rave
Kieron Tyler
Remember Primal Scream’s woozy “Higher Than the Sun”? It’s a fair bet Mauro Remiddi does. His debut album as Porcelain Raft drifts through 10 foggy songs as disconnected, yet warmly melodic, as that era-defining excursion through the ether.Italian born and America-dwelling, Remiddi has been through a few musical incarnations. He’s played klezmer for the Berlin Youth Circus, was pianist for a New York tap-dance show and in the Sixties-ish band Sunny Day Sets Fire. Where he’s landed up is familiar, but still satisfying. As well as nodding towards the rave/indie crossover, he’s got the chillwave Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Justice – pronounce it “Joosteece”, for they are as French as they come – deconstruct the opposition between style and substance. Everything about them is preposterous, from the hipster facial hair via the rock-pig antics in their A Cross The Universe tour “documentary” DVD to the way that almost the entirety of their musical palette is cribbed from their countrymen and close associates Daft Punk. They are masters of the big, empty gesture taken to ridiculous extremes, of blustering noise and gut-punching beats made strangely friendly, of the reduction of both rock and rave music to a Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The Chemical Brothers have long had one of the most vital shows around. It’s a visual spectacular that can only be likened to peak-time Pink Floyd or Jean-Michel Jarre, yet precision-tooled, without the bombast of those acts. Their long-term visual designer, Adam Smith, is mostly responsible and now he’s shot a concert film of the electronic duo’s appearance at the Fuji Rock Festival in Japan last year. Smith has directed a few bits and bobs before, notably the BBC adaptation of Little Dorrit, and he’s the perfect choice to take the Chemical Brothers experience into the cinema.He doesn’t, Read more ...
Joe Muggs
Against all the odds, I find myself going into 2012 with a strong sense of optimism. And the reason? I am a born-again rave zealot. I saw it at Outlook Festival in Croatia, I saw it at Sónar in Barcelona, and I saw it at the Big Chill where I was running a stage; participatory, constructive, creative partying, where the crowds go not just to be entertained but to plug into something bigger, to be part of something.Now, I love Kanye West's music with all my heart, but the sight of his latest whining pseudo-breakdown on stage at the Big Chill just seemed like the latest peeling away of the Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
2011 was a year when the wheels of global history cranked noticeably forward, the news always full of images that will be in school text books within a decade. It was also the year when, for most of us, “a bit peeved” became “utterly livid” that greedy, over-privileged vermin had gambled and lost all our money and were clearly getting away with it, unhindered.On the other hand, such weighty affairs needed a preposterous counterpoint and there’s little in life more inconsequential yet excellent than Lady Gaga, who dominated the first half of the year with the release of her second album Born Read more ...
Joe Muggs
If 2011 was the year when dance music's natural tendency to fragmentation was taken to extremes, this album was the one that bound those fragments together into one demented but scintillating vision. Russell Whyte – Rustie – comes from a very particularly Scottish club scene that is the perfect antidote to the idea that musical connoisseurship means nerdiness.From the very simple imperative of moving a dance floor in fresh ways comes an explosion of ideas and influences: retro video game soundtracks, obscure Japanese noise bands, the hyper-capitalist hyper-pop of 21st-century R&B, the Read more ...
theartsdesk
Whether it's via the Disc of the Day column or our eclectic mix of overnight live reviews, on theartsdesk we try to traverse as much of the world of New Music as we possibly can. As Christmas swings around we consider it our duty to help guide readers through the thicket of music DVDs. They can be a tricky proposition: with live concert films it's notoriously hard to retain the sense of occasion while also somehow rising above it, while documentaries are often either exercises in fan-only arcana or ego-fuelled attempts to build a personality cult. We’ve tried to select releases that transcend Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Example seems a most unlikely sex symbol but the four-fifths full Brighton Centre (capacity 5100) contains multiple gaggles of young women in their late teens and early twenties who want a piece of 29-year-old Elliot Gleave (EG = Example). My pal Don is bemused. “He looks like a bloke you’d see at a bus stop,” he exclaims above female screams. He does, albeit more stylishly dressed and with a hint of Edmund Blackadder (series one) about his severe fringed haircut. This vocal, partisan crowd – also, it should be noted, filled with men of a similar age - appear willing to lap up anything Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A decade and a half ago I was junglist correspondent for Eternity magazine, a long since defunct organ that catered to the then thriving print press for rave devotees. This was how I ran into Aquasky, a trio of studenty, long-haired guys from Bournemouth making chill-out drum and bass. A lot has happened to them since then. Most notably - apart from being much less hirsute - they long ago dumped the marijuana’n’jazz approach and make, under the radar, contagiously ballsy rave music that takes no prisoners but also welcomes anyone with a party bone in their body to their party.Their new album Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Friday 9th SeptemberA ferry adds to the fun. It may seem rather childish but the fact you have to take a ferry to the Isle of Wight makes the whole Bestival experience seem more of an adventure. Sitting on the open air deck with my youngest brother Enrico, the wind tempered by a warm, bright sun, and a bottle of cider passing between us, the only perturbing issue is the amount of wax jackets making the journey to the festival, Barbours and the like. When did the wax jacket become acceptable? When I were a lad they were only worn by Sloanes and men with shotguns Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Great idea. Geeky Hasidic kid from Brooklyn's claustrophobic Jewish community finds his attention wandering during his rabbinical studies, and falls under the raffish spell of the older and wilder Yosef Zimmerman. He finds the slope is slippery indeed, and with head-spinning speed he's enmeshed in a transatlantic drug-mule racket. He's making big piles of wedge, but losing his immortal soul in the process.Kevin Asch's directorial debut, which is based on the true story of a team of Hasidic smugglers who imported a million Ecstasy tablets from Amsterdam to the USA in 1998-99, has potential in Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Thursday 23 JuneHaven’t left yet but someone sends me an email saying, "Not going to Glastonbury this year and feeling rather smug about it." What are they feeling smug about? The fact that they’re going to have a forgettable, normal weekend while this extraordinary event is going on? It is, of course, to do with ideas of rain. A lot of the pre-Glastonbury coverage focuses endlessly on rain and mud, as if home comforts are everything. When did comfort become the big cultural draw?Possibly when the average age of music journalists went from 27 to 45, or possibly when we began our techno- Read more ...