Spend a minute listening to jungle and you’ll feel its torrential power right away: the immediacy of whiplashing breakbeats; the incessant drive of sinuous melodies; the triumphant integration of Black music, from jazz to ragga to techno to hip hop.… Read More
Koreless’ debut single sounded like the work of someone who’d already been whittling his ideas down for a good long while. Released in 2011, “4D” and its B-side, “MTI,” were elegantly stripped takes on the nebulous style known simply as… Read More
In 2013, Cold Cave’s Wes Eisold had just released a single called “People Are Poison.” He was detoxing from the bad vibes that surrounded 2011’s Cherish the Light Years, the band’s final release for Matador, and recovering from professional backlash… Read More
If EDM had been created in the 1970s, it might have sounded like Escapades, the debut album from Gaspard Augé, better known as one half of French electronic duo Justice. Like EDM, Escapades is utterly in thrall to scale, an… Read More
On his latest album as Suzanne Kraft, Los Angeles native Diego Herrera, now based in Amsterdam, takes the pulse of a heart in flux. Written during a period when a flourishing romance was abruptly transformed by enforced distance, About You… Read More
Video-game soundtracks have often drawn upon club music for inspiration: Just think of the drum’n’bass of Soichi Terada’s music for Ape Escape, the hard techno of the PlayStation Ghost in the Shell game, even the straight-up proto-grime in an X-Men… Read More
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