"My purpose was simple: to catch the feel, the pulse of rock, as I had lived through it. What I was after was guts, and flash, and energy, and speed" - NIK COHN - ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "When the music was new and had no rules" -LUNA C
My Instagram keep throwing up reels of Charlotte de Witte , who apparently is one of the biggest deejays in the world. I thought I'd check out her stuff, so tried the Mixmag mix she did in 2021 Where I heard this: Thought it might be some old skool acid from back in the day I'd never heard - but it was originally released in 2019 by one Robert S . I cannot believe this kind of thing is still being…
I was quite taken with the Bass-O-Matic album, cringe though the band name is In the review, I make that cardinal rockcrit error of looking for the dance artist who can sustain at album level. Writing still from outside the culture at this point (October 1990, a year before the Conversion). The technorave-chillout yen for Pink Floyd is worth a mini-essay - wasn't there some ambient house (89-90…
Thanks to Gemma Ross for including Futuromania in the Mixmag list of summer reading for dance music fiends T he full list is here , a worthy bunch to sit alongside indeed
From a 1971 issue of Melody Maker Still, there are two turntables - plus bonus feature of a built-in cassette recorder! This slight return is picking up on the earlier post about the extensive prehistory of discotheques and "disco music" - prior to disco as we have come to misunderstand it. A time when the music was as likely to be some form of rockin' pop as it was soul. And deejays used a a…
Pure Gurley gorgeousness in this Rogue Unit mix Such emotional subtlety to almost anything Steve Gurley touches The other versions - nice 'n' slinky Ray Keith (+ Nookie) work-over in two parts and then the Shades of Rhythm version, the "Hard" Halfway through there's the pleasant surprise - what the Nuumologist lives for - of the Rufige Cru "Menace" diva sample appearing. Here it's much closer to…
Fun and fascinating - with fabulous fotos - Danceteria oral history by Joy Press , aka the missus, who was a regular at the legendary New York club in the 1980s. Everyone from Madonna and Fab 5 Freddy to Marc Almond and Johnny Rotten to Beastie Boys and Butthole Surfers (worth reading the whole article just for the "piss wand" story) makes an appearance. Something in the air clearly - in freaky…
Had Instagram for ages and ages but never got into looking at it regularly until quite recently.... the algorithm quickly learned to serve me up dance music, as that's what I'd linger on. So what I get is an endless succession of reels of deejays playing tunes, either in their living room, or it's clips of them performing at a rave. Occasionally there'll be one where a DJ or producer talks about a…
Sourced in Isn't she lovely? After N’Joi , Saffron fronted - front being the operative word - this Republica tune that I file with a lineage of excitable go-for-it ladette pop ( Icona Pop , "I Love It", Pink "Coming Up", Spice Girls 's "Wannabe", Ke$ha "Tik Tok" / "We R Who We R", Martin Solveig + Dragonette "Hello", Ting Tings "The Drums", right through to Charli xcx ) Even more delightful in…
Well, a dream comes true - I appear on a pirate radio station. Except it's legal now, but still - Rinse FM ! I am talking - alongside Martin Clark aka Blackdown - about Burial 's debut album , which came out 20 years ago - on Eclecticist 's show on Rinse. Now I think about it, I have been on a pirate before - twice in fact. The first time was inadvertent: BBC radio (I think Radio 4) had done a…
Well, I may not have provoked a musician to pen a retaliation tune (unlike my own flesh and blood, who recently joined a select pantheon of irritant critics). But I can now bask in having inspired a song, and one made by a well-known and highly regarded group too: electronic act Overmono. Their single "Lockup" - which heralds a new album Pure Devotion - apparently came from reading not Energy…
Made me mad? Sent me to sleep more like! It's nearly always the case that the things that are touted for their supposedly superior musicality, are actually - on inspection - rather meagre, musically speaking. Timbrally and tonally impoverished. Especially when compared to the alleged hoi polloi of the day. Far more startling melody-dissonance clashes and harmonic strangeness to be found in the…
This video for the Monolithikmaniak mix of “Window in the Sky” - only to be found in this fuzzy, off-TV video cassette recording - is some kind of audio-video apex of its era. The chaste frenzy of the female dancers, who look like twins, but aren’t The sound, so original and consummate - not techno but pure rave: those swoops and the squitty synth riffs that mash and mesh into the breakbeats,…
Missed this 2016 tune, nodding back to / riding on a 1997 tune that's some folk-memory persistence some contiNUUMity ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Ooh a UKG refix of what on some days is my absolute favoritest jungle tune of all-est time. This looks to have been not made during the height of speed garage but much later... It is admittedly not great but... It's the thought that counts! Let's hear the…
Everyone knows about Moving Shadow coming from Stevenage But I hadn't realized that Ruff Kut! Record s was from there As in The Good 2Bad & Hugly Variously spelled - sometimes there's a comma, sometimes it'se "The Good", sometimes it's Hugly and sometimes the Hugly, and sometimes there's an ampersand and sometimes nothing at all Like The Criminal Minds , the ruff-cut origins are in Britrap Those…
Enjoy this forensic analysis by Michaelangelo Matos of a classic pirate radio set. Presented yesterday at the EMP conference, it's titled " W e Can Be Free”: The Pirate Radio Explosion of Ezee D on Don FM (February 20, 1993) and can be enjoyed in script form at MM's Beat Connection Substack . Enjoy also the set itself at Soundcloud I once gave a talk titled "Just 4 U London" at EMP, back when it…
This pair had a Top 10 hit with a song that is basically about an intra-scene war - the nu garage rappists (Oxide + Neutrino, So Solid) versus the old guard. Represented here by the sour faced, jowly, paunching-out a bit deejays who get their comeuppance thanks to a G-Force rippling blast of noise. Portion of the lyric The garage scene well it's really fucked up Certain guys can't, won't keep…
just some of the obvious greats... but Sly (with and without Robbie) did all sorts of odd things Dunbar worked on a record by Jackson Browne!
Brand-new anachronism from Z-Neo Fault-less - very-nearly-convincing as time travel The artwork by one AROE is very in the wildstyle of DJ Trax early releases on Moving Shadow release rationale " Z-Neo's new album RE:Z is his fantastic & most exhilarating 12 track masterpiece, quintessentially a ’92/93 hardcore rave piece of perfection. If you have his EP’s and previous Trueskool album (both sold…
Big shout to Matthew Ingram the Mighty Woebot whose tape of the early Black Dog EPs introduced me to their most magickal musik phase. Here is Matt's lovely tribute to the Black Dog from a few years ago Here's my own writing about the group: THE BLACK DOG, The Book of Dogma emusic, 2007 A legend in techno circles, The Black Dog’s music is like the missing link between Coil’s eldritch electronica…
Talking about favorite records of the 21st Century so far... I contributed, just barely, to Resident Advisor 's Best of 2000-2025 epic with a mini-review of The Caretaker 's Everywhere at the end of time . Kieran actually contributed more blurbs, in both the albums and the tracks categories, including one for Joy Orbison 's "Humph Mango" (RA taking the mickey a bit? ) So despite the enormity I…
A long overdue big shout going out to S. Vispi, B. Thomas, D. Duncan aka Intense aka Babylon Timewarp aka various other identities Here's a disorganized playlist including also some of their celebrated remixers and allies like Little Mat and D.O.P.E.
Always felt this tune by Dev , "In the Dark" - my fave single of 2011 - was a UK garage flashback / rip-off. And now I realise that the main reason that it has that association for me is the parping synth-horn vamp that comes in at 32 seconds - a UK Garage hallmark . Not only are those horns horny, the song itself is about being uncontrollably horny. At this point Dev had the sexiest singing voice…
Three pieces very much worth reading: 1/ James Parker with a short piece at the Atlantic on the mystery of drumming and its relationship to Time and Flow (spinning off a book that also sounds worth reading: John Lingan’s Backbeats: A History of Rock and Roll in Fifteen Drummers 2/ Ethan Hein blogging about the Amen Break with an inventory of sampled examples of use. 3/ Nick Coleman substacking…
I have long delighted in this 1957 quote from Dr. Joost A.M. Meerloo - what a name! - on the subject of rock and roll and dance mania. Don't think I was able to deploy it in Energy Flash itself but it got included in my Rave Theory Toolkit : "Why are rhythmical sounds and motions so especially contagious? A rhythmical call to the crowd easily foments mass ecstasy: 'Duce! Duce! Duce!" The call…
Published by Rolling Stone Books in 1976 Which is pretty quick off the mark (and again, another strike against the idea of the blinkered rockism and exclusionism of the rock press) Abe Peck was a serious journalist, whose pedigree included stints on the Underground press of the Sixties What I like about Dancing Madness is how different its perspective is from the disco scholarship of recent…