club music
hilary.whitney
Maxim (b. 1967) who is known for, amongst other things, his mesmerising, somewhat unnerving stage presence (he has a penchant for cats-eye contact lenses and is not adverse to wearing a skirt) is a founder member of the electronic dance group The Prodigy, which emerged on the underground rave scene in early 1990s. The band’s first album, Experience, was released in 1992 and since then they have sold over 25 million records worldwide.Maxim started out as the band’s MC before performing vocals on "Poison", a track from their second album followed by several others on The Fat of the Land. For Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
An awful lot of people involved in producing electronic dance music find a niche and stick to it. Many do this with a very po face. Speak to them about it and they may play you a track they think is "poppy" to demonstrate their range. It usually isn't, it's just a teensy-weensy bit less purely dance-floor functional than the rest of their oeuvre. Because all they ever listen to is techno, dubstep, fill-in-the-blank, their ability to make a comparative judgment has eroded.In truth, this is also one of the great things about dance music, that zealot-like devotion to the conceptual core of a Read more ...
joe.muggs
If you want the distilled sound of global hypercapitalism, David Guetta is your man. A genial, workaholic Frenchman, he has created the sound of superclubs from Miami to Dubai to Kuala Lumpur – the sort of clubs where the VIP section is bigger than the main dance floor, with Guetta's own “F*ck Me I'm Famous” parties in Ibiza as the ideal model – and, thanks to the trickle-down effect, the sound of every shopping mall and taxi from here to eternity. His sound is the cheesiest of Nineties commercial dance music given a turbo boost with every possible megastar from the worlds of rap and R&B Read more ...
joe.muggs
At the start of September, the fourth Outlook Festival takes place in a 19th-century fort on the Croatian coast. Already this festival has become a vital point in the calendar for those involved with dubstep, grime and other UK underground scenes – not only a jolly in the sun (“dubstep's Ibiza”), but the one time in the year when everyone involved takes a break from international touring and comes together in the same place, a time to compare notes and take stock of the progress. Its British organisers make even bigger claims for it, though: they see it as drawing together decades' worth of “ Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's always interesting to see how revolutions in music get folded back into the fabric of the culture that fomented them. Dubstep, which changed club culture so dramatically in the mid-2000s, is now an intrinsic part of that culture from mainstream to margins, and the forms it takes as it beds into these various parts of the ecosystem are manifold. And Jazzsteppa – two Israelis named Gal and their trombones – turn their hands to a fair few of those forms.Watch video for "Investment Decision"
Hyper Nomads is on a label run by dance/dub veteran and ex-KLF producer Tony Thorpe. It is a Read more ...
joe.muggs
“It's like an advert for American Apparel,” said my companion a song into the set – and she had a point. The elegantly poised electropop of Little Dragon is so sharp, so cool, so impeccably internationalist in its outlook and presentation that, taken in small doses, it would be perfect for any brand targeted at affluent hipsters. But while their antics on stage, and especially those of singer Yukimi Nagano were admittedly a brand manager's dream at any given moment, over time they proved to be something much more interesting.'Pleasingly for a crowd so dressed up, they appeared extremely Read more ...
joe.muggs
This is where the delirium kicks in. Tired but happy, the attendees started the third day of Sónar festival slightly boggled by how to pick and choose from the strange delights on offer. Saturday was when the true musical variety of the festival was displayed: straight-up hip hop to eye-popping South African tribal dance displays, balmy ambient revivalism to apocalyptic techno, heartbroken electronica to deranged prog rock: it was all on offer...If day one was a warm-up, and day two when the energy levels peaked, this was where we just got swept along in the sheer diversity of the festival Read more ...
joe.muggs
Thursday was gentle – an easing into the festival experience – but yesterday is when Sónar Festival really kicked into gear. With tapas and Estrella coursing round their veins, the audience was thoroughly drawn into Barcelona's bohemianism and ready to go from the beginning of the day. Which is a good thing, as shameless, in-your-face rave music seemed to be the order of the day.The SonarDome stage throughout the weekend has entirely featured alumni from the Red Bull Music Academy, and while the yearly Academy has built a reputation for nurturing sophisticated and intricate electronica, it Read more ...
joe.muggs
“This is what Ibiza used to be like,” said the man dancing next to me. I've never been to the White Isle, so I have to take his word for it, but he presented a very convincing argument that the commercialisation of dance music's Mediterranean Mecca has led to a polarisation of its crowds towards either ostentatious spending or mindless drunkenness – whereas Barcelona's Sónar Festival attracts more diverse and discerning hedonists focused on music above all. Certainly a good cross-section of people were in attendance for the first day of Sónar. A large number of electronica nerds mingled Read more ...
joe.muggs
The house music of Chicago, led by producers and DJs, has long had a tendency to feature the greatest vocals of any genre yet not make stars of its singers. And for most of his working life, Darryl Pandy, who died yesterday aged 48, was not the star his huge presence and elemental, gospel-schooled voice warranted – instead working the club circuit and soul revival shows, and featuring on dance tracks scattered across dozens of 12" singles on many labels worldwide.However, Pandy did have one moment of glorious exposure to the mainstream, one which will ensure his immortality, and which also Read more ...
joe.muggs
This month sees an audacious attempt to showcase British dancehall music, when the Cargo venue in Shoreditch hosts the multi-artist revue Showtime!. The Heatwave collective have brought together vocalists from various UK underground scenes, linked by a strong influence from the high-energy Jamaican sounds of the past 30 or so years. While many of the artists involved have found success in crossover scenes like rave, jungle, grime and garage, the appeal of dancehall itself (also known by the overlapping terms bashment and ragga) has traditionally been restricted to predominantly black Read more ...
joe.muggs
The Sónar festival occupies a very special place in the New Music calendar – and is this year expanding outwards temporally and geographically, with new franchises in Tokyo and A Coruña, Galicia. Now into its 17th year, the parent festival in Barcelona serves as a vital meeting point for those of all stripes who refuse to acknowledge the polarisation of avant-garde and populism, or of club culture and the mainstream music industry. With 10 or more main stages and untold off-piste club events around the city, it would be impossible to condense even a single day and night of Sónar Barcelona Read more ...