#wire magazine

[garadinervi]

Meta Gesture Music, (CD, Digital album), GD-2017, «Wire» Magazine / Goldsmiths Press, 2017

Artists: Atau Tanaka, Sarah Nicolls, Leafcutter John, Laetitia Sonami, Renick Bell & Steph Horak, xname, Tom Richards, Dane Law, Ewa Justka, Kaffe Matthews

Design: Studio Cymbal

↗ Meta Gesture Music

[bluetapes]

Office Ambience 490 - The Wire

Stream a selection of tracks from releases we listened to during the making of our December 2024 issue

Do you like:

a) The Wire magazine b) Blue Tapes c) banjos?

If the answer is affirmative to any or all of the above then head on over to the link above, as our GUE (Grundy / Uziell / Elswyth) release has made Wire's Office Ambience playlist!

I am looking forward to checking out all the cool stuff on there.

Also, why not check out the GUE album?

[ruiraiox]

[danyelisnotforsale]

[coverdebut]

MF DOOM-WIRE Magazine-issue 253-March 2005

[wiremagazine]

MEET STRIKING HUNK JOE WACHS

By Rafa Carvajal

This week, we introduce you to striking hunk and OnlyFans sensation Joe Wachs from Chicago, Illinois, with some of the hot photos taken last week by Photo Studio Miami.

Rafa Carvajal: Where are you originally from and where do you live? Joe Wachs: I am originally from Chicago, Illinois and currently living in Scottsdale, Arizona.

RC: What do you do for a living? JW: I am a full-time paid athlete and model, with currently the #1 biggest OnlyFans page in the United States. I also have multiple brand deals with companies for monthly income and run an online coaching business on the side.

RC: Who is the professional icon that inspires you most? Why? JW: I don’t have an icon that inspires me the most, but I do look up to Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson because of who he is as a person. He is humble, amazing at what he does, and The Rock always shows how thankful he is and gives back to the community. That’s exactly the imprint I want to leave on the people I meet in my career. I honestly look at myself as my main motivation and inspiration because I know I have tons of potential, and as long as I continue working hard every single day, I will have exactly what I want in life.

RC: How do you stay in such great shape? JW: Nothing but consistency and hard work. I wish there was a magic pill, but it all comes down to training hard at the gym, following your diet 24/7 and keeping up with your hygiene.

RC: What do you enjoy the most about modeling for photography? JW: I love modeling and everything about photo-graphy. I enjoy being in front of the camera just as much as I love being behind. The biggest thing I like is creating fine art that shows such expression and creates much more than just an image. We are creating a fantasy and it’s amazing to see it come to life.

RC: What is your favorite food? JW: I’m such an all American guy... That being said, I can never go wrong with a big fat juicy burger and fries.

RC: What is your favorite pastime? JW: I love scrolling through social media to support my other influencer and model friends. It’s fantastic seeing all of my friends, doing what they love and creating such amazing work! I enjoy seeing all the creativity others have to offer.

RC: What is your favorite place in the world? Why? JW: I recently traveled to Aruba, and it was a very breathtaking and beautiful place. I am definitely going back soon. As long as I am somewhere with the people that I love and enjoy spending time with, everywhere is my favorite!

RC: What is your current struggle? JW: Juggling all my business ventures and being able to keep sane. With my goals and ambition, it drives me crazy because I never stop working and never know when to take a break. Now, with business being so good moving forward, I’ve been able to hire a full time assistant to help me run all of my work and take on more as myself and as a brand.

RC: Is there anything else you would like to share with Wire Magazine readers? JW: Thank you all so much for giving me this opportunity to be on the cover and showcase myself in front of thousands. I also want to thank the amazing photographers Jorge and Abel from Photo Studio Miami for helping create such stunning images. They are now my full-time project photographers who will be working with me moving forward as a team. If you aren’t already, make sure you subscribe to my OnlyFans! I’m currently running a promotion in honor of my first cover and it’s only $3 to join and 65% off. Every single member gets a free video on the house and there is also tons of behind-the-scenes footage from the pictures you’re currently seeing now. Thank you so much.

This was originally published in Wire Magazine Digital Issue 7.2020

[joemuggs]

Drexciya’s Kitsch Sublime

Apropos of a conversation about Drexciya’s odder Euro electropop influences, I was reminded of a WIRE review I did for the Neptune's Lair reissue in 2010.

Could Drexciya be the most perfectly-realised project ever to come out of Techno? The consistency of the huge body of work between 1992 and James Stinson’s death in 2002 makes almost any other artist in the field look like a woolly-minded dilettante in comparison. During Stinson’s lifetime, Drexciya’s anonymity was total: despite occasional (masked) interviews, his and his primary musical partner Gerald Donald’s names and identities were never publicly revealed, and their individual roles in the music and ever-developing mythos are still unclear. Their musical practice was severe, with every track’s sparse electronic groove relentlessly linear in structure and seemingly recorded live and without edits. The mythos was Afro-Futurism in excelsis, combining fierce working-class pride and engagement with racial issues with cosmic and utopian thinking, scientific and technological obsessions, and most importantly the creation of Drexciya itself: a black Atlantis peopled by aquatic descendents of drowned slaves, and a fluid imaginitive space where a play of identities and futures could take place.

1999’s Neptune’s Lair was the first Drexciya album proper following the compilation The Quest and also their first release for Tresor, and at the time, thanks to the Berlin label’s dominance, was a leap into the Techno mainstream. What is striking now, though, is how playful it is, even to the point of being wilfully silly in places. The methodology may be austere and the back-story dense, but the music is neither. For every moment of sublime cosmic scope or intense physical funk, there are kooky Star Trek special FX bleeps (“Species Of The Pod”, “Habitat O Negative”) or out-and-out kitsch B Movie sci-fi synths (“Quantum Hydrodynamics”). There’s also a strain of European cabaret camp to the synth pop of “Surface Terrestrial Colonisation” or “Oxyplasmic Gyration Beam” whose place in the post-Kraftwerk lineage is closer to Jimi Tenor or Felix Kubin than to Cybotron or Bambaataa. It’s this which has been taken to ultra-deadpan extremes in Donald’s later work as Dopplereffekt and Arpanet, and which perhaps most directly influenced Electroclash-era acts like Adult. and Peaches (Stinson went on record as being pleased with Drexciya’s influence on these artists, whereas he had criticised white Techno artists like Richie Hawtin for co-opting black musicians’ styles).

But the kitsch never undermines the lofty aims of the Drexicya project, and the reason is simple: behind the mystery and technology, they were ultimately a funk band. It’s explicit in the strangely dainty P-Funk squiggles and slick cyborg jazz-funk, and even the Belgian-style rave of “Devil Ray Cove” has drum fills and voice snatches that are unadulterated funk. Of all Detroit’s Techno artists, Drexciya were the ones with most overlap with the city’s speedy, resolutely non-cerebral Ghettotech sounds. Like James Brown, like George Clinton, like Sly Stone, they were able to short circuit any opposition between foolishness and seriousness, to bring dense layers of history, imagination and futurism into the party without succumbing to the po-facedness that dominated Techno in the late 1990s.

All of which explains why Drexciya are more relevant now than ever: electronic club music is currently undergoing a spectacular resurgence of The Funk. Their influence is obvious in the Glasgow’s Numbers/LuckyMe scene, most notably via Rustie whose early Voltaic releases were pure Drexciyan Electro and who has been remixed by Gerald Donald in his Heinrich Mueller guise. But whether it’s in LA’s Low End Theory or Manchester’s Hoya:Hoya club or Alexander Nut’s Rinse FM show, you can hear the crisp and witty sounds of Drexciya rising from the deep once again. It’s hard to say that this is the definitive Drexciya release – the EPs that preceded it had more raw soundsystem charm, and the deluge of releases that followed (no less than eight albums under different aliases in the final year of Stinson’s life) further finessed their techniques creating ever more immersive soundworlds and moments of overwhelming beauty. But as a centrepiece between these phases of their work, as their breakthrough record, and as one which feels as if its time has finally come, it couldn’t be a better way into their world.

[tilde44]

Techno Animal in Wire by Mattias Ek, Oct. 2001