The other afternoon my colleagues and I succumbed to a moment of pop-rave nostalgia and spent the afternoon listening to the sometimes silly, sometimes beautiful dance sounds that flooded Britain’s charts and radio stations in the early 90s. We talked about the joy of watching Orbital at Glastonbury, or trying to copy the dancers SL2 [...]

This afternoon I found my first grey hair. My pessimistic side is thinking ‘oh OH NO GREY HAIR aging process accelerating at speed!’ whilst my cheerier side thinks ‘at least it’s a kind of Meryl-Streep-In-Devil-Wears-Prada-silver.’ I have decided to mark this event in the time-honoured fashion of music bloggers everywhere and have made a playlist. [...]

I have been listening to a lot of Hybrid and Way Out West lately, and I decided to indulge in one of my favorite eMusic activities: following the rabbit down the hole. Here are a few great discoveries I made along the way…

Like many of you, I usually spend a good portion of my day wearing headphones and choosing music; clicking buttons on an MP3 player, scrolling through my computer’s iTunes, fiddling with Last FM and slotting CDs into the mouths of players. Yesterday I took the headphones off to conduct a serious piece of social research [...]

01 I generally view the Pickin’ On series as the music industry at its worst: piggybacking with kitschy covers meant to dupe unsuspecting folks into downloading something they don’t really want. I resent the whole concept, and always have. Well, today I eat a slight bit of crow as — surprise of all surprises — [...]

The kings of indie rock, the best band ever from Stockton, California, and one of my favorite bands of all time: Pavement. They were an incredible band, with a range (life) that stretched between power-pop, slow indie jamz and even (in their later, forgettable years) jam band-age. Their first three albums are musts: Slanted & [...]

The German DJ/electronic musician Superpitcher has a well-defined and even iconic sound based on a handful of key elements: 01 The slight, pulsing schaeffel beat that forms the skittering, perfectly too-slow foundation for microhouse, the name for a minimal style of house music. Superpitcher has a beautiful sense of how to use this rhythm, interweaving [...]