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This is a preview of next year
On the Discogs entry for the After Shock label, it still lists a couple of phone numbers you might use to contact the label. Putting your mobile on the label of a 12″ was common in the old days of grime, when few artists had managers, distribution was barely on the agenda, and creating your…
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Ten more (more) from 2024
The previous list of 2024 supporting actors left behind a few more albums deserving of maybe a little more attention than they received, so to celebrate a blessedly diverse year of music, these are ten more that have rewarded my listening. Brian Gibson, Thrasher (Thrill Jockey) “Metal Maze”, “Maelstrom”, “Monolith” – this rare album from Lightning…
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Ten more from 2024
Every year brings more music than could neatly fit into a list of ten. Each time you pick something, it displaces another equally valid from someone else, often from a different place in the world – testament to just how diverse and accessible adventurous music is today. As usual, The Wire published the top tens*…
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Utilising the transients
Dan Chapman, aka DJ Crystl, is demonstrating why his drums are harder than the rest using a cup of hot chocolate. “You can overly compress one channel, and slowly feed it in under the other of the same break,” he explains. “You want to slowly feed it in, where all of this top stuff is…
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I make the people physical
A motormouth in a cap and orange puffer is speaking from the past. Backstage in a club in Ilford, he’s extolling the life of the MC on the jungle scene. “This is what I do, but it’s a knackering job, believe me,” he laughs, cracking a gap-toothed smile. An intertitle tells the viewer that Stevie…
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All you need is a stopwatch
It was a thrill to get the chance to write some sleevenotes for the new Soul Jazz compilation, Electro Throwdown: Sci-Fi Inter-Planetary Electro Attack On Planet Earth 1982–89. The comp, put together by Soul Jazz’s Stuart Baker, widens the horizon beyond the brief moment of the 1982-84 electro boom to include tracks from true school…
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West coast killas
A nice development in the last decade of so of Cafe Oto has been its openness to dancing. Occasional nights with knowledgable selectors, and the odd drinks night with someone on the decks, gradually opened up to dedicated evenings with tables and chairs cleared away and feet on the ground. When the venue beefed up…
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Music does not exist on paper
Evaluating the art of Cecil Taylor is like trying to forecast the weather in the middle of a tornado. His playing can be torrential, a storm of piano notes and strikes, and he performed with almost every imaginable type of ensemble over 60 odd years as a bandleader and composer/instigator, even incorporating poetry and dance. …
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Sting like a bee
It takes a certain confidence to take a ferocious and freewheeling album and call it simply Folk Songs. Tijana Stanković is a Serbian violin player, singer and ethnomusicologist, and her new disc is four extended tracks which riff loosely around Balkan folk themes – there’s a “Song For The Bees”, and a “Song For The…
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This microphone turns sound into electricity
On Shellac’s debut album At Action Park, Bob Weston, Steve Albini and Todd Trainer were credited as playing “mass”, “velocity” and “time”. Maybe this was just a throwaway gag on a record whose sleeve also included instructions for “resuscitation from apparent death by electric shock”. But considered alongside the LP’s annotations of materials and production…
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