dance music
Jonathan Geddes
There was something incongruous about seeing Basement Jaxx in a venue best known for regularly playing host to the likes of Scotland’s national orchestra and the roots and trad music of the Celtic Connections festival. Admittedly a chunk of seating had been removed to create a dancefloor down the front, but a sweaty club it is not, and waiting for the arrival of one of the UK’s preeminent dance acts while gazing around at rows of seats still felt strange. Perhaps it was simply an acknowledgment of the passing of time, given Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe have been doing this for over Read more ...
Joe Muggs
theartsdesk’s Thomas H Green has lately been noting a “mellow production flatness” in modern pop and he’s really nailed a ubiquitous tendency there. The pendulum has definitely swung a long way back from the “loudness wars” of the era that trap and EDM crashed in and everything was amped up and ramped up as if to fight for attention in a crowded mall. One might trace the global counter tendency back to the chillwave of the Noughties, and its mainstreaming to the breakthrough of Tame Impala a decade ago, ushering in era where (brat being the exception that proves the rule) everyone from SZA to Read more ...
Joe Muggs
In 1988, in The Manual: How to Have a Number 1 The Easy Way, Bill Drummond wrote: “We await the day with relish that somebody dares to make a dance record that consists of nothing more than an electronically programmed bass drum beat that continues playing the fours monotonously for eight minutes. Then, when somebody else brings one out using exactly the same bass drum sound and at the same beats per minute (B.P.M.), we will all be able to tell which is the best, which inspires the dance floor to fill the fastest, which has the most sex and the most soul.”It looks like a reduction ad absurdum Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Yo, I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want. Er… another nostalgic play about growing up in a Yorkshire post-industrial city?Hard on the heels of John Godber’s Leeds-set Do I Love You? running last week at Wilton’s and Kat Rose Martin’s marvellous Bradford-set £1 Thursdays at the Finborough (my best new play of 2023), we take a 30-mile trip south to Doncaster (Donny to friends) for Children of the Night. Is it something in the air? Besides the coal dust of course.
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If those earlier productions traded primarily on the Read more ...
Ellie Roberts
When an artist as popular as Harry Styles releases an album, it’s inevitable that the noise and expectation surrounding it cloud the music initially, with fans and critics jumping to share their intensely positive or intensely negative long held thoughts about the musician’s place in the cultural landscape, regardless of how the album sounds. Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. feels like it needs more time to land, probably intentionally. The tracks are slow building, casual and subdued but all feel like they’ll mature well, even if the initial spark is missing. As is typical Read more ...
Joe Muggs
This album raises an interesting question: how many other musical artists have had as much of a career as Joshua Idehen prior to releasing their debut album proper? The Nigerian-Brit found his feet in the London poetry scene of the Noughties, just as grime was blowing up and bringing varied local vernacular into the heart of pop culture. A relentless collaborator, he has regularly made theatre, performance and video pieces as well as three albums with his band Benin City, four with Hyperdub-signed electronic duo LV, one with Californian beat scene godfather Daedelus, one in Calabashed with 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 ...
Joe Muggs
Another interesting thing about the endless flux of the streaming era is that, for all that it’s supposed to homogenise and flatten things out, sometimes it ends up allowing more interesting things to belatedly get their due. Look at the way once-obscure musicians like Julius Eastman, Alice Coltrane or Arthur Russell have snuck into the vocabulary of alternative and even mainstream music. But also, acts who weren’t short of success or acclaim but were nonetheless perhaps considered a bit cultish, nerdy or niche have gradually achieved a sort of cross-generational depth and universality of Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Over the past few years, the National Theatre has specialised in trilogies. End is the final play in both playwright David Eldridge’s outstanding trilogy and in this venue’s former director Rufus Norris’s Dorfman programme. Like Roy Williams and Clint Dyer’s Death of England trilogy, Eldridge’s cycle – Beginning (2017) and Middle (2022) – says as much about the state of the nation as it does about the personal lives of its characters. Starring Saskia Reeves (familiar from Slow Horses) and Clive Owen, this two-hander explores the emotional landscape of a couple making plays for a final parting Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The first live performance at the inaugural Riga Music Week is by Saucējas (pictured above). This seven-piece vocal ensemble is avowedly Latvian. Formed in 2003 at the Latvian Academy of Culture, their singing, though polyphonic, allows space for solo lines within the framework of the collective voice. Drones and rounds are incorporated. A kinship with runo song is clear. In traditional costume, they embody an aspect of Mother Latvia: that this country wants to celebrate its traditions, ensuring they are not lost.
Saucējas are tremendously powerful. Experiencing them at Riga Music Week’s Read more ...
Tom Carr
Anxiety and self-doubt have been constant themes for Kevin Parker, the Australian musician who now finds himself among the highest echelons of modern music. With his project Tame Impala, these themes have provided an almost unending source of inspiration, even while musically the project has transitioned from pyschedelic/Indie rock, and into a pop and a dance-oriented sound.Parker and his project resonated quickly with an audience who were captivated by his profound creativity on the first two albums (2010’s Innerspeaker and 2012’s Lonerism). But with 2015’s Currents, the Pandora's box was Read more ...
Kathryn Reilly
Quite why Baxter Dury isn't already a national treasure is a mystery to me. Not for his nepo connections but for his perfectly pitched delivery and super-dry observations. He's sardonic, sleazy, sexy and has a cracking dog – what more does any man need? Maybe a bigger profile and some higher rankings in the charts...This is a very different proposition from the last album, I Thought I Was Better Than You (full disclosure, I gave it album of the year on this very site, so this was going to have to work hard to impress). The different tone is down to producer Paul Epworth (Adele, Rhianna, Read more ...