avant-garde
Joe Muggs
Lots of international superstar DJs end up making cosmic and exploratory records when they tire of – as the late Andrew Weatherall, albeit with tongue firmly in cheek, put it - “that ghastly oompty-boompty music.” Lots of them do quite well at it, too. But they are just daytrippers in the galactic expanse compared to Detroit hero Jeff Mills who is not only still bashing out the brain-jellifying techno to vast crowds week-in-week-out well over 40 years into his DJ career, but has been making out-there sounds for imagined futures in performances, collaborations and recordings for very Read more ...
Joe Muggs
There’s a whole wide open area of leftfield music that belongs entirely to Chicago. The 1960s social radicalism and futurist musical experiments of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and its parent organisation the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), fused into punk and alternative attitudes with the founding of labels like Thrill Jockey and Touch & Go, fed the jazz-electronic-dub-“post-rock” genre meltdown of bands like Gastr Del Sol, Tortoise and Chicago Underground Duo/Trio/Quartet/Orchestra in the 1990s, and is still vividly present in a sprawling and endlessly Read more ...