rave
joe.muggs
Googling for academic articles about Britney Spears is one rabbit hole I've managed to avoid falling down thus far, but one imagines there are reams of the things. From demonically driven Disney child star via pigtailed Lolita and sex-droid air hostess to shaven-headed loon lunging aggressively towards her public through the paparazzo's lens, she's provided no end of provocative and iconic images, and stirred up all kinds of problematic issues around post-feminism, celebrity and voyeurism, while remaining an odd non-presence at the centre of it all.
Not an obvious provocateur like Madonna or Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
There's been a lot of waffle lately about rock'n'roll being dead. This is down to mainstream radio turning its back on guitar music in favour of a stew of electro-pop and R&B, and the fact that just three spots in the Top 100 UK bestselling singles (ie downloads) of 2010 were held by rock songs (for the record, Journey's "Don't Stop Believing", Train's "Hey, Soul Sister" and "Dog Days are Over" by Florence + the Machine). Whenever this sort of media babble starts, it's time to run for cover because there's undoubtedly another tedious wave of guitar bands waiting gleefully in the wings. Read more ...
joe.muggs
Carl Craig is extraordinarily easygoing. Most dance producers of his seniority and level of achievement would come with at least a publicist in tow, but when we meet him in his London hotel, his only entourage is his nine-year-old son, playing happily with an iPad or chatting to the photographer as we talk, and Craig is very easy and engaging company. One might expect someone more driven-seeming, given that, in the notoriously fickle world of club music, he has managed to keep both fiercely snobbish techno fans and mainstream club audiences on side for over two decades, branching out Read more ...
joe.muggs
2010 saw some major shifts stirring up the UK club music ecosystem and unleashing some fascinating hybrids and variants of existing sounds out into the wild. As the hefty bass of dubstep muscled its way firmly into the heart of the mainstream, everything else was forced to rearrange its position, with some surprising results. The most aggressive sounds proved to have a sensitive or celebratory side, the hoariest old rhythms were given a new lease of life and – despite the supposed globalisation of the weird wired world – highly localised club scenes were once more at the forefront of Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's only after hanging up the Skype connection to Richie Hawtin that I realise how effective a branding exercise he has made the interview. In conversation the English-born, Canadian-raised Berlin resident is charming and smart, but listening back I realise that he has subtly repeated the names of his projects and products over and over, with the slickness of a high-flying salesman. But then you don't sustain a 20-year career making relentlessly odd music - yet still be regularly ranked in the very top flight of global club DJs alongside perma-tanned monstrosities more likely to Read more ...
bruce.dessau
Primal Scream's gig last night may well have been the loudest gig theartsdesk has ever attended. Three hours after returning home, my ears are still ringing like they've never rung before. At the time I didn't notice the volume though. I was enjoying the veteran band's emphatic performance too much to realise quite how many decibels were being pumped out.The main reason for the two-night stand at Olympia was the opportunity to perform the Mercury Award-winning 1991 album Screamadelica. Before that, however, there was the small matter of a quick greatest hits set. The surrogate Stones homage " Read more ...
joe.muggs
Rave music, in its many ever-mutating forms, is now more than a generation into its existence. Many, possibly most, of the crowd pushing into Heaven, under Charing Cross station, weren't even born when acid house fully hit the UK in 1988, but none of them are here for some retro experience. It's hard, as a superannuated lover of electronic beats, not to feel cultural vertigo at the fact that what once felt like the most impossibly inhuman of sounds has now become so ubiquitous and so established as to be a kind of folk music. But there it is, as established as the blues or punk rock, and as Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In 1920s London, those who could afford to indulged in a craze for wild parties - pyjama parties, sailor parties, pool parties - the wilder the better, with American jazzers such as the Blackbirds Revue providing the stomping music. Resplendent in glittering finery at the heart of this social whirl was a new generation who rejected the dark tragedy of World War I in favour of sheer hedonism.At the time their names were splashed across newspaper society pages every day - the stunning society beauty Lady Diana Manners, the middle-class arriviste and genius novelist Evelyn Waugh, the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Its authenticity was helped no end by a torrential downpour leaking through the brickwork and creating puddles in various parts of the uneven floor – and by the rousing mix of hyperkinetic Nineties jungle beats cut up with seemingly humanly impossible dexterity over a dazzlingly crisp soundsystem by Japanese man-machine DJ Kentaro (pictured below) who was playing as we entered.Rather less rough and ready was the preponderance of expensive specs on punters everywhere you looked, indicating a disproportionate number of designers in the crowd. But that's Ninja Tune for you – since its foundation Read more ...
joe.muggs
Dubstep is everywhere – and if you will excuse a little self-promotion I have, in my small way, helped this state of affairs come about. The bass-heavy, rhythmically exploratory and very British electronic dance music genre has now – via Magnetic Man and Katy B – proved it can produce bona fide top-10 hits, and it has become the de facto sound of every summer festival to boot, while still keeping both feet in the underground clubs from whence it emerged.Watch the video of "Katy on a Mission" by Katy B:
Regular readers of theartsdesk will know that I have written extensively about the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Wiley, Electric Boogaloo (Back Yard) Erratic and spiky where his old mucker Dizzee Rascal has been slick and unerring in his rise to the top, East Londoner Richard "Wiley" Cowie has managed several massive pop-dance hits while remaining thoroughly entangled in the edgier, more aggro grime music scene which he helped to invent. This is very much on the pop-dance side of his output, with every mid-1990s club-energising trick in the book thrown into the mix - but it is done with huge élan, and there is enough of Wiley's wildcard persona audible in his raps about getting stuck into the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Justin Kerrigan was only 25 when he made Human Traffic. A bristling portrait of rave culture at the dawn of New Labour, it did well enough commercially and enjoyed a cultish afterlife on DVD. That was 11 years ago. Kerrigan hasn’t made another film since. Or hadn’t. With I Know You Know he returns with a script from his own pen. Whenever a promising debut is followed by a long silence, the question is always the same: was the wait worth it?It’s hard to say, and that’s partly to do with the character at the heart of a perplexing portrait of psychiatric breakdown. Robert Carlyle plays a Read more ...