Even if he hadn’t made his name rapping about kilos and capers, Wu-Tang MC Ghostface Killah’s long-form flow would still be described as straight dope. But Ghostface — AKA Tony Starks, Ironman, Pretty Toney, and now Ghostdini the Wizard of Poetry — did form a reputation from swaggering through tales…
In the Venn diagram of modern electro, fidget, and hip-house, Milan-based DJ duo Crookers resides in the overlap. The pairing of producers Phra and Bot, Crookers is often mentioned alongside the Bloody Beetroots, a similarly beat-saturated set of Italian DJs that rose to prominence through blogs. But Crookers differentiates its…
In the Venn diagram of modern electro, fidget, and hip-house, Milan-based DJ duo Crookers resides in the overlap. The pairing of producers Phra and Bot, Crookers is often mentioned alongside the Bloody Beetroots, a similarly beat-saturated set of Italian DJs that rose to prominence through blogs. But Crookers differentiates its…
As anyone who has eaten Asian party mix will tell you, rice crackers are delicious, a condensed indulgence balancing salty, spicy, and sweet. But more than anything, the real pleasure of these treats is the texture — they are satisfyingly crunchy, whether shaped like spheres, crescents, or spirals. And if…
Dubstep, the London-gestated UK garage mutation, has been dropping the pressure for a decade. Yet it feels equally fresh with each new release. Ever-increasingly, overseas labels are setting the bass-line baseline by drawing the intimate connections between a ten-year gap of genres, from tech-step to tech-house, from inebriated ambient to…
A hail of bullets greets Baltimore MC Ryeisha “Rye Rye” Berrain in the club. Well, the crowd hails the sound of bullets. There’s nothing outright dangerous about a Rye Rye performance, and only her mike is packin’ heat. But her music holds your ear’s attention like a stickup. It features…
Initially catching a break as an opening DJ for progressive figurehead Sasha, UK DJ/producer James Zabiela funneled an interest in acid house’s tightly pitched trills and the instant editing potential of the Pioneer CDJ decks into a blissfully slick sound that’s both sci-fi and hi-fi. Digitally assisted by MIDI controllers,…
Initially catching a break as an opening DJ for progressive figurehead Sasha, U.K. DJ/producer James Zabiela funneled an interest in acid house’s tightly pitched trills and the instant editing potential of the Pioneer CDJ decks into a blissfully slick sound that’s both sci-fi and hi-fi. Digitally assisted by MIDI controllers,…
Stockholm-born Axel Willner has, since 2006, braided together two full-length albums from the chromosomes of minimal techno and trance. His latest, Yesterday & Today (ANTI-/Kompakt), further captures aural atmospheric swatches interspersed with snippets of blissful chatter. Yet regardless of this sonic sensibility and his moniker, it comes to light that…
Vienna. Always culturally and politically modern, yet pleasingly anachronistic in many ways, Austria’s low-slung capital is an amber cast of the 19th Century. But a little more than 200 years after the death of Wolfgang Amadeus, in that very city, along came DJs/producers Peter Kruder and Richard Dorfmeister — two…
Unfashionable is the next fashion. That’s been working for me the last four years,” DJ/producer Diplo says by phone from Austin, Texas, on a recent evening. But claiming to be unfashionable seems strange from a DJ called to the Longhorn State to coheadline two parties at the annual South by…
You won’t hear his cinched beats and dub fringes unfurl through the radio (unless, that is, you live in a tech-house fantasy land). But it would seem he’s been a slave to the mixing board, based on the number of tracks tagged with his name in the past few years…
With great power comes great responsibility, or so the superhero saying goes. And when it comes to the power to rock the dance floor right, and rock it all night, call the Bloody Beetroots. With their Marvel Comics-style masks, the Italian twosome can be seen bobbing in the booth, gleefully…
Paris-based indie electro music/fashion label Kitsuné was founded in 2002 and named after the Japanese word for shape-shifting foxes. It releases tracks that pile on robotic gargling, squelchy synths, new rave’s saw-tooth bass, and four-on-the-floor, French disco-house buildups. The only filter the artists don’t employ is the one in their…
Naming his label Size Records, DJ/producer Steve Angello set himself up for criticism if he couldn’t lay down the magnitude of tracks necessary to command a room like Mansion, where he will help commemorate the club’s fifth birthday this Saturday. Luckily, Angello’s brand of breezy, big-room progressive house perfectly complements…
In a world where divas are bionically enhanced, the bloom of marquees and floodlights can be seen from space, and the energy crisis has been averted by harnessing the kinetic motion of dance floors, powerhouse is the genre of choice. And those who choose power house DJ Boris, who has…
DJ and producer Darren Emerson was once a member of dub-strewn acid house collective Underworld. And lest you forget, he opens and closes his new mix compilation, GU36: Bogotá, with the then-progressive trio’s 1993 epic “MMM Skyscraper I Love You.” The two CDs this bookends are Emerson’s third entry for…
You need to understand the physics of a speaker, which work the same from the headphones to the club,” DJ/producer titan Paul van Dyk says from his home in Berlin. In the promotional club-date storm following the release of his recent remix album, Mirror’s Edge, he reflects on the science…
Kevin Barnes is a centaur. Or at least he plays one for a few minutes onstage each night with his polymorphic pop sextet Of Montreal. Dressing as a partly nude stallion is just one way Barnes and his hallucinatory Athens, Georgia-based troupe visually accompany the tour for their ninth album,…
People speak of him with reverence, yet he still worries about being seen as relevant. He was recently honored as Top Progressive House DJ at the DJ Awards in Ibiza, yet he thinks the tag “progressive” is still partially a burden. He has long been seen as a herald of…
Adrian Michna, on the phone from his Brooklyn home, has been called to discuss production. Known to many as DJ Egg Foo Young, or as a producer under his own last name, 30-year-old Michna could just pimp his full-length debut, Magic Monday, released on Ghostly International. The album is first-rate,…
The Brooklyn quartet the Shondes offers no shortage of politically charged tinder with which to spark a debate. That’s clear from just the band’s name: Pronounced shonduhz, it’s adapted from Yiddish for “shame” or “disgrace.” Outspoken — emphasis on out — the group is part Jewish, part transgender, and all…
