rave
Nick Hasted
Pinned eyes stare from a frozen husk of a face as a clubber comes down, cradled high over London on a window-cleaner’s perch. Director WIZ’s 18-minute video for Flowered Up’s rave epic “Weekender” (1992) takes you on the E’d up odyssey of Little Joe (Lee Whitlock), from skinning up at work through clubland peaks to chilly aftermath.This BFI release pairs this perfect marriage of music, film and moment’s 2K remaster with Chloé Raunet’s new documentary I Am Weekender. Here Jeremy Deller dubs Weekender “the first meditation on rave culture”, Lynne Ramsay, who similarly caught clubbing’s hazy Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Some rock bands base their career around being musically fluid, an ever-changing what-will-they-do-next? conundrum. Others, such as, famously, Motörhead and The Ramones, simply go on doing their thing, honing it, repeating ad infinitum, with an almost zen devotion. The results, at their best, are vigorously on-point.It’s not only rock bands, though. Some of those swept up in the 1990s rave-olution also knuckled down, stuck to the cause, purposefully focused. One such is Steve Mac and his new album combines aspects of old and contemporary production to salute the history and ongoing potency of Read more ...
mark.kidel
The Orb’s story is rooted in the widescreen psychedelic explorations of Pink Floyd as much as the MDMA-fuelled musical adventures of acid house. This is music to get high to, laced with all the effects, from distortion to reverb, that play with the mind and take it on a trip.There was a time tripping for self-discovery or pure fun were not proscribed. With many drugs recognised today as beneficial, and increasingly used in therapy (as they were in the 1950s),The Orb’s music, although it’s in many ways stuck in a form of retro music that takes you on a voyage into inner space, is now part of a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Just before the encore, the crowd is finally warmed up and dancing. It took a while, but hands are now in the air, middle-aged bodies are shifting about, muscle memory of MDMA nights in the last century.The Hartnoll brothers are also jigging onstage silhouettes. The song, “Impact (The Earth is Burning)”, is from their second album, The Brown Album, as it’s known (because their first couple are just called Orbital). It’s come into its own in our age of environmental concern. Their backdrop film shows footage of our planet’s detritus floating in space… a triceratops… a shopping trolley. Greta Read more ...
joe.muggs
Ageing boppers may bristle at the idea of a dance album where the average track length is three minutes. Yet this, Sonny “Skrillex” Moore’s first solo album since his debut nine years ago, is the most groove-based thing he’s done. It’s certainly a long way from its predecessor, 2014’s Recess, which came as the EDM and commercial dubstep waves were really cresting in the States and – while its tracks were actually slightly longer – really pushed the high-spectacle, instant gratification hyperactivity of those styles to the limit, together with noisiness fitting with his previous life as a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Orbital, one of the great electronic dance acts, had a run of albums during the 1990s that encapsulate that decade in the UK (at least, for those willing to ignore the historical revisionism around tired, retro-tastic Britpop by the same media "arbiters of taste" who invented it).Those five albums remain gorgeous. The run came to an end with the flabby The Altogether album in 2001, featuring a vocal by David Gray among other unlovable things. Their latest album, though, is their first to feature a welter of guest vocalists. It could have been a disaster, but it’s not.The 21st century has seen Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Carl Cox is one of the key DJs of his generation, the generation that propagated the club culture which blossomed from the European acid house/rave scene (and originally, of course, from black American house and techno).Going through various musical stages Cox ended up as “the three-deck wizard”, focusing on tougher techno-centric sounds. These are the core of his fifth album, and first in over a decade. Utilising analogue equipment dug out of his garage, he achieves mixed results, but the best of Electronic Generations, despite its uninspiring title, has solid exhilarating whip-bang foot- Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Oslo World organisers are at pains to point out that, despite the name, they are not a “world music” festival. And with good reason, really. There may have been a few familiar WOMAD veterans headlining over the week-long event – Senegal’s Youssou N’Dour, Malie's Fatoumata Diawara, the queen of Cuba Omara Portuondo – but the emphasis was emphatically not on any kind of beads-and-bongoes authenticity.Far from it: even in just the three days I was there the culture on offer in venues across Oslo felt more like a trip into a giddy sci-fi vision than the worthy anthropologist’s guide to other Read more ...
joe.muggs
There is now a kind of “leftfield mainstream” in electronic music. It’s populated by people a decade or more younger than the original acid house generation, but who take their core inspiration from post-rave experimentation of the early-mid Nineties. Dusky, Bicep and to an extent people like DJ Seinfeld, Four Tet and Jon Hopkins all channel the rich melodies and textures of Future Sound of London, Orbital, early Aphex Twin, Underworld and co to arena-filling effect. And Daniel Avery has been chief among these. Running through his work from the beginning have been tones and Read more ...
joe.muggs
The journey of Ross “Hudson Mohawke” Birchard has been truly one of the most extraordinary in modern music. From teenage scratch DJ champion and happy hardcore raver in some of Glasgow’s more feral club environments, in the late Noughties he quickly moved through making rhythmically fractured hip hop.Just as quickly he leapt into huge trap beats that made him a trailblazer in the explosion of the arena-packing US EDM scene, and from there to being studio collaborator of choice for Kanye West, making significant contributions to 2013’s Yeezus and 2016’s Life of Pablo. Now LA based, he is Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Last days of June 2022, I sit in my writing hut. My liver is radioactive jelly, my nose reinforced concrete, my leg muscles marathon-cramped, and poisoned perspiration rolls down my forehead, stinging my eyeballs.You’ll already have seen a trillion Twittering threepenny-bit reports on Glastonbury, but you haven’t taken this trip, I promise. So stroll in, fall over, pick yourself back up, take it all in, sniff it all up, drink it all down. Let’s do this.THURSDAY 23rd JUNEFinetime, my regular Glastonbury partner and photographer, is very proud of the tent he’s bought me from Lidl. My own tent Read more ...
joe.muggs
The endless circles and spirals that dance music moves in can take you to some strange places.It is, after all, a little peculiar that a producer from California, who was first turned on to DJing by the edgy, claustrophobic, ultra-modernist sound of Chicago’s footworking DJs, should on her debut album sound like a blissed-out, hazy sunrise at a hippie rave somewhere in the English countryside 30 years ago. But Tomu DJ has captured a very specific mood and moment that feels slightly outside of time so well that this doesn’t even feel like a nostalgia piece. Back between 1991 and 1994 Read more ...