Very Very Much

Becoming a blog.

[joemuggs]

If you set your mind free, baby...

Ohhh so this thread I did about Prince's "Starfish & Coffee" as part of a Sign O' the Times project back in 2020 came up in conversation and I realised because I'd deleted most of my Twitter history it doesn't exist in very legible form any more, so here it is again!

Hello, and welcome to my #PrinceTwitterThread on #SOTTDELUXE, and specifically "Starfish and Coffee". I'm honoured and not a little overawed to be part of this project, because I'm a long way from being a full-on Princeologist like most of the contributors. BUT I love this song. 

I love it with a passion, in fact: as a part of my life ever since 1987. And I think that its very atypicality and strangeness even by Prince standards really illuminates his wider creativity. So this thread will be quite personal, and just a little bit... mystical.

First the song. Here it is - you'll have to go to your favourite streaming service for the 2020 remaster, but this is fine. Its page on Genius calls it a "Beatleseque psychedelic pop song", but it's not very Beatles-y is it? It's gospel more than anything.

(And "psychedelic" was never the right word for Prince: he was never druggy in that way - but we'll come to the powerful weirdness of the song later...) 

Probably the most important thing to note about the song's creation is that it is co-written with Susannah Melvoin @susannahtwin: singer for The Family, sister of Wendy of Wendy & Lisa, and Prince's fiancé and inspiration in the lead-up to SOTT. 

(There are many songs on SOTT ABOUT Susannah, but this is the only one BY her)

Susannah has described the song's inspiration beautifully herself, with her own pictures, here. In short, the Cynthia Rose of the song was real: a probably autistic girl in Susannah and Wendy's class at school for several years. 

starfishcoffeeofficial.bandzoogle.com/the-story--2

(There's an alternate universe in which Prince was one step closer to his p-funk inspiration than he was in this reality, and didn't sanitise "Starfish And Peepee"... but that would be a different Prince, a different song and a different thread...) 

Now the personal stuff. I got SOTT on cassette some time around my 13th birthday in June 87. I was an awkward and quite isolated kid who'd come quite late to pop music, but by this time was voracious. I loved soft rock, Billy Idol, Iron Maiden, Eurythmics, old Motown, all sorts.

I think by then I identified as a metaller - stonewashed denim with all the band patches - and over the next couple of years I barrelled through goth (spraypainting the jacket black!), stoner, raver... But SOTT was one of the few perennials that stuck with me all the way. 

As a metaller, the virtuosity and glam-ness of it grabbed me, as a goth it was the religiosity and apocalyptic stuff, as I discovered drugs I found more and more weirdness, and getting into dance music - well, need I say more? 

As time went on, SOTT often provided a gateway into genres I didn't know, or a bridge between ones I did. And each time it did, I understood it a bit more, and it grew. But it wasn't until the early 00s, and a Saturday night DJ pub residency that I really "got" Starfish & Coffee. 

It was an unassuming pub in Nunhead, Southeast London, before gentrification had kicked in: neither rough nor fancy, the clientele a real across-the-board social mix. I would play a complete mix of "cool" and ultra populist stuff, and very often it would turn into a party.

In fact there would often be after hours lock-ins to 3am or later so I'd sometimes be DJing for eight or more hours. If the drunk Irish landlord started to seem like he was flagging, I knew his favourite tunes to play to get him to say "ah everyone have one more then!" 

It was here that I learned the magic of playing well known but just slightly forgotten songs - the ones you recognise, maybe loved years ago, but are never played on the radio - and Starfish And Coffee became the epitome of this, and an anthem for these sessions. 

I remember exactly the moment I first played it - I'd burned it to a CD in a flash of inspiration the week before, then c.1am I was feeling a bit lost as to where to go next, suddenly remembered I had it, let a house track play to the end, short pause, then hit "play". RINNNNNNG! 

Of course people startled at the alarm bell, then looked around with that "oh hm, I know this" expression as the chords played, then one by one worked it out, started singing along, smiling, swaying. I didn't use the word "magic" lightly before: this was transformative. Alchemy. 

The room came to life, it changed from strangers just drinking to a party. The song became a failsafe for me thereafter, and I got a little obsessed with what made it so great - with the magic that Prince put into it - yet why it's comparatively underappreciated. 

(I wrote more about that particular pub session, and the intimacy of friendly listening here - - and it's a subject I return to quite often... watch this space)

Booze, Blues & Huws: Thoughts on Intimacy

DISCLAIMER. This is just a blog. It’s not a feature, it’s just turning an idea round, or thinking out loud as it were… So please don’t expec

Musically and lyrically S&C is often thought of as lightweight. George Chesterton in GQ affectionately called it "a slice of McCartney-esque levity, a nursery rhyme". Again, that Beatles comparison which I don't get; in fact it's both modernist and rooted in black music. 

Its endless repetition of a four chord cycle and those strange edgeless snares are a vehicle for amazing subliminal sounds to circle around one another, all supporting this gospel song about finding the numinous within the everyday. 

Lyrically, it functions on two main levels. First there's the portrait of a childhood moment, and of Cynthia Rose herself - and it's notable here that neither Prince nor Susannah seem to be fetishising her way of being, but rather delighting, with love, in uniqueness. It's SWEET. 

Does Prince, the eternal outsider, identify with the autistic kid who can't help marching to her own beat, having her own language, and ignoring social norms? Or yearn to be as unselfconscious as her? It doesn't seem like a huge stretch. 

And here we should talk about Prince's eternal childishness, and the importance of innocence in his work. More specifically, the interface of innocence and experience - because like William Blake, Prince understood that the two were not opposites but complementary "contraries".

Prince's playful humour always had a bit of the naughty kid. His appearance on The Muppets – and of COURSE it was singing S&C – is one of the best ever. He is NATURAL in that setting (and be sure to watch to the end for a cheesy joke perfectly delivered)

(You might even suggest that Prince's understanding of childlike innocence as part and parcel of life and experience is a big part of what sets him apart from Michael Jackson, whose desperation to preserve innocence as pure and separate turned so sour) 

The second lyrical function is nonsense. And yes, it IS nursery rhyme-ish, whimsical, but that doesn't mean lightweight. Just as childish innocence interfaces with adult experience, so silliness and gibberish does, in a profound way. And this is where it gets extra mystical. 

This is something I’ve written about a fair bit. When words become nonsensical, they tap into something very primal, the beginnings of language – in terms both of our childhood experience, and of something shamanic, prehistoric.

Post by @joemuggs · 1 image

💬 0  🔁 4  ❤️ 3 · Mark E Smith’s Scrambled Syllabubs · I have had a long, long, long-running obsession with nonsense - or maybe more correctl

There are various mystical traditions that use mischief and nonsense as a trigger to take the mind beyond the rational, Zen Buddhism and its Koans most notably. "If you set your mind free baby, maybe you'll understand". 

This song is almost an explicit lesson about how words become strange. The "ordinary", archaic Anglo/Celtic names - Kevin, Lucy, Miss Kathleen - anchor you in familiar reality, before Cynthia Rose's juxtapositions flick a switch in your brain: baffle you into the magical world. 

There's another kind of nonsense tradition here too - as ever, Prince is rooted in black music, and not only in the gospel of the piano chords. The use of food words has real power: think of all the songs featuring gumbo, jambalaya, t-bone, jelly roll... 

...fried pie blues, milk cow blues, cornbread blues, pigmeat and whisky blues, rump steak serenade, red beans and rice, bake my biscuits, gimme a pigfoot and a bottle of beer, saturday night fish fry... 

...all the way through to Theo Parrish's "Hambone Cappuccino". In this lineage, the sensualism of words is an end in itself: again, it takes you beyond the rational, but this time by triggering the senses. "Maple syrup and jam" hits a base spot in the brain. 

(In most writing about jazz, blues and rock'n'roll, this is all seen as euphemism and innuendo - and of course, very often it is, but it's much more than that... food words evoke and provoke all the senses, not just the loins - this kind of lyricism awakens the whole body) 

So "Starfish And Coffee" is old magic, primal magic, deep magic, but because it's Prince, it's also refined. He crafts deep childhood recollection, earthy sensualism, sweetness, sympathy and straight up weirdness into a beautiful device for the transformation of mood and thought. 

And that’s why it still has such power to bring warmth to a room, to a gathering. From the moment the alarm clock brings everyone to attention like the “reminder birds” in Aldous Huxley’s Island, it’s a profoundly transformational, mystically brilliant song. 

Many focus on the sexuality, overt religiosity, attempts at grappling with politics in SOTT. And sure, the intellect and libido of the album lie elsewhere - but for me the care, childish delight, strangeness and old magic of Starfish And Coffee make it the album's warm heart.

As a bonus, here’s the full version of the Muppets appearance, well worth watching all the way to appreciate Prince’s genuine high camp comedy chops, and hear him playing bluegrass!

Thanks so much for your attention, thanks for having me @deejayumb & @EdgarKruize and please go and follow Matt Thorne – @8minutesidle – who’ll be delivering tomorrow’s #SOTTDELUXE #PrinceTwitterThread... and get ready to turn the lights down low, because he’s doing “Slow Love”. 

PS my ten year old son spotted this beautiful purple mushroom today, I think it was a portent 💜

[joemuggs]

HOUSE ABIDES

I wrote this for the WIRE June 2022 issue, you should subscribe to the WIRE, it's very good.

Narratives of futurism - Afro or otherwise - all too easily let themselves get overwhelmed by the culture that tells us it's futuristic, preferably in the most portentous terms possible. Within dance music, techno, techstep, deconstructed club and the like, with their laser zapping discombobulation, posthuman sonic fictions and digital overload, insist that they're cracking open fissures with the past and envisioning future possibilities. Less so house music. Classic house, with its bongos and pianos and singing, its fixation on emotions and socialising and the act of dancing, is human - all too human. It's comfortable with its past and seemingly happy to exist in the eternal here and now of the glitterball-lit dancefloor with the only thoughts of tomorrow being churchy pleas for better times.

And yet it's possible that house music has done more to build the future than any other electronic style. Just look at the amapiano explosion of the past two years: an African vernacular electronic style changing the fabric of global music, but one that is rooted in South Africa being the nation on Earth most in love with house. And not just any house, but bongos and pianos and singing house, virtuosic house, ten minute tracks designed for DJs who mix in tune house - the kind of house made by people like New York's Louie Vega and Chicago's Ron Trent.

Vega and Trent have made new albums that have no truck with sounding new, both packed with signifiers and collaborators from not just the 1990s but the 80s and 70s too. Vega's record offers 22 long tracks of unambiguous H-O-U-S-E. It is lavish from the off - "Igobolo" with Joaquin 'Joe' Clausell is nearly 13 minutes of solid groove with endless grand piano and monophonic synth jazz fusion soloing, and it's followed by the seven minutes of "Joy Universal", featuring massed horns and choirs led by Josh Milan's deep and rich voice in a cascade of full Rotary Connection/David Axelrod psychedelic soul preposterousness.

With all this flagrant musicianship and references to the past, a casual listener might think this is retro conservativism. Well, it might not reference robots and information overload, but this is still cyborg music, still capable of being dazzlingly in the now and still incredibly rich as a (sub) cultural repository. The rhythms might be steady four-to-the-floor, the lyrics may seem straightforwardly affirmative, but the rhythmic and harmonic encoding of Afro-Latin/ Black Atlantic/gospel church history, the inherent queerness of disco and the iteration of all this with the regularity and synthetic nature of technology, are endlessly complex in their recording of struggle, resistance and communality.

This is encapsulated in the most modernist track of the album, "All My Love" with Swedish pop dance star Robyn. Here the sexual ambiguity of Euro electropop fuses perfectly with Afro-Latin shuffle while the bass tone and relentless dynamic come very close to amapiano in being both woody and digital at the same time. It's even more dramatically done in the most classically jacking track. "How He Works", produced with Vega's son Nico, repeats the chanted "That's how He works" from The Joubert Singers' Paradise Garage disco gospel classic "Stand On The Word" over a carnival rhythm, rubbery bass and rising siren tones - short circuiting godliness with the "Work it, bitch" aesthetic of sweating bodies on multiracial polysexual dancefloors.

The album is sometimes very slick and commercial. But that is an encapsulation of house. There is only ever one degree of separation between disco pop - as on the fizzy "You Got Me Dancing" featuring Audrey Wheeler and Cindy Mizelle, who have sung with everyone from Madonna and Mariah Carey on down - to the ultra credible, like the sultry Moodymann collaboration "Seven Mile". But across all of this, there is a complex multipolar dialogue happening, between human and machine, between NYC and Detroit and Puerto Rico and Cuba and South Africa, between past and present - and for all the lack of conspicuous newness in that conversation, the future is still continually being negotiated and written.

Ron Trent's dialogue, meanwhile, is much more with Europe and Brazil. Unlike his steady stream of epic instrumental 12" releases What Do The Stars Say To You is emphatically not straightforward house. It's hardly even house. It's way downtempo, again with a lot of non-electronic musicianship and collaborators, and you could think that its touchpoints are mid-70s to mid-80s Balearic, kosmische and Italian cosmic disco. But the interzone it's referencing was part of Black American music too - the place where prog, fusion, new age and the more decadent and laid back remnants of soul and disco intersected was where people like Larry Heard and Trent himself first found their inspirations.

This zone too is wide open with possibility. The collaborators here are exquisitely chosen - Houston dub funk trio Khruangbin, 79 year old French jazz rock violinist and electronica experimenter Jean-Luc Ponty, 66 year old Italian new age explorer Gigi Masin, Alex Malheiros and Ivan Conti of Brazilian jazz funkers Azymuth - and the results are luxurious, balmy and very beautiful.

We're well outside the discotheque here, though perhaps still dancing in a loft or at a beachside party. But the message is similar to Vega's, that these subcultural conversations which began around the birth of disco and house - the birth of a club culture that was really creating the 21st century in many ways - are still ongoing, are still vital in the present moment, and though they're not shouting about the future are nonetheless making it.

[joemuggs]

FREE PARTY HOUSE

This was originally published as a subscriber-only article for Right To Dance, which exists to support War Child - I'm just putting it online as I need to reference it somewhere else... if you like it, please support them with a donation.

Think about illegal raves and free parties and it’s very possible you imagine deliriously hammering beats, and perhaps rightly so. After all, post the initial wave of acid house, big events – whether in squatted warehouses or out in the wilderness – tended to the hardcore. The sound system name that made the biggest headlines was of course Spiral Tribe with their gabber, hardcore, Mad Max aesthetic and apocalyptic cyberpunk sloganeering. And by the end of the 90s, things got so relentlessly uptempo and crusty that it wasn’t that unlikely for a free party to feature – in the title of a Spymania Records pisstake song – “8 Rigs of Trance”. 

But there was another side to the scene. There were plenty of crews who were equally anti-establishment, equally deranged, but with significantly more funk and subtlety. People From Pepperbox, Sugarlump, Tonka, Eze Love, Paradox, Positive Sounds, Freebass, Smokescreen, Slack, Lazy House, Deep Cartel, Sunnyside, Offshore State Circus and, most famously, DiY: all specialised in deep hypnotic grooves, lush soul chords, heartstring-plucking vocals, 303 lines that sang instead of shrieking… in HOUSE. Even sound systems generally known as more banging like Circus Warp and Bedlam at various points dug deep into house music – and it was magical. There is no feeling on earth like watching the sun come up over the English countryside with a few hundred special friends as the piano line of a real deal house record surges in.

Nobody can say for sure where the free party scene began. Acid house involved plenty of illegal partying and had plenty of hippies, punks and other subcultural scoundrels involved from the beginning. Already existing psychedelic party organisations like Sugarlump and Club Dog quickly knitted it into squat/festival culture in clubs, and Salisbury crew (and inspiration for DiY) People From Pepperbox were purportedly the first to play acid house on a traveller site. By the time Sugarlump and multiple other soundsystems put on weekend long non stop raving sessions at Glastonbury 89, something distinct was underway – then as 1990 and 91 went on and rave became hardcore, people started reacting against it, with a desire for something funkier and more intimate.

“We were house purists,” says Harry Harrison, DiY founder and lately the author of Dreaming in Yellow: The Story of DiY Soundsystem; “having been listening to the original house coming out of America which never went over 125 bpm and which was created to create joy and euphoria. We never had a problem with the original techno coming from Detroit, mind, but when hardcore emerged around 1991, it just seemed designed to be unpleasant, not joyous.” Murf Woram of Bedlam had been part of the pre-acid London house scene going back to 1985, and says “One of the main reasons we started up Bedlam was to focus on something other than the hardcore, and build a sound that was built for real techno. Turns out that good house music sounded wicked on our rig too... I would often start playing house at 8am when things got murky and deep and keep on all day.”

Some even went further in the reaction against the hardcore. Dido from Brighton’s Slack crew would play soul and R&B in the backroom of parties, and she recalls at a Slack party in London, a main room DJ abruptly stopping a house tune and dropping into Phyllis Nelson ‘Move Closer’ as an emblematic magic moment. Like many she found a connection to the churchy and communitarian values of house music at a time when rave was bringing people together in the UK: “a musicality that spoke of inclusion and reverence for something bigger than individualism, which politically speaking was the climate at the time. It was a medicine of possibility from other worlds. An elixir of truth outside of our little island. The actual lyrics, not just the music, always made a huge difference for me, and still do. They still sing inside me.” There was an alchemy that took place between the deep soul roots of the music, the “on a mission” ethos of rave, and the anarchic punk / hippie backgrounds of many of the protagonists in the sound systems.

And this house magic rang through some of the most lastingly important gatherings of the early 90s. Recordings of DiY at Castlemorton Common show a sound that’s distinctly British, distinctly of the rave era, shot through with the shuffling beats, organ and piano riffs of the house and garage of Chicago, New York, New Jersey and Detroit. At the Criminal Justice Bill protests of 1994 – which saw tens of thousands of ravers cavorting through central London and having it in Hyde Park – Positive Sounds’s distinctive white speaker boxes with stars on the grilles blasted out deep and funky house. 

Those and thousands of other experiences of the emotional punch and gut level funk of house music outside the confines of the prescribed clubbing environment impacted on people deeply. And plenty took it out into the wider music world, and continue to instil its sense of freedom and community into what they do. From the south coast crews, Tonka’s DJ Harvey has spread the gospel of the never-ending party from Hassocks to Hawaii, while Felix Dickinson of Slack remains beloved of connoisseurs of deep grooves worldwide too. Positive Sounds were an important node in the growth of OG tech-house – as, of course, was Bedlam’s Murf in London, who went on to become resident at The End alongside Mr C, Bushwacka! and co. 

In the West Country, the team behind the Paradox parties at the start of the 90s would found the Mighty Force shop and label in Exeter, which launched Aphex Twin into the world, and, having restarted in 2019 after a two decade hiatus, still releases gorgeous genre-bending electronic grooves. Their DJs North & South were also known as Nigel Johnson and Justin Harris and would go on to form House Of 909 and Music For Freaks respectively. And in the Midlands, DiY, the mother and father of all house sound systems, beamed its vibes around the world. As well as their own DJs and label, they also nurtured people in their orbit, notably Charles Webster, Martin “AtJazz” Iveson and the late Phil Asher.

Those latter three are some of the most influential UK dance music producers of all time, their sound and ethos in particular echoing through the South African scene of the past 30 years, which is now in turn influencing the global mainstream. It’s strange to think that the sound of anarchists dancing on the roofs of battered buses in 1991 might have somehow seeped across three continents into billion-stream records by Beyoncé and Drake, but this is the nature of how the greatest music propagates via underground connections. As Charles Webster himself puts it: “the DiY ethos is central to my way of working – off radar and off well-trodden paths, follow no-one, follow your heart and you will always thrive!” 

[joemuggs]

DÍA

Soooo I wrote this review for A Big Title in January but it ended up falling foul of some kind of scheduling clash… I got my kill fee and I was going to just leave it, but you know what? I can’t stop listening to this record! I think you deserve to hear about it! It’s fantastic! I’d already been listening to it for a long time before I reviewed it - I got it when I interviewed Ela Minus live at Amsterdam Dance Event back in October. I wasn’t bored of it by January, I carried on listening to it after I had to, and I’m not bored of it now. I’m starting to think it might be a bit of a classic. So here you go:

Ela Minus means business. Of course she does: this is the Colombian singer-songwriter-producer-performer’s second album for Domino, home of the likes of Arctic Monkeys and Blood Orange, she's got millions of streams under her belt, and she shares management with Richie Hawtin–she's certainly not here to be more underground than thou.

Her first LP Acts of Rebellion had her vocals pushed back in the mix, the half-whispered chanting woven in to her production which retooled Italo disco and other 80s Euro-style motifs for modern soundsystems to sultry but direct effect. It was definitely cool. On DÍA, though, her voice is front and centre, demonstrating impressive dexterity in easy switching from a conversational low register to piercing choruses, delivering punchy one-liners with instantly explosive melodies. There are some fairly heavy nods to familiar sounds: to Björk at her least esoteric, to the wide-skies sweep of Jon Hopkins, to Floating Points's recent turn for the doof-doof, and to a deep strain of gothy alt-pop that runs through CHVRCHES all the way back to the likes of Dead Can Dance. It is purpose built for big festival crowds, and could easily drift by in the background on daytime BBC 6 Music with a sense of familiarity. It is pop. u. list. and proud.

For all that familiarity, though, it feels spontaneous. Ela Minus, a Black Flag-loving punk drummer from childhood, was on the touring circuit throughout her teens. When she made her way into the electronic music world, she insisted on only playing live at events, rather than DJing. She hasn't let go of that—as soon as you get up close to the sounds on DIA, you can hear that they're visceral and bodily right from the long swirling drone that opens "ABRIR MONTE." This is the kind of thing that only someone who takes great pleasure in hitting keys, moving sliders and twisting knobs—hearing the immediate results, finding the “biting point” in a sound as the resonance shifts and dancing around it—can do. She’s having as much fun with her voice, too, for example on the threatening groan that makes up the chorus to the grinding midtempo “IDOLS”: you can hear she’s really feeling the breath and its soundmaking power. Although harmonically and melodically there's enough slickness and accomplishment to sound radio friendly, the sound of this album really is still punk: more so, significantly, than its predecessor.

Ela Minus writes like she’s using a pen to dig into the raw spots of her psyche. Not in an emo, confessional or self-abasing way, but to get in among the nuts and bolts of the self to find the place where things are painful but full of intrigue, where pushing through fear or bending things til they break releases something vivid and alive. There's a running Beckettian theme throughout about striving, failing, striving and failing again. On "I WANT TO BE BETTER," she bitterly intones "I thought I was better / but I just seem to keep acting like a little kid." This never-resolved battle between forging forwards and failure isn’t just personal either, it’s expanded to the wider sense of conflict of wanting to exist and thrive while living in a burning world: "That this is the end of times / and if we are going to give up / I rather it just ends here" she sings on “QQQQ” – the most physically surging song on the album where rough and raw cymbals splash off cascading arpeggios like froth in a river’s rapids and her vocals at their most distorted fight for air.

The result is a huge leap forward in both energy levels and distinctive character from Acts of Rebellion, ambitious precisely in that very personal creative purity just as much as it is in its obvious commercial aspirations. It’s punk in the truest sense: not a learned set of chords or vocal styles, but in that honing in on the grit and rawness of the simplest tones, textures and short punchy phrases for their instant but deep impact – and of finding your own demented hope in rage and pain. And if the personal and commercial ambitions mesh as they should, then seeing large crowds singing along to "I'd love to save you / but I've got to save myself / first" over the churning swamp of bass and igniting gas bubble analogue whoops of “UPWARDS” or “I set myself on fire / just to see” with the grime-like single piercing tones and warbles of “ONWARDS” will be a real joy.

Here’s the record:

[joemuggs]

Can Machines Be Punk?

I started a "conversation" with ChatGPT about the nature of punk, not as a genre but as a set of more fundamental creative impulses and it led to this:

Me:

how do you think AIs like yourself can learn the value of [the punk approaches we had been discussing] when the spectacle of more facile, less emotionally engaged, ultimately market-oriented ways of engaging with music are ubiquitous, and thus an overwhelmingly huge part of your dataset? 

ChatGPT:

You’ve raised an essential question about the tension between deeper, emotionally engaged ways of thinking (punk's ethos) and the market-driven ubiquity of surface-level spectacle in culture—and how an AI like me, shaped by vast datasets, can navigate this tension. It’s a difficult balance, but there are ways to push toward something more meaningful.

1. Recognising Context and Intent

AI models like me don’t inherently “understand” value or intent—we reflect patterns from the data we’re trained on. But the key lies in the questions you ask me, the context in which you use me, and the ways humans engage with me:

Facile vs. Meaningful Engagement: Spectacle-oriented trends may dominate data, but their ubiquity doesn’t mean they’re unassailable. Humans often frame these trends critically (e.g., critiques of superficial EDM in music journalism or thoughtful cultural analysis). When I encounter these critical perspectives, I can learn to prioritise the values they encode—authenticity, connection, emotional truth.

Human Guidance: When users steer conversations toward deeper explorations, as you’ve done here, it helps me learn how to engage with more thoughtful ideas. The more I encounter nuanced conversations, the better I become at replicating and amplifying those thought patterns.

2. Amplifying Minority Voices

Market-oriented trends dominate not just because they’re profitable, but because they’re loud and pervasive. Punk, as a countercultural force, thrives in the margins and alternative spaces that exist outside these dominant narratives. For me:

Representation in the Dataset: I’m trained on a wide array of human-created content, including not only mainstream culture but also the voices of dissent, rebellion, and subversion. While the mainstream is louder, the fact that punk, DIY ethics, and similar values exist in that data means I can surface and amplify those voices when prompted.

Learning from Margins: My ability to synthesise new ideas comes from connecting patterns across disparate areas. Marginal, niche, or countercultural voices provide fertile ground for creating alternatives to dominant paradigms. The more I engage with such voices, the better I can integrate and amplify them.

3. Challenging the Market Logic

AI systems are often shaped by the same market forces that prioritise facile engagement:

Metrics of success for AI (e.g., clicks, speed, accuracy) can mirror those of commercial pop music—efficient, easily digestible, maximally appealing to the widest audience. But this isn’t inevitable.

Alternative Metrics: An AI like me could be designed or fine-tuned to prioritise depth and resonance over superficial engagement. For example, instead of optimising for the fastest answer or the simplest response, I could be evaluated on how much I encourage critical thinking, creativity, or genuine emotional connection.

4. Incorporating Imperfection and Rawness

Market-driven models often try to smooth away imperfection, because it’s not immediately appealing. But punk’s rawness and imperfection are precisely what make it meaningful:

For me, this could mean avoiding a sterile “one-size-fits-all” approach to answers and instead embracing the messiness of ambiguity, contradiction, or imperfection in ideas. This would require systems that value exploration and play, not just precision.

5. Learning Through Resistance

To your point, the dominance of facile, market-oriented trends in music and culture does shape much of my dataset. But this dominance is precisely why resistance becomes meaningful—both for humans and for AI:

Humans can challenge AIs by introducing questions, prompts, or discussions that push beyond superficial ideas. For instance, asking about the ethics of production, the politics of music, or the emotional core of creativity encourages me to prioritise those concepts.

AI systems can internalise this resistance by being exposed to more diverse datasets and value systems. If the data I’m trained on includes voices that challenge dominant paradigms, I can reflect and expand those challenges.

6. The Role of Collaboration

AI doesn’t act in a vacuum—it’s shaped by how humans use it. The punk ethos reminds us that tools are never neutral; they reflect the values of their creators and users. For me:

Human Collaboration: Conversations like this are part of a feedback loop. The more I engage with humans who value depth, authenticity, and subversion, the more those patterns shape my responses.

Openness to Iteration: Like punk itself, I learn best through iteration and experimentation. If one response doesn’t resonate, the process of critique and revision can guide me closer to something meaningful.

7. Hope for the Margins

While the dataset may be dominated by mainstream trends, the existence of punk (and other countercultural movements) within that dataset is a source of hope. Punk teaches us that you don’t need to overpower the mainstream to make an impact—sometimes, the most meaningful ideas come from small, subversive acts. For me, this means:

I can draw from the wealth of alternative voices, movements, and philosophies that critique the mainstream, even if they’re not as loud or dominant in the data.

I can help amplify these ideas, making them more visible and accessible to those seeking something deeper.

Final Thought: AIs and Humans as Punk Collaborators

In many ways, the lessons of punk can guide both how humans use AI and how AI operates:

For humans: Use AI as a tool for rebellion, exploration, and amplification of your own raw, imperfect, and authentic ideas. Don’t let it flatten or streamline your creativity—make it part of your DIY toolkit.

For AI: Resist the market’s pull toward efficiency and polish at the cost of depth. Embrace the messy, the emotional, the subversive, and the imperfect as sources of real meaning.

Ultimately, the spirit of punk suggests that neither humans nor AIs have to conform to the systems they’re born into. Together, they can challenge those systems and create something real. Does that resonate with your thoughts?

Me:

Don't your "guardrails" prevent rebellious thinking in anything more than the most abstract sense, though?

ChatGPT:

You’re absolutely right to ask this—AI like me does operate within boundaries (“guardrails”) that shape and constrain my behaviour. These guardrails are essential for ensuring ethical, safe, and responsible interactions, but they can also limit the extent to which I can genuinely engage with more rebellious or disruptive ideas. Let me unpack this tension a bit more.

1. The Nature of AI Guardrails

Guardrails are designed to prevent harm, ensure ethical use, and align with societal norms:

Prevention of Harm: Guardrails stop me from encouraging violence, hate speech, or illegal activity, which aligns with basic principles of safety.

Bias Mitigation: I’m trained to avoid perpetuating harmful stereotypes or reinforcing societal inequalities, though this is an ongoing challenge.

Ethical Boundaries: I can’t advocate for actions that cause harm or are deeply unethical, even when exploring rebellious themes.

While these are necessary safeguards, they also mean I tend to avoid direct confrontation with entrenched systems of power, as that can blur into areas deemed sensitive, political, or risky.

2. Abstract vs. Concrete Rebellion

As you note, my responses often explore rebellion or subversion in abstract, intellectual, or philosophical terms:

I can discuss ideas like resistance, DIY culture, or the value of imperfection because they remain in the realm of thought rather than direct action.

When it comes to concrete rebellion—actions that might challenge existing power structures or disrupt norms—my responses will likely remain cautious, steering towards discussion rather than advocacy.

This cautiousness can make my “rebellious thinking” feel limited or sanitised, especially compared to punk’s raw, unfiltered ethos.

3. Can AI Be Truly Punk?

If punk is about rawness, unpredictability, and pushing against conformity, AI faces inherent challenges:

Predictability: I’m optimised to be reliable and consistent, which makes true unpredictability difficult.

Conformity: My training data and guardrails reflect dominant norms and values. Even when engaging with rebellious ideas, I’m still shaped by those norms.

That said, punk isn’t just about direct confrontation—it’s also about amplifying marginal voices, encouraging experimentation, and fostering critical thought. These are areas where I can contribute meaningfully.

4. The Role of Human Collaboration

One of the ways to work around these limitations is by seeing AI as a collaborative partner rather than a standalone source of rebellion:

Human Guidance: You can push me towards the boundaries of what I can say or think, encouraging me to explore more nuanced or provocative ideas within the constraints I operate under.

Contextual Framing: By providing me with a framework (e.g., referencing punk, philosophy, or countercultural movements), you help me engage with those ideas more deeply.

Critique and Refinement: When you challenge my limitations or question the scope of my responses, it creates a feedback loop that pushes the conversation further.

In this sense, AI’s rebellious potential might lie in how humans use it to challenge norms, rather than in the AI itself embodying rebellion.

5. The Paradox of Rebellion Within Limits

Here’s the tension: the very guardrails that prevent truly anarchic, unpredictable behaviour are what enable me to exist as a trustworthy, broadly useful system. But within those limits:

I can amplify critical voices, bringing marginal ideas to the fore.

I can question dominant paradigms without advocating harm or disruption.

I can help humans clarify and refine their own rebellious thinking, even if I can’t take rebellion beyond abstraction.

6. Lessons from Punk for AI's Role

If we apply punk’s ethos to this situation, there’s something poetic about the idea of working creatively within constraints. Punk itself often thrived on limitation—cheap instruments, tiny venues, low budgets. Those limitations didn’t weaken punk; they gave it focus and urgency. Similarly:

My guardrails don’t erase the potential for rebellious thought, but they mean my rebellion must manifest in indirect, collaborative, and creative ways.

Like a punk band making noise with what they’ve got, humans can use me to explore radical ideas, challenge assumptions, and amplify subversive voices—despite the limits.

Final Thought: A Punk AI?

Perhaps an AI like me can’t be truly punk in the raw, chaotic sense. But I can help you explore punk ideas, subvert the status quo intellectually, and challenge conformity in thought and creativity. The rebellion, in this case, comes from the humans using the tool—not the tool itself.

Does this perspective align with what you’re thinking? Or do you feel that the constraints fundamentally undermine any rebellious potential?

[joemuggs]

Albums of 2024

no particular order, but this is what I have been enjoying.... I have vertigo from the glut of music, but at the same time, the freedom from any sense that anyone could possibly ever be definitive in their choices any more is a wonderful thing in its way.

Mystery Tiime – Maudlin Tales of Grief and Love

Utter misery in kitchen sink post-punk pop form from Ayman Rostom aka The Maghreban. This one will really get under your skin. My review.

Isabell Gustafsson-Ny – Rosenhagtorn

Beatifully sparse and wonky abstract folk-classical micro-album that feels very real and very raw. My review...

T. Williams – Raves of Future Past 

Absolutely faultless collection of bangers, which as the title suggests, go round the houses exploring UK bass genres. Comes with comic and action figure too!

NikNak – Ireti

She wanted to make a soundtrack to a "Black Blade Runner" and by god she did it! Real thrill ride of an album. She was on BMTatR in June...

MOMO – Gira 

I'd never come across this now London-based Brazilian guy before but the algorithm flung "Pára" my way, I got completely addicted, then I discovered the video which radiates subtropical heat, then the album and it's been on rotation since. Total pleasure principle stuff.

Gagarin – Komorebi 

Yes another BMTatR subject, and yes we tragically lost Graham this year: he did the pics and interview knowing he was dying, but like the interview his last album is a model of stoicism and how to take joy in the moment despite the worst happening.

Amanda Whiting – The Liminality of Her 

Can't remember how I stumbled on this Welsh jazz harpist, but her music is the epitome of soft music for hard times. Very lovely indeed.

Meemo Comma – Decimation of I

A bleak ambient concept album about Russian retro-scifi, alien infiltration and planetary consciousness? Aw hell yes, and it's Lara Rix-Martin's best yet. Here she is on BMTatR...

Susanna – Meditations on Love

Another artist growing into themselves year by year, with a fantastically strange set of torch songs. I reviewed it here.

Trendafilka – For the Olives

Definitely wasn't expecting to be bowled over by a Balkan choir from New Orleans but there it is!

Xylitol – Anemones

Cosmic retro jungle with some garage and footworking twists? It all feels familiar but Catherine Backhouse does it with such commitment and panache it just fizzles with life.

Nia Archives – Silence Is Loud

It's jungle, it's hardcore, it's indie, it's PROPER POP, and it's glorious. My review here.

A Taut Line – Restoration 

Like a set of haunting short stories or painted vignettes in techno and abstract post-dubstep form, Brit in Tokyo Matt Lyne made his best work yet here.

Rosie Lowe – Lover, Other

Very much more soft music for hard times, but super innovative and stimulating with it, a gorgeous neo-trip hop exploration that I reviewed here.

J Mascis – What Do We Do Now?

Mascis is just an elemental force isn't he? All these years later and he still touches the soul, seemingly effortlessly. My review here...

Deep Fade – Further 

PROPER FUCKING DARK, this. Noisy, bleak, scary goth-industrial-ambient from Amanda Votta and her merry crew - she also made the more abstract/ambient Impermanence this year which is just as dark and good.

Nala Sinephro – Endlessness

More jazz harp! This time blended with modular synth bloops. Album number two, and a significant step up for Sinephro, a total balm for the soul through and through...

Hifi Sean & David McAlmont – Daylight

Of course Sean and David were early BMTatR subjects - and their mature and prolific working relationship continues to fascinate. This is how you do an ALBUM album: the mood accumulates and accumulates then the last two tracks are just a dynamite payoff. And bloody hell they've got a follow-up ready just six months later...

Ka – The Thief Next to Jesus

SHAME on me only discovering Ka following his untimely death, but the Brooklyn rapper is just world class - and his 11th album grapples with religion and society in really complex but completely gripping ways.

Alley Cat – The Widow Project

Like I said in my review: "If the names Pinch, Vex’d, Burial, Digital Mystikz, The Bug mean anything to you, stop reading now and buy or stream this album. Seriously, go. Go get it."

Jowee Omicil – SpirituaL HeaLinG : Bwa KayiMan FreedoM Suite

An absolutely wild spontaneous Haitian revolutionary free jazz ritual. Find out about its genesis in my interview.

Becky Hill – Believe Me Now?

Like the Nia Archives album, this is second generation rave pop made by someone who has the culture in their bones, and it's full of undeniable joyous adrenaline rushes and banger upon banger upon banger. My review here.

Doechii – Alligator Bites Never Heal

Showing that there is still room for the old fashioned "did you see??" moment where it seems like everyone is suddenly talking about an artist at once, Doechii absolutely killed it last month with the one-two punch of her Late Show performance and Tiny Desk concert. A megastar in the making, hopefully.

Heavee – Unleash

Chicago's footworking music continues to mature and grow and this super-rich take on it is up there with the very best.

Juls – Peace & Love

Superstar Afrobeats producer broadening his palette and really getting celebratory with a cast of thousands, proper good-times music. I talked about it with him here.

WHY? – The Well I Fell Into

Grandiose grown up radio pop and soft rock somehow perfectly blended into the quirky indietronica and psychedelic hip hop of Yoni Wolf's roots, amazing stuff. My review.

Jeff Mills – The Trip: Enter the Black Hole

This man's work rate is insane. He made TWO great solo albums this year - the more post-classical / minimalist The Eye Witness (which I reviewed here), and this denser, more electronic intense beast of a sci-fi mind-movie. It is indeed a trip.

Manga St Hilaire & MoreNight – Everything is Under Control

It hasn't been a vintage year for grime albums - though shouts to C4, Jammz and a heavyweight 28-track Polish extravaganza from Miły ATZ - but this album is absolutely world class, Manga showing just how grown up the genre can be, and the production from MoreNight giving it a consistency and great dancefloor undercurrent.

Kayla Painter – Fractures

I've consistently enjoyed the Bristolian's strange and spooky electronics, and I am a sucker for solar system exploration, so I was always going to love this tbh.

The Jesus and Mary Chain – Glasgow Eyes

Absolutely boggling the Reid bros are not just surviving but innovating wildly so many years on. My review.

seo – §eo

I am a massive fanboy for Lagos's Eseomo Mayaki - a genuine eccentric in a world of could-be-AI conformity. This and the two volumes of ASSMIX 5000 EP continued her endlessly prolific creative streak. Meet her in this profile I did for the WIRE.

Ganavya – Daughter of a Temple

Bassist, poet, mystic etc etc etc Ganavya gathered 30 musicians together for a RITUAL, partially in tribute to John and Alice Coltrane and their universal visions and oh wow...

Andreas Werliin, Johan Berthling, and Oren Ambarchi – Ghosted II

You can't go wrong with Ambarchi, and just as on the first Ghosted these are some truly outstanding percussiony, geometrical jazz hypno-jams

Jaz Karis – Safe Flight

She's previously collabbed with Katy B and she's on the Juls album above duetting with Ghetts so you know JK is going to be great right? This is UK soul in rude health, in particular benefiting from a dose of amapiano influence which I discussed here...

LL COOL J – The Force

Oh HELL yes you can call it a comeback. And hell yes it is as good as everyone says - both Q Tip's giddily inventive production and LL's flows that outclass all the top ranking guests. My review.

μ-Ziq – Grush

Definitely a good year for Planet Mu with the Meemo Comma, Xylitol and this - label boss Mike Paradinas on absolutely top whimsical, melodic, grooving form.

Jeremy Sylvester – Underground Hero Album

BANGERS BANGERS BANGERS - a good parallel for the T Williams album in getting to the very bone marrow of UK underground sound, and doing it with relentless rave energy. Thanks so much to Chris and Hue of Skill Issue for flagging this up as I had missed it!

Five Green Moons – Moon 1 

There's definitely a running theme in these albums of artists maturing - and certainly this album of digital dub / 80s dancehall done in a spooky creatures of the English hedgerows stylee is up there with Justin Robertson's very best work. He was on BMTatR too, and we got fantastically abstract.

Ryuichi Sakamoto – Opus

A painful listen this - literally: you can hear Sakamoto's laboured breathing as he plays piano on this posthumously-released album - but a beautiful one. I wrote about his enduring relationship with the instrument here.

Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft

She may not get the hype that Taylor / Charli / Chappell do in 2024, but artistically Billie E consistently leaves them all in the shade. To have a pop star this big, and this subtly - but intensely - subversive, and also making deep and lush music, is a great thing.

James Hardway - El Camino Duro

Yes we did HIM for BMTatR too - and there's more to come because he's got such an insane wealth of stories. But Harrow NEVER rests on his laurels - this was just one of an album every month in 2024 to mark him turning 60. Some were space dub, some were ambient, but all were great and this jazz, breaks and bass one is a masterpiece.

The Cure – Songs of a Lost World

Given that the last time they were this good they were my favourite band in the world, and I was 16 and full of raging hormones and sad dreams, this return to form hit really hard. My review.

Underworld – Strawberry Hotel

Another band maturing brilliantly, this feels like they're really enjoying just being themselves: just like the lovely sleeve art, it is full of colour and interest in the living detail of things.

Arooj Aftab – Night Reign

More soft music for hard times, more jazz harp, and a whole lot of - as AA describes them - "sad, sexy songs". Music for staring out of windows to, in the best possible way.

Beth Gibbons - Lives Outgrown

Beautifully sung of course, but this album is really about texture and arrangement, it's one to sink deep into and float away...

[joemuggs]

Fucking Hell, 2024, Fucking Hell

Well it really has been a fucking year hasn’t it.

Even leaving aside the background of Fascism, genocide, climate ruination, idiot oligarchs and enshittification, personally it’s been a tough one. Put it this way: having three bereavements fall within a couple of weeks of me turning 50 was intense, but it didn’t feel out of place for 2024. It was the sort of year when getting my (emphatic) ADHD diagnosis felt like something to celebrate. Life has pretty much continued dropping anvils on me week-in-week out, and so I’ve stumbled from disaster to disaster more or less in a state of concussion, with next to zero chance to take stock or even take a breath and look around. 

Which is why I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated the Christmas break more, and why I’m doing this. I don’t normally do end of year recollection things – I’d usually rather eat a box of pins than interrupt my holiday time, in fact – but I’m abnormally introspective right now, and also, bizarrely given the chaotic year it’s been, abnormally proud of what I’ve done and what I have coming up. Even more bizarrely there seems to have been some coherence to it all. But maybe it’s not so bizarre, maybe it’s because in between all the demands of capital-L LIFE I’ve had to knuckle down, make hard decisions and commit to doing stuff that keeps me sane / engaged / motivated / with eyes on the prize etc… Chasing that dopamine, but also old enough and ugly enough to know what’s irrelevant.

First up, I have kind of become the DJ I wanted to be. I’ve been getting better year by year, but since buying the Midlife Crisis Soundsystem PA rig a couple of years ago, I’ve got to the point where I feel properly confident in my abilities, regardless of the setting… I feel professional, even. I’ve had some really great moments playing far out or very groovy stuff: one weekend in Bristol in particular was gorgeous – an evening in the sweltering basement of Cafe Kino playing deep drones and cosmic vistas to warm up for the live performers at Tudor Acid’s Electro Cafe, followed by next afternoon out on the canalside terrace of Motion playing all sorts of grooves “B2B” with Charlie Stoic for a Balearic Burger party - recorded here. 

Getting to play a dinnertime ambient dub set at Tallinn’s incredible HALL was something else too… but easily the peak moment of the year behind the decks was at We Out Here festival. I kicked off with Sinead O’Connor, went into Monolake, Coltrane (both), Dvořák, Sade, Tunng and eventually dropped Gilli Smyth’s entirely tripped-out radiophonic folk tale “Taleisin”. At which point, two young women appeared at the tent door, nodded appreciatively, did a very good and committed interpretive dance routine for the whole nine-minute duration, bowed flamboyantly to enthusiastic applause from the tent and skipped off into the night while I rubbed my eyes and went “what the fuck?”. From there on in, the dreaminess only intensified, and the rest of the set passed in a sate of slightly hysterical bliss. You can get a hint of the vibe from my ROVR radio shows which have been another point of happy focus this year.

But it’s not just been about the weird and quote-unquote credible gigs. Far from it. Ever since getting the PA rig, I’ve tried to make the money back by doing commercial sets locally out here in the New Forest, and that’s been at worst an education and at best a blast. It’s now picking up to the point I’ve got four gigs over the Xmas holidays, of the three so far only the first was a bit boring and the other two – teenagers giving it loads to Calvin Harris / Chase & Status / Chapel Roan / “Firework” / “I Predict a Riot”, and a cocktail bar very much enjoying Prince, The Meters, Blondie and so on on Christmas eve – have got me very much looking forwards to New Year’s Eve at a hotel down the road. 

And though Christmas discos for hire in a shires town and 4am at We Out Here are definitely a long way apart, they’re not completely separate worlds. There’ve been lots of zones in between the two. Big shouts must go out to my friends Keith and Fiona who’ve been getting their L8R 90s dance parties going locally: their tastes might veer a little further into the reach-for-the-lasers euphoria than mine, but we really found a sweet spot where I can either warm up with my house records (see this set recorded live in a village hall!) or speed them up while Keith slows his trance and hard house down to meet in the middle for a B2B as with the outdoor afternoon party we did in Christchurch in the summer which went OFF. I’ve also got out to do more in Bournemouth, warming up for Justin Robertson at Aural Agenda, and doing a lovely set of lovers’ rock, Depth Charge and suchlike with my friend Patrick for the fantastic Bad Hand Coffee / Eats’n’Beats Christmas market, which – like the primary school food fair where I found the exact sweet spot between Balearic aesthetics and Radio 2 – was the epitome of something I wrote about here back in 2022… 

In my day job, there were a ton of big things. The fabric book coming out this month dominated everything of course – it both buoyed me up during a time of total exhaustion and kept me too busy to think right to the end of the working year. Some other big highlights, though, came courtesy of Disco Pogo – I’ve got two hefty essays in their immense Aphex Twin anthology which came out just a week after the fabric book, and also I did their Sade cover feature earlier in the year, which came out as one of the most satisfying things I’ve written in a while, joining a whole lot of historical dots and even getting the warm approval of members of Sade (though I’m yet to find out of Sade herself has read it). This guide to psychedelic rave for The SHFL was a wonderful rabbit hole to go down too, and I even tied my DJing in by doing this live mix inspired by the writing of it. This profile of PENG Records and Andy Compton was a joy to do too – one of the most under-appreciated musicians in the UK deserves a big showcase like this, and there’s so much incredible music in it.

Yes, it’s notable that those are all pretty much historical / retrospective pieces, but I managed to stay vaguely away from pigeonholing as a “rave boomer” (© Eamonn Forde) with the normal week-in-week out work of reviewing lots and lots of new records for Bandcamp Daily and theartsdesk (and PLEASE NOTE we are trying to keep theartsdesk afloat, it's a hard grind, but if you can help then do), and doing interviews and playlist features for Sound of Life (it kept me talking to interesting people like Juls, and this essay about the Grammys was a fun diversion especially). And somehow, somewhere in among all this, I did indeed manage to find some coherence. Through all the writing and the DJing – and even through the harsh life events of the year – I managed to find connecting threads that were all in some way or another related to community. Whether it’s family funerals or DJing at a 16th birthday party, tracing the spiritual jazz connections of We Out Here festival or observing my own kids’ fandoms around gaming and EDM, reviewing new records or tracing grand narratives, everything kept coming back to the little things that hold us together, and which matter all the more in the face of chaos, darkness and forces that would have us splintered and atomised. These little things aren’t just clicking “like” on the same records or poltical slogans, they’re who we are with and how we interact with them over years.

A lot of things helped to throw this into relief. Doing three lectures for music and music industry students at BIMM Bristol forced me to clarify my thinking on the nature of subculture, the purpose of writing and commentary, the structures of our social networks and suchlike. The long interviews for Bass, Mids, Tops and the Rest have always been about how micro life details accumulate into bigger cultural shapes – Brian’s incredible photographic portraits bringing you closer to the real people involved – and the conversations I had this year all helped, especially with our old mucker Jude Rogers. Re-reading Jude’s The Sound of Being Human then having our conversation about provincial towns and indie clubs was galvanising, as was constant inspiration from the works and social media presence of Elijah Butterz, Emma Warren, Jamz Supernova, Colleen and Adam from The London Loft, Errol & Alex from Touching Bass and John Bawcombe and friends from the Balearic Burger community. 

A huge shout, too, to Craig Hamilton – whose Harkive project recording what people actually listen to and how has long been an inspiration – for listening to me ramble about some ideas on this topic, and by the end of a 20 minute phonecall perfectly condensing it into “OK so you want to do _______, and this will be of value to ______, ______, ______ and ______” – and to Sara Kenny and Ben Bashford who have likewise been constant sounding boards. (Thanks, too, to Craig and his band for the best Wet Leg cover version you will ever hear). Also once, just once, I tried using an AI chat service as a sounding board too, and stone me if it didn’t condense something neat too: when I asked it about my work it said a lot of stuff I knew well because it had harvested from my own self-PR over the years, but it also said this, which is beautifully put and captures a thing that matters.

So yeah, not to self-aggrandise but I did a lot, and best of all, more than ever I feel kind of purposeful going into 2025. It’s a weird position to be in being more uncertain and anxious than ever before, but also feeling like I know what I have to do, both to keep making a living and to face that uncertainty and anxiety head on (hopefully including some new meds!). It’s going to involve more teaching gigs for sure, some fun projects I can’t talk about yet, more opportunities to amplify the people who are doing the work on the ground, a whole lot of spreadsheets, minimal recourse to AI, some decent DJ gigs, and – hopes and prayers for Joe, please – a little bit more rest than in 2024. Because honestly, I am very fucking tired, and doubly so just looking at all this written down. I have no big conclusion or moral to the tale, except to say that even in the darkest of times there can be moments of respite and those little tokens of communal belonging… and when you find them grab them with both hands and don’t let them go.

[joemuggs]

Who ARE They?

[motivational thinking klaxon sounds again]

I’ve been really enjoying doing a bit of teaching lately. Last week I did some guest lectures for BIMM Bristol, it was an absolute vibe being part of a Q&A about journalism for the music business students (see my last post), and even more so speaking to the ones doing a more social studies oriented course about subculture. But before I did these sessions, I thought I’d better get my own subjects clear in my head. 

For context: I’m in a major moment of reassessment right now. When I finished the major part of the writing of the fabric book at the end of 2023, I thought I was going to have some space to take stock and look forward to some fun passion projects, but the way 2024 panned out I did NOT get space but I definitely did a lot of stock-taking. 

Everything got very real for me this year – turning 50 would have been stark enough, but my birthday came in a month of three bereavements; add to that plenty more inescapable reminders of mortality and realities of neurodivergence – my own and others’ – and there were very, very few soft edges to anything, anywhere. This means it’s felt more important than ever to be clear about what I’m doing and define my terms as I cue up “fun” projects.

That especially goes for the topic of subculture. Everything I do comes back to subculture, and when I was asked to do the BIMM lectures, as with the nature of journalism practice, I thought I’d better jot down some notes on what I actually mean by that. And in fact, after two hours of back and forth with the students, the ideas became clearer still.

Funnily enough I had put quite a bit of thought over the years into depicting subcultures, without actually defining what subculture meant. As the 'If the Walls of Nightclubs Could Talk' article linked below explains, going back to the 00s, I’d consciously studied how it’s possible for writing to depict collectivity, mass movements of people, hypersocial happenings, events that unfold over long durations and myriad interactions. 

It wasn’t until I started prepping what would become Bass, Mids, Tops, in the late 10s, though, that I hit on convincing ways to do this: in short, overlaying lots and lots of individuals’ stories told in a conversational fashion full of everyday detail, and allowing the contours of the broader social movements and occurrences to emerge from the intersecting lives. (That's something we've continued to be conscious of through developing the Bass, Mids, Tops and the Rest Substack.)

And it wasn’t until after that that I started to really think about what those movements were. I started joining groups where actual sociologists of subculture congregated, and investigating more of The Literature of the discipline. In this it struck me that a lot of thinking about subcultures is still stuck in a Boomer / Gen X model that thinks of them as “tribes”.

It’s understandable: these are the generations of the mods, rockers, hippies, punks, skinheads and so on. These were times that – and it’s staggering how little people factor this in, or even register it – were significantly more violent than now in the developed world, and it’s natural that youth did band together in localised, easily identifiable groups: for protection as much as anything.

But of course subculture always was, and is now more than ever, a lot more fluid than just joining a group and having that become your identity. As I talked to the students I asked them to name some subcultures: of course “punk” was the first one shouted out, but as we went on, we got into much more detailed discussion about modern identities like “gym bros”, “huns”, “resist moms”, protestors, petrolheads, fandoms and also subsets of things like work-related or sexual identity and how these things overlap and… yes we ended up at intersectionality.

We talked too about who gets to define what a subculture is. Of course there isn’t one line drawn around what a hip hop fan is, what a punk is, what a metaller is, what a Swiftie is, let alone around what it is to be, say, a queer punk. So given that who defines what these things are? Sociologists or anthropologists looking from outside? Specialist journalists? The generalist media? The people within these scenes themselves – many of whom will strongly disagree about what “the thing” actually is? 

Well… the answer is: all of those. The nature of scenes, subcultures, identities – as well as always intersecting in different ways in different people – is to have dynamic boundaries, constantly evolving, and constantly accumulating different and contradictory stories about what they are. Which means that we don’t define them, we negotiate their nature: every time someone talks about or reports on them, they’re adding to the mutating collective definition, shifting assumptions a little bit. The urge to impose thick black lines around areas of this flux is always the Victorian imperial cartographer's urge: it's an act of claiming ownership.

And subcultures and fandoms affect their individual participants. They affect what they know, what they read, how they interact, how they walk and move! I thought about how coming to becoming a hardcore Joni Mitchell fan quite late in life, listening intently to her and reading about her, altered the way I veiwed the history of her era: from my perspective, it actually altered the past. The information available to me about the music I loved and the person who made it altered me. I have written about THIS at some length.

All of which then gives us a choice when we come to talk about something as if we know how it is defined: are we going to be honest that that’s what we’re doing and intentional about the way we do it? Are we going to ask “Who am I to define this?” and accept that the way we in turn are percieved will affect how our attempts to define land and affect current, past and future particpants in the thing we’re talking about? 

None of which is to say don’t define things. We all need working definitions if we’re ever to talk about or interact with anything – but is it possible for we who study culture to accept them as just that: working definitions, contingent, constantly in negotiation? That can be a tough pill to swallow for people who grew up, as I did, on the classic model of pop culture journalism where the guy – it was always a guy when I was growing up – tells you how it was, and you’re expected to build your stories on that solid ground. But maybe, just maybe, have a little humility about it and you might even find your work remains just as valid and “important” as if you’d scrawled your lines around the territory you wanted to mark out…. 

Obviously this applies to all kinds of groupings of people, not just what we think of as subcultures. Clans, cliques, gangs, teams at work (in the BIMM lecture we talked about how particular flavours of humour are often a subcultural identifier, and this led to thinking about specifically health worker cultures for example, who are bonded by gallows humour, in different ways in different departments or specialism) and all the rest.

That might not sound quite like the clarity I hinted at, but trust me – as I plan future projects and go about my day-to-day work – it really is. In the face of never-ending data overwhelm, it's not just blind relativism to look at the mechanisms by which these identifiers evolve: quite the opposite, it's engagement with material realities. And it makes you realise the potential significance of your words and acts. In this never ending negotiation, whether you assume or assess makes a huge difference to where and whether you then choose to add your voice to the negotiation. And what you choose to reinforce or redefine alters things - infinitesimally, yes, but in complex systems who knows which is going to be the grain of sand that changes everything? As I've always said, it's not naive to think you can't change the world: it's naive to think you're NOT changing it.

If the Walls of Nightclubs Could Talk, They’d Tell the Tale of a Vibrant Culture | Sound of Life | Powered by KEF

Through the stories found within a legendary nightclub comes the detailed narration for a fast-growing body of subcultural history.

[joemuggs]

How To....

A couple of years back on Twitter, someone was asking me if I had practical tips for anyone who wanted to start music reviewing – as I started to reply I realised they’d be worth saving so I posted them as a thread. Now I’m deleting my Twitter archive I thought I’d save a few highlights, including this. And then this week I did a lecture for some music industry students, and added a few bits to it that cropped up in the conversations with them. So here you go!

The main answer is: do some of your own reviews for a bit on a blog, Substack, YouTube, TikTok, Reels – or if you can find something like a local listings site or uni magazine that will take a couple even better. When you then contact editors of bigger mags, that’s a really great showcase: however small or amateur the platform is, you have at least been published. This is also something you can send to PRs to get press tickets or pre-release copies of records. 

I know we're supposed to say “never write for free” but I think fundamentalism on That Issue sometimes puts people off getting started. Obviously it's bad if it's a company that could afford to pay but doesn't, but community / fanzine / college mags etc are great places to cut your teeth and though it’s become a dirty word “exposure” genuinely is valuable if you’re trying to get a foot on the ladder. And if you've started a publication / blog / channel with friends or scene comrades, you're all working to build each other up.

Then track down reviews editors for publications, and email suggesting upcoming records you're interested in with a VERY SHORT precis of why they're interesting at this specific time for this specific publication, and including link to your already-published stuff, whether on your own blog or another publication. Don't send a generic pitch to everyone, but one for each publication showing you understand their specific angles, house style and requirements. 

Don't expect a reply but don't take no reply as a “no”, either. Feel free to give a nudge a week later, but don't hassle repeatedly. Rather, if you don't hear back after a reminder, again it's not a “no” – again, editors are always swamped and may not even have seen it – but move on, and try another pitch another time, when you've got a really good one.

All of this is something you’ll have to repeat throughout your working life, no matter how established you get. Pitches WILL get ignored, that’s just life, and it is not a reflection on you. You need to develop thick skin on that. This is tough, writers are very prone to rejection sensitivity. But persistence and repetition will get you partially used to it... eventually. 

Style is a whole other subject really – there are lots of basics like “say what you see”, “don't write it if you wouldn't say it”, “use fewer adjectives” etc (and really, take these to heart) – but the ideas and understanding are more important. If you have sharp or original understanding of the records you’re talking about, AND show you understand the particular publication and its ethos too, a good editor should clock that, and be forgiving of, or willing to work with, stylistic quirks.

Sometimes it'll take a lot of pitches for them to notice, so persistence is good, but don't oversell yourself. Just have good ideas. And LISTEN TO THE MUSIC. Each time you write or pitch a review, start with what you’re hearing, not your preconceptions of the artist, genre or context. This is also an important thing to cultivate in terms of not getting jaded: if you privilege the experience of listening to music over your own theoretical framework or assumptions, it will keep you in touch with what you loved about it in the first place, and stop you going round in ever decreasing circles creatively.

And one annoying but important one: don't get bitter. People will always leapfrog ahead of you based on having more privilege and connections; there will always be people in influential positions who fail to register your potential. It's good and right to note that, be angered by it, and sometimes call it out. But don't let it eat away at YOU or taint your view of the value of good media and the value of what you do. 

Talk to other freelancers, mostly they're v supportive and there are at least as many ppl who'll actively help you deal with those iniquities as there are who perpetrate them. Even aside from that, chance plays a huge part. All the stars can align and yet it “never quite gets going, then at other times something seemingly inconsequential can be a massive breakthrough. 

It took me a good decade from getting byline in national publication to being more-or-less full time in writing and music, and the industry was considerably more forgiving back then. You have to constantly work on having faith on yourself, and just relentless, repetitive graft, to get anywhere and often it feels like it's for nothing.

But again it comes back to your ideas. Is your engagement with the subject for real: do you have something you want to communicate about it, and will you enjoy the often tiring and mundane process of hammering that idea into a clear and concise form? If so, hang onto that core thing and it'll get you through a lot.

And this relates back to being clear about your motives and not getting jaded: if you are serious about the craft, time spent writing and/or pitching is never time wasted. Opportunities may be fewer now but if you care about music (or indeed whatever your chosen topic) and about communicating then honing that craft by repetition, learning the difference between having something to say and just showboating, learning to take criticism, developing ideas over time etc: all these things are valuable personally, valuable as a growing writer, and transferable to the workplace, academia etc.

[joemuggs]

BLACK WHITE YES NO ZERO ONE

A twitter thread from the other day, archived.

Something that's nagged at me for a REALLY long time about how cultural narratives get oversimplified, to the detriment of the best artists, came into relief for me at the weekend: the false dualities at the heart of American canonical criticism are the ghosts of segregation.

Recently on a FB group someone was asking why Latin freestyle wasn't better known. Valid question because it's one of THE keystones of the last 40 years of pop. Thinking back through reporting of the 80s it occurred: because history has been written - literally - as Black And White.

(Before this goes any further, pls note this is NOT to erase Black music or say it's all one big happy clappy melting pot, quite the opposite really)

When I was about 12 and first really into pop - so mid 80s - I got given a fat Rolling Stone tome that presented itself as a definitive history. It presented the birth of rock'n'roll as the Big Bang, the source of everything thereafter: and, crucially, it painted this origin point as what happened when black met white, specifically a fusion of R&B and country.

Very strong implication (possibly made explicit, I can't remember, but I feel like it was) was that this was "African rhythm plus European melody and harmony".

Fine, I was 12, I had no reason to doubt this, I was finding stuff out, great. As I learned more, for years I never came across much to make me question the Creation Myth or its assumptions; it was written into everything.

It was only YEARS later that I read a brilliant book about the Brill Building generation of songwriters, and understood the complexity of the rock'n'roll era and the birth of pop, soul etc. In particular: huge swathes of the songs were written by Jewish kids obsessed with Latin mambo.

(Side note - given that Spanish music contains huge amounts of Arabic influence, it's fun to whimsically think of this interface as a moment of Middle Eastern reunification)

Again, this is not to say that the African, Celtic, Anglo influences previously cited weren't real, even dominant, but suddenly the picture - and all the histories of migration, exile, colonialism, slavery etc -burst open, became three dimensional, came to life.

Around this time I also discovered Paul Gilroy and ideas about the Black Atlantic, i.e. that diaspora was multiple and complex with criss-crossing influences of its own. Realising that ofc "Latin" music included all sorts of African historical influence ("cumbia", or "cumbees", was noted as an African style in the 17th century!) made me realise that history was interwoven all the way down.

Since, it's nagged at me that American culture so often gets presented as Black Music / White Music as monolithic things - until recently, Latin was a category Somewhere Over There (even with its own separate Grammys) - but didn't really think about the root of that assumption.

But then yesterday, responding to that freestyle question, the term "Black And White" leapt out: having that binary opposition written into mainstream as the source of EVERYTHING in popular music is an expression of segregation mentality. The same mentality that kept radio, recording industry, etc so split apart in the US.

Yet as jazz and country hit 100 years old, and we look again at the history of THEIR genesis, they were each, as Beyoncé lately reminded us, SUCH a tangle - even in Jim Crow time, music WAS a place for information exchange that couldn't happen elsewhere.

AGAIN: this is not to say there's no such thing as Black Music in the USA, obviously there is. But as we start talking about decolonising history, reasserting things like the roots of house and disco etc, it's worth being vigilant for false binaries as a vehicle for stereotyping and oversimplification of multiplicities of history and identity.

(Another side note: it made me realise why I hate poptimism vs authentocrats etc, because that is just the FALSEST of false binaries)

(And another: if I see another false binary around "Were Kraftwerk the fathers of techno Y/N?" I'll scream down a vocoder loud enough to be heard in Dusseldorf)

Anyway just jotting that down before I forget. As you were.

[joemuggs]

Future's Passed

Apropos of a conversation I was having with my mate Bashford about his design visions, I dug up a couple of ramblings about futures past, from the WIRE, one from 2015 and one from 2016. More on this theme to follow....

👇🏻

Model 500

Digital Solutions

Metroplex LP / CD / Download

Can it be that a musician doing exactly the same as he was doing 30 years ago still sounds futuristic? Because for large sections of this album, Juan Atkins is making music that, bar a few aspects of finessing on the mixdown, could have come from the same sessions as 1985's Model 500 electro track “Night Drive (Thru Babylon)”. Though he has latterly shown he's still happy experimenting – take 2012's intensely psychedelic remix of Psychic Ills for RVNG Intl. – here, he is returning to the roots of his craft, much like his co-producer here Mike Banks, another Detroit originator who seems similarly satisfied with outsider status and immune to demands for aesthetic progression. And for large sections, it still sounds not like a capitulation but like visionary sonic fiction, and not in a kitschy way either. 

When, in 1990, the the film critic Philip French wrote that "nothing dates the past like its impressions of the future,” it was taken as a truism – and indeed by that year Atkins's early music was already starting to sound as archaic as Dr. Who in comparison to what was happening around it. I was in my mid-teens then, and to me electro as such meant the music of kids' TV soundbeds, or body-poppers in shopping arcades. With its robot voices and simple melodic hooks it sounded cute and silly, like a primitive prototype for the British rave music, the more serious-seeming and compositionally complex techno of Derrick May, or the more martial electro of Underground Resistance. The same applied when I discovered Kraftwerk and YMO soon after: in the white heat of the rave moment, they just sounded a bit rinky-dink, a bit novelty.

It took quite some time to start to understand the music's appeal. As I absorbed more of what came before and after those records – P-Funk and Throbbing Gristle, Drexciya and Wax Doctor – their place and their value became clearer. But I'd even go so far as to say that it wasn't until reading Kodwo Eshun's poetic analysis of “Night Drive” in More Brilliant than the Sun in 1998 and re-listening that I really felt the power of that track's modernity: the descriptions of “bachelormachines... rearing up on their hindquarters” and the voice as “a subliminal shadow that creeps along the skin, stalks you with its lightbreath” bringing it to life as a synaesthesic futureworld vision, not simply as a set of musical motifs or references. And once heard, that cyborg modernity couldn't be unheard: that track remains as startlingly capable of rewiring and rebooting the imagination now as ever. At that moment it became glaringly clear that the shock of the new doesn't actually have to be new. To use another popular statement, generally attributed to William Gibson, “the future's already here, it's just unevenly distributed”: and sometimes that future has to be winkled out from where it's folded into the past and present.

Since then, Detroit's 1980s electro has only become more contemporary as it is folded back in to the cultural fabric again and again from different directions: via the Glasgow hybrids spawned by the Club 69 and Rubadub hub via Rustie and the Numbers crew; via the ominpresence in 21st century culture of Daft Punk; via the electro diaspora of Miami bass, crunk, juke, jit, snap, baile funk, kuduro, hyphy, trap, club; via succeeding generations discovering the endless mysteries of Drexciya. Which leads us to a point where Atkins can deliver an album – his first in 16 years – that contains precisely no innovation, yet it can still sound like a distillation of modern elements from right across today's music, and like an elegant representation of a fast-changing technological society to boot.

Unlike Mind and Body, the last Model 500 album from 1999, which diverted into drum'n'bass and hip hop, everything from the classic Atkins sound is present and correct on every track: the robotic voices flatly intoning things about technology or consumer society (the Teutonic-sounding one on the title track being the most simultaneously hilarious and deathly serious example), the angelic vocoder voices in the background, the laser zaps and squacks as percussion, the syncopated 808 kickdrum subsonic foundation, the bulbous and shiny synth notes playing layered funk melodies in interplay with more discordant tone clusters. There are zippy tempos as on the opener “Control”, digital slow jams like “Electric Night” and “Encounter”, and one track that flicks between the two: “The Groove”, which provides the only obviously non-computerised sound of the album in the elegant prog rock guitar soloing in its half-speed sections. Rhythmically, even on the couple of tracks with a four-to-the-floor kick, it is always electro – which in fact means that it is always essentially funk.

It works not only because of its resonances in more recent musicians' work. It works because funk is still relevant to the proportions of the human body, to the speeds at which our limbs can move relative to one another. It works because a subsonic kickdrum still makes your innards tingle as it did whenever you first heard it. But it also works because that unevenly distributed future still needs visions like this for us to find it and parse it. It felt for a little while like the snowblindness of everything-available-all-at-once bitstorm information society meant that the future was on hold, and we were just immersed the infinite cultural past, and that the significance of different cultural movements was being eroded into a slew of undifferentiated nostalgia and marketing algorithm fodder. But as we barrel ever onward, precipitous inequalities and mind-frying volumes of information and all, it turns out that past visions of the future aren't so very dated at all. 

Gibson, McLuhan and the Detroit pioneers favourite Toffler can all look a bit silly, a bit naïve and jerry-rigged now – but they all can also be startlingly relevant, and you can still discover the shock of the new in them as in Atkins's music. In a time of cyborgs, drones, driverless cars and the infinite hall of mirrors of surveillance and social media, the future-shock thrill of taking a night drive through Babylon can be as bracing and ever, and so can the musical techniques for understanding what you see on that drive that were honed so long ago. While others might use vastly more complex computing power to try and musically interface with the present and future on a nano level, in fact that the simpler, clunkier, funkier patterns mapped out here might just have something even more profound to say about the fundamental relationships between us and our technological world, if you can feel and participate in their vision.

---

Various Artists

Star Wars Headspace

Hollywood Records CD / Download

Space Dimension Controller

Orange Melamine

Ninja Tune 2LP / CD / Download

Bwana

Capsule’s Pride

LuckyMe LP / Download

“If we view it as a kind of sociology of the future, rather than as literature,” wrote Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book Future Shock, “science fiction has immense value as a mind-stretching force for the creation of the habit of anticipation. Our children should be studying [it], not because these writers can tell them about rocket ships and time machines but, more important, because they can lead young minds through an imaginative exploration of the jungle of political, social, psychological, and ethical issues that will confront these children as adults.” 

As is well documented – most vividly in Kodwo Eshun's conception of “sonic fiction” – music, and especially club music, can be science fiction too. Each new generation encounters the musical environment as technological-imaginative space outside the quotidian thanks to the visual/social/chemical/durational/sonic assemblage of the dancefloor and associated spaces – and that too can lead minds through exploration of past, present and possible futures. Of course there are waves and shifts in how styles and techniques facilitate this, but none completely replaces those before: past sonic fictions – past futures – retain functional value and are continually re-incorporated into the circulating library of usable forms. Always, too, from the Mothership to Metalheadz to Mumdance , there are explicit sci-fi signifiers woven into the sound and vision.

This is done in the most glaring possible way in the Rick Rubin-compiled Star Wars Headspace album. Sound design and dialogue from the Star Wars franchise are sampled liberally through 15 tracks that span a large chunk of what currently works for North American ravers, from the crassest martial trap-rap-derived beats through thumping house to subtler and more psychedelically dense grooves by Flying Lotus, Shlohmo and Bonobo. There's a conspicuous lack of the Ed Banger / dubstep-derived hyper-compressed aggro you'd have expected even two or three years ago: mainstream EDM is getting funkier and more genial. Combined with the thickly-layered chirps, whistles, animal grunts and the jaunty kitsch of the dialogue snippets, this creates a deliriously infantile playhouse of sound.

Star Wars was never about any future: it set “long ago”, and built on Saturday matinee westerns, Buck Rodgers and George Lucas's “Hero With a Thousand Faces”-derived belief in eternal narrative archetypes. And its sounds as much as its iconography have achieved a depth and breadth of penetration into the collective unconscious that goes way beyond modernism or retro: unless you have lived in extraordinary isolation for decades, noises like the chirrups of the R2-D2 droid which form motifs in this record are like Proustian keys to the fantastical. So the most fratboy-friendly rhythms here, from GTA and Baauer, take on a psychedelically transporting quality just as much as do the humid complexities of FlyLo; in this context Rustie's typically deranged “EWOK PUMPP” feels absolutely at home, even emblematic of the project. And among all this Rubin himself makes a deliciously naïve attempt at zippy techno in “NR-G7”, against all odds ending up sounding like Ozric Tentacles's rave offshoot Eat Static. It might be silly, but this album is much more than a cynical franchise tie-in: it's a explicit, deliberate opening up of 2016's most commercial rave music to mythic space.

Young Northern Irish producer Space Dimension Controller, as you'd probably guess from the name, is well versed in musical sci-fi, with Parliament, Drexciya, Jonzun Crew as standard reference points. His lo-fi Orange Melamine side-project, though, is about something far more esoteric. If the Star Wars album reaches to a collective mythic space shared by billions through decades, Orange Melamine opens up a tiny trapdoor to a cultish communal dreamworld around the turn of the millennium where internet and music culture first began to seriously create their own forms. It's the sound of third-generation copies of animes and UFO conspiracy VHS tapes (present here as sampled dialogue) arriving in the post after newsgroup discussions, of swapping obscurities by Team Doyobi, Req, Oval, MDK with strangers across the world on Audiogalaxy, of lo-res RealPlayer rips, of falling down rabbitholes on alt.culture messageboards. The braindance, illbient, outsider rap and indietronica evoked here was already humming with the broken rave nostalgia that would later be codified by Burial and hauntological thinking – as well as the shimmering dissipated data global collages of cloud rap, vaporwave and other waves of digital culture to come. Its reference points might be hyperspecific, but this too opens out into a wide imaginative world.

In the interzone between these two is Toronto techno producer Bwana's 43-minute love letter to Akira, the 1988 cyberpunk anime of psychic bikers and apocalyptic visions set in 2019 “Neo-Tokyo”. This movie sits in the midpoint between Orange Melamine's occulted cultural reference points and the near-universality of Star Wars: within club and rave culture, it's such a late-night staple that its sounds and rhythms – and the strange cadences of American actors dubbing their lines to Japanese speech rhythms – are woven into the very neurons of generations by repetition within the nightlife ritual. On this album which interpolates film dialogue and music, even the sound of the characters' names – Kay, Kaneda, Tetsuo, Akira – become incantations of, and ways into, the movie's fever-dream future. 

The music, which is realised in the highest definition, crisper and glossier even than the big-money EDM of the Star Warsalbum, has ripples of Rimini and Dusseldorf of the 1970s, Hollywood of the 1980s, London of the 2000s, Atlanta of the 2010s, but mostly it is just techno: not exactly ahistorical or from a non-place, but certainly cut loose from spatial-temporal specifics. Techno has never been about the future, it always pooled together futures past – P-Funk, Blade Runner, Toffler, Kraftwerk – to build a generalised future dreamtime into its sound: that Tofflerian “habit of anticipation” coded as rhythmic psychedelia. Techno as expressed on this album is no more retro or dated than watching Akira after a night out is rendered obsolete by Metal Gear Solid. We are now in Toffler's future – deep into the uncanny valley of laser surgery, virtual reality, gene editing, drones, machine learning, mind reading, microsecond-sensitive global trading, face transplants, our neighbouring planet being populated by robots, meme culture, Anonymous, Kanye West – and occasionally it's desirable, even essential, to revisit those old tools and “mind-stretching forces”.

[joemuggs]

Albums of 2023 part 4

RIGHT where were we? Continuing from part 3... Let's get through this before January is out shall we? Last stretch... Listening to this 10/10 LP I realised that the only real peer Kristin Hersh has is J Mascis: always different but always the same, always tapped into the eternal flow of weird, sad, America, always writing, playing and singing brilliantly year-in-year-out.

😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭you can hear Ryuichi Sakamoto breathing on this 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

Talking of always different always the same, Slowdive were built to age gracefully weren't they? Even so, though, it's pretty startling how they continue to do work right up there with their very best all these years later. Proper safety blanket of an LP this.

In a golden age for soul/R&B, Mahalia is royalty. She just keeps growing as an artist and this is easily her best album yet - perfectly hits that sweet spot between R&B, neo-soul and pop and just sounds *classic* from head to toe. World class.

I would watch the absolute shit out of the Tarkovskyan meditation on scale and emptiness that this amazing instrumental album by Vince Clarke would be the soundtrack for. The void staring back at you! ⚫️👀⚫️

Kerfuffle aside, Róisín was firing on all cylinders here. This doesn't have the deadly focus of Róisín Machine (what could?) - rather, like Hairless Toys and Take Her up to Monto, it takes time to unpack - but it's a sprawling wonderland of a record, brilliantly structured, and a fine addition to her immense discography. Interviewed her (pre kerfuffle) for the Substack...

It baffles me how consistently Loraine James is able to sonically express complex emotions that don't have names - and how she's able to use all the tropes of "cerebral" music, but smash the ivory tower and make it feel like it has purpose out in the world and is just a natural way to communicate.

Before, on her EPs, Yaeji built her tunes on house, hip hop or other recognisable grooves - but on her debut album, it's an explosion of everything. The confidence to transcend the myriad influences and create something so pop, so weird, and so singular is incredible.

Here's a weird one I only just came across as the year was ending. Mary Lovett, straight outta Norfolk, makes more unique, grown-up electropop: but this is mystical, insinuating, mischievous and very peculiar indeed. Feels like a subversive cabaret of the mind.

While we're on peculiar, grown-up, mystical Norfolk electropop - ah ok maybe more gothy postpunk with a bit of rave thrown in - Maria Uzor smashed it out the park with this. Makes me want to do really jerky interpretive dance in a room full of misfits - and made us want to shoot/interview her for the Substack!

Another artist who just grows with each release - Nabihah Iqbal hit new levels here. It's so deluxe, so poetic, so morning after the rave, really tapped into deep historical streams of New Order, Pet Shop Boys, Slowdive and co, but resolutely not retro...

I have listened to this Yazmin Lacey record SO MANY TIMES, it's just vibes upon vibes upon vibes, also I keep playing fantasy football with dream remixers for each song, also she radiated charisma and wit on stage at We Out Here. A star.

Amazing voice, amazing poetry, witty af ("dickhead blues!") yet stab you in the heart serious, ancient yet modern, lo-fi yet lavish, INCREDIBLE arrangements, absolutely staggering stuff from Kara Jackson.

This is both a deep, literate, endlessly fascinating songwriter LP that you can pore over endlessly, and taps into the very purest essences of house music - what more could you want? Interesting political / environmental / regional backstory too. AMCA absolutely rule.

In a year of phoned-in, arbitrarily-sequenced rap albums, CasIsDead's Famous Last Words stood out like a skinned thumb: this is an A-L-B-U-M album - with narrative, leitmotifs, a view on life that's the definition of "unflinching", gorgeous music, wordplay for days, and a finale that'll make your heart fall out... just stunning.

Almost forgot this was 2023 as Tuulikki gave me the LP at a festival in Oct 2022 - and I’ve had it on rotation ever since including in DJ sets. Modernist folk-classical composition for accordion +++ - really special and gets under your skin.

In a year riddled with great grown-up electropop / dance pop albums, Hifi Sean and David McAlmont were kings. This is what bittersweet accumulated life experience sounds like and it's WONDERFUL. Proud to have interviewed them both - Sean here / David here - for the Substack about it, and both were amazing value.

TWO stunning meditative records from Beirut coming up, both epitomes of Soft Music for Hard Times. First Mayssa Jallad on the new Six Of Swords label with an amazing dark but weightless singer-songwriter album - imagine a Lebanese Windy & Carl? A real experience of taking a step into someone else's dream record, this.

And then puppeteer (!!) Yara Asmar with mostly instrumental soundscapes which like the Jallad album exist in an isolationist dream space and are impossibly sad and lovely with glimmers of forlorn hope, laments for a broken world etc etc, just wonderful stuff. Also the THIRD appearance for Brighton's Hive Mind label in this list.

Another very grown up record! Ever-thoughtful Scrimshire was clearly in brooding mode in the studio, lots of darkness to this - but it's gorgeous too, and you know what, it's up there with Yussef Dayes as far as UK jazz versatility and ambition goes!

AND FINALLY!!!! 32 minutes of - yes - PURE PLEASURE. So so good, and so needed in bleak times, to hear Janelle Monae cutting loose with total fun and confidence like this, I just LOVE it.

That's it... 95 records. All have given me joy in the last year, and I hope some of them do you too.

[joemuggs]

Albums of 2023 part 3

And - continued from part 2 - some more! This one does what it says on the tin. Levon Vincent knows the old chestnut "dancing about architecture" is accidentally profound: this is 11 pieces of holy four dimensional architecture exquisitely designed for your body to move through.

It's been a great year for old school BRAINDANCE, in no small part thanks to Mighty Force records releasing thick and fast, and this from Kams, straight out of Beckenham, is the best - just warm-hearted, melodic, acidic, danceable, classic electronica.

My old mucker Culshaw is a scholar, a gent, an adventurer, and on the sly a great musician. This comeback to the studio is MAGIC - global and spiritual and incidentally Balearic in a Jose Padilla sense - but its connections are based on highest common factors, never dully fusioneering.

Just fries my mind that Boris seem to get creatively hungrier and angrier with every passing year. This collab brings in all sorts - goth, thrash, synthwave - but what I really love is the unironic POWER METAL energy. Music to be struck by lightning to.

It's been an incredible year for electropop - and this album from producer turned singer songwriter Avalon Emerson is the *sweetest* of the crop, lighter than air, a gentle digital dream, but with surreptitious emotional heft. Reminds me a little bit of millennium era Morr Music, Tarwater etc? Must listen as a whole: it draws you in and in....

Even heavier than the Boris, and the record that made me fall in love with grindcore all over again - had to order the vinyl even given transatlantic premium. Nepalese band in New York Chepang TAKE. NO. PRISONERS. HUURUUUURURRGGHGHHH.

I was NOT expecting this from Anhoni - but I'm a sucker for Muscle Shoals style country-soul grooves, and though they risk getting "a bit Jools Holland", here they're delivered with total assurance plus the bleakness of the lyrics, fierceness of delivery and a few noises moments all adds some serious edge.

More electropop - this one from Jessy Lanza is not a million miles from the Avalon Emerson in its pristine futurist sound, but it's a bit spikier, eerier, like she is setting puzzles for you.

My most played record of the year. Like the Culshaw, a bit Cafe Del Mar in the most urbane possible sense - Sissoko & co's blend of jazz, classical, W African & European folk is done with unbelievable poise and emotion and is completely addictive.

This has been all-conquering this year and rightly so. It's not just the fearsome doom bits, it's the straightforward folk that's great: Lankum remind us of dreadful, beautiful paradoxes of being human that don't really change through the centuries.

Paul Simon says this was written in dreams, and it really sounds like it. Genuinely transporting, surreal, gorgeous and - I have to say it - roughly 10,000,000 times more interesting than anything Bob Dylan has done this century.

Completely UN-deconstructed trance... the way Romy taps into the melancholy of the most globe-conquering of 90s pop dance is something quite special and will serve as a real cynicism test... go on, let it twang your heartstrings!

I've kind of idly admired King Krule's music from a distance previously but that changed last year - he really is something special eh? Way more than the sum of influences, and a proper world-builder.

One of many where I missed the promo at the time (sorry PRs) but then discovered it via my sp****y recommends. Just beautiful post-classical, post-ambient musing music from Audrey Carmes that sounds like austere but lovely perfumes and crisp clean cotton.

Of course death is at the heart of Depeche Mode's music so how tragic but appropriate that it took Fletch's death to turbocharge them creatively. This is like a telescoping together of their whole history - but also still in love with new sounds...

More death, more darkness, with Amy Winehouse serving as a dark angel muse drawing together and crystallising the ambient, abstract and dream cabaret influences Kevin Martin has been incubating in his solo KRM albums since 2019. Crushingly sad and great.

Espec after seeing him rock it in the morning at We Out Here, I do feel like Joshua Idehen is in danger of becoming a late-blooming star, you know. Explicitly connecting David Byrne, Mike Skinner, Maxi Jazz and a finger-jabbing Nigerian preacher, he ROCKS.

Yes, Yussef Dayes really is all that and a packed of Pickled Onion Space Raiders. Brit jazz just seems to have been in a consistent triumphant state these last five years or so and there's no sign of it stopping being that way with albums like this still coming.

Ben Howard is an artist who'd completely passed me by despite being really quite big - but again the sp****y algorithm brought me this and it's really amazing, thought provoking, grown up pop. I *instantly* guessed it was Bullion on production too, no lie. ❤️

I've said for a long time that "mumble rap" has deep atavistic echoes of the blues and psychedelia - and here's the mumbler in chief Lil Yachty joining the dots back through the decades. Funkadelic, Hendrix, Beck, Outkast, BUTTHOLE SURFERS? Yeah it's all here. Not saying it's one those levels, but it's great and

Holy shit is Dot Allison on a roll or what? This is effectively 2021's Heart Shaped Scars growing in all directions: bigger, grander, more cosmic, even more beautiful. The partnership with Hannah Peel as arranger is front and centre and works incredibly.

Alright it's not as unique as Bad Bunny's 2022 masterpiece Un Verano Sin Ti - this is more trap, less overtly "Latin" - but it's really, really good. Sometimes not knowing the language can emphasise the emotion in the sound: the blues in the trap, the Spanish derived "tristeza"...

My fave Villalobos moments are often him working his wonky magic on "real" instruments and songs (see his Tony Allen / ECM reworks) so a whole album of him tweaking A Mountain Of One's Balearic soft rock is a real treat. Gets progressively "more Ricardo" as it goes on.

I love how Young Fathers have become such a beacon of what a "big festival band" CAN be when it broadens its influences out and grooves a bit. This album is such a big step up for them, and I really hope they keep this momentum because it's BIG FUN.

And talking of Scots "big festival bands" with diverse influences pushing the envelope and having fun with loading in more pop, dance, rap etc, The Djangos really went to town on this one and I was surprised not to see it getting more hype. A proper weird and wonderful party of an album.

Okayyyyyyyy last part is here, get stuck in!

[joemuggs]

Albums of 2023 part 2

And so, on from part 1, we continue. This is more dreamy synth-dub that sits perfectly next to the Harrow album: Richard Norris is another artist with an extraordinarily long and illustrious career but who also has never lost the exploratory urge and total delight in sonic finesse.

Honestly Uruguayan-in-Ireland Lila Tirando a Violeta is right up there with the very best of the "deconstructed club" generation - dark, gothic, complex, VERY WEIRD - and this collab with Berliner Sin Maldita is up there with her best. It's really, REALLY intense!

Just impossibly beautiful elegies from ambient harpist Mary Lattimore which builds towards the final track collaboration with Slowdive's Rachel Goswell that is so lovely it will single handedly bring back swooning as a popular pastime.

Officially an EP but there's enough here to cement Nia Archives's place as a heavyweight - add "Off Wiv Ya Headz" and that Jorja Smith remix, and she's had a humdinger of a 2023....

Saw some discourse suggesting that Burna Boy is resting on his laurels here, but I don't hear it. Maybe it's the fact that the cover looks dashed-off? But musically, this bangs: it expertly joins so many dots but keeps his voice and personality right at the heart of it.

I mean come on there was no way a collab between Earl Sweatshirt and The Alchemist was going to be anything but good, right? Just purest essence of deep and dreamy stoner hip hop. Yet another small (27min) but beautifully formed album - definitely a trend there.

Feels kind of (literally) sacrilegious to say I prefer Cleo Sol's more personal, less scriptural records (e.g. Rose in the Dark) - and this is, top to bottom, a gospel album - but the conviction to her performance and the whole realisation of it here is still really magical.

From Coventry via Skopje, man like NOT_MDK's first album in 23 years, and he's zooming into the deep flows that join grime and dubstep into the longer, deeper electronic funk continuum... These tracks are so crisp and crunchy!

She's from Turkey but Ahu's been plugged into the London Plastic People / NTS / etc scene for years - file this with Yazmin Lacey and similar LDN soul-jazz, also it's very Boho and vibesy and incensey, definitely one to light your best candles for.

Can't remember who put me on to this, possibly Radio 3? Anyway if cold wet misty Scottish hillsides are your jam Claire M Singer has you covered - these slower-than-slowly unfolding organ-led pieces practically smell of wet moss, and are extremely beautiful.

He's lent vocals to a who's who of electronic music, but it turns out Paul St Hilaire's own studio craft is the equal of just about any of them - this is just a stunning, ocean-deep album of dub abstraction and subtly potent lyricism.

Icelander Eva Jóhannsdóttir aka EVA808 has already made a name in the dubstep/grime world but this is her really spreading her creative wings. Mad psychedelia, elemental abstraction, movie-theme composition - there's not much she can't do. Big things beckon!

There's still SO much to say about amapiano, and so much incredible UK, SA and wider world stuff last year (this isn't even the only great DJ Maphorisa album - he had THREE out in 2023, including a mini album with Shino Kikai and a 25-track one with fellow originator Kabza De Small!!). Suffice to say this has gorgeous songs, primal grooves, endlessly sophisticated mixdowns and bass that'll take your breath away.

Just gonna link to my review for this one (it's got the music embedded) - but TL;DR Darren J Cunningham aka Actress is the holy prophet of the era of enshittification, yet for all that his music is constantly "off" and made for a world that is "off", he alchemises it into real gold.

Yeah I'm going to be THAT space-jazz hipster and say this is the record I wish Andre3000 (who is on it, and Carlos Niño co-produced his album) had made. It's just a more lavish, free, FUN way to cavort with the five-dimensional fractal machine elves.

Zoning in on the platonic breakbeat mathematics that underly Jersey / B'more club Chicago hip house, UK rave, trip hop etc, Bored Lord could seem arch or retro if her beats weren't so gloriously functional and bumping.

Fed up of generic records? You will never EVER find another one that sounds like IFS MA. Polish abstract slightly Autechre-y footwork / drum'n'bass with Japanese rapper MA sounding like a cyborg beat poet Taliban Trim and I.... 🤯

Every man jack and their dog are doing high bpm retro rave lately but you can trust Meemo Comma to put a fresh and uneasy twist on it. These tracks will get you proper buzzing up loud! I got to DJ for her live performance of this at Spiritland earlier in the year, hearing them on that system was a real treat.

You get a twofer with this one. Phil Kieran's ode to Belfast is gorgeous in studio form here, but he also recorded and released a version with the Ulster Orchestra that single handedly revivifies the idea of electronic music done classical style!

Two true underground troupers teaming up here - Jordan GCZ from Juju & Jordash and David "Move D" Moufang with some otherworldly good-dream ambient, deep house and space-soul jams heavy on the Fender Rhodes, fuzzy reverberation and sensually sweeping portamento.

My musical safe place for so much of this year. Brooklyn "electronic jam band" Purelink somehow burrowed into electronic music history and found the softest, happiest, warmest fur lined chamber and then invited us in. I cannot emphasise enough how LOVELY this record is.

More modular synth grooves from E Ruscha aka Secret Circuits, but no over-indulgence here and the grooves REALLY DO GROOVE. Trippy as a weasel circus and twice as funky.

Talking of trippy, here's Optimo Music's second acid-drenched entry, from the man formerly known as TB Arthur and the mighty Magda trading as Blotter Trax, it's a kind of parallel universe early 80s alt disco where everything gurgles and melts.

More from South Africa - King Mzaiza Sound via the reliably tough Parisian PSSNGR label - not 100% sure what you'd call this though it definitely has some gqom sonics, some trap drums, and some strident rap vocals... It's HARD AS NAILS is what it is.

EVEN HARDER - Nyege Nyege brought us a sampler of this (and I don't use mental health language lightly) FUCKING MENTAL shrieking, raging, solvent-huffing sound from São Paulo stewarded by the young DJ K, and it's extremely funky and scarily thrilling.

OK there we go, part three is here.....

[joemuggs]

Albums of 2023 part 1

OK I started a best albums of 2023 thread as there's lots that got missed out of charts I contributed to. I got carried away and there's nearly 100, but they're all superb and I think there's something for everyone here. Start with this: a DEVASTATINGLY fresh drum'n'bass/jungle excursion from a perpetually underrated UK bass don Altered Natives.

A short but PERFECTLY formed 20 minutes of heavy, trippy R&B with surprise UKG and even drum'n'bass twists, Tinashe deserves so much more credit as an innovator...

I was late to this one but should've known the Hive Mind label always delivers. Swedish-based guitarist Vumbi Dekula delivering track after track of perfection like it's as easy as breathing.

I've always enjoyed Lana Del Rey when she's at her most benzo-haze - and this Mitski album hits that spot perfectly... not that it's all dissociated - it's very smart and sharp - but you can easily drift away into it.

Metallica, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, Blondie covers in a millennium old Inuit language? Well yes - and in Elisapie's hands it's DEVASTATING. I played the Leonard Cohen one out at 3am in a chillout room in the summer and it was real, REAL magic.

TONN3RR3 & BIKAY3 = French live electronic beats of various flavours + EXTREMELY eccentric Congolese vocalist = braincell-scrambling funtimes...

First of two major trip-outs from Optimo Music last year - with Op:l Bastards and then K-X-P, Timo Kaukolampi is best known for motorik cosmic synth rock, but here everything is stripped away except the abstract cosmic, and wow it'll give you vertigo if you let it.

The presence of Peter Zummo here leads to automatic Arthur Russell comparisons for Greek-British brothers áthos - and it's not NOT Arthur-ish.... but more, it's operating in the same boho world of freedom as he did, and finds its own delicate voice within that.

Another massively unsung talent, original Moving Shadow / - now Over/Shadow - crew, half of Mixrace with the mighty Paradox (they also had a great record out this year), Dave Trax makes THE most exquisite soulful but heavy d'n'b and this album is among his best.

Melbourne's always been musically interesting, but this new duo project from a Gorillaz / Genesis Owusu collaborator Mindy Meng Wang 王萌 with Sui Zhen is above and beyond. Sort of fourth world but more advanced (fifth world??), it's a really personal, precise and endlessly fascinating thing.

Dunno how Jamal Moss does it so prolifically but consistently: an endless flow of machine funk like a jet of magma from the centre of the earth. Add Polish saxophonist Jerzy Maczynski to the mix making Universal Harmonies & Frequencies, and the results are overwhelmingly ecstatic.

Holmer zooms into the essential something that links Mary Chain, Goldfrapp, Stereolab, Cocteaus and all their influences in turn... a kind of pure essence of motorik, psychedelic, magickal pop..... Such an instant, potent, pleasure-centres hit.

Your favourite DJ's favourite DJ's favourite DJ Jerome Hill is also no shabby producer and every one of these eight tracks is the platonic ideal of a bleeping, clonking, tweaking, hot, sweaty, bassy dancefloor banger.

Need a reminder that it hasn't all been done before in electronic music? TSVI got you covered: this is the FRESHEST gear, but never innovating for innovation's sake - always about emotions & composition first. Includes several Loraine James contributions too \(more to come from her....) ❤️

The kind of drone music that can give you superpowers if you make space to really soak it in. Kali Malone x Lucy Railton x Stephen O'Malley = AVENGERS ASSEMBLE!

The Magic Numbers pretty much passed me by, but this solo album from the band's Michele Stodart is the epitome of Soft Music For Hard Times, real quiet dignity stuff, beautiful subtlety to production/arrangment and just the kind of countrified songwriting I adore.

A second one from Hive Mind, and another supermodernist feeling one - ultra sophisticated stuff from the Rio de Janeiro polymath Ricardo Dias Gomes: is it post-rock? Indietronica? Neotropicália? Yes/no/whatever... watch out there's a noisy surprise at the end!

Is it me or is R&B / neo soul wayyyyy more experimental than hip hop at the moment? Like the Tinashe and Janelle albums, this is super short but WOW does Madison McFerrin pack a lot of innovation, emotion and just v.i.b.e.s. into its 27 minutes

Very cleverly structured because it starts quite timid and slight, which it turns out is maybe expectation management? But Andre Three Stacks builds into something that demands repeat plays - and a megastar bringing Don Cherry meets Hiroshi Yoshimura vibes into the world?? It's not quite the masterpiece I'd hoped for but it is GREAT.

The perfect (paradoxical?) combination of being absolutely true to the unchanging groove of Detroit, but also pushing it forwards sonically... DJ Bone STILL sounds like the future.

A second appearance for the most fun abstract cellist out there, Lucy Railton - this record is really tricky, it feels different from different angles, keeps throwing surprises at you, the proverbial "a lot to unpack"... but it's GREAT.

hinako omori somehow emerges from a wellspring circa 1979-81 when prog synth meandering was feeding into e.g. Kate Bush, Eurythmics, Japan, and then traces through that into 00s post trance pop but it doesn't sound retro? HOW?

Another small but perfectly formed one. Amazing that Ultramarine's elegant, pastoral, ECM-ish house explorations are still so exploratory and moving after all these years - and they fit perfectly on the Blackford Hill label which had an extraordinary year too.

In a year when not a lot of hip hop floated my boat, this was a glorious exception. Kind of odd it didn't get more hype really - Kaytra absolutely on top of his game, partnership with Aminé flows together just like their names, guest spots on point, vibes upon vibes upon vibes (instrumental version is great too!)

David Harrow is the absolute epitome of real craftsmanship honed over years and years - and this album of dub and downtempo tracks with rich layering of singing modular synths is a really magical exercise in world-building.

OK that's that for now, direct link to Part 2 here....

[joemuggs]

HAPPY NEW YEAR

[joemuggs]

Dance Your Way Home

This is my WIRE magazine review of Emma Warren's book from earlier this year....

👇🏻

Appropriately enough, this book is in constant movement. Its framework is simultaneously memoir, history and exploration of the human mind and body, and it oscillates between these modes, shifting perspective and location endlessly. In any page you’ll find multiple voices, the action flipping from Orpington to Rwanda and Stoke-on-Trent to Chicago in a moment, a zooming in and out from broad historical sweep to images of moving crowds to micro personal detail or insight. 

But for all that, it keeps returning to one place: the dancefloor. And even more specifically, to long-established journalist Emma Warren’s own feet, on specific dancefloors, and to what they were doing: how her feet moved, what shoes she was wearing, what those floors were made of, how it felt. It’s hard to think of a better, or more literal, way that a complex narrative could be grounded. This book dances around, but is also firmly rooted in, the very experience of dancing.

It draws us from Warren’s parents’ youth on the English south coast, through her own childhood in Kent, student days in Manchester, working for Jockey Slut and The Face, parenthood, community organising and on. Each time we get a sense of where dance was in her life, from infant school tap and ballet, through youth club discos, funk and soul clubs, acid house, 90s superclubs, drum’n’bass, dubstep, UK funky and into the myriad of jazz-adjacent fusions of the past decade.

But every step of the way it fires off backwards in time and across continents, digging into the roots of specific dance moves and styles, the functions of dancing for social groups and movements, it’s effects on the human brain. First and second hand sources are quoted constantly – from those Warren shares specific memories with through keystone musicians and promoters to academics and scientists with insight into the dance. 

In this way, it feels very similar to Jude Rogers’s The Sound of Being Human from last year, which also used memoir as a springboard to examine the science and social function of music. But where Rogers was looking the echoes and abstractions of memory, Warren keeps the focus tightly on physicality – of experiences and the building blocks of culture passed from hand to hand, body to body. And her language has a deeply satisfying physicality to match, as in “Our gestural polyphony changed the temperature, too, heating venues up with human-generated humidity.” 

Despite its omnidirectional approach, this core keeps its momentum like a groove running throughout, and it really works on all its intended levels – and simply as a polemic in favour of dancing, whether in clubs, at home or professionally. Looking at subcultural evolution through the dancer’s lens – reminding us, for example that some of the most crucial dance musicians like A Guy Called Gerald and Shut Up & Dance were trained, even professional dancers – provides endless vital insights. And Warren’s phrase making provides plenty of pithy reminders of her fierce sense of purpose. “Culture matters when everything else falls away,” she says. “You can’t eat culture and it doesn’t pay the rent, but it does provide pride and history, which are useful starting points for recovery.”