February tends to be kind of a hard, dark month for much of the United States – it’s cold, days are short, and things can get lonely if you don’t have love in your life, around V-Day. To commemorate it is almost over, we’ve got some hard and dark sounds —this is your music review […]
Read MoreHip-hop is full of false binaries – East Coast/West Coast; Old School/Nu Skool; Street/Club; Male/Female; Gay/Straight, and, all too often, never the twain shall meet. Superstar Top 40 Hip-Hop artists like Drake, The Weeknd, and Nicki Minaj broadcast the intricacies of celebrity like some crystalline Fortress Of Solitude, faces as perfectly presented as some ceramic […]
Read MorePortland, Or. is a complicated, layered, and nuanced place. Beneath the facade of being a millennial paradise, Portland’s rooted in the blue collar industry of yesteryear, as one of the Pacific Northwest’s most bustling port towns. Even Portland’s reputation as being a hub for underground culture came about due to the economic downturn of the […]
Read MoreChance The Rapper – Coloring Book – Album Review Considering hip-hop’s roots in the pavement and asphalt of the urban environment, there is a certain crossover with the “hard living school of hard knocks”, as a lot of rappers, producers, and DJs are forced to live outside of the law to get by. Groups like […]
Read MoreBrian Eno‘s The Ship (Warp Records) is like a libretti for Snowpiercer, or J. G. Ballard/Ben Wheatley’s High Rise – imagining society as a vessel lost at sea, forever drifting through endless, featureless landscapes. Trying to conceptualize or visualize society is a tricky business, especially in these uncertain mercurial times. Society changes in a nanosecond, […]
Read MoreEnigmatic Mancunian producer Andy Stott‘s output, these past few years, have been an exquisite portrait of what’s been going on in the post-dubstep electronic world. Dubstep’s ferocious bassweight is tempered with intricate, precise grime beats; weightless, ethereal, dreamy synthpop – all polished and poised, seemingly, by the human hand. This particular phase of Stott’s career […]
Read MoreMuch like fashion, Electronic music has never been very good at looking in the rearview. In the accelerationist framework of the genre, producers and DJs have simply not taken the time to dig through the past to make sense of it all. There are whole continents of early ’90s rave tapes, the early digital trance […]
Read MoreHistorically, towns and city centers were organized around a sacred building, all roads leading to some chapel, church, or cathedral, which were the orbit around which Medieval life orbited. These buildings were designed to evoke a sense of awe & rapture – vaulted ceilings and flying buttresses, as sacred choirs filled the monolithic space with […]
Read MoreThe UK’s most mercurial, shape-shifting producer Dean Blunt gives the straight dope on life in the UK, with some of his strangest friends. Trying to put a finger on the pulse of a culture via its government and the mainstream media is futile. What you see is distorted by financial interests, hidden agenda, PR campaigns, […]
Read MorePop music is designed to be a salve for modern living – a way to blow off some steam after our 80-hour a week jobs, letting us lose ourselves in some escapist fantasy for a bit as we listen to Top 40 hip-hop artists talk about booze we can’t afford to drink, clothes we can’t […]
Read MoreMuch has been made, of late, as to the malleable, fluid nature of identity. Daily, we discuss the ramifications of systemic bias; of The Other and our reluctance towards, or embracing of, another point of view. The boundaries of “the self” are not concrete – we are not walled off like some isolationist state. We […]
Read MoreSince the very beginning, electronic music has always been exploring alien worlds, conjuring images of whirling discs, horseshoe nebulae, and strange, alien races. Whether this is due to electronic music’s arsenal of non-acoustic sound generators – synths and drum machines – which can produce pure, mathematical tones not possible in the natural world; or because […]
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