April 2012
1 post
Rubbish Raver
I wrote a thing, for a journal called Loops, which was put together by the excellent Richard King at Domino Records and Lee Brackstone at Faber & Faber (who got me brain-bent at Green Man Festival shortly after its publication).[[MORE]] My thing was published pseudonymously nearly three years ago, and as the intention was that there would be a Part II, I kept it that way.
But as Loops is...
March 2012
3 posts
Something For The Weekend
I did a mix. Where the previous ones I’ve done have mainly had a theme or concept to them, this one is just “here’s some bang up to the minute club tracks”. [[MORE]]Couple of big anthemy ones, some upcoming stuff from the promo inbox, and a few exclusives including two tracks that are going to be on the first couple of releases on (OMG) the new label I am starting with Tom...
Past, Present, Future... And Then What?
A couple of weeks ago I took part in a panel discussion hosted by The Wire, talking to Kode 9, Simon Reynolds and Lisa Blanning about “Aesthetics, Innovation and Tradition” - which kind of amounted to “is there anything new in rave music, and if so what is it and where does it come from?” You can hear it all here:
It’s 90 minutes long, so I’ll forgive you if...
ELECTRO NOW!
With each shift in British and global electronic music culture, a myriad but finite set of influences get shuffled about, some occurring for the first time, some returning to prominence, others disappearing completely. But certain of those influences abide through the decades, whether that be soul, psychedelia or electro. And electro’s presence seems to be as strong as ever, thirty-plus...
January 2012
1 post
Never Trust A Hippie... BUT......
I still find it odd how few people are documenting the history of rave culture and music, at least in relation to other comparable movements. The 60s pop explosion and counterculture have been picked apart in acres of print, likewise punk rock. But for all the mid 90s post Trainspotting hype on “chemical literature”, and sterling documentary efforts from a brave few rave hasn’t been written...
October 2011
1 post
140's not dead.
This mix relates partly to what I said the other week about grime and partly to what I said about smooth soul. It also features the first of many things I’ll be doing with artists I met in Brazil this month, in its intro track by the outstanding Anna-Anna. But mainly it’s just about frustration at people thinking that finding a new tempo equals originality. Fine, find your inspiration...
September 2011
1 post
Acid in yer crevices
I’ve been thinking about acid, and house music, and electro, how they all fit together, how they are retro and how they are modern. I’ll do a notebook piece about it later, but here’s a DJ mix I did (on Ableton, mind - my mixing skills are much untidier than this “live”) while I was thinking about it.
ACID IN YER CREVICES
* = unreleased tracks
*Tanka –...
August 2011
1 post
Grime time
I’ve had a lot of contact with the new school of instrumental grime recently, and it’s an area rife with possibility. It’s going to be absolutely fascinating seeing where it goes over the next year and whether it can capitalise on the opportunities presented or whether it will (no pun intended) shoot itself in the foot. What’s clear, though, is that it is rambunctious party...
July 2011
10 posts
Festival Action - WIN VIP BIG CHILL ENTRY
This weekend I’m going to Camp Bestival, dressing as a sinister monk and playing music for the Kids’ Disco Silent Hour on Saturday evening. THEN the following weekend I will be bringing the absolute best in bass to the Big Chill, as - together with Richie “Slugraver” Rundle - I will be helping out with Tom Middleton’s Sound Of The Cosmos tent.
It looks to be a...
More Luscious Slow Sounds
It’s come to my attention that in my “Slow it Down” post I pretty much missed out one area in which the tempo drop is very much in evidence at the moment: slow HOUSE music. Quite an oversight really as my review of Lukid’s “Chord” - which is contains some dramatically slowed-down and abstracted house - in the January 2011 issue of Wire was the seed for the ideas...
Beautiful Norway
The news from Norway has broken my heart today. Such a small country, so full of sweet people - and with such amazing musical talent too. Out to everyone there trying to deal with this shock. Normally talking about Norway I’d think of happy, sensuous disco music - of Lindstrøm, Prins Thomas, Bjørn Torske, Skatebård, Annie, Todd Terje etc etc - but not today…
More of what I've been doing
New issues of The Word, Wire and Mixmag just in… Mixmag has my feature interview with David Kennedy aka Pearson Sound aka Ramadanman, who is a very personable young man. I can’t say there’s anything exactly eye-popping in it, but though it’s low key I think it captures a moment quite well. Sadly they cut the bit where I asked him about girls and he laughed and went...
Get live
I went to see Little Dragon play live last week, for the second time in a month. Seeing them up close and personal rather than on a festival stage made me really fall for them, and realise why they are such “musicians’ musicians”: they are a tough little unit, and what they do has a genuine live feel without sounding like a rock band doing dance or vice versa.
This video gets...
Slow it down
In my review of Andy Stott’s quite incredible new album in The Wire last month, aside from shamefully getting the title wrong, I said this:
“Slowing down is one of the defining aesthetic responses of the past decade’s club music. The drop to half tempo in dubstep; the Berghain imperative of Marcel Dettmann and co to pull Techno back to a writhing, muscular House tempo; the jump from Grime’s...
A video talk by me
Not my finest moment in terms of organisation or presentation - this was written and recorded in a real rush. I didn’t even brush my hair or hide the baby vests on the dryer. But the ideas in it seem to have been going down well.
One thing I should make clear: this is not intended as some utopian vision. I’m all too well aware that those networks that 1990s club culture built also...
Get smooth
Smooth soul of various flavours is everywhere I look at the moment. David Toop’s absolutely essential article in The Wire a couple of months ago really got in deep to the lasting appeal and heavyweight weirdness of vintage slick grooves and “quiet storm” songs, and he pointed to some areas where it’s resurfaced in modern electronic music (e.g. James Blake, Jamie xx, DJ Rashad)....
What I've been up to
THIS is my most recent lot of stuff on theartsdesk.
It includes a trip to Paris to see some nicely mad old Cubans, a hectic weekend at Sónar, an obituary of Darryl Pandy, lots of record reviews (including the Lil B album which I think is SPECIAL), and - if you click back a page - Alec Empire taking me to task on my Atari Teenage Riot review.
Other than that, in the current Mixmag you can see...
Self-Justification
So I’m starting a new, regularly updated, section of this site.
Its main motives are:
The big interviews on veryverymuch take so long to type up what with everything else I have to do that I wanted something that would keep the site moving and living rather than just updating every three months and having it look like a museum exhibit.
I want somewhere to draw together all the...