dance music
Joe Muggs
Bernd “Burnt” Friedman is one of the most relentlessly questing of experimental musicians. In over 30 years of making music and 25 years of releasing it, he has specialised in researching ancient, hypermodern and as-yet-undiscovered methods of soundmaking, including traditional and home-built instruments and the application of high-tech methodologies to established forms from around the world, in particular jazz, western club sounds, and African and Japanese styles.A tireless collaborator with a staggering array of other musicians, he has formed long-running partnerships with other genre- Read more ...
Guy Oddy
“Good things come to those who wait” sings Neneh Cherry on “Everything”, from her new album, and the 17 years since her last solo album certainly has been a long wait. She’s right though - Blank Project has good things in abundance.RocketNumberNine provide industrial beats and a backing that is sparse and frequently conveys paranoia and feelings of pressure and claustrophobia. This has been shaped further by producer Kieran Hebden, of Four Tet fame, into sounds that often suggest Massive Attack or ambient dubstepper Burial. At times Blank Project also recalls the arrangements of Neneh’s 2012 Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Queer as Pop (****) was as much about social as musical history, and Nick Vaughan-Smith’s film told its story with a combination of outstanding archive material and some incisive interviewees, the archive taking fractionally more of the weight. Subtitled “From the Gay Scene to the Mainstream”, it started loosely in the Sixties, then jumped back and forth across the Atlantic until the present day as the story demanded.It started from the premise that gay clubs were the places that played the best music, and that it was gay artists who were pushing the stylistic boundaries, which were then duly Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It's an understatement to say that the massive revival of fortunes of club music in the 2010s has had its ups and downs. It's been a time of chaotic glut, of excess and spectacle – thanks particularly to the American “EDM” (electronic dance music) wave, which has seen egos, assholery and unnecessary fireworks that make the 90s UK superstar DJ era seem like a gentle Sunday afternoon stroll in the park – but also of diversification and fertility. And one particularly interesting phenomenon has been musicians who've picked up certain threads which the diminished scenes of the 1990s had left off. Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The thought of attending a dance music conference in Amsterdam frankly gave me the creeping horrors. I'd never been to Amsterdam Dance Event before, and the combination of DJ egos, business hustling and relentless partying through hundreds of club venues in a renownedly liberal city presented so many opportunities for both boredom and complete catastrophe, it just seemed like a fool's errand. But this, of course, wasn't fair. The dance music business is far more interesting than rumour and memories of the ego-bloated nineties superclub era would have it, and Amsterdam is a delightful place to Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It was a bittersweet kind of evening. Walking down Brick Lane, it was striking how Caucasian, tanned and healthy most people we passed were, and we couldn't help wondering if the Bangladeshi locals were starting to get priced out of their own neighbourhood, while the artists and party-weirdos who ironically made the place such a tourist destination are fading away, sloping off to Dalston and Peckham to continue the gentrification process all over again.On the way to one corporate-sponsored gig we passed another, even bigger one, just yards away, a whole building frontage done up apparently in Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
R Stevie Moore: Personal AppealIt’s a brave person who whittles down the output of R Stevie Moore to one CD. Since 1969, he’s made at least 175 albums, a significant proportion of which he committed to cassette tape. There are also a similar amount of singles, live albums and collaborative efforts. Handily, the British label Care in the Community has taken up the challenge and, instead of releasing a compilation which darts off all over the place stylistically, has issued a disc which unfolds as a unified album. No mean feat considering that the tracks on Personal Appeal originally Read more ...
Joe Muggs
When I used to work for the much-missed Face magazine, there was a phrase regularly used, only half in jest: “three things is a trend”. Which means that, unlikely though it might sound, hip hop marching bands are now a trend in leftfield club music. First came the Hot 8 Brass Band, then the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, both from the projects of New Orleans, and both bringing a hip hop and funk sensibility to the generations-old brass tradition of that city – and now come the “peace-lovin' aggro dance” Riot Jazz Brass Band from Manchester, who regularly perform on stage with popular local rap/ Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Somewhere round about 10 years ago the concept of “folktronica” settled down to become a relatively stable area of music. Fringe its appeal may have generally been, but it incubated some major talents who are still making great music, and for better or worse primed general music fans' ears for the sounds of folk and thus arguably laid the ground for the monstrous success of Mumford & Sons.This year has seen a subtle resurgence in the sound, with artists affiliated to the first wave of folktronica like Tunng, The Memory Band, Colleen and CocoRosie all making extremely fine albums. But Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The part-Japanese Brit Maya Jane Coles displays elaborate asymmetric hair, interesting piercings and enormous tattoos in her moody photoshoots, makes sounds that are uniformly smooth and high-gloss, and has a sonic palette that takes in populist trance, chillout and straight-up pop music as well as more nerd-cred underground sounds. And in an era of techno that's been dominated by Berlin-centric cosmopolitanisms – by sophisticated internationalist crowds with creative haircuts and intricately-knotted scarves as well as sometimes tediously tasteful musical minimalism – it'd be very easy to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Giorgio Moroder: Schlagermoroder Volume 1 1966-1975 / On the Groove Train Volume 1 1975-1993 / On the Groove Train Volume 2 1974-1985 / Son of my FatherSo far, this year has been good for Giorgio Moroder. He’s been integral to Daft Punk’s world-conquering Random Access Memories. “I Feel Love”, the timeless, pulsing synth-dance fantasia he fashioned for Donna Summer, opened the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra. At once, he’s evocative of a particular era and his influence is shaping the contemporary. The voyage through these seven CDs (three doubles and a single) shows how hard he’s Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Ian Dury: Lord Upminster / Ian Dury & the Music Students: 4,000 Weeks HolidayAs a single, "Spasticus Autisticus" was never going to be an easy sell. Ian Dury's reaction to the United Nation’s declaration of 1981 as the International Year of the Disabled was caustic and confrontational. Witty too. The BBC decided it was in poor taste and gave it no airplay. Yet it featured in the opening ceremony of last year’s Paralympic Games and the BBC broadcast it. Dury would have appreciated the irony."Spasticus Autisticus" was the first single released by Dury after he had left Stiff Records. Read more ...