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.
Some artists never sit still, and continue to innovate, moving their sound forward by involvement in new projects and new concepts.
For many, gigs in the heat of summer evenings are a tough sell, particularly in small venues (outdoor, festival shows of course are a different matter entirely). However, the summer is paradoxically a busy time for indoor shows, and two came up this week on consecutive evenings, and they were very different.
What’s that coming over the hill? This week, it really is a monster (or mythical creature). Ten of them, in fact.
It is, then, the week of another bloody election this week here in the UK, and there has been distinct signs of just how fucked off everyone seems to be with it across the coverage of it (not helped by the uptick in terrorist attacks in the country in recent weeks). Fuck knows what is […]
The cliché of the second album. It gets raised every single time, by just about everyone, but is it really a thing? I guess it depends on what happens with your first. If your first album isn’t great, though, will you have a chance to make a second? This second album expectation only really comes […]
The announcement of a European Skinny Puppy tour earlier in the year (“Down the Sociopath Too Euro 2017“) was, I have to say, a bit of a surprise. It has been seven years since their last UK appearances at least, and in the meantime they’ve released the excellent Weapon – but that was four years […]
We’re edging toward the halfway point of 2017, and this week I’m taking a fifth look back at 1997.
