DJs
Ismene Brown
It's time to dust down your tent and ice-box and plan some summer breaks with theartsdesk's definitive clickable festival guide - listings and links for all the UK festivals this summer, from rock by the lochs to DJs in London parks, and catching classical and opera on the way. See theartsdesk's invaluable European festivals 2011 guide too. SCOTLAND Knockengorroch World Ceilidh, 26-29 May, Drumjohn, GallowaySecret Scottish streams and woods resound to roots music sounds, with Adrian Edmondson & the Bad Shepherds, Salsa Celtica, Horace Andy & Dub Asante, DJ Yoda, Russkaya Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Cambridge University, cradle of Newton, Keynes and Wittgenstein, of Wordsworth, Turing and Tennyson, has produced 15 prime ministers and more Nobel Prize-winners than most nations. In its 200-year history, the university’s debating society has hosted princes, politicians and leaders in every field: the Dalai Lama, Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela, and last week a 25-year-old east-London DJ, Kissy Sell Out. But lest pacemakers should stutter or tweed be set atremble at the presence of mixing decks and a speaker in baseball cap and wife-beater, the Union also invited Stephen Fry along – Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Moby (b 1965) has been a presence on the dance scene and in global clubland for two decades. He is best known for the multimillion-selling 1999 album Play which, among other things, combined lush electronic orchestration with old field recordings of a cappella blues shouters. Moby's musical career, however, began at least a decade earlier.Born Richard Hall, he was raised in Connecticut, and moved to New York in his late teens. He played with punk band Vatican Commandos and gained the name Moby due to his very distant ancestral relationship with Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick. The single Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As well as a new album, Destroyed, Moby is putting out a book of photographic prints under the same title. The idea of the book is to capture the essence of being on a global tour, from the mundanity of waiting in airports to the majesty of landscapes and cities, from the explosive excitement of stadium-sized crowds to the solitude of hotel rooms at night. The images will also be on display in the Proud Gallery in Camden Town, north London. theartsdesk showcases a selection below.
Read theartsdesk's Q&A with Moby
Moby, Destroyed at the Proud Camden, London NW1 from 18 May to 19 Read more ...
hilary.whitney
In 1970, Annie Nightingale became Radio 1’s first female DJ. The appointment was made somewhat grudgingly - DJs, believe it or not (and we’re talking about the likes of Ed “Stewpot” Stewart and Tony Blackburn here), were perceived to be “husband substitutes” and it was generally accepted that a female voice would alienate the listeners. And yet 40 years later, Nightingale is the only DJ left from the original line-up.She has always been passionate about discovering and sharing underground and new music – quite a heady mix over the past four decades - and thanks to her championing of Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's only after hanging up the Skype connection to Richie Hawtin that I realise how effective a branding exercise he has made the interview. In conversation the English-born, Canadian-raised Berlin resident is charming and smart, but listening back I realise that he has subtly repeated the names of his projects and products over and over, with the slickness of a high-flying salesman. But then you don't sustain a 20-year career making relentlessly odd music - yet still be regularly ranked in the very top flight of global club DJs alongside perma-tanned monstrosities more likely to Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Hackney’s Empire is the perfect venue for pan-Atlantic producer/hipster Mark Ronson’s vehicle The Business Intl. New album Record Collection is an aural revue – with guests ranging from Eighties idols Boy George and Simon Le Bon through Wu Tang’s Ghostface Killah to Andrew Wyatt of Swedish dance-poppers Miike Snow. A former musical hall, it’s a fitting showcase for Ronson’s portmanteau sensibility. It’s as if variety was primed for a comeback at this show, the second of six smallish-venue road-test dates. In support, his Business Intl colleague, Rose Elinor Dougall, trod the boards on the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The music world is reeling from the death of Charlie Gillett. He was not just an influential DJ who was instrumental in widening the listening habits of millions of listeners on his World Service and other radio shows, a journalist, writer and a key figure in promoting global music. He was also a beacon of decency and rare integrity in the music world who affected so many people. Heartfelt tributes have been pouring into his site with postings from complete strangers the other side of the world, to members of his family and even his post-man.I found out the shocking news when Caspar Llewellyn Read more ...
joe.muggs
Immediately following the death of radio DJ John Peel in 2004, it became clear very rapidly that there was no obvious heir apparent. With so many specialist shows on the station, nobody ran the full gamut of leftfield and underground music in the same way that Peel had. But if anyone comes close, it is Mary Anne Hobbs. Schooled in rock and indie journalism in the last great era of the weekly music press, the mid-1980s to early 1990s, and presenter on XFM and then Radio 1 of everything from extreme heavy metal to deep electronica, she certainly approaches Peel's eclecticism and dedication to Read more ...
joe.muggs
Londoners, we know, can be spoilt. Certainly the crowd, predominantly of nerds in rare and expensive trainers, at the Lightbox last night didn't seem to be overly bubbling with enthusiasm despite an exciting lineup of talent and astonishing surroundings. The main dancefloor area of Lightbox lives up to the club's name, being an arched space with the entire wall/ceiling surface covered in colour-changing LED lights that allow pictures and patterns to dance across the room. But the nerds – and a very few women, mainly in equally modernist trainers – seemed almost oblivious to the fabulous Read more ...
joe.muggs
Glasgow-born, south London resident Steve Goodman – better known to discerning lovers of modern music as Kode 9 – has a unique and privileged position in relation to the ever-shifting UK dance music underground. In the mid 90s he formed part of the slightly cultish Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) founded by Sadie Plant and Nick Land at the University of Warwick, where he gained a PhD in philosophy.The CCRU cooked up a rich gumbo of postmodern theory, situationism, science fiction and HP Lovecraft, occultism, rave music (particularly jungle / drum & bass) and high-tech Read more ...
joe.muggs
Club music has always been a mongrel creation. By definition, DJ-driven music – assuming the DJ is any good – is about combination, recombination and juxtaposition. But even allowing for all that, we are currently going through an uncommonly fecund time in the clubs as disparate fringe innovations of the last decade collide and combine.London's pirate radio stations and blacked-out VW Golfs are pumping out the sound of “UK funky”, a deliriously upbeat reboot of 1990s UK garage, fusing house music, dancehall, calypso, African rhythms and grime, its whipcrack rhythms supporting Read more ...