Mono bass is not a law of physics. It is a fix for a mechanical problem in a disc cutting lathe, and it outlived the machine for reasons nobody planned.
Sanremo Rock was born in 1987 in a separate building, with its own presenter and a satellite link back to the theatre. It took 31 years to get inside the Ariston.
Marseille has no Paris style club economy and a thriving electronic underground anyway. The reason is structural: a converted tobacco factory, a rap festival that adopted the machines, and collectives that double as political spaces.
Fifty years after The Saints pressed 500 copies of (I'm) Stranded in Brisbane, the details show that almost everything later read as punk ideology was a practical workaround.
In July 1992 Warp put an android in an armchair and called it electronic listening music. The sleeve was an instruction, the title was a joke, and IDM never recovered from either.
Davey Graham built DADGAD to chase an oud around Morocco. Jimmy Page renamed it after three continents and used it on Kashmir. A tuning is the most portable idea in guitar music.
Sahko Recordings was founded in 1993 to release one friend’s music. Six years later a trademark letter took a character out of Pan Sonic’s name, and the album that followed was named after the gap.
For most of recorded rock, amp tone was a one way door. You picked the cabinet, you placed the mic, you committed. If the mix later told you the guitar was too thin or too woolly, your options were to live with it or to book the band again. The device that quietly dismantled that […]
For most of Japan’s postwar era, the thing that could get a nightclub raided was not the volume, the hours or the drugs. It was the dancing. A 1948 Law Written for Dance Halls Fueiho, the Law Concerning Business Affecting Public Morals, was enacted in 1948 under the Allied occupation. Its actual target was prostitution […]
The Paisley Underground had no shared sound. What held the Dream Syndicate, the Bangles, Rain Parade and the Three O'Clock together was a 1972 compilation and a handful of terrible clubs.
