It will come as no great surprise to our readers when I say that we here at ISM take the long view when it comes to ol Electronic Dance Music. It is still partly viewed as “new” and there has always been a certain obsession with innovation within its varied sub sections even though we…
Culture
All posts from the 'Culture' category
Sherkin Jerkin’
For those of you not too bothered about seeing Tiga for a 4th time in 12 months, or slightly perturbed by how last years Electric Picnic’s headliners were copy and pasted on to this years Forbidden Friut line up and / or generally can’t tell the difference between most festivals on the calendar any more, this June…
Mix – The End of Raving?
Last Friday I was recording this mix at around the same time one of the Bloc organisers wrote a rather foolish article decrying the state of “rave” and its populace and so forth, in the modern age. The mix was from the bag of records I played at Bloc. We’d meant to record the whole…
Mix – Massive Carl’s M5 Mixtape / Bloc Mixxx
My latest mix is for the Bloc Weekend festival which is taking place this weekend over in Butlins in Minehead in the UK. Apartment and Lunar Disko will be taking over the Pub Venue on the Saturday of the festival from 7pm to Midnight featuring myself, Tr One, Automatic Tasty and John Heckle. At this…
A reason to be cheerful (?)
This post has been inspired by the RA Dj poll. Not something I expected to be doing when I woke up today but there you go. I apologise now if you are hoping that this will be a rant about how rubbish it is or about how contrived it is, you’ll have to go elsewhere…
Who do you think you are kidding?
Disruption, abstraction, subversiveness, outsider, challenging preconceptions, fucking things up and just plain old weird. Terms, ideas and narratives that never stop being appealing. And why shouldn’t they be? Music needs to evolve, needs to break boundaries and challenge its listener. Experimentation is the cornerstone of many great musical movements. Techno music as a form is quite…
Twisted Pepper closes…
I can’t say I was hugely surprised with the news that Bodytonic’s Twisted Pepper will be closing its doors this week. Even though it is Dublin’s most well known and highly regarded dance club of the last ten years it also felt like its time, in its current incarnation, was up. Clubbing – and Dublin…
COOL ANALYSIS, DAWG
About a year ago, I became a columnist for Attack Magazine. It has been fun writing opinion columns and providing analysis to a very wide audience that stretches beyond the confines of the genres I participate in. When Attack approached me about doing this, their primary concern was that the column lead discussion as opposed…
Fatima Yamaha & D1 Recordings
Unless you have been living on Pluto for the last few years you can’t have missed the continued rise of a “lost” classic by Fatima Yamaha called “What’s A Girl To Do”, to the point where even perennial dullards such as John Digweed and Dixon are now playing it in their sets and Matrixxman is…
Guess Who’s Back
For most of the past year and a half since we announced the end of this blog, I assumed the next post I would make here would be a eulogy. The fact that I probably wasn’t gonna do as good a job as Bernhard did might have added to the ass dragging. So after the…