sun 24/08/2025

dubstep

Houghton / We Out Here festivals review - an ultra-marathon of community vibes

The long, hot summer of 2025 has been something else, right? Hate rallies, creeping authoritarianism, a weird reluctance to discuss the extremity of the weather even as everyone scrambles to buy air conditioners...But also a slightly delirious sense...

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Album: Adrian Sherwood - The Collapse of Everything

UK dub maestro and producer, Adrian Sherwood is hardly what anyone might call a slacker, but it’s 13 years since the release of his last solo album, Survival and Resistance. Those who have been eagerly anticipating more of his particular take on one...

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Album: Slikback - Attrition

In the eternal now of the strobe-lit sweatbox, innovation functions in a different way to the rest of culture. Yes of course, the thrill of the new has consistently been a vital part of dancefloor culture, but so has the familiarity of particular...

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Album: Mark Stewart - The Fateful Symmetry

I met Mark Stewart once. It was on a platform at Clapham Junction, I wouldn’t normally approach a famous person like that, but I felt I had to pay my respects. It turned out he was getting on my train – going down to Dorset to “visit his old Ma” –...

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Album: Sam Binga - Sam Binga Presents Club Orthodontics

When I was writing the introduction to my book, Bass, Mids, Tops: An Oral History of Soundsystem Culture, I came up with a phrase, which I ended up putting on promotional badges: “BASS CULTURE IS FOLK CULTURE”. It referred to the way riffs, refrains...

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Album: Alley Cat - The Widow Project

If the names Pinch, Vex’d, Burial, Digital Mystikz, The Bug mean anything to you, stop reading now and buy or stream this album. Seriously, go. Go get it. That honestly is all you need to know: if you like the imperial phase when British dubstep was...

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We Out Here Festival, Wimborne St Giles review: it's a family affair, and then some...

We Out Here Festival, now in its fifth year (and fourth edition, as 2020 was of course cancelled for Covid), has become an institution. Curated by jazz-centric veteran DJ Gilles Peterson and actualised by Noah Ball – best known for his role in...

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Album: Skrillex - Quest for Fire

Ageing boppers may bristle at the idea of a dance album where the average track length is three minutes. Yet this, Sonny “Skrillex” Moore’s first solo album since his debut nine years ago, is the most groove-based thing he’s done. It’s certainly a...

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Album: Greentea Peng - Man Made

Greentea Peng is a south Londoner, heavily tattooed, heavily spiritual, heavily anti-establishment, and very, very heavily into basslines. She cuts a singular figure in many ways, but her rebel dub soul style also makes her a particularly British...

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Disc of the Day 10th Anniversary: the level playing field

Theartsdesk is a labour of love. Bloody-mindedly run as a co-operative of journalists from the beginning, our obsession with maintaining a daily-updated platform for good culture writing has caused a good few grey and lost hairs over the years. But...

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Disc of the Day Celebrates 10 Years of Album Reviews

Ten years ago yesterday, on Monday 14th February 2011, one of theartsdesk’s writers, Joe Muggs, reviewed an album called Paranormale Aktivitat, by an outfit called Zwischenwelt. It was the first ever Disc of the Day, a new slot inserted into...

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Album: [MONRHEA] - her[ART]

The debut album from one woman outfit [MONRHEA] shows off the seriously impolite electronica that’s blossoming in East Africa. Electronic sounds from Africa are over-represented in Europe by jolly pop and elegantly faceless house music, but there’s...

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