For most bands, an underground reputation is a phase, a rung on the way up. For Les Rallizes Dénudés it was the entire architecture of a fifty-year career, built on refusal. No studio album. No interviews. No sanctioned records for decades. A frontman, guitarist Takashi Mizutani, who dressed in black behind dark sunglasses and receded
Most electronic acts hide behind a logo because a logo is easier to market than a face. Drexciya hid because the hiding was the work. For a decade, two men from Detroit released some of the most physical, forward leaning electro ever pressed to vinyl, and they did it while building a fictional nation so […]
A record-store manager with a documentary impulse When Roger Shepherd started Flying Nun Records in Christchurch in 1981, he was not trying to invent a genre. He managed a record shop, he liked the bands he saw play around Christchurch and Dunedin, and he wanted a way to document them before they disappeared. That modest, […]
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 […]
