A two minute instrumental with no words, improvised at a 1957 Virginia sock hop, gave heavy guitar its two founding techniques. The lineage of Link Wray's Rumble.
Most electronic acts hide behind a logo because a logo is easier to market than a face. Drexciya hid because the hiding was the work. For a decade, two men from Detroit released some of the most physical, forward leaning electro ever pressed to vinyl, and they did it while building a fictional nation so […]
Ask most people to explain the sound of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and they will point at a pedalboard. Fuzz, reverb, chorus, a delay or two, stacked until the guitars melt. It is a tidy story and it is mostly wrong. The thing that gives Loveless its seasick, underwater tuning is not a box on […]
Dubstep was not born on a record but in a dark Shoreditch basement. How FWD>> and Plastic People's soundsystem forged a genre Thursday by Thursday.
Most rock scenes are born from clubs, labels, or a couple of bands who refuse to sound like anyone else. Zamrock was born from a policy memo. In the first turbulent decade after Zambia declared independence from British rule in 1964, president Kenneth Kaunda paired the slogan “One Zambia, one nation” with a broadcasting decr
There is no venue in this story. Sometime in the late 1980s, in the wind-scoured flats east of Palm Springs, a group of teenagers loaded amplifiers and a gasoline generator into a truck, drove until the city lights disappeared, and played until the fuel ran out. No stage, no address, no closing time, and no […]
On December 12, 1981, a German guitarist sat alone in his Berlin studio and pressed record before heading out on holiday. He wanted something to listen to on the plane. What he captured in a single unbroken take would spend the next decade quietly rewriting the rules of electronic dance music, even though almost nobody […]
A record-store manager with a documentary impulse When Roger Shepherd started Flying Nun Records in Christchurch in 1981, he was not trying to invent a genre. He managed a record shop, he liked the bands he saw play around Christchurch and Dunedin, and he wanted a way to document them before they disappeared. That modest, […]
There is a version of synthesizer history where the good stuff comes from sculpting: hands on filter cutoff, patch cables, a producer chasing a sound through a hundred small decisions until it belongs to them. Then there is the Korg M1, which sold roughly a quarter of a million units on the opposite proposition, and […]
Most festivals ask the same question every year: who is available, and who will sell tickets. Roadburn asks a stranger one. What music does not exist yet, and what would it take to make it exist for one night in Tilburg? That question is the whole thing. It explains why a festival built by two […]
