club music
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 ...
joe.muggs
A wise man once said: DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE. It's a simple concept, but it seems so very hard to grasp, even – or especially – in a supposedly media-savvy world. The oddest thing of all is that it seems to be the people who consider themselves the most resistant to, or able to rise above, hype campaigns who have been caught up the most in the frenzy around this album.I have been consistently boggled and slightly saddened by the number of people who should know better that I have seen tripping over themselves to explain how “bland” or “disappointing” or “derivative” or “cynical” or "shallow" Read more ...
joe.muggs
Some 20 years ago, a series of albums called Artificial Intelligence on WARP Records aimed to promote techno as home-listening music. They made up a frequently sublime collection, but unfortunately the word “intelligence” in their title was picked up by a movement through the 1990s that became known, horrendously, as “intelligent dance music” (IDM) and tended to the belief that intricacy and awkwardness made music somehow superior to that made with more sensuous or hedonistic aims in mind.Thankfully, in the wake of dubstep in the 2000s, the experimental and the danceable began to overlap Read more ...
theartsdesk
We're pleased to announce The Arts Desk is a media partner of the Denovali Swingfest London on 20 and 21 April at London's The Scala. It's a good match, as Swingfest and the Denovali label, like The Arts Desk refuse to acknowledge artificial boundaries between “high” culture, the avant-garde and grassroots electronic and club music.Denovali Swingfest has taken place annually since 2007 in Essen, Germany but 2013 sees it expanding to take in weekends in Berlin and London. The Scala event is headlined by Andy Stott, the Mancunian techno powerhouse who in recent years has tended Read more ...
joe.muggs
Walking into the auditorium of a packed Heaven last night, we were instantly treated to the sensation of having our bodies invaded by thousands of infinitely complex machine insects. It's rare that a band can have such an instant and disquieting effect, but Fiium Shaark's music, we discovered, is as unusual as their name in many ways. At first seemingly entirely improvising, Rudi Fischerlehner on drumkit and Maurizio Ravalico on assorted high-tech looking percussion set arrhythmic patterns scampering around one another while Isambard Khroustaliov filled the spaces with itchy fragments of Read more ...
joe.muggs
Croydon-born Coki – Dean Harris – is without question one of the most important musicians of modern times, but unless you are a close follower of underground club scenes it is unlikely you would have heard of him. He has never been interviewed at any length, and though over the last decade his records have been pivotal in at least two musical revolutions – the birth of dubstep itself, then its subsequent transformation into a fiercer and more belligerent version which has become a global phenomenon – he never sought adulation or took to the DJ lifestyle, instead working a 9-5 office job until Read more ...
joe.muggs
If you listened to the last archived Arts Desk Radio Show you'll have heard me play a couple of tracks from this, and it was all I could do not to play more. As so often I'd gone into the studio with the previous couple of days' post pile and started picking through it for CDs to play. Usually this is a faff involving flicking through tracks and hoping one will jump out, but as soon as this one went into the machine, every single track got a tick by its name.The name Fimber Bravo meant nothing to me and I hadn't read the press release to find out the provenance of the album, but the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Of all the major acts from the the acid house/rave explosion, Leeds's LFO seem least interested in becoming a “heritage act”. Perhaps it's because Mark Bell (the sole member of LFO since the early departure of Gez Varley) has no need to cash in on the brand, thanks to his lucrative “day job” as producer of choice for the likes of Björk and Depeche Mode.Which isn't to say he's left LFO behind at any point; although it's almost ten years since his last album Sheath, he continues to periodically play live at clubs and festivals and by all accounts prolifically produces new tracks, but enabled by Read more ...
peter.quinn
For the way it combined mercurial, on-the-fly interplay, seismic textural shifts and listening of the highest order, this gig was remarkable. In the space of two continuous sets there wasn't a longueur to be found, such was the incredible union of Black Top #5's boundary-pushing improv and fine-tuned musicianship.Saxophonist Steve Williamson, trumpeter Byron Wallen and vocalist Cleveland Watkiss joined Black Top founders, pianist Pat Thomas and vibist/sampler Orphy Robinson, to explore the intersection of live instruments and the technology of dub, reggae and dance floor.You would search in Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's a truism in dance music culture that “everyone's a DJ nowadays”. It's generally meant in a flip, pejorative sense – suggesting that cheap technology means every man Jack and his dog can put a sequence of records together and the role is somehow devalued. But it hides a rather more positive truth, which is that dance culture is intrinsically participative, that the line between industry and punters is so blurred as to be non-existent, that those punters truly are easily as important as the hallowed DJs they look up to.Certainly at the Dimensions Festival, the boundaries seem pretty fluid Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is a techno album. A techno album on a British label best known for the indie-est of indie rock, from a duo whose last album featured rock vocalists Beth Ditto and Alex Turner among others, but a techno album nonetheless. It's all about pulse and texture, immersion and physicality, the power of the hypnotic beat, and it is absolutely bloody lovely.And why shouldn't it be? There's a school of thought that to make music in genres most popular in the early 1990s is “retro”, and that this is by definition a bad thing – but this is clearly idiocy. This is no more beholden to the past than, Read more ...
joe.muggs
Welcome to our second show, brought to you again from the Red Bull Studio in London where it was recorded by Brendon Harding.This time, Peter and Joe are joined live in the studio by two guests: friend of theartsdesk and musical polymath Mara Carlyle, and Arthur Jeffes of Sundog and Penguin Café. Mara discusses sharing management with J-Lo, and sings Gershwin with a ukulele, while Arthur discusses continuing the legacy of his father, Penguin Café Orchestra founder Simon Jeffes, and exclusively plays us some new material from his Sundog project, hot from the hard drive.Elsewhere you can hear Read more ...