psychedelia
Joe Muggs
If there's one festival in Britain where people are ready for the rain, it's the Green Man. After all, nobody goes to the Brecon Beacons to sunbathe, right? The weekend, which began the spate of boutique and specialist festivals that dominate the summer season now, remains one of the most spirited in the UK, and its crowd seems to be one of the hardiest even when, as this year, the deluge is near-continuous. It helps that the site is both beautiful and sloping, so it wasn't able to turn into a grim waist-deep mudbath; the real saviour of the festival, though, is that attention to detail in Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Steven Ellison is one of the most fascinating figures in modern music. Son of Motown songwriter Marylin McLeod and nephew to Alice Coltrane, he's inspired in equal part by his own musical heritage, the slow-and-low hip hop of his home state of California, and British electronica and drum and bass. His fans include Damon Albarn, Erykah Badu and Thom Yorke (the latter appearing on this year's triumphant Cosmogramma album), his Brainfeeder and Low End Theory collective of musicians and DJs are among the hippest on earth, and the world is pretty much his oyster. But can he transform his intensely Read more ...
Joe Muggs
The Green Man festival takes place this coming weekend at the Glanusk estate near Abergavenny in the rolling hills of the Brecon Beacons. What begun in 2003 as a glorified gig for the husband and wife duo It's Jo And Danny has become the very epitome of the 21st-century “boutique festival” - indeed is very possibly responsible for that concept itself.As well as reclaiming the rock festival from bovine crowds and sensory overload, the Green Man also provided a nexus for a rising scene of hirsute youngsters intent on mining musical source material outside the standard canons of rock and club Read more ...
Joe Muggs
One doesn't want to be prejudiced about audiences, but when you go to see a show by a “pioneer of electronic music”, particularly one in his seventies, you most likely expect a crowd that are fairly male, fairly unfunky and tending towards the middle-aged. And to be fair, there were a good few paunches and beards in evidence at the Luminaire – but there were also a quite startling number of young, dressed-up, attractive and really rather groovy twenty-somethings of both (and indeterminate) genders milling about the place too.Listen to "Oscillations" and "Seagreen Serenades" by Silver Apples ( Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
It has been said that Dan Treacy (b. 1960) is the TV Personalities in the same way that Mark E Smith is The Fall. Certainly he has been the sole consistent member since they appeared in 1978 with the single "14th Floor" and subsequent cult hit "Part Time Punks". The early Eighties incarnation of the band, which included "Slaughter" Joe Foster and Ed Ball (later of The Times) has a claim to laying down the blueprint for British indie.Treacy's recurring themes of childhood, Sixties culture, and lo-fi, punky psychedelia became scene staples as Creation kingpin Alan McGee has acknowledged. The Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Neil Campbell is a one-man subculture. In 30 years of music-making in various configurations of improvised rock, psychedelia and electronics, he has released hundreds of hours of recordings, mainly in micro-editions of home-produced cassette, CD or mp3, and collaborated endlessly with a global network of musicians that have fallen through the cracks of genre or stylistic allegiance. Since separating from Leeds-based guitar drone group Vibracathedral Orchestra in 2006, he has mainly concentrated on his activities as Astral Social Club, under which name he performed a relatively rare live set Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Dinosaur Jr never change. Formed in 1984, the trio added a heavy dose of rock classicism to the then-current sound of US hardcore, inadvertently inventing grunge in the process. Since then, members have come and gone around lead singer/guitarist J Mascis – eventually returning in 2005 to their original lineup featuring Lou Barlow (also leader of Sebadoh and Folk Implosion) on bass and “Murph” on drums – and the Mascis has calmly watched scenes come and go.Hardcore, grunge, nu-metal and emo all rose and fell, but Dinosaur Jr just kept on keeping on with their formula of Mascis's plaintively- Read more ...