Hidden Banger: Five Surprising Dancefloor Sensations
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Banger: Part 2
Chad Parkhill takes us for a tour through the world of weird, wonderful and unexpectedly danceable tunes. iPods at the ready: it’s time to kick off with part two of this special five-part blog series. Jan Turkenburg and His Pupils of the Geert Grote School, ‘In My … Read more
Hidden Banger: Five Surprising Dancefloor Sensations
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Banger: Part 1
Chad Parkhill takes us for a tour through the world of weird, wonderful and unexpectedly danceable tunes. iPods at the ready: it’s time to kick off with part one of this special five-part blog series. Bahumutsi Drama Group, ‘To the Comrades (PB edit)’ Over the past few … Read more
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Worst. Review. Ever: On the pillorying of Jessica Andrews
Every writer writes because they want their work to be read – and in the brave new world of digital publishing, this desire takes the specific form of wanting to ‘go viral’. Virality can seem so arbitrary, so why shouldn’t a young writer pin their hopes … Read more
Music
Meet Me on the Desertshore
It’s easy, and inaccurate, to reduce Throbbing Gristle to a band obsessed equally with sex and death; but that doesn’t mean that they weren’t obsessed with those very topics. Take the cover of their seminal 1979 album 20 Jazz Funk Greats: a lovely shot of the … Read more
Music, Reviews
Claustrophobic and Bittersweet: Tristesse Contemporaine and The Music From the Balconies Nearby Was Overlaid by the Noise of Sporadic Acts of Violence
The Parisian DJ-collective-cum-record label Dirty Sound System – DJs Guillaume Sorge and Clovis Goux, alongside a roster of associated producers and curators – have always been somewhat out of sync with their contemporaries, and this characteristic has usually served them well. In 2003, at the fag end … Read more
Music, Reviews
Rendering unto Caesar: Dirty Projectors’ Swing Lo Magellan
Until recently, Dirty Projectors traded in a highly idiosyncratic and instantly identifiable form of indie rock. The band’s sole songwriter and explicit leader, Dave Longstreth, is a Yale-trained musician whose songs contain passages as fiendishly convoluted and baroquely formalist as anything in the classical music canon. At … Read more
Music, Reviews
‘It’s a natural fact that it’s good to be gay!’: Strong Love: Songs of Gay Liberation 1972–1981
The digitisation of vast back catalogues of music has made music historians of all of us. Consumers can now access nearly any recorded music they want, and are thus encouraged to explore their favourite genres of music in great depth. Paradoxically, this also encourages a kind of … Read more
Music, Reviews
Unreal Love: The Magnetic Fields’ Love at the Bottom of the Sea
Stephin Merritt, the musical arch-contrarian behind American pop fabulists The Magnetic Fields, knows a thing or two about artifice. More specifically he understands that, at its most fundamental level, all music is artifice – what separates music (even musique concrète, music created from recordings of natural noise) … Read more
