fri 09/05/2025

club music

Showtime! - UK dancehall on the rise again

Lady Chann: The face of the new wave of UK dancehall

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...

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A Taste of Sónar, Roundhouse

Buraka Som Sistema demonstrate the universal language of... music

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...

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CD: Britney Spears - Femme Fatale

Britney: Definitely femme, lethality unconfirmed at time of going to press

Googling for academic articles about Britney Spears is one rabbit hole I've managed to avoid falling down thus far, but one imagines there are reams of the things. From demonically driven Disney child star via pigtailed Lolita and sex-droid air...

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CD: Aggro Santos - Aggro Santos.com

'Aggro Santos.com': Little-known fact - it's named after his website!

While the world of indie bands is, with a very few exceptions, colonised by posh kids with well-conditioned hair and earnest agendas, this country's pop is feeling more like the voice of those who actually consume it than it has for many years. The...

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Year Out/Year In: Electronic Music Digs In and Spreads Out

2010 saw some major shifts stirring up the UK club music ecosystem and unleashing some fascinating hybrids and variants of existing sounds out into the wild. As the hefty bass of dubstep muscled its way firmly into the heart of the mainstream,...

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Magnetic Man, Heaven

Magnetic Man's LED cage

Rave music, in its many ever-mutating forms, is now more than a generation into its existence. Many, possibly most, of the crowd pushing into Heaven, under Charing Cross station, weren't even born when acid house fully hit the UK in 1988, but none...

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The new funk: Belleruche exclusive

Belleruche: Taking some very interesting ideas into the mainstream

Here, we present the exclusive first showing of a new video by the Brighton/London band Belleruche. This clip for “Fuzz Face” is highly arresting, an ingenious and slightly disturbing collision of hi and low-tech, made using thousands of photocopies...

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Moombahton, Boombahchero and 21st-century genre meltdown

A suitably confusing image for a confusing sound

Some days I feel like I've woken up on the other side of some wormhole in the spacetime continuum, and the world is a subtly but definitely different place to yesterday. So it was last week when I got a slightly drunken email from a music...

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Ninja Tune XX, Ewer Street Carpark

Its authenticity was helped no end by a torrential downpour leaking through the brickwork and creating puddles in various parts of the uneven floor – and by the rousing mix of hyperkinetic Nineties jungle beats cut up with seemingly humanly...

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New Music CDs Round-Up 11

 CD of the MonthTom Jones, Praise & Blame (Universal/Island) by Adam Sweeting Reinvention is all very well, and indeed indispensable for any career that aims to last longer than a series of X Factor, but you can have enough of seeing Tom...

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Plastic People vs the Ministry

Two London clubs currently appear to be under threat. The Ministry of Sound, one of the most successful brands in club music's history, is kicking up a fuss because new housing block planned opposite it may make it vulnerable to noise complaints....

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Q&A special: Rave for Haiti

Grime rapper Jammer, one of hundreds of artists involved with Rave For Haiti

Amongst all the musical benefits for the victims of the Haiti earthquake, one club event which took place on Wednesday night in London stands out as a small, but powerful, beacon of hope. Not because it could rival Jay Z and U2 for levels of funds...

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