Montreal post-rock is usually explained as a sound. It is better explained as real estate: an Anglo exodus, a loft above a garage, 500 hand-glued LPs, and two venues opened by a bass player. How Mile End built the infrastructure first.
The story of the Monks is almost always told as a costume. Five American GIs stationed at Gelnhausen, two German design graduates, shaved tonsures, black habits, a manifesto. It is a great story and it is also the least interesting thing about the record they made. What produced Black Monk Time was not an art […]
Every genre has a signature sound that producers claim to have built themselves. The hoover is the one where almost nobody did. For thirty-five years the rave stab that opens a thousand records has travelled through hardcore, gabber, jungle, hard house, drum and bass and back into chart pop, and the overwhelming majority of those [&hell
The story sells itself, which is the first reason to distrust it. Five boys at St Gregory’s College in Obalende, Lagos, borrow instruments, get signed by EMI, and cut a psychedelic rock album while still in school uniform. Try and Love came out on EMI Nigeria in 1973, catalogue NEMI (LP) 0032, with a parallel […]
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.
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 [
On 6 July 1992, Warp Records released a compilation with a picture of a sleeping android on the cover. The robot is slumped in an armchair. Two record sleeves lie on the carpet beside it: Kraftwerk’s Autobahn and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. A third, Pioneers of the Hypnotic Groove, is Warp’s […]
Every scene has a label everyone name-checks and a label everyone actually stole from. In New York house, the first is Strictly Rhythm. The second is Nu Groove, and it was already finished by the time most people learned to say it. Nu Groove opened in New York in 1988, founded by Frank and Karen […]
