mon 11/08/2025

techno

CD: Kode9 & The Spaceape - Black Sun

Kode9 & The Spaceape's 'Black Sun': 'An endlessly listenable and quite timeless album'

There's something about this album that feels as if it's already existed for a long time. Full of post-apocalyptic images of smoke, dust, decay and weakness, and themes of struggling individuals and implacable political forces, it thematically fits...

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CD: Zwischenwelt - Paranormale Aktivitat

The geometric mystification of 'Paranormale Aktivitat'

The Detroit electro-techno duo of James Stinson and Gerald Donald aka Drexciya never gave away their secrets easily. Almost completely anonymous and never photographed during their 10-year existence – which ended with Stinson's 2002 death after a...

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theartsdesk Q&A: Producer/DJ Carl Craig

Carl Craig is extraordinarily easygoing. Most dance producers of his seniority and level of achievement would come with at least a publicist in tow, but when we meet him in his London hotel, his only entourage is his nine-year-old son, playing...

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theartsdesk Q&A: Producer/DJ Richie Hawtin

Minimal techno kingpin Richie Hawtin deals with those allegations of over-seriousness head on

It's only after hanging up the Skype connection to Richie Hawtin that I realise how effective a branding exercise he has made the interview. In conversation the English-born, Canadian-raised Berlin resident is charming and smart, but listening...

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Pendulum, Wembley Arena

The full lineup of Pendulum, their facial hair as untrendy as their sound

Next time BBC2 want to do one of those periodic “what happened to the white working class” documentaries, they could do worse than come to a Pendulum gig. The crowd at Wembley Arena last night were defiantly not “studenty” as many for post-rave...

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Magnetic Man, Heaven

Magnetic Man's LED cage

Rave music, in its many ever-mutating forms, is now more than a generation into its existence. Many, possibly most, of the crowd pushing into Heaven, under Charing Cross station, weren't even born when acid house fully hit the UK in 1988, but none...

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Moombahton, Boombahchero and 21st-century genre meltdown

A suitably confusing image for a confusing sound

Some days I feel like I've woken up on the other side of some wormhole in the spacetime continuum, and the world is a subtly but definitely different place to yesterday. So it was last week when I got a slightly drunken email from a music...

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Techno for Concert Ensemble

Parallels have occasionally been drawn between techno and modern classical music, most especially dissonant movements such as minimalism, serialism and the broader avant garde. The purest techno has a stark, almost barren simplicity and those...

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Green Man Festival 2010, Glanusk Castle

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...

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Silver Apples, The Luminaire

The spry Simeon Coxe operates his esoteric machines

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...

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Singles & Downloads 6

Wiley, master of both grime and pop

Wiley, Electric Boogaloo (Back Yard) Erratic and spiky where his old mucker Dizzee Rascal has been slick and unerring in his rise to the top, East Londoner Richard "Wiley" Cowie has managed several massive pop-dance hits while remaining thoroughly...

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Berlin Sounds: the not-so-new Bohemia

“I'm moving to Berlin.” In artistic circles and especially those that include electronic musicians, over the past few years such a threat has become so commonplace as to be cliché. It's not without reason, though. For one, despite gentrification,...

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