As her landmark folktronica album Speak for Yourself celebrates its 20th anniversary, the singer and tech innovator is ready to take your questions

This summer marked 20 years since the release of Imogen Heap’s landmark folktronica album Speak for Yourself – featuring the beloved single Hide and Seek. If you saw that scene in The OC, you’ll never forget it. The album also influenced stars such as Taylor Swift, a noted fan who collaborated with the British singer on her 2014 song Clean; and Ariana Grande, who reimagined the track Goodnight and Go on her own 2018 album Sweetener. A new vinyl reissue is coming out to mark the anniversary.

Speak for Yourself was entirely written, produced and mixed by Heap, who has long been at the vanguard of music and technology, including her creative embrace of AI. Her fans talk about her one-of-a-kind “Imogenation”. She developed a pair of gloves that double as a wearable instrument, allowing her to record loops and add effects purely through gesture, and is now at work on a project called Auracles : a digital ID for music that encourages collaboration and fair licensing for sampling, and helps artists stake their claim to their work as AI muddies the waters of authorship.

Will the Shawn Levy-directed instalment, set five years after The Rise of Skywalker, offer a radial reinvention or return us to a period no one particularly wants to revisit?

How do you reinvent Star Wars? How do you flip the script and subvert expectations for a long-running, much-loved cosmic saga? The truth is, nobody really knows, because other than George Lucas, no one has really tried.

The prequels, for all their beige politics and clunky dialogue, were at least the Star Wars creator’s brave if misguided attempt to rewire the mainframe: a widescreen tragedy about the corruption of democracy, wrapped in a toybox of podracers and CGI frogmen with comedy accents. Elsewhere, experiments have been patchy. The excellent Rogue One took a gritty war-movie detour, only to end with a Vader cameo. The Last Jedi flirted with real subversion, then got bludgeoned into retreat by a panicked studio. And Disney+ has provided everything from samurai-inspired anime shorts (Visions) to Ewan McGregor brooding in a desert hut (Obi-Wan Kenobi). Bold strokes, yes – but ones that have usually been followed by a hasty retreat back to the warm embrace of lightsabers and Skywalker surnames.

(Atlantic)
Seven years after her debut, Cardi B is back with a ferociously enjoyable 70-minute album of eclecticism and enthusiastic annihilation of her enemies

Should you need confirmation that Cardi B’s second album is considered a very big deal, you might consider the response of fellow rapper Young Thug to the announcement of its release, seven years on from her debut, Invasion of Privacy. An artist with 30 gold or platinum singles to his name, he nevertheless quickly shifted the release date of a new album he has been promoting for six months, when it became apparent that it would clash with the arrival of Am I the Drama?

It was a gesture that seems somehow antithetical to the very nature of hip-hop – a genre that’s had gloves-off rivalry in its DNA ever since the night, getting on for 50 years ago, when Busy Bee made the fatal mistake of challenging Kool Moe Dee to an onstage battle and inadvertently ushered in a new rap era in the process. But equally, you can understand Young Thug’s logic. Dressed up as let-me-hold-the-door-for-you chivalry – “It’s a ladies day,” he tweeted – it smacks a little of fear. Perhaps he remembers 50 Cent loudly announcing he would retire if his 2007 album Curtis didn’t outsell Kanye West’s Graduation, then dramatically changing his tune when it signally failed to do so. Why take the risk of being bested?

The great kinetic artist has never been properly celebrated in his home town of Philadelphia – until now. But is a $90m subterranean labyrinth, created by Herzog & de Meuron, really the answer?

A shimmering metallic wall slices through a scrubby mound on the edge of a highway in Philadelphia, like a long steel blade cutting into the earth. Halfway along its length, this silvery barrier flips up, recalling the lid of a giant laptop, forming an entrance canopy that beckons you inside. As you ascend the planted knoll, you find great furrows gouged into the ground, jagged concrete sinkholes from which the peaks of colourful sculptures protrude.

Welcome to Calder Gardens , an otherworldly place conceived by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron to celebrate the work of Philadelphia-born Alexander Calder, master of mobiles. It is one of the strangest cultural complexes to be built anywhere in recent years. On an unpromising site no larger than a football pitch, wedged between two highways, a beguiling sequence of spaces take visitors on a journey of discovery deep into the ground. It is part barn, part cave and part rolling meadow, compressing a whole universe of different gallery types into one compact encounter.

Bold Tendencies, London
The narrative was lost but Oliver Leith’s large-scale work – world premiered here – was full of memorable moments

On one side of the orchestra: a supermarket trolley piled up with domestic castoffs (a drying rack, a lampshade, a Thermos flask, a couple of dustbin lids) and an industrial catering tray suspended from a frame. On the other: a Steinway concert grand piano. Such juxtapositions are typical of Bold Tendencies , the groundbreaking arts organisation based in Peckham Multi-Storey car park, which programmes a wide array of performances in its concrete concert hall a few minutes’ walk from the vivid scruffiness of the south London high street and a busy railway line.

Commissioned by Bold Tendencies, the world premiere of Garland, Oliver Leith ’s large-scale “processional work”, fitted right into its world of equivocal, self-conscious semi-gentrification. Leith, the composer of the critically acclaimed Last Days , begins his hour-long piece with hymn-like piano chords and someone whistling a descant. Then the two tubas of an expanded 12 Ensemble entered with a hefty bass pedal, cueing the first of many slow journeys across the stage travelled by a community choir, the Bold Chorus, and professional vocal ensemble Exaudi. Initially they smiled and chattered before standing to join the pseudo-hymn, their sound warm and wholehearted. Later, grim-faced, they trailed thin ropes of bells, blew through straws, spun whirly tubes, and dragged planks of wood and lengths of aluminium tubing. A couple of singers pushed supermarket trolleys full of glass bottles, shaking them as commanded by scores propped on the child seats.

In this week’s newsletter: Once the preserve of backslapping celebrity interviews and inoffensive segments, late-night TV is now in Trump’s sights – giving its hosts unprecedented political weight

If nothing else, the Trump administration’s assault on late-night talkshows is creating some proper old-school water cooler TV. The first thing I did this morning was fire up YouTube and watch Jon Stewart’s monologue on last night’s Daily Show. Stewart usually only does the Monday edition, but he had made an exception in the wake of ABC’s decision , at the encouragement of the Federal Communications Commission and its Trump acolyte head, Brendan Carr, to indefinitely sideline Jimmy Kimmel. Stewart’s midweek appearance , then, was an event – and one that didn’t disappoint.

Set to the images of soldiers saluting and American flags billowing in the wind, the opening voiceover trumpeted the “all-new, government-approved Daily Show, with your patriotically obedient host Jon Stewart”. Cue Stewart, his usually cool blue set switched out for Mar-a-Lago gold, his eyes nervously darting, launching into 20 minutes of mock-obsequious toadying to “our great father”, praising his state visit to the UK, redrawing maps to reflect Trump’s spotty knowledge of international affairs – Azerbaijan is now officially “Aberbaijan”, and it’s at war with Albania – and frantically shushing the studio audience whenever they laughed at or booed the president (“Shut up, you’re going to blow this for us!”)

Kerry James Marshall unveils a triumphant vision of Black America, the executed queen of style gets her own show, and Hitchcock puts the knife in – all in your weekly dispatch

Kerry James Marshall: The Histories
America’s superstar painter shows his carnivalesque pictures which make Black people the triumphant heroes of art history.
• Royal Academy, London , 20 September until 18 January

Double bill of the beloved 60s animations sees International Rescue coming to foil a supervillain and save some hapless journalists from disaster

Attention all nostalgia buffs infatuated with 1960s kids’ TV: get ready for a serious wallow. This package offers a reissue of two episodes, about 50 minutes each, from the first 1965 season of Thunderbirds, the sci-fi/adventure series performed entirely with puppets and scale-model sets, a format that creators Gerry and Sylvia Anderson called “Supermarionation”. Most readers will probably already be familiar with the basic premise, but for gen Z and Alpha types out there, the idea is that the all-male Tracy family, led by former astronaut paterfamilias Jeff (voiced by Peter Dyneley), operate a private international rescue business with mysteriously unclear sources of funding that sends various super hi-tech vehicles (the titular Thunderbirds) to bail out people in jeopardy. Indeed kids, this is what inspired Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s spoof movie Team America: World Police .

In Trapped in the Sky, an evil Asian supervillain called the Hood plants a bomb on a Concorde-like supersonic plane making its maiden voyage so that he can lure out the Thunderbirds and thereby study their mechanics in order to sell them on. It’s a delightful hark back to an era when industrial espionage just involved covert photography rather than hardcore hacking and intellectual property law. Also, this episode contains posh spy totty extraordinaire Lady Penelope (voiced by Sylvia Anderson herself), and her trusty manservant Parker (David Graham) with his almost prehensile bushy eyebrows. (Parker has to stand up coachloads of guests to Penelope’s stately home in order to help out with the rescue, a shocking violation of etiquette, but needs must.)

As the high-octane Belfast BBC cop drama roars back on to our screens, our man on the ground hits its crime hotspots in an unmarked car … and has to make a quick getaway

‘Look out, guys, we’ve been spotted,” says our driver, raising his right arm to conceal his face as he steers. “That guy’s a known face in organised crime. We need to get out of here.” As we speed out of a north Belfast estate, he checks the rearview mirror. The pedestrian who spooked him is snapping our departing car with his phone. Once we’re safely out of view, our driver breathes a sigh of relief. “That was a close call. I didn’t mean to scare you but that was a bad boy. And he was definitely taking an interest in us.”

As part of our exclusive visit to the set of Blue Lights – which is about to roar back on to BBC One, sirens blazing and bulbs flashing – the show’s creators and police adviser have invited us on a ride-along around some of the locations that inspired the Bafta-winning drama. It’s the first time they’ve taken a journalist on such a trip and nobody’s treating it lightly.