club music
joe.muggs
Imagine that The Ramones were not only still playing into the mid 2000s, but were still writing new songs as good as “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” and still sending young audiences completely delirious to boot. That might seem fanciful, but it's a pretty accurate analogy for where Lorenzo D’Angelo – Lory D – is now. From 1991, Rome-born and bred Lory D has been making techno that boils all of the European and black American history of the genre down to its most perfectly minimalist but completely wild core elements, and delivering it to crowds who want nothing more than that. One of the most Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
While the 36 records reviewed below run the gamut of Wreckless Eric to Democratic Republic of the Congo Afro-electronica, this month there’s also a special, one-off section for modern classical. This is due to an ear-pleasing haul of releases reaching theartsdesk on Vinyl lately. Modern classical, often computer-treated, is on the rise, recalling the long ago days when tweedy collectors would have chests of classical to dig into on Sunday afternoons, place on weighty old stereos, and sit quietly, eyes closed, contemplating the eternal verities (well, I knew one older gent who did that, back Read more ...
Barney Harsent
2016 has been a big year for Tel Aviv’s burgeoning underground scene. Acts including Red Axes, Moscoman and Naduve have produced endlessly inventive music at an impressive pace and on a range of labels. Of these, Disco Halal, run by Chen Mosco and based at the Berlin record shop Oye, has been absurdly consistent in its releases, notably a series of re-edits that blend exotic Middle Eastern melodies with dancefloor beats and, in doing so, provide a groove for both head and heart.In May this year, they broke with their MO and released a mini-LP by Nadav Spiegel, better known as Autarkic. Read more ...
joe.muggs
Berlin's electronic music world has been traditionally been very white. Sometimes, as with the inward-looking minimal techno of the 2000s, it could feel painfully so. Obviously a city can't really help the nature of its demographic, but monoculture is rarely healthy for the development of living club scenes – and it certainly needn't be that way. Techno, the city's life-blood over decades, has always been at heart about the interplay between the European avant-garde and black American music, and back in the Nineties, many of Detroit's techno originators held musical residencies or even lived Read more ...
joe.muggs
One of the great things about club music is that it deals with ageing in very different ways to rock – and as such can offer fantastic creative rebirths. Witness theartsdesk's recent startling Q&A with Mark Hakwins aka Marquis Hawkes, who'd been around the artistic block and back a good few times before achieving his current success. Or Sean Dickson – the singer with Scottish indie band The Soup Dragons, who went from Eighties psychedelic janglers to Nineties baggy-clothed ravers, then faded away. Dickson, though, took fully to clubland, is still a jobbing DJ, and has slowly and Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is not a standard dance music story. Marquis Hawkes is one of the club music success stories of the past couple of years – since the first release in 2012 on Glasgow's revered Dixon Avenue Basement Jams, there've been many 12" club hits on multiple connoisseurs' labels, and his album Social Housing on the Fabric club's Houndstooth label has soundtracked many people's summer this year, with the artist all the while remaining anonymous. But the reason for that anonymity is that he's a long, long way from the usual neatly-coiffed 20-something house producer you usually see in “breakthrough Read more ...
Barney Harsent
“Ooooh, it’s gorgeous!” exclaimed my wife-to-be as we arrived at what had been described as “an oasis in Hertfordshire.” They weren’t kidding, either. The site for the inaugural festival organised by Notting Hill Carnival stalwarts Sancho Panza couldn’t have been more different from West London if it tried. In place of terraced houses there were wall-to-wall trees, the only flyover was the sound of planes headed for Luton across an open sky.Now, full disclosure here, I’ve never been the biggest fan of Carnival. I’ve been unlucky I suspect, but if I want to re-create the magic of Bank Holiday Read more ...
joe.muggs
In the early 2000s, a club called Trash in London, run by DJ Erol Alkan, introduced a wave of indie teenagers to the joys of electronic music, giving them a way into club culture that was all theirs and not beholden to the superstar DJs of the acid house generation. A generation of bands would form directly or indirectly influenced by it – and by the end of the decade, there was a mini wave of bands like Friendly Fires, Late Of The Pier and Wild Beasts, who integrated electronic sound into a rock band format, and brought a bit of disco glitter and androgyny to their image to boot.It felt like Read more ...
joe.muggs
Detroit techno music is important. Any student of the club music of the modern age knows this. The sound that fermented among the majority black population of the decaying industrial city in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as disco's last remnants fused with the avant-garde experiments of Europeans who were first getting their hands on synthesisers and drum machines, went on to change the world. It seeded the UK's rave explosion, jungle, drum'n'bass and all the electronic experiments that came after. It created a futurist aesthetic, which managed to be somehow both optimistic and dystopian, Read more ...
joe.muggs
A few beers down, in the middle of a crowd listening to music you love, you tend not to think of the latest news story as your highest priority. But Britain's relationship to Europe weighs heavy on the mind these days, and when the news of the violent attack on Jo Cox started filtering through as we danced under the Catalan sun on Thursday afternoon, it threw the nature of Sónar festival into relief.Unlike a lot of international music events, which can often be little more than monocultural awaydays for Brits and/or Germans seeking hedonism in the sun, Sónar is both proudly reflective of its Read more ...
Barney Harsent
I looked around at the grime-flecked warehouse and surveyed the brick parquet floor. Even the dappled sunlight and birdsong couldn’t soften the realisation – or the ground, for that matter. “We’re going to struggle to get a tent peg in this,” I said to our travelling companions. Then, taking command of the situation, I boldly stated what we were all thinking: “I don’t think this is a campsite. I think this is a Jewsons.”We were on our way to Colebrook Lakes, the site of the Alfresco Festival, a brand-new, family-friendly affair in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. Apparently home to the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Skepta (aka Joseph Adenuga Jr) and James Blake provide a fascinating parallel as voices of the UK's “generation bass”. Both are from north London, and both have come from a grounding in the subsonic undercurrents of London's early 21st century underground genres – Skepta mainly in grime, Blake in dubstep, although each reached into the other's scene a little via early collaborations – and both have risen to international success, in particular becoming influential on the American mainstream.Skepta has attracted the patronage of premiere league US hip hop stars, particularly Drake, A$AP Read more ...