Thirty-three years, twenty albums, countless singles, a few live albums, various re-issues. Various record labels (most notably associated with WaxTrax! and then later Metropolis (North America) and Dependent (Europe)). And, broadly, one instantly recognisable sound, the Ultra Heavy Beat that blusters in on industrial beats and rock guitars, but somehow sounds like no-one else.
Here we are with week two of my musical round-up. As I explained last week, this will be a weekly post on a Friday that will wrap up relevant new releases that week, newly announced releases coming in the near future, newly announced gigs of note, and also upcoming gigs/clubs over the next few weeks […]
The instrumental is often a rather maligned part of an artist’s repertoire. There was some discussion of what counts as an instrumental. Wiki suggested:
The third party I’ve DJed this year, and what has been remarkable about them has been that all three have been very different. Different locations, different people, and different music, too. The DJs here (Bob and myself – only my sets are shown here for the moment), were actually a surprise element to Tim’s birthday […]
There have been a few comments recently about how difficult it is to keep up with new releases, new tours, and general music news (I have the same problem) – particularly in the UK, as various sites in Europe and North America are already pretty good for this in our scene. (Release Magazine in Europe, […]
It isn’t often that I get the chance to interview someone who can justifiably be called an industrial legend. That said, there aren’t many bands in any genre, never mind industrial, that are like Paul Lemos’ band Controlled Bleeding.
Already back ’round to a new month, and we’re hurtling through summer. First Tuesday of the new month, then, so time for the best tracks, and there are a lot of them this time around. Why? The autumn release schedule is, it seems, rather crowded this year.
What has become affectionately known as #industrialsummercamp kicked off this weekend just gone with Terminus in Calgary. It has become something of a thing in recent years that I usually try and make at least one of the North American festivals (Festival Kinetik (Montréal) in 2011, then Cold Waves (Chicago) in 2014, 2015 and 2016), […]
It feels a bit weird posting this today. Only yesterday I posted Talk Show Host: 034, my latest interview with seeming, where there was a lengthy discussion about how nostalgia in music makes us all regress.
Conducting e-mail interviews – in effect a set of questions that then get answered in turn – can be a tough business. It’s difficult to tell whether you have the right tone in the questions, and of course it is also easy to be misconstrued. But then, just once in a while, you get measured, […]
I made the mistake of asking “What is Goth to you” on Facebook recently (after being asked the same question by French journalists at Whitby, in my role as (co-)captain of Real Gothic FC). Over 700 comments later, we were still no closer to the answer.
Welcome to Tuesday Ten 300, and this week I’m talking about songs that are about music. I’ve spent just over ten years on this series – with more frequent posting at some points than others – with the core posts being monthly run-downs of the best new music within the realms of my interests. This […]
I go to see a whole lot of live music. Somewhere between 40 and 70 nights of my year, every year, are spent going to gigs and festivals, in the UK and beyond. Which probably means that I go to more gigs than most – and I started at my first show twenty-two years ago […]
As I nudge toward Tuesday Ten: 300 next week (a milestone I never thought I’d reach), another month has passed and here we are again with the latest batch of new tracks to catch up on. It’s something of a mix of styles, as ever. We were having a debate on my Facebook page a […]
The final part of this is to deal with the issues women have as performers – be that in bands, as DJs, or as other performers in a musical space.
Sadly, clubbing is no more a safe space for women than gigs are. Some of the stories I’ve had for this section are jaw-dropping, with quite extraordinary examples that should never, ever be happening.
I really shouldn’t have to be writing about this. “Our scene”, judging on many of the comments I’ve seen that came about from this, is anything but a safe space. We keep banging on about how friendly and inclusive our scene is, but then I see comments about sexual assaults at major festivals, violence towards […]
The realisation of how strong a year 1997 was for music, certainly in the UK anyway, has been seen by a whole litany of posts on various sites in recent months (this one from 6Music piqued my interest, seeing as every single album in the list, I think, will be covered by me in my […]
In something of a return to DJing (aside from a few private parties recently, this was my first set in eighteen months), I donned my DJ:traumahound hat last night to join Jonny and Nathan at Tragedy >For Us< in Whitechapel, and it was great to be back.
I swear that as a reviewer, things are getting harder to define. What do I mean? The crossing of genres, the meshing of styles, is becoming so common as to make established genre descriptions almost defunct, and this is making the job of those of us that still write about music very much more difficult.
