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 […]
Thirty-eight years ago this week, on 22 August 1988, 10 Records and Virgin put out a single that had no business existing. “Big Fun” by Inner City was not conceived as a hit, not written for a label, and not even actively pitched by the man who made it. Kevin Saunderson had recorded the backing […]
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
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 […]
From Hotel2Tango to Studio PM, Montreal's producers, engineers and string arrangers quietly shaped some of alt rock's most influential albums, from Arcade Fire and The National to Sarah McLachlan and Frank Ocean.
Sin-é was a tiny Irish cafe at 122 St. Mark's Place with one cappuccino machine and no real stage. In 1992 it became Jeff Buckley's Monday-night residency and the room where Columbia signed him. The story of a forty-seat venue that launched Grace.
A federal radio quota, a small Toronto label, a Montreal recording studio in a former garment loft, and a juried prize designed to ignore sales numbers, four pieces of infrastructure that turned a mid-sized country into the gravitational center of English-language indie. The pieces still exist. The result no longer does.
Two venues, two provinces, four decades of Canadian rock, Les Foufounes Électriques against The Horseshoe Tavern. Who carries more weight, who bled more, and why El Mocambo plays a different game.
