drum and bass
Thomas H. Green
Ten years ago yesterday, on Monday 14th February 2011, one of theartsdesk’s writers, Joe Muggs, reviewed an album called Paranormale Aktivitat, by an outfit called Zwischenwelt. It was the first ever Disc of the Day, a new slot inserted into theartsdesk’s front page design, where it still resides today. By the end of the year, we’d introduced the now-obligatory stars-out-of-five system, keeping in the swim with other reviewing media. Since then, Disc of the Day has covered approximately 2600 albums and, before COVID, when the tube trains were running, it gave me great pleasure to see those Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Dance music has a notably different relationship to its past than other kinds of music. This has a real, material basis: because its core experience is that of the mixed DJ set, in principle nothing is ever the same twice, elements are constantly combined and recombined, so past and present are constantly churned together in new contexts. Once a style is established, it never completely stops being current, because its main riffs, samples or tracks are reused and remixed enough to maintain familiarity with every new generation of listener/dancer. “Revivals” of acid, dub, hardcore and what Read more ...
theartsdesk on Vinyl 61: Amy Winehouse, Krust, Motörhead, Extrawelt, Sade, Chase and Status and more
Thomas H. Green
Welcome to the penultimate 2020 edition of the world’s vastest, most musically wide-ranging, regularly posted, online vinyl reviews. This year vinyl boomed, especially in the wake of COVID-19, with gig-goers stuck at home but wanting new music. 2020’s sales are now heading for the £100 million mark, vinyl’s biggest year since 1990. When theartsdesk on Vinyl began, six years ago, it was a very different picture. All things must pass, and vinyl eventually will, but that’s for the churls! Let’s enjoy these boom times. So check out the reviews below, which run the gamut from the grungiest thrash Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Everything about this mixtape oozes confidence. It crams 12 tracks plus interludes – all produced by Andre “Shy FX” Williams – into barely more than half an hour. It happily leaves “Roll the Dice”, the single which conquered club and radio and featured Lily Allen, until last. As well as roots reggae, carnival marching bands, lyrically and rhythmically brutal bashment and lashings of the drum'n'bass that Shy FX is best known for, it traverses creepy-crawling avant pop, modernist R&B and moody off-centre hip hop, yet never loses the sense of being a focused party soundtrack. And Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Rob Smith & Ray Mighty are truly the unsung heroes of British bass music. Coming out of the same cultural melting pot in Bristol that gave us Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead and mega-producer Nellee Hooper, they looked to be among the city's big successes when they first emerged in 1987. Their debut single, a cover of the Bacharach / David classic "Anyone who had a Heart" on their own Three Stripe label was a club success, they produced Massive Attack's debut single "Any Love", and Fresh 4's 1989 rave and chart hit cover of "Wishin' on a Star".However an uncomfortable major label deal Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Clifford Price – Goldie – has long cut an imposing, and complicated, figure in the music industry. Part larger-than-life entertainer, part monster (as satirised in music industry grotesque Kill Your Friends), part irrepressible raver, part grandiose conceptualist. But there's another side to him too: the massive, Pat Metheny-idolising, jazz smoothie.His breakthrough 1994 track “Inner City Life” was partly high-tech drum'n'bass ferocity, but it was completely merged with jazz-soul sophistication and of course the soaring voice of the sadly recently-deceased Dianne Charlegmane (who would work Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Renegades of Jazz is the alter ego of German DJ David Hanke, whose blending of breakbeats, a distorted big band, rap vocals and electronica to create something billed to bring jazz back to the dancefloor would already be an unusual combination even before the addition of John Milton’s biblical epic Paradise Lost. The result is a brooding and initially rather puzzling release that after several listens reveals itself as addictive and original.The Miltonic connection seems at first to be interpreted very loosely, as a general theme, rather than specific set of references, some of which, such as Read more ...
Joe Muggs
It's an understatement to say that the massive revival of fortunes of club music in the 2010s has had its ups and downs. It's been a time of chaotic glut, of excess and spectacle – thanks particularly to the American “EDM” (electronic dance music) wave, which has seen egos, assholery and unnecessary fireworks that make the 90s UK superstar DJ era seem like a gentle Sunday afternoon stroll in the park – but also of diversification and fertility. And one particularly interesting phenomenon has been musicians who've picked up certain threads which the diminished scenes of the 1990s had left off. Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The thought of attending a dance music conference in Amsterdam frankly gave me the creeping horrors. I'd never been to Amsterdam Dance Event before, and the combination of DJ egos, business hustling and relentless partying through hundreds of club venues in a renownedly liberal city presented so many opportunities for both boredom and complete catastrophe, it just seemed like a fool's errand. But this, of course, wasn't fair. The dance music business is far more interesting than rumour and memories of the ego-bloated nineties superclub era would have it, and Amsterdam is a delightful place to Read more ...
Joe Muggs
When drum'n'bass emerged from hardcore rave's interactions with London's pirate radio culture, 20-odd years ago, it created some of the most radical grassroots music ever to come out of the British Isles. It came in such a white heat explosion of underground, transforming repeatedly and rapidly through different iterations its first few years, that nobody could have predicted that it would reach a commercial high-point two decades on. Yet here we are with the likes of DJ Fresh creating chart toppers, d'n'b's top rank of DJs still touring the world to arena crowds, and a whole range of new Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
In a two-decade ripple effect typical of pop culture, there’s been a recent spate of interest in 1990s jungle. This was frantic bass-led breakbeat club music that led to the more media-friendly term “drum'n'bass” which, in turn, led indirectly to UK garage, grime and globe-conquering dubstep. DJs such as Shy FX and DJ Hype have maintained their careers and the spotlight is now creeping back towards them. Another player from those days is London’s Rebel MC, AKA Michael West, AKA Conquering Lion, AKA Congo Natty.The Rebel MC’s career was woven deep into Nineties rave, starting with a series of Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Alison Moyet is not just one of the great voices in pop, she's one of the most likeable figures. A brilliantly no-nonsense character, she consistently skewers music industry pomposity, laughs in the face of the expectations the world has of female artists, and generally does precisely what she wants while retaining an abnormally acute sense of the absurdness of it all.All of which seems to have fed into the minutes, which is a fabulously immature album – in the sense that this is clearly a singer-songwriter having nothing but fun in the studio, like a kid in a candy shop. With production Read more ...