dance music
joe.muggs
A gothic aesthetic is very common in the left field of electronic/club music these days – but it tends to go with fairly extreme sounds: either industrial pummelling, or glitched-out “deconstructed club” as in artists like Ziúr.But Andy Butler and his Hercules & Love Affair project have gone for something altogether different on the fifth H&LA album. Just as, in his early records, Butler went back to the source building blocks of house and disco music, here he's gone right to the roots of goth. So this album is rife with influences. Woven throughout, you can clearly hear Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
As Bloc Party singer Kele Okereke noted at one point in this gig, his band have now been visiting Glasgow for nearly two decades. Yet few of the shows played in that 18 year span, which have touched upon nearly all of the city’s main music venues, have been as contrasting as this one. By the night’s end, when the band blasted out a rare outing of their very early single “Little Thoughts”, the audience were a jubilant and sweaty throng, but it was hard work getting there.Okereke noticed it as well. Clad in a bright multi coloured shirt that possessed more vibrancy than the early part of the Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
“This town makes me sweat”, declared Charlotte Aitchison at one point in this set, as she took a brief breather between songs. The 29-year-old should have tried being in the audience, for this was a sweat-drenched evening right from the opening seconds, with a wildly devoted crowd which congregated into a heaving mass rapidly and consistently.Aitchison might have too many quirks to ascend beyond a venue like the O2 Academy, but something about both her personality and performance suggested she is better suited to such a setting anyway.Which isn’t to say that the Essex native is Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
Prior to alt-j’s encore getting underway their video wall switched to the Ukrainian flag. “Fuck Putin!” bellowed keyboardist Gus Unger-Hamilton, to hearty roars of approval, in what was both a brief reminder of the outside world beyond the increasingly humid Barrowland and also a look at the band themselves and their own emotions, which otherwise remained distant during this show.That distance was quite literal, particularly early on. The trio were on a raised platform on the stage, meaning they truly towered over the audience, while a large portion of the gig was spent with them in shadow, Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
What’s in the groove isn’t necessarily the end of the story. Sound is fixed into a record when it’s pressed. Get it revolving on a turntable, dump the needle onto it and what’s heard is what’s intended to be heard. It’s fixed. Nonetheless, DJs realised a record can be part of the route to something else, something which becomes their creation.Saturno 2000 - La Rebajada de Los Sonideros 1962-1983 celebrates a previously obscure form of sonic manipulation. In Mexico, DJs were playing records at a lower rpm than the standard 33 1/3 or 45 bringing their tempo down to make them more easy to dance Read more ...
Jonathan Geddes
There are few people, especially musicians, who would wish to revisit the spring and summer of 2020 with any fondness, but Sophie Ellis-Bextor might be an exception. Her kitchen discos, in which she and her husband Richard Jones, aided by their children, played a variety of covers became a lockdown source of solace and regular entertainment at a time when it was much needed.Two years later she has taken the concept out on the road for a celebratory party, albeit sans the kids, as she admitted with a laugh. To replace her children’s unexpected antics we instead had a large wheel, spun on a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The fourth Ibibio Sound Machine album is produced by Hot Chip (who also contribute musically). However, fans will not hear a drastic step away from their last album, 2019’s Doko Mien. Instead, it has the feel of a logical progression, albeit with just that bit more techno-pop heft in places, and a subtle flavour of the Eighties. Business-as-usual, then? Maybe, but Ibibio Sound Machine’s Afro-inventive business-as-usual stands out brightly from the competition.The London-based band, fronted by Eno Williams, who sings in both English and Ibibio, a southern Nigerian language, open proceedings Read more ...
joe.muggs
There’s a period of British club music that deserves to be much better appreciated. Before hardcore and jungle, before the Underworlds and Leftfields and other arena acts, came a generation who were much closer to the most song-based US house music, to considerable success. Between 1988 and 1990 came dazzling records from S’Express, The Beloved, Coldcut’s earliest manifestation, and several Eighties pop acts that evolved with the times: The Style Council, The Blow Monkeys and Boy George with his Jesus Loves You project.Into this milieu came four Brummies known as the Groove Corporation, and Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Wind the clock back 45 years and the Big Apple was bankrupt, the lights had gone out and many native New Yorkers were packing their bags. Gangs controlled whole neighbourhoods, drugs were the currency of choice and, for a kid with no college, prospects were strictly limited. The movie Saturday Night Fever captured this social decay, illustrating the crisis of confidence that suffused so many big Western cities.In faraway England, the nihilism of punk was leaning into the "no future" narrative, but suddenly, here over the ocean was Tony Manero, this strutting master of the universe, Read more ...
Barney Harsent
A Life in the Day is the second album from Bed Wetter, nom de plume of DJ, producer and experimental artist Geoff Kirkwood. Perhaps best known for his dancefloor-centred productions under the Man Power moniker, Kirkwood’s thoughtful and committed approach to his art has often seen him venture into uncomfortable territory and work within self-imposed boundaries – from a spell as Artist in Residence for the Sage Opera House and Concert Venue to his music subscription service that promised fans an EP a month for the duration of 2021.During the UK’s second big lockdown, roughly a year ago, the Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The title borrows from the lyrics of Siouxsie and the Banshees’s August 1978 debut single “Hong Kong Garden”: “Harmful elements in the air, Symbols clashing everywhere.” It also refers to Marcus Garvey’s prediction that on 7 July 1977 two sevens would clash with damaging consequences, a forewarning acknowledged that year by Culture’s Two Sevens Clash album.Yet Jon Savage's 1977-1979 - Symbols Clashing Everywhere collects “Voices,” “Hong Kong Garden’s” B-side, and Two Sevens Clash producer Joe Gibbs’s single “Prophesy Reveal,” a version of "Two Sevens Clash" voiced by Marvin Pitterson in his Read more ...
joe.muggs
2021 might not seem the most likely of years for the globalisation of dance music to intensify, what with the lack of travel and the lack of... well... dancing. But, in fact, thanks partly to the enforced time spent online which led to a lot of discovery for a lot of people, and partly to a simple yearning to get back out there dancing, the connections made have been wild. And no record exemplifies this quite like Toya Delazy’s Afrorave. The adopted Londoner comes from Zulu royalty, and is very keen to represent her heritage in her music: this entire album is rapped/sung in Zulu, its Read more ...