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 […]
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.
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.
Greg Sage meant the Wipers to be records without a road. The mystique never paid the bills, but the records outlived the plan.
Gilman Street opened on 31 December 1986 with a ban on alcohol and a vote for every major decision. Four decades on, the governance is the thing that survived.
Most dance scenes can be traced to a record, a machine or a room. The Balearic one is harder to pin down, because its founding document was a DJ’s running order, and the man who played it could not follow it home. Alfredo Fiorito, the Argentine who became the house selector of Amnesia in Ibiza, […]
Underground Resistance refused photos, wore balaclavas and built its own distribution. How a Detroit collective turned anonymity into independence.
A label that began in a kitchen, a cassette series and a six-day convention. How K Records turned Olympia, Washington into an indie scene with its own rules.
The Electric Eels played five shows in Cleveland, lost their last venue to a lawnmower, and became a legend through one Rough Trade single and decades of archival releases.
