Ableton Live is a loop based program created for live performance and improvising with electronic music. This is a paradox, musically and ethically. A loop is a continuous sound that, when it reaches its end, starts at the beginning again. It’s an exact replica, a copy of itself, repeating over and over, and a live performance is duplicated after the fact. More»
Sound System Revival
October saw the American dub-reggae-based sound-system scene get its profile raised with the launch party for Dub-Stuy Records, the Brooklyn label launched by Quoc “Q-Mastah” Pham’s Sound Liberation Front crew. But as Vice tech-site Motherboard notes, the party was really centered around the debut of the deluxe 15,000-watt sound system that SLF has spent the past year building and tweaking. More»
Brixton as Genre
“Drum and bass, dub, roots and culture.” To anyone used to shopping in Brixton Market, the loop is as familiar as a Jamaican patty. Recited for hours on end by a street rep equivalent for London’s University of Dub, the promoter has a lock on the genres the locals prefer, not to mention a rotating cast of first class artists to pitch. More»
Dub and Bass Culture
Jamaican dancehall began rushing Germany’s charts in the early ‘90s, at around the same time that Berlin’s Basic Channel label starting releasing its uniquely stark brand of dub-influenced techno that’s influenced countless artists in the city and around the globe. More»
Dub Step to Roots and Culture
Alongside the Olympics, London is currently bursting with activity celebrating the 50th anniversary of Jamaican independence. The all-star mega-big Respect Jamaica 50th Festival enters its second week at the nearby Indigo2, sporting a roster that includes everyone from Jimmy Cliff and U-Roy to Maxi Priest and Shaggy. More»
Ghost Riders and Showroom Dummies
Rock criticism’s great sensationalist Lester Bangs warned the world about the “Cybernetic Inevitable” that rock was fated to suffer. It was an evolutionary stage where flawless musical machines put human musicians out of work. More»
Dubstep Democracy
With the exception of albums such as Kode9 and the Spaceape’s Memories of the Future, and Dusk and Blackdown’s Margins Music, dubstep is not known to be political. Reflective of its contexts, like Burial’s debut, certainly, but a protest idiom, like punk, well, no. More»
Breaking the Sound Barrier
It was two in the morning as I made my way up the hill. Halfway through my second listen to Burial’s new Kindred EP, the music had started to saturate me, like rain that has stopped searching for the fastest way to the sea. But the sounds were still new too new for me to trust my ears. Was this strange wail I was hearing a part of the recording that I’d missed the first time? More»
Dub, Not Dub
I’ve loved reggae and dub more than any other musics since first raiding my Parisian cousin’s tapes at the age of 14. What I found in his banlieue bedroom spiritualized me, politicized me, and made me a lifelong fan of adventurous and committed sounds. My love has never waned in the slightest. If anything, it pounds louder and more insistently in my world now, than ever before. More»
Money to Burn
It’s been nearly 20 years since the Kopyright Liberation Front (KLF) committed suicide, twice. One incident involved a gun; the other had a furnace. The pioneering group was at the top of their game. They had international hits. They made money. They wrote the book on ambient-techno in their 1990 masterpiece, Chill Out. And they imbued the notion of “trance techno” into British pop with their single, What Time is Love? More»
Introducing Missed the Gig
You can’t get to know a place without knowing what the folks in town listen to. The best way to do that is to keep your eye out for gig flyers. In all likelihood, the shows have already taken place. Still, what you’re left with is, at best, a testimony to local music, at worst, the work of an overzealous label intern. More»
Revolutionary Times
From the amp-straining bursts that introduce Is This Hyperreal? through the robotic reverberations that close it, Atari Teenage Riot’s comeback album forcefully reminds listeners that technology has a history. But this is no conventional exercise in nostalgia, like records that fetishize guitar pedals from the late 1960s or synth effects from the early 1980s. The sounds on Is This Hyperreal?” are theatrically dated, but thrown together like the odds and ends in a costume trunk. More»
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