been very focused on audience, I think because of my theatre background. I’ve always been concerned with both sides of the stage, so I just naturally drew the people.

Again, it was one of those things where someone gave me an opportunity.

When I look at your drawings of live music, I can see a clear and recognizable style, enough so that if one popped up on my feed, I would probably know right away that it was your work. Did that style develop over time, or did you strike lightning with it immediately?

The former. And I’m quite proud of that now, because it was developed over such a long period of time. There were technical issues… you’ve been to jazz clubs: they’re very dingy. I couldn’t see my paper. Initially, I had a book light. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, to detract from the performers.

You’re the fly on the wall.

Yeah. I really admired the musicians that I was drawing, so the last thing I wanted to do [was to draw attention away from them]. I try and keep myself less visible, at least until the interval. It was about being compact. I limit the size to A3. Jazzlive at The Crypt is quite small, so it was out of consideration for the other members of the audience. Using Wolff’s Carbon, which is a very dark, compressed charcoal, and chalk, which makes it shine. It was also about expedience, I couldn’t draw a representation of all the things in front of me, and the time limit forced that issue – I have two 45-minute sets, and I need to achieve something within that time period. I have been completely trained by it – if I’m listening to live music, I feel weird if I’m not drawing it. It is a learned reaction, but initially it was a journey of discovery.

I did try a lot of things, I experimented with color because other artists were using color in that scenario, but I found that under the very strong lighting of the stage, I couldn’t and didn’t like doing that, because I couldn’t control my color choices.

Right at the start, I did a lot of sketching at what’s called an EMOM – an Electronic Music Open Mic night. Totally anti-acoustic. They would put a whole series of amps which they ran the sounds through, and they’re moving cables… I was sketching them because my friend was organizing the night. That was extreme lighting, because they were also doing audiovisual displays, with psychedelic lights cast over my paper.

Then I moved on to jazz, which was a bit more manageable because it wasn’t so chaotic. So that really is responsible for part of the style, because it has become black and white, and it’s effectively line drawings. You could almost etch it.

Have the audiences had an impact on what you do at all?

I would be remiss if I didn’t say the audience also educated me. They are really partly responsible for how I draw. When it came to drawing, [I was very] academic. And you can’t do that very fast. They would come and give constructive criticism, and I was getting the message that [drawings] being recognisable was being rewarded. I always say that artists go towards the light, and if you encourage them, they will lean in that direction.

You mentioned the story of your boyfriend who loved Miles Davis and introduced you to a lot of jazz. I’m curious to hear how your knowledge expanded, and how you discovered new jazz artists from there?

There were several systems. One was Russell, who set up the club, he really loves his challenging jazz. I mean, he’s an art student! He told me about a “drummer poet”… I didn’t understand it at the time, although I did admire the way he played the drums. He was very technical. He had this setup where he had just two other performers, one on the guitar and one on the bass guitar. He had a microphone, and he’d drum explosively and then stop and scream “I want my treasures”, about 10 times. Then he would go back to drumming furiously, and then he would scream again. Russell said that, at the previous performance by this drummer, he was very impressed by the audience: by the end of the night, there were still five people left in the crowd. Most of them left after the first hour, because the jazz audience is so tolerant.

I was being educated in this place for at least the first two years, because I couldn’t go anywhere else, I couldn’t afford to. I didn’t realise what was happening, I was just trying to make my drawing better, and I really enjoyed doing it to the music.

What is it about watching music live that most excites you? What inspires you as you draw?

One of the things I love about jazz musicians is that there is this collaborative element. For any musician, you have to be able to collaborate with your fellow bandmates. And it’s very important, especially in jazz, that you listen to each other. There’s this conversation that’s occurring between other people on the stage that you’re watching. As an audience, you’re in a position where you’re a voyeur – and I’m an artist, that’s something I like doing anyway, I’m there to watch.

Everybody’s there to watch, and that’s so much part of the joy of the music. If people around you are very enthusiastic, you’re met with a very positive response before you’ve even listened to the musician.

Is this still the main way that you discover new music? Going and drawing something, watching it unfold in a live environment?

Well, I have to give credit to Instagram, Spotify and Qobuz, for introducing me to new musicians. You have to train your algorithm, and I was accidentally doing that by going to these jam sessions and following the people when I did a drawing.

And because of that, I would get pinged with other musicians’ work, who were friends of them.

I would also turn up to jam sessions, and see somebody like Grifton Forbes-Amos, who I really love. And then I’d keep seeing other performers who were their friends, who would perform with them, like Sokkyo. Because of that, I was going to other jam sessions, and I would follow them on Instagram. It’s all enmeshed.

Because you follow these musicians on these apps, and you get other suggestions, it takes the algorithm away from the trash that they deliver up to you.

How do you follow up, once an artist has caught your eye on social media? Do you keep a list of things you want to go back and listen to? And are there any other artists who have impressed you?

I’m really bad [at that]. I should be good, I used to be a secretary. I have notes all over the place, and sometimes I’m on my desk and find something I wrote down 6 months ago. I would like to say there’s a “later” list, but I also believe in synchronicity. It’s part of the magic of the world, isn’t it? Sometimes you just bump into people or… something happens.

There’s an artist called Lilah Esther, she set up a jam session that I went up and sketched, and that introduced me to a lot of people I didn’t know before.

There is a pianist called Luke Bacchus, I saw him many years ago with an artist called Amy Gadiaga. She’s originally French and sings and plays the double bass. Another luminary like Esperanza Spalding. Amy impressed me so much that I followed them. And then a few years down the line, Luke gets nominated for Young Jazz Musician of the Year, or something like that!

Thank you for joining How We Listen, Hamley. I normally do this at the beginning of these conversations, but I still want to ask you, as nobody can do it better than you… How would you describe yourself and what you do?

What I always say to people is that I draw jazz musicians, live. With an emphasis on the word “live”.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

If this is your first time coming across HWL - welcome to the crew, and thank you for being here. Here at How We Listen, we love music discovery. It’s becoming increasingly hard to find time for it these days, for many, many reasons, but there is still plenty of joy to be found in it. The guests that come onto the newsletter every two weeks certainly believe so too (you can read issue 1 with Giles Bidder of podcast 101 Part Time Jobs here, and issue 2 with Anahita Shamsaei of the label/community Makaan Records at this link).

With every issue, you also get a 7-song playlist with songs I think you’re going to like, plus a handful of recommendations of the best music-related reads (or videos, or podcasts, or artists) that you can spend your time with. Keep scrolling to find all that.

You can of course subscribe (for free! no transaction!) to receive our bi-weekly issues in your inbox by typing out your email and clicking the button below. Should you ever want to reach me, feel free to email howwelisten.newsletter@gmail.com.

I thought the season would have shifted by now but we’re luckily getting one more day of warmth in London, and we’re just as lucky to have an interview with Joey La Neve DeFrancesco coming up in the third issue of How We Listen. Joey is a very busy person: in 2020, as the COVID pandemic brought everything to a halt, he was part of the group that founded the United Musicians and Allied Workers organization, also known as UMAW. The collective aims to unite and organize musicians in the United States and beyond to educate, to help, and to obtain better working conditions not only for its members but for the wider music community in the country & the world. Joey’s years of experience in both organizing and as a musician, via projects such as punk band Downtown Boys (whose latest record Public Luxury came out in June) and solo endeavor La Neve, contributed to several campaigns that UMAW has spearheaded. These include the proposed U.S. federal bill The Living Wage For Musicians Act which UMAW co-authored, as well as their fights for increased and fairer pay at Austin’s multi-day festival South by Southwest, where they are also campaigning to keep war-profiteering companies & sponsors away from the event. If you’re interested in joining UMAW, their website is the best place to gather information and get involved.

Joey joins How We Listen to chat about his history spread between playing music on the road and unionizing, UMAW’s efforts, becoming enamored with artists who stand for something, and how he listens.

Joey, thank you for joining us and welcome to How We Listen. Let’s start with the tough questions. Who is Joey DeFrancesco in a nutshell?

I’ve been a musician for many years, now mostly with the band Downtown Boys where I am a composer and play guitar. I’m also the founder of a group called United Musicians and Allied Workers, or UMAW, which is a musicians’ union.

We’re everywhere in the world, though we’re largely centered in the US and North America. We try to organize artists collectively to take power back in the music industry, to better distribute resources in the industry, to get artists paid more fairly, to organize artists in solidarity with Palestine and the BDS movements, and much more.

UMAW started during COVID. You’ve gone on to gather a thousand-plus members, you’ve started several campaigns, co-authored The Living Wage For Musicians Act, and more. What was it specifically about the pandemic time, what made that the moment to get going?

I had been touring in Downtown Boys and other bands for many, many years. I was involved in labor organizing for many years. When I was younger, I was organizing hotel workers in Providence, Rhode Island, at a hotel I worked at. I had, for many years, talked with other musicians on the road, other musicians we were working with, about all these terrible conditions in the music industry and had done some shorter, smaller efforts to organize artists.

For instance, in 2017 around the South by Southwest music festival, when the festival was working with ICE to threaten to deport foreign artists who were supposedly breaking South by Southwest contract clauses. There was also an effort to boycott Amazon Music around the same time period, over Amazon’s working with the Trump administration and with ICE.

Then 2020 hit, we had a network of artists who I had worked with and done organizing with in the past who were suddenly all out of work. It was a huge thing with COVID: you had artists who suddenly had a lot of time [on their hands] because nobody had any income anymore, all touring was shut down, and so on.

The contradictions and the wealth disparities in the music industry that already existed really intensified during COVID. We saw, for instance, Spotify double or triple its valuation at the same time that every single artist was totally out of work, totally out of business.

So I think people were very angry and also had free time suddenly to start organizing. It was a very active time politically for a lot of people. There were these massive protests around Black Lives Matter, there was a lot of organizing for other types of independent and precarious workers in the US to get unemployment benefits, and that was some of the first UMAW campaigning.

In the US, you don’t get unemployment benefits unless you have a very standard employer-employee relationship in your workplace, or your former workplace. Musicians don’t have that, so at first we were not eligible for unemployment benefits and other kinds of benefits during those early days of COVID. So I think there’s a lot of factors that finally got us all together into these rooms to begin realizing this idea that I think a lot of us had had for quite a while.

One of the things that struck me about UMAW, other than the campaigns that it has led, was the internal communication service you have for your members which seems like a vital resource. Why do you think that part is so important to them, and how much of the job is educating? People might know what they’re fighting for, but may not know how the process works.

The theory of change we had at UMAW from the beginning was that us, as artists, and particularly the type of artists UMAW organizes - largely middle level, smaller artists – where we have power is through organizing large masses of people.

And this is true of any type of worker, right? You only have power when you unite with your other workers and act collectively to fight back against the boss, and to take back your resources and your power in that workplace. So for UMAW, from the beginning, we knew we were not going to be some kind of very top-down non-profit, where we just have a few staffed people who send out communications and put out reports and stuff like this. No, our goal from the beginning was to get as many people involved as possible. And we have a very broad tent, a very broad definition of who can join, who counts as a music worker, and so on.

We very much value, as you mentioned, keeping everyone up-to-date with everything when we have organizing events and need to turn out for a protest action, for a city council meeting, to make phone calls to lawmakers, whatever it is. We really focus on activating our members. We have a couple thousand people who are paid, more formal members, but we have tens and tens of thousands of people who are in our broader network of email lists, Slack channels, and social media. So our principles, our power, come from mass organizing, and that’s what we try to focus on.

Another part that stood out to me was your Office Hours program, the educational series UMAW hosts for its members. I’m aware it might just be one an “extra” and not your central offering, but as we both know very well, the music industry is so hush-hush about almost everything. And when a musician, or anyone else, finally speaks up about something, people are always so surprised to learn how things work because plenty of things are just simply left unsaid. How did the concept of the Office Hours start, and why did you feel it was needed?

We’ve done the Office Hours as well as some other popular education efforts, but that was definitely our biggest series. You’re right, so much of the music industry is very cryptic and very difficult for a lot of artists to follow what’s actually going on, particularly things like royalty payments or how streaming payments actually work, or how booking breakdowns work at different venues. A lot of the industry’s exploitation is really underpinned by a lack of information, a lack of knowledge sharing.

Take something like booking. It’s very hard to know [how a lot of it works] unless you work with an official booking agency. And even then, what are the guarantees other bands are getting? What are the deals and the door deals other bands are getting? What standard can you ask for from a venue?

This stuff is kept in the darkness because it benefits the employers, and the big labels and the big companies involved in the music industry, to keep this kind of stuff in the darkness. So when we can do stuff like our Office Hours education series, just doing popular education and other mechanisms and panels we’ve had as part of our protests, the more we can expose this stuff in the music industry and get our members and other music workers knowledgeable of how the economics and power in this industry actually work, the better we can then organize people and make musicians feel empowered to demand what they deserve.

You founded your own band Downtown Boys with people you had met at a hotel you used to work at, during union meetings for the hotel’s workers. From the very beginning, clearly, Downtown Boys has been a politically charged band. Your new album is the first one since UMAW started: has that had any direct impact on the band?

That’s a good question. I think it’s had an impact on my time. If I didn’t do UMAW, maybe we would have gotten it out a little bit faster. But everyone in the band has been doing different organizing projects and other projects this whole time.

UMAW, as I was explaining, I think was a natural offshoot of other organizing I and the rest of the band were doing already. So I don’t think [this new record] is that much different in terms of outlook, or political messaging. I’ve certainly come out and been much more vocal as a critic in lots of parts of the music industry. Who knows to what extent that’s maybe made it harder for Downtown Boys to be heard, or get covered or booked places, if there’s any of that kind of retaliation going on.

The music industry has changed a lot this time around, the last nine years… Putting out the singles we had on this record, there’s so many fewer music outlets willing to cover smaller bands, or explicitly political bands. The algorithms, whether it’s Spotify, YouTube, Instagram, are just so much more of a driver of everything than they were even 10 years ago. It’s certainly a disheartening industry to be working in, but there’s still a lot of people who are still pushing to make sure stuff is heard and listened to and thought about in serious ways.

I’m not sure how much UMAW informed exactly the songs we’re producing and all of that, but it’s certainly part of this very different context we’re going to be releasing this record into, absolutely.

AI is the next important barrier facing the music industry, and I’m sure this is discussed often within UMAW. It’s also one thing where all the arts seem to be - or at least are destined to be - fighting or trying to regulate together. Do you see a world where unions in music, film, and everything else work together towards resolution or hopefully making some sort of sense of how AI is progressing and affecting different fields?

I think you’ve already seen it in the US. I don’t know what the situation is like where you are, but in film and TV, a few years ago the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild both had quite long strikes of more than six, seven months that were massive across the country, but particularly in New York and LA. Both those groups were negotiating their new contracts, and they won - this was in 2023, I believe - so this was still [towards] the beginning of some of this AI tech stuff.

They won, in their contracts, some great protections against AI, including things like: AI can’t be in writers’ rooms, AI can’t be used on scripts that are copyrighted, SAG-AFTRA won protections against actors’ likenesses being replicated with AI against their consent, or without their consent.

That stuff was won not through vague online discourse, or individualistic opting in or opting out; it was won through the labor movement, and there’s still a lot more to win. But these were significant victories – I feel like they aren’t talked about enough – and there’s no reason musicians cannot win similar protections. We’re finally seeing more traditional union structure in the US for musicians; the American Federation of Musicians fighting back and running lawsuits against Suno and some of these AI companies.

We think they need to be doing more to push back against them, but if musicians were more organized here and anywhere, I think we’d have regulations in place to where a company like Suno just really should not exist. We shouldn’t have these backroom secret deals that Spotify is cutting with these AI companies. And yeah, we need lots of regulations, including the Living Wage for Musicians Act, which is the big bill that we’ve been pushing to re-regulate streaming, but it also specifically cuts out in the bill to say that only human artists should be paid this new royalty we’re creating, and it’s not going to get paid out to AI production companies and so on.

There’s a lot that needs to be done, but I think the fundamental thing is that artists need to be more organized, like the TV actors and the writers are, so we can get these protections.

We’ll come back to the Living Wage for Musicians Act and other UMAW campaigns in a second, but I did want to ask about how it all started for you, discovering music as a kid. How would you normally find artists that you’d fall in love with?

A lot of those were word of mouth from friends. I am old enough to remember: the internet was there, but it was mostly file sharing still, pre-streaming. So I would look at music websites, good music journalism on Pitchfork, Brooklyn Vegan or whatever blogs I was reading that I can’t quite remember the names of right now, to find newer stuff and stuff that was exciting to me.

I think it was an interesting time to be a young person, getting excited and getting into music, because it was post-Napster and file sharing coming out. It was also post-MTV as real music discovery, there was MTV but at that point it had already transformed into something that wasn’t playing new exciting music anymore.

I think a lot of it was happening in early internet music journalism that was very thoughtful - not always very thoughtful, I’m not defending everything that was on Pitchfork in 2010, or whatever - and there was just more discussion going on. There wasn’t as much corporate consolidation in media, it wasn’t Penske Media owning every single music website, or Condé Nast owning every single music website.

You could have stuff that was more unusual, more varied, more strange. You could have local music message boards and blogs existing to recommend stuff. And once I got into playing music, so much of the music discovery was from bands we’d play with. Or when I was running a show space in Providence, it was bands that would come play the shows with us, and that we’d become friends with.

How has that changed for you? How do you go about discovering new artists in 2026?

My favorite way is still via seeing artists live. We’re about to go on tour again in a serious way, which we haven’t for a while, and for instance we’re playing a bunch of shows with a band called Pop Music Fever Dream. That’s a newer band in New York, and we’re doing a little tour with them. It’s been exciting to be listening to them, and I’m pumped to be performing with them a bunch.

There are people that are in the UMAW network who I’ve gotten really into. There’s a Lebanese artist named Yasmine Hamdan who is incredible. Her record, “I remember I forget” was one of my favorite records last year. One of the first things I was listening to was a video she made for one of her singles last year, this beautiful video for the title track, I loved the animation. I then contacted the animator for that video to make the video for our single that came out a few months ago, called “You’re A Ghost”, who did an incredible job.

I feel like just from looking up that animator’s work, and what artists he has worked with, what artists Yasmine has played with, I end up finding a lot of stuff that I’m excited about. This kind of connection via a broad sense of community of people I’m working with, or playing with, or who join UMAW, that’s also become a cool kind of music discovery mechanism for me. Meeting so many new people and so many new artists, finding out what their projects are.

Continuing to prioritize that kind of community - whether it’s bands I’m playing with, artists I’m working with, bands I happen to see opening for a different band that I love in New York, people I’m organizing with - having that kind of personal connection for me is always very meaningful for adding context to the music and making it mean something.

Would you say you need to have that added context in order to pay more attention to something?

I don’t know if there needs to be, but in terms of thinking about music in the sense of building this community, I think it makes it mean a lot, and for me it makes it certainly more meaningful. I think it’s a good antidote to just being fed endless stuff on a Spotify auto-generated playlist that the algorithm wants you to listen to.

If you think about other sorts of media or art - films, books, even journalism. If a recommendation comes your way, do you welcome the same kind of added context? Or is that something specific to music that makes it more personal?

I think it works similar for whatever you are working with. If your friends are recommending something to you, or you’re seeing a film… I don’t mean to say that you need to know the film director to appreciate the film, but understanding the context they’re creating this in, understanding what it is coming out of, certainly makes these works more meaningful.

I think it is important as, again, a counterpoint to this AI slop that quite literally has no context, or algorithmic recommendation systems which are also designed to remove the context of listening to an album, or being a fan of the band. But having these AI-generated auto playlists and everything, feeding us everything from films, to summarizing articles, to creating music playlists, whatever it is, it by its nature strips all of that of its meaning. I think if you really want to feel something with the stuff you’re listening to and reading, I think it’s important to try to add that context back in.

You’ve mentioned a couple artists you’ve enjoyed recently, and word of mouth is central to this newsletter. Are there other songs or albums or artists that you want to shout out?

I want to shout out that Yasmine Hamdan record again, I think it’s a really important record that is written in the context of three years of Israel’s genocide in Palestine, and now the invasion of Lebanon. I think it’s very, very difficult to create a record in response to something that’s still going on right now which is so heavy, and still make this record that is musically beautiful and meaningful. It stands out to me as something really special and beautiful.

The last few months I’ve been really obsessed with the band Crack Cloud. They’ve gotten press attention here and there, they have somewhat of a fan base but their last couple records haven’t been quite reviewed as much, maybe because they’re just so prolific. But I think they are really one of the smartest, most exciting bands out there.

I recently saw my friend Katie Alice Greer perform her new record “Perfect Woman Sound Machine, Vol. 1.” Katie was in a band called Priests that Downtown Boys played with a bunch in the mid-2010s. She just put out this new record in April of this year, which is great. It was really cool to see her performing.

I want to finish by asking you about the wins you’ve had so far with UMAW. What’s the campaign that you point to first when talking about the organization? What’s the defining UMAW moment so far?

Our biggest win that is a clear win has been getting raises and BDS commitments from SXSW. After campaigning the first year and second year, we won pay raises for artists for the first time in decades for that festival, via our collective organizing. And we also won – via our campaign along with the Austin for Palestine Coalition – a commitment from the festival to kick out the weapons manufacturing industry and the US military from sponsoring or presenting at the festival.

But there’s still work to be done, right? They backtrack on both these things a little bit every year, including at the SXSW London that happened recently, where Hasan Piker was scheduled to speak and they didn’t defend him when the UK government prohibited him from entering the country. There’s still a lot of work to be done at SXSW, but it was our collective organizing and artists coming together that actually won pay raises for thousands of artists at that festival.

It’s the first time this has happened at a major music festival like this. It’s really kind of a proof of concept for UMAW, that we can do this kind of mass organizing of artists and wield this collective power and win real victories like that.

Thank you, Joey. You guys are doing something very useful & important.

Excited to see this come out. Thank you for involving me. Sounds like a really cool, important thing to be getting out there.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

First things first - THANK YOU for being so kind and supportive of this launch and the 1st issue. I’ve been positively overwhelmed by the love shown by so many people I trust and respect. Very grateful.

If you’re just joining us now - welcome! How We Listen is a bi-weekly music newsletter focused on discovery. Every issue comes with an interview with a very cool someone who loves music more than almost anything else, where we chat about who they are, what they do, and how they find new artists to fall in love with. We want to celebrate the joy there is in being intentional! Additionally, you get a new 7-song playlist with every issue, and recommendations of the best articles / features / podcasts / etc that you should be reading, watching or listening to in the next couple of weeks.

Don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t yet (button below!)

Our first issue featuring Giles Bidder, host of the podcast 101 Part Time Jobs, is available to read here. Oh, and you can read a little bit more about the newsletter on our About page.

Before we get into this issue’s guest and our recommendations of the week - I thought I’d once again mention that you can always reach me for your own suggestions (music, articles or podcasts to highlight, guests you think we should have on, unsolicited advice and insults, whatever you fancy) at howwelisten.newsletter@gmail.com.

It’s still surprisingly sunny in London this morning, and we are joined by Anahita Shamsaei of Makaan Records. Originally from Iran, Anahita founded Makaan Records in London with the belief that “everyone deserves to be seen and heard”. The label and its community, developed by Anahita and her fellow Residents, focus on underrepresented artists from the regions of Southwest Asia, North Africa and the Middle East, giving them a platform to be heard. A large part of this is done via Makaan’s all-night events - often taking place at Fold’s Steam Room in London - where techno artists of different backgrounds take the stage, both literally and figuratively: with the help of projectors, musicians who cannot join the party physically due to visa restrictions are able to perform in places they wouldn’t have been able to perform in otherwise. Anahita, who is also a DJ, calls it a “station for everyone who has always been unseen and unheard.”

Makaan is doing important work, and I am very lucky to have had Anahita on for this issue. Keep scrolling past the first batch of recommendations to find out more about her story, about Makaan Records and its events, and how she listens.

Hello Anahita, and welcome to How We Listen. First things first - tell us a little bit about you and what you do!

My name is Anahita Shamsaei. I’m now living in London, and I’m the founder and a resident at Makaan Records. Through my work in the humanitarian sector, particularly with refugees, I have always worked on the frontline and I’ve seen many who have faced restrictions and incredibly difficult circumstances, but still remained dedicated to their music. The kind of underground music and events we were involved with in Iran faced significant restrictions, and we didn’t have the kind of club spaces we have here in the UK. For me, it was just like a fight. And it was very male-dominated. I felt we needed more women in this scene. I felt I wanted to play techno specifically because techno is like a genre of resistance.

What made you start Makaan to begin with?

I felt that there are so many parties, so many events that are happening, but Makaan is not entertainment: obviously, we dance there, we enjoy, but there is a reason why we are there. Makaan is like a station for everyone who has always been unseen and unheard due to censorship, due to so many restrictions, borders, sanctions.

I saw so many amazing, talented artists within the regions, and elsewhere, everywhere. It doesn’t matter who they are, but that they’re being unseen. It started because I felt there was no space for us, any space where I felt belonging. And it felt like there was a necessity to make this a station for everyone.

Was a place, or a community, like the one you’ve created with Makaan, something you realised you were missing as you were coming up? Or is it something you look back on now and think, “I wish I had something like this back then”?

To be honest, Makaan started because I came out of my job in Istanbul, where I was a field investigator. Then I moved to London, and I was waiting for my partner, and I thought “let me do something.” I didn’t plan to make Makaan. I saw so many displaced people and refugees who could die on boats as they’re coming over, going through incredibly difficult journeys while still holding onto their dedication to music. That’s how much dedication they have. They must be seen. So who could do that? I thought that maybe I could.

So I started Makaan as a space for everyone to be seen, with the help of our residents. This space was missing.

In June, we had our tenth event - Makaan 10 - and it went really well. And it’s because of teamwork – anything can happen with a team.

How does your team work? And how do you get artists involved?

It’s me and the other residents. For mastering, my friend Bobak helps. Regarding finding artists, I don’t look at who has the most followers or visibility on Instagram. I look for very niche artists, who have even lost motivation. Because how can they sell their tracks on Bandcamp, or how can they be on Spotify, when there are sanctions?

That’s why we release music from that region specifically. They send [the music] to us, Bobak does the mastering, and we release it from here.

I know that a big part of it all is the live aspect of things, the shows you’re setting up, like the Makaan 10 party you just mentioned. What’s the goal behind these, and what do you hope people get from attending them?

Obviously, bringing more artists to be seen [is one of the goals]. We had so many artists that couldn’t come here because of visa restrictions, but we make it possible with a projector. The artists send me their video and set. There was one from Syria [for example]. I was looking for one in Iraq and I couldn’t even find them, to be honest. I do a lot of research to find artists.

I believe Fold has one of the best sound systems ever, and I believe everyone must be heard with that sound. It’s hard when you use the projector – people are confused, “what is happening?” So we have to explain it.

At some parties, we have the projectors, at others we don’t. That depends on the visa barrier. Otherwise we focus on unseen artists here – there are many amazing artists here that can be booked or be heard, but they can’t – because of competition, because of the algorithm, because of this system of capitalism and commercialism.

In Makaan, all lineups are artists that maybe people don’t know – it’s a cultural exchange of sounds.

I’d love to hear about the beginnings, when you were younger and first getting into music and techno. How would you fall in love with an artist?

In Iran, it was mainly through my friends. And it was always techno, it was never house or deep house, it was always techno for me. It started with my best friend from childhood – he’s one of the residents at Makaan, Aram – he was taking me everywhere. And I wondered, “how come there are no girls around?” Something is missing, we need to be more visible. But now everything has changed, in Iran.

I used to find music from my friends. I didn’t even know most of the DJs from over here [in the UK], the known ones. People thought I was lying, but I wasn’t – because my friends in Iran weren’t showing them [to me].

How do you do it now? Of course, the record label and Makaan in general must have such an impact on how you discover music.

I listen. And I trust when people tell me that an artist is good. I go and check them out. It can be from the energy, but it won’t be the amount of followers – word of mouth for me matters more.

It’s really easy to curate a lineup of well-known DJs, people will come. But there are so many artists that are unseen, and what I want to do all the time is to bring them so they can be seen.

People will tell me to bring an artist because they’re well known – and I go “no way, there is no headliner.” I don’t believe in headliners. Everyone is a headliner. Everyone needs to play two hours. You don’t play two, three hours just because you are someone.

And because Makaan is non-profit, everyone helps. Shout out to all the residents, they’ve always been by my side and each of them helped me. Even the Notion feature [where you found out about us] it came through Sita [Shah, one of the residents].

Is there anything that, to you, separates one artist from another instantly, when you’re just discovering them?

For example – recently I got to listen to Kiss Nuka more. She messaged Makaan actually, and I saw that she’s always playing live, and she changed my perspective a little bit regarding sounds. I’m tired of constantly hearing repetitive techno – all of our residents feel that way, that’s why they’re Makaan residents, we represent with sounds, if that makes sense.

Taha, our other resident, he comes from Algeria. In one of our EPs – the track Sahara Raha – the vocal is from a person in the desert, in the Sahara. That’s why I say it’s a cultural exchange.

Kiss Nuka did that for me, and I was in shock. Because someone giving that frequency to me, which made my brain actually tired because of so many different sounds, I was just in shock about how amazing you can play live. Not everyone can get that, because people are used to that kind of techno in a way. It’s always educational – and Kiss Nuka is a well-known person in the community, who talks a lot about community, identity, and belonging. So she’s not just an amazing artist, but also a very good person.

How do you stay up-to-date with music news?

I do a lot of research myself. I love to download sounds specifically and add them to techno. Our residents always tell me about new people, or people also send me their demos. And through friends!

If it weren’t for Makaan - do you think you’d still be as active in your research?

Good question. Yes. I would like it even more, because it would be for me alone. It would be just Anahita Shamsaei, not Makaan. When you have that, it’s kind of a responsibility as well. But if it was Anahita alone, then I wouldn’t have it – and it would be even better. That’s the honest answer!

As you’ve said yourself multiple times - word of mouth is so important, it is for me too and it’s such a big part of this newsletter. I would love to hear about songs or artists that you have fallen in love with recently.

Taha One - “Dzayer” is a track that I really love. Makaan has also recently released Barzakh, a 10-track compilation featuring different artists.

Thank you Anahita, for joining How We Listen.

Thank you for having me. As I said, it’s all about teamwork. Through your platform, Makaan will be seen. And Makaan is not Anahita, Makaan is a station for everyone. So whoever wants to send their EP or music, they’re more than welcome.

Since we’re just getting started, I wanted to tell you about what you’re getting into here:

In an age of passive listening & algorithmic predominance, How We Listen is a music newsletter focused on the art of discovery: twice a month, I’ll be speaking to all kinds of interesting people about who they are and what they do, their relationship with music, how they find new music to fall in love with, and how that search has changed over the years.

Once every two weeks - delivered straight to your inbox - together with a few recommendations of the best music-related reads and news of the week, and suggestions from both myself and our guest to hopefully put you onto something you might not have been aware of yet. You can read more about what spurred the launch of this newsletter in our About page.

If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe for free by clicking on the button below. You can also follow How We Listen on Instagram.

And if you have any recommendations you want to share - new music, articles / podcasts to feature, or anything really - you can always reach me at howwelisten.newsletter@gmail.com.

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It’s a sunny yet chilly morning in London today, and for HWL #01 we are kindly joined by Giles Bidder, host of the beloved music podcast 101 Part Time Jobs. In over 300 episodes, Giles has chatted with the likes of Brian Fallon (The Gaslight Anthem), Amy Taylor (Amyl and The Sniffers), politician Jeremy Corbyn, Matt Berninger (The National), Johnny Marr (pictured above with Giles) and so many more great personalities about - among other things - the financial difficulties of being an artist, especially in the early days. He has guest hosted BBC Radio 1’s Rock Show, stood at the top of the UK Music Podcasts charts, and he was also once part of the great British punk rock band Great Cynics (sorry Giles, had to mention it!)

I’ve been a fan and a listener of 101 Part Time Jobs for years, always impressed by how knowledgeable and passionate Giles is. I am very grateful for his time and support, and extremely happy that I get to have him on as first guest.

Keep reading to find out more about him, his podcast, and how he listens. Plus some articles to add to your favorite Read Later app this week, music recommendations from myself and Giles as well as a playlist with 7 songs worth checking out.

Giles, please tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do these days!

I’m a music fan. I played in bands, put on shows, was involved in all of it. And at some point in my mid-20s, I thought “damn, there’s no money in this.”

I realized that it’s an important conversation for loads of different reasons. To help inspire people, to help people find a connection with the artists they love and then the economic, political, cultural understanding of it. I think most people who go to a gig, who buy a ticket to go see a gig probably won’t really understand how difficult it is for artists to be there in the first place, and that it’s only getting harder.

And I was like, “I kind of want to do this for myself”. I want to reconcile this kind of confusing, complex situation. But as more time goes on over the last five, six years of the show, I’m really happy to keep on learning that it’s helpful for the culture as a whole.

Because the more we understand how people do it, the more helpful we can be. Ultimately music is an entire industry run out of passion, it’s not really run out of money. People don’t get into music for money, but you need money: you need money to exist, you need to pay rent.

And that’s the kind of bottom line for me. Music contributes so much to everybody personally. The more music, the more art that’s out there, extending into comedy and film and acting, the better the world will be. That’s the spirit behind it.

And that goes into physical spaces as well, like whether your area has a youth center. I was really lucky to grow up in a town where we had a youth center where the kids from all different types of schools would, once schools were clocked out at four o’clock, because some people didn’t want to go back to their families, or because they had a rough situation there.

What I’m interested in there is: how does that affect people? And it’s all about people. I’m interested in people. If you were to meet my family, they’d just ask you questions about yourself, and that’s where I’m coming from. I just like hearing about other people. I get excited about what other people do. That’s what makes me happy, seeing people do stuff and succeed and feel open to be themselves. And now, increasingly, it’s a protest to be yourself unapologetically.

That’s something that’s really, really important to me. And I feel incredibly lucky that I can do it. I’m so fortunate I found a way to be in a position where I could tell other people’s stories.

It’s evident when listening to your podcast, and how you interact with guests, that you are a musician yourself, and that you have been a touring musician specifically. Is that still a part of your life? Do you ever miss it?

101 Part Time Jobs does what I wanted to do with writing songs better than I ever did before. It took me a good while to be able to say it and understand it in this way: it’s connection and conversation. That’s what I wanted to do: make connection and conversation.

That was always the nugget of gold inside of me. That’s why I want to be here. Feeling like part of the bigger thing in the room. Now, with 101, I feel like I’m contributing to this conversation and I can use my experience for good.

There is a lot of pain that comes with being an artist because you’re really putting yourself out there. And in so many different ways, there’s always twists and turns, the way you see yourself can really fluctuate and your own sense of self can be so detached from reality.

That becomes difficult. I feel now that I can use my experience to make good, use my experience for positive. And my experience helps with interviewing bands and artists because not every interviewer has been in the shoes of an artist, in a Sprinter Van like the artists that I have had on have. So I think that immediately finds a connection. Sometimes it’s not even what I’m saying, it’s a bit of an energy, an acceptance.

Is that what keeps it vibrant for you after all these years, trying to find that connection? Or what is it?

I feel fortunate from an audience point of view that the way the world around us has changed, and is changing so quickly, actually makes our show more and more relevant every single day, which I feel grateful for: that I can contribute to that conversation and have some kind of part in people’s understanding about the way the world is changing. I think people are a lot more open about it now.

Because it’s right and fair that people talk about earnings, about being fair. We need to help each other now, now is the time that we really need to help each other. And sometimes that’s just talking.

One of the reasons I’ve been able to do 101 is because I lucked out and found a place I could live in that was affordable, and I’ve stayed here eight, nine years, and live with my partner. It’s just important to work out how to be sustainable.

I wrote a column for the i Paper for 10 years and for the first five years I didn’t get paid for it. I kept on asking them and eventually they did. It wasn’t much, but for those first five years I was writing a column that was valued by PRs, and it was valued by readers and artists. I was very happy to do it and I’d do it under the desk or in the toilet at my day job, but asking to be paid for it felt like I was “cap in hand”, asking for more.

The real damage of that is that identity thing where you’re an unpaid intern, and you don’t feel your own value and you don’t take your work importantly, because how can you? You know you’ve got nothing to back that up, and that’s the real damage. I think that’s a huge reason why there’s not much journalism today, because no one’s had an opportunity to get good at it, because they haven’t been paid for it.

That whole unpaid internship thing just killed the whole business.

Interview continues after a couple recommendations!

You’ve been able to achieve quite a few milestones with the podcast – reaching the top of the music podcast charts multiple times, guest hosting the Rock Show on BBC Radio 1… Are you someone that attaches a lot of value to this kind of wins?

Radio 1 is massive, yeah. It felt so cool to be on Radio 1 and talk about High Vis, and say how I put on one of their first gigs in a pub down the road here in southeast London, to introduce their track and say “this is my story, what is yours?” I want that to inspire people.

I’m a bit of an “everyday, wake up and go” kind of guy. I probably don’t celebrate myself as much as I should. I don’t really pat myself on the back sometimes.

It’s always the next thing for me, that’s what I mean. The only thing that I’m really thinking about is, “what’s the next thing?” “What can I do that’s putting something good out there in the world?”

That’s 101. I feel so grateful to do 101 because it’s a whole project that’s based around that.

Doing 500 episodes, though, that was great. The milestone was when we had a party and my mom came, and she said it was the best night of her life. That’s what I’ll remember from that milestone.

To go around chatting to all these friends, labels, artists, PRs, chatting to them about their lives. That’s what I’ll remember about 101 reaching 500 episodes.

Let’s get into the topic at hand. I want to talk about how you discover music, starting with your younger years. How would you usually find a new artist you’d fall in love with eventually when you were a teenager?

My older brother, and my friends. Back then I would look at the gig listings on Kerrang! and NME and, if they were pretty interesting, then I would go listen to them. That’s how I found out a lot of bands - they were playing in London or near where I grew up. I was just desperate to go to gigs. Very early on, gigs became my social life. That’s how I made friends.

I was always more interested in the local bands, they always felt more important to me. I don’t know why. I would be happy to go see a big stadium show, but I was always more keen to go to the local ska punk or hardcore gig. The mixed local bill, which could be good ones, or it could be not so good ones. But just being there always felt more real.

How is it for you now in 2026? What’s the process like these days?

Working this job and having PRs understand my music taste, I’ll listen to anything they send me. Whether it’s big or no one’s ever heard it before. I’m lucky. It’s a music fan’s dream, just open the emails - I get 100 emails a day - and it’s just bands, bands, bands, bands, bands, bands, bands. Obviously, you can’t listen to it all, but you can try. YouTube’s pretty good for discoverability… KXP sessions, NPR. And support bands, of course.

The friend group WhatsApp, though, I think is probably the most consistent, powerful way to do music. There’s no better PR than just someone telling their mate, “holy shit, have you heard this? You’ve got to come with me to the gig.”

My favorite time to listen to music is before I’m going out and I just sit in the house, get ready, do my hair, put some clothes on… That consistent environment scenario. I remember being a teenager and making these new friends and going around their house, everyone had their GHDs, the girls were doing their straight hair, and the boys too. We’d listen to Enter Shikari, and Gallows, and Bring Me The Horizon. That’s a good environment to listen to music in.

Do you think it would be vastly different for you if you didn’t have the podcast? You wouldn’t have PRs filling your inbox every minute of the day, obviously, but as a clearly very passionate music fan, how different do you think it would be for you?

Putting myself in my friend’s positions, who don’t do this kind of work... A phrase that always comes up, and that I think probably most people feel like now, is “I’m out of the loop”.

There’s so much music out there. It’s hard to say, but some stuff comes across you and you get into it, other stuff doesn’t and you maybe never hear it.

And that’s why festivals are important. Primavera Sound is obviously a legendary one, End of The Road and Green Man are huge. This kind of curation is really important now. It always has been. Just looking at the playlist that End of the Road and Green Man put out, I think it’s probably one of the best ways you can get into music.

They’ll put on the bands and artists that don’t have a million fans who have been booked because of their music and only their music.

And even if those bookers are booking it because they know the agent and there’s more of a legacy route, the agent is probably working with them because they’re good.

I think you’ve got to trust. I like to think the music industry is people who just really care and love about music, because why else would you do this? You’ve got to work and put so many days and hours and years into doing stuff for very little money. To stick at it, I like to think that you’ve got to be a real big music fan who gets excited and sees music.

There’s loads of great stuff out there. There’s always new stuff to be found.

Have you ever had a moment like that yourself, like the friends you mentioned that feel out of the loop – did you ever have moments when you felt a little bit out of touch, or not willing to get into new music?

Yeah. You can definitely get fatigued or overwhelmed. And it’s probably part of human nature, we don’t like what we don’t know and we don’t like what we don’t understand. So you need to get over that to ultimately get rewarded for it. When you pick up a CD or you see something, you think “I’m not sure.” But when you actually get into it, that’s a really great feeling. And that’s just something you have to do yourself, no one else can make you do that, but more often than not, you’re going to get rewarded for it.

When it comes to shortform content, platforms like TikTok – do you ever fall in love with artists you’ve found through those avenues?

I find artists who I think are funny. Lewis Capaldi’s a great example. Or someone who’s really eloquent: anytime you see CMAT on the red carpet, she says something that makes you think “this person is interesting, is on the right side of history, is making a positive impact on culture.”

I think that can really elevate an artist. And that’s what we want to do for 101. We want to put out stuff that makes people go “wow, this band’s really interesting”.

We just did a reel with Westside Cowboy, they’re part of this collective in Manchester called No Band Is An Island, and they just started working with UK-Med, this humanitarian charity in Manchester. If you see that, you think this band has something to believe in, and believing in something is a real protest now. It is a rally to believe in something, and we’re seeing more of that in music.

It’s no longer just the song, it’s not just the music. It’s the culture around it and the importance and the value of it. Is it helpful? Is it helping people get through their lives? Is it not making other people’s lives harder? Is it contributing? Is it helping the world around us? I think more and more people are seeing that.

I’m very interested in the relationship between podcast listening and music listening. You tend to think that they are very different things that don’t intersect. But time is finite, right? There’s only so much time we have these days. Has podcast listening had an effect on your music listening time?

I think the cool thing about podcasting is that it can be like the theater of the mind. It can be really calming, and soothing, and kind of meditative to listen to a podcast.

I think a lot of people’s behavior with podcasts versus music is [based on] where they are. Are they getting the train to work? Are they at home doing the cleaning? And with music, are they listening to the radio? Are they listening to Alexa at home and asking it to play 6 Music?

For me, it’s based on that. I listen to Radio 3 Unwind at night, it helps me go to sleep. I will listen to podcasts on a Sunday, if I just need to get out of the house because I know it’s going to make me feel better, and just go for a walk. And then music for me, thankfully, is work, so every day I’m listening to music. I think people do associate physical places with podcasts or music.

A big part of this newsletter is word of mouth. Are there any artists or songs that you’ve particularly enjoyed recently that you want to shout out?

They’ve been around for a few years, but caroline I think are one of the most innovative, interesting artists out there. The new Ratboys album is amazing, “Singin’ to an Empty Chair”. Madra Salach, people are writing about them quite a lot, I really recommend them.

An old one that I just got recommended from Run For Cover’s Instagram is this band Acetone, who I immediately liked.

And I’ll give you one more recommendation: Jasmine Myra, she’s amazing. It’s instrumental, orchestral, pretty chill. It’s really great.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.