For what is ostensibly club music, Loraine James’ productions can feel fiercely guarded. Many dancers and DJs favor smoothly paved superhighways to bliss; James’ zig-zagging tracks are filled with potholes, speed bumps, and the occasional vertiginous bridge to nowhere. The… Read More
Feed Me Weird Things, originally released in 1996 on Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label, is the Squarepusher LP you could take home to meet your mom—the well-dressed eccentric to “Come on My Selector”’s slobbering psychopath. That’s not to say it is… Read More
In 1984, London’s Bronski Beat rejected the industry’s ideas about which in-your-face marketing tactics could be applied to a trio of working-class gay men. Instead, they crafted “Smalltown Boy,” a kitchen-sink drama about a bullied outsider who flees home but… Read More
Born in Bahia but long based in Rio de Janeiro, Lucas Santtana should have had both ears plenty full from those two centers of Brazilian culture. With his colloquial, imagistic Portuguese and references to all manner of regional and historical… Read More
In 2017, Alessio Natalizia made an interesting claim about the brusque, intelligent dance music he was making as Not Waving: “We live in such a fucked-up world, so it’s important to make some optimistic music once in a while,” he… Read More
Punk set out to shock the ’70s rock establishment, but disco did a far better job. Safety pins and ironic swastikas had nothing on one-piece jumpsuits and boogie shoes. After all, no one ever hosted a baseball-stadium rally to detonate… Read More
On their 1995 album Soul Food, which sounds like it was recorded in a deep fryer, Greg Cartwright’s old band the Oblivians released a song with an n-bomb in its title. The Oblivians were Memphis garage-punk kingpins, and Soul Food… Read More
Like certain Celtic druids or Rome’s emperor Constantine, the 7th-century Arabic poet known as Al-Khansa leapt into an unfamiliar cosmos, converting to the nascent faith of Islam during middle age (Muhammad himself was said to be a fan). She composed… Read More
In his work as Murcof, Fernando Corona has long shown a talent for drawing beauty out of bleakness. On his earliest albums, 2002’s Martes and 2005’s Remembranza, the Tijuana native fused the timbres of contemporary classical with the tonal and… Read More
The past year has not been good for dancefloors, but it’s been an incredible year for dance music: Mining the rich histories of drum’n’bass, bitch and Baltimore house, juke, hardcore, and gabba, beat culture has been pushing so far and… Read More