techno
James Saynor
We’ve heard of dad rock, but how about dad techno? This Spanish movie, directed by the French-born Oliver Laxe, immerses us in one of Europe’s more curious subcultures – ravers who decamp by the horde to North Africa to party day and night in the desert. But these are not a familiar Ibiza crowd: most are 30-plus, and one or two look as though they might go back to the Second Summer of Love of the late 1980s.We’re invited to join their generous vibe, backed by a battered sound system, the odd laser and enough deep bass pulsing to rattle the roof of your local Odeon. You might feel the odd curl Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHWest Virginia Snake Handler Revival They Shall Take Up the Serpents (Sublime Frequencies)
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Californian producer Ian Brennan walks, loosely speaking, in the footsteps of groundbreaking (and controversial) father and son song collectors, John and Alan Lomax, who, between them, gathered an essential storehouse of American folk music in the early-to-mid-20th Century. Like them, he’s interested in the cultural context of roots music and he’s ranged across the world, from Rwanda to Azerbaijan. His recent 2023 Parchman Prison Read more ...
Joe Muggs
One of the smaller but more passionately enduring subcultures in the world today is that around slow dance music. The core of its audience is a Gen X crowd, a good number of whom have stuck with club culture since the mid Nineties or earlier, with others who’ve rekindled their love of electronic music in middle age: people whose knees might not be up to stomping to techno for hours, but are still deeply committed to the experience of deep and prolonged immersion in repetitive beats.Belfast’s Phil Kieran is a key mover and shaker in this scene. Though his career began 25 years ago as a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Mandy, Indiana are a Mancunian four-piece with a French singer who's based in Berlin. They make a lot of noise. Their second album is a take-no-prisoners amalgamation of electronic squall, thrashy rap (a distant cousin of Dälek), and tints of deranged hyperpop. In an age when ever-increasing quantities of people seek soothing music, they are outliers. URGH is too cacophonic to be the making of them but those after a solid, catalytic bash around the brain may want to tune in.The album was flavoured by multiple operations undergone by frontwoman Valentine Caulfield and drummer Alex Macdougall Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In the 1990s, the world of electronic music was a frontier where the unimaginable often happened. These were the days of early Aphex Twin, Basic Channel, Autechre and many more pushing at the vanguard, challenging what we might even consider to be music. A golden time, Musique Concrète’s underlying principles were reborn for a chemically enhanced generation of clubbers.Quarter of a century into this millennium, while there are still outliers (such as, say, Oneohtrix Point Never or Simo Cell), the zeitgeist has moved on and, since the advent of dubstep, the sonic frontiers feel well Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHManduria Bite Me (Wild Honey)
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The debut from Milan punkers Manduria is a six-tracker haemorrhaging rock’n’roll cheek and sass. They riff and fuzz and bang about without a care in the world, shouting and revelling in reverb mess, howling like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins while cranking up the amps like The Cramps, the rhythm section indulging in a mono-stomp that penetrates the inner brain like Joe Pesci’s vice. There’s a track called “I Hate to Think” and you don’t need to. On “Buongiorno” they slow things down for a dip Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
VINYL OF THE MONTHMartel Zaire (Evil Ideas)Montenegro-born, Cyprus-based producer Martel Vladimiroff is a hard man to find out about. His meagre online imprint and extensive global travels make him seem more like “an asset in the field” than a musician. Whoever he is, his new EP, four tracks drawn from his second album of the same name, is a unique idea, well-executed. Inspired by the imperial ravaging of Africa and the ongoing horrors of its modern equivalent, with the Congo as prime exemplar, it’s a conceptual head-trip. A dense gumbo of African field recordings and tribal drums play off Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The backscreens pop alive. A wall of photographer’s flashguns. On cyberpunk crutches, Lady Gaga stumbles jerkily towards us. She sings her 2009 global smash “Paparazzi”, her arms clad in armour, on her head a metallic skullcap. Her corseted dress has a train that extends, diaphanous, floating back behind her the entire length of the long catwalk into the audience. It disappears into the darkness of an arch.Theatre, yes, but Gaga is committed. Her eyes on the big screen above aren’t smirky or cool. They have a performative, deranged intensity. Lady Gaga is a proper pop star, haemorrhaging Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The long, hot summer of 2025 has been something else, right? Hate rallies, creeping authoritarianism, a weird reluctance to discuss the extremity of the weather even as everyone scrambles to buy air conditioners...But also a slightly delirious sense of fun as people get out and about in the sun – exemplified by the eruptions of joy of DJ AG’s spontaneous pavement sets featuring unknowns and megastars, broadcast online as a super-democratic antidote to all those videos of DJs alone or surrounded by too-cool-for-school party people. Anyway, it’s all quite exhausting. I was feeling burned Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Debby Friday is a Nigerian-Canadian singer-producer who found some success a couple of years ago with her debut album Good Luck. It won the Best Electronic Album 2023 Polaris Prize, the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy or Brit. That album had a moody rock-tronic feel.The new one, created in her new London base with her guitarist, the Australian producer Darcy Baylis, is more straightforward EDM, but draws from a varied palette and retains her personality. It’s a likeable club-centric outing.Initially, it appears she’s going to go 4/4-bangers-all-the-way but, as the album goes on, she becomes Read more ...
Joe Muggs
In the eternal now of the strobe-lit sweatbox, innovation functions in a different way to the rest of culture. Yes of course, the thrill of the new has consistently been a vital part of dancefloor culture, but so has the familiarity of particular sonic signatures that emerged from its fervid evolutionary processes. From the endless echo of classic disco house and rave samples in the mainstream, to the purity of raw, churning acid house in underground basements: once something works, it works.Sometimes the sounds that endure are super niche. For example, some time around the middle of the Read more ...
Guy Oddy
Swiss electro-rockers, Young Gods have been around for 40 years, but this in no way should suggest that they’ve gone soft in their old age. These days, vocalist Franz Treichler looks like the psychopathic Bob from David Lynch’s original Twin Peaks TV series and still exudes a certain malevolence – which is more than reflected in their new album Appear Disappear.The Young Gods’ influence has been readily acknowledged over the years by the likes of David Bowie, Mike Patton and even U2, to name just a few. Their sound draws from the same sonic seam as industrial metalheads Ministry and Nine Inch Read more ...