If you haven’t heard the music of Maya Arulpragasam, you aren’t alone. But visit any online music-geek mecca, like the MP3 post Fluxblog (www.fluxblog.org) or the tempest-in-a-text-post board ILM (I Love Music) (ilx.wh3rd.net), and you’ll be smacked with the feeling of missing out. As the definitive word-of-fingers sensation, her debut…
There are only a handful of DJs whose names resonate beyond dance music: John Digweed is one of them. Back in the salad days of the late Nineties, when the genre exploded from an underground cultural renaissance to a global industry, the British-born Digweed and his frequent partner Sasha invaded…
The shoe-gazer phenomenon of the early Nineties exploded out of the UK like a giant sunburst of swirling guitars, distorted synths, and cascades of feedback. By the end of the decade the heat of the movement had waned. Now Germany’s Ulrich Schnauss is breathing new life into its ethereal textures…
Most internationally respected DJs are known for spinning only one genre of dance music. Not so with San Francisco’s Mark Farina, who is comfortable plying nightclubs with jackin’ grooves one night and down-tempo, instrumental hip-hop flavored “Mushroom Jazz” the next. In the late Eighties the Chicago native participated in the…
German house producer Ian Pooley’s repertoire ranges from the airy, ambient Euro-house of his brilliant Meridian to his Brazilian house anthem with Esthero “Balmes (A Better Life).” As one of a handful of house producers to earn a major-label deal in the past few years (via his now-defunct relationship with…
Do all the New York hipsters and Miami club kids know where mash-up — mixing up records from disparate genres — really came from? It’s something hip-hop and disco DJs have been doing for ages, and their modern counterpart is expert party-rockin’ DJs such as Z-Trip. Raised in Phoenix and…
They say everything’s bigger in Texas, so Austin’s Dustin “D:Fuse” Fusilier, who Urb magazine rated as its second-favorite DJ at last year’s conference, is reckoned to be a contender this year with his expansive musical approach. D:Fuse plays drums (using the Roland V-Pad) during his sets, and he also sings…
David Morales spins true, classic New York house, the pumping, four-to-the-floor, body-moving tracks that everyone, whether elitist, anti-dance, or rockist still gives props to. His most recent album, 2 Worlds Collide, was one of the best released last year, thanks to the blazing first single and collaboration with Tamra Keenan,…
Record companies love to say that their song did well at the Winter Music Conference. “This was the hit of WMC!” looks great splashed across the sales sheets and press releases. (If I had a nickel for every hype sheet I get with this absurd claim on it, well, I…
Is the Winter Music Conference ready to grow up? Praga Bhandari thinks so. “You could say our event represents a maturing of the music audience,” says the drummer for Formula One, a band that specializes in “dirty rock and roll.” The New York City outfit will be one of several…
As possibly the only genre in modern dance music that Britain can truly call its own, drum and bass is a U.K. phenomenon that has been slow to catch on in the United States. In the last year, however, the style has gone through a period of malaise in its…
Producing and reproducing crisply delineative yet densely rhythmic textural techno, Detroit-bred DJ/producer Jeff Mills weaves a nuanced mesh of pointillist percussion, ominous ambience, and undulating synths with pinpoint accuracy. His mixes are considered “minimalist” because they don’t rely on the push and pull of peak-and-valley pump. Like snow flurries, his…
Every few years since the mid-Eighties, the true revival of “electro” has been heralded. The depth charge 808 drum machine and scratchy freestyle funk of Miami bass can be felt in everything from dirty South crunk to Detroit ghetto-tech to Orlando-based DJ Icey’s Florida breaks to the output of European…
The word “party” can mean so many things. Saying that you “like to party” could mean that you enjoy attending get-togethers with your friends. It might also be a sign that you’re down to swap sexual partners or purchase narcotics, depending on the conversation. No doubt Drew Daniel, one-half of…
The cult of superstar DJ, after turning a handful of artists into the closest thing to a rock star the dance world has, seemingly has disappeared from the lexicon of the trend-obsessed music press. As progressive house titan Sasha laughs, “We’re not flavor of the month. The honeymoon period is…
The telephone connection crosses the Atlantic and Ivan Smagghe picks up in the studio amid zaps of off-putting metallic modulation crafted by his chum Arnaud Rebotini. Together they are the French outfit Black Strobe, who recently swooped into clubland stateside via a remix of the Rapture’s “Sister Savior” and the…
From the urban heart of San Francisco emanates the penumbral, funky sonance of Om, “the source sound and vibration from which all sounds are derived,” according to Chris Smith, a.k.a. DJ Fluid of Afro-Mystik. After founding Om Records in 1995, Smith began propagating what he calls “future music”: the hypnotic…
It was hard to ride the No Wave, especially when the New Wave was so poppy and colorful. Thus, late-Seventies and early-Eighties bands who performed noisy punk versions of funk and disco got caught in the riptide. No matter: While the electroclash rehash becomes a faded memory, it looks like…
This year’s WMC and M3 events can make it or break it for countless record labels attempting to forge new ground … yeah, you’ve heard it all before. But consider London-based Barely Breaking Even Music (BBE). From pioneering hip-hop albums (see Jay Dee’s memorable Welcome 2 Detroit) to acclaimed compilations…
Hollertronix is what the ADD kids are chattering about, period. Never Scared, a low-pro mix album they released late last year on indie start-up Money Studies, is a pirated rush of hip-ified Jock Jamz adrenaline, where dirty South b-ounce fire adroitly meets No Wave undercurrents that freeze sweat like Napoleon…
Soon after the advent of electronic composition — commencing with the breech birth of electric instrumentation, which came kicking and squalling into the academic world in the mid-1920s through the form of the theremin — Germany established an integral, indelible role in forwarding narrative minimalism. It was in the Fifties…
It takes a lot of work for DBJ to get his records out to the club. First he loads eight metal cases, carrying about 7000 records in all, from the back of his car onto a trolley. Then, with the help of two club employees, he rolls them into State,…
