Feeling Listless
The last thing we need is more record lists, right? Well, maybe. No doubt we suffer from a glut of rock-lists. Glossy consumer mags use lists of all types as selling points (“you need these in your...
View ArticleFunky Accordions
“Accordions are banned from the office,” comes the judgement as yet another lame East/West dance fusion disc gets abruptly slung out of the CD player. Like any rules, there’s exceptions of course, and...
View ArticleCollateral damage
Kenneth Goldsmith’s Epiphany in the May issue of the print zine is the first in a series of essays about digital cultures and their effect on the music industry: what they mean for listeners and...
View ArticleDrowned City
It’s not surprising that there’s relatively few films made about pirate radio, when being collared with illegal broadcasting equipment or running a station can land you in jail, with an unlimited fine,...
View ArticleSynthesthetic Illusions
At this year’s Mutek, the series of A/V performances (as well as Amon Tobin’s bombastic stage spectacle) were notable for treating visuals with an extra gravity that isn’t often extended to VJs and A/V...
View Article110% Dynamite
Spin the dial across the AM airwaves in the UK and you could be forgiven for hearing some oddly familiar sounds, at least for readers of The Wire. Work your way past the 1970s golden oldies stations,...
View ArticleParadise Lost And Found
Not many mixes demand to be prefaced by an hour long documentary, but this is an exception. The BBC radio series Legends Of The Dancefloor: A Piece Of Paradise featured a four hour radio broadcast...
View ArticleKorean internet broadcasts: Where silky pop ballads still roam
Internet radios spider the internet for stations: algorithms track down broadcasts. Spinning a dial means I don’t head for a particular target, I browse. Channel surfing by location, I stumbled (and...
View ArticleReal North
Recently I listened back to Glenn Gould’s influential 1967 radio documentary The Idea Of North, part of his Solitude Trilogy. It features the voices of people who have had a ‘direct confrontation’ with...
View ArticleAnalog alchemy: Auris Apothecary and the anti-cassette
Indiana based label Auris Apothecary is only a record label in part. A package sent from them recently contained cassettes and CDs, but also a small spice mix, a tin full of dirt, and a small wax...
View ArticleDanielle De Picciotto: Rock and a hard place
It might be a city built on sand but going underground in Berlin lands you between a rock and a hard place: on one side, the raw, existential rock-soul-noise drummed up by Einstürzende Neubauten and...
View ArticleSuffering through suffrage: Compiling The Wire’s Rewind charts
Consensus is mendacious. A composite of multiple, often conflicting individual realities, consensual reality projects an image that doesn’t exist. Which is another way of saying that all democratic...
View ArticleLou Reed & Metallica: Why all the #WTF?
Sitting conspicuously at #9 in our 2011 Releases of the Year chart was Lou Reed and Metallica’s Lulu, one of the most hated albums of the year. Reactions to its charting have ranged from noisy...
View ArticleHerbie rides again
Last week at East London’s Cafe Oto the new season of The Wire Salon got off to a futurological start with a talk by Adam Harper based on his book Infinte Music: Imagining The Next Millennium Of Human...
View ArticleChannel of Curiosities
“This odd museum merely documents, juxtaposes, relativizes – a perverse collection.” – James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism” In the Unofficial Channels column of the February issue of The Wire,...
View ArticleThe Keith Fullerton Whitman Notebooks
My recent interview in East London with Keith Fullerton Whitman, the starting point for the piece in The Wire 336, meandered down almost as many byways and dead-ends as we found wandering about the...
View ArticleJoshua Light Show and Manuel Göttsching: Berlin stage invasion
One of the central events at the CTM and Transmediale festivals in Berlin just over a week ago was Manuel Göttsching with Joshua Light Show (whose line up now interestingly includes Ana Matronic of...
View ArticleBad Thoughts on the Death of Mike Kelley
Mike Kelley photographed by Robert Gallagher for The Wire 235 September 2003 [This post was written following a conversation in The Wire office about the effects of the influence of the art of the...
View ArticleLast month a DJ showed me life: Hieroglyphic Being @ CTM
A month ago a DJ set by Hieroglyphic Being (aka Jamal Moss) set my world on fire. It was in Berlin, at the CTM festival, and I can’t stop going over it in my head, rerunning the maths to find the...
View ArticleGoing underground (Disco re-edit)
The Loft staff Thanksgiving party, 1979. Photo: Don Lynn A number of disco revivals around at the moment – a four CD box set of Tom Moulton’s remixes of tracks issued in the early-mid-70s by...
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