The sound came from Bristol sound-system culture in the late 1980s. The name came from a London magazine in 1994, and the musicians never warmed to it.
Lou Reed died on 27 October 2013 at his home in East Hampton, New York. He was 71 and had received a liver transplant earlier that year. The obituaries reached for the usual list: the Velvet Underground, “Walk on the Wild Side”, the songs about New York. Less often they mentioned the guitar trick that […]
Tangerine Dream spent hours a day tuning a Moog that had no memory. The drift is on the record, and it is the best thing about it.
The Melvins did not just influence Nirvana. On 23 January 1988 their drummer played on the demo that became Bleach.
In May 1992 tens of thousands found a common in Worcestershire. Two years later the law had a definition of the music they danced to, and the sound system that helped cause it was already rebuilding the party in France.
The Echoplex was built to repeat your notes. Plenty of guitarists bought one, switched the echo off and kept the preamp, and the box that was meant to be invisible became part of the sound.
Most clubs treat the floor as a place to stand. In October 1999, fabric opened beneath Smithfield Market in London and treated it as a loudspeaker. The idea was simple enough to explain and strange enough to feel: if low frequencies can be felt as well as heard, put the machinery for feeling them in […]
Athens, Georgia had almost no music business in the late 1970s. A record shop, a bulb-lit club and a heatless church built the scene instead.
Spacemen 3 built The Perfect Prescription in Rugby as a trip with a beginning, a peak and a comedown, using almost nothing but repetition and tone.
In 1981 Yellow Magic Orchestra made a record around a sampler that existed in a single hand-built copy. The ideas it carried travelled much further than the machine.
