In October 1973 an album called Photos of Ghosts entered the American market and did something no Italian rock record had done before. It reached the Billboard 200, peaking at number 180 in November. That is a modest number until you look at what was inside the sleeve. The record was not a new album. […]
The remix is now so ordinary that it barely registers as an idea. Every release arrives with alternate versions attached, every streaming profile carries a shadow discography of other people’s edits, and nobody thinks of it as a format at all. But the remix was not designed. It was the accidental byproduct of two separate [&hellip
Hamilton's Simply Saucer cut a proto-punk classic in a basement in 1974 and on a mall roof in 1975. Nobody released it until 1989.
Before Auto-Warp arrived in 2005, every track in Ableton Live had to be gridded by hand, and for four years that tedium was somebody's paid job.
On Friday morning at Parc Jean-Drapeau, somebody will inflate a very large board and write the day’s set times on it by hand. Until that moment, nobody attending Vans Warped Tour knows who plays when. That is not a logistics failure. It is the oldest working idea in the festival and the reason the thing […]
Most scenes are named after the fact, by journalists reaching for a shorthand. Anatolian rock is one of the rare ones that arrived with a brief. In 1965 the Istanbul daily Hürriyet announced a competition called Altın Mikrofon, the Golden Microphone, and attached a rule to it that read less like a contest condition than […]
Richard David James was born on 18 August 1971 in Limerick and raised in Cornwall. The birthday gets marked every year. The more useful anniversary is the second half of that sentence, because the label he ended up co-founding was not built out of a taste. It was built out of a postcode. A supply […]
Most independent labels are built around a taste. Man’s Ruin was built around a squeegee. Frank Kozik was already the most recognisable rock poster artist in America when he started the label in 1994. He had gone from black and white flyers stapled to telephone poles in Austin to large format silkscreens for Nirvana, Soundgarden [
Every retelling of the Amen break opens with the same statistic: the most sampled recording in history, thousands of tracks deep. It is a true fact and a useless one. Counting appearances tells you the break spread. It does not tell you what anyone actually did with it, and that is where the interesting lineage […]
Most bands form to play. The Desperate Bicycles formed in March 1977 for the specific purpose of recording and releasing a single on their own label, and they were not being coy about it. They owned an amplifier and a bass guitar. The Dalston studio supplied everything else. Three hours later they had two songs, […]
