‘It felt like we were in the 90s!’ HomeBass, the white van revving up UK rave culture

The father and son DJ duo have become viral sensations for their guerrilla raves. Now working with brands and major labels, can they keep their countercultural spirit alive?

In a public square in Dalston, east London, out the back of the kind of bog-standard white van more used to transporting fitted kitchens or cleaning supplies, a crowd of ravers are in a jubilant mood, all sweat-sheen and wide smiles. Inside the van DJs spin tunes characteristic of this itinerant party, dubbed HomeBass: garage, jungle, drum’n’bass. It begins to rain but they remain in place, arms upraised, waiting for the first drop from rising jungle star Nia Archives.

What began with the van pulling up to forest raves during Covid – with all the legal and ethical quandaries that entailed – is now a UK dance music phenomenon. Artists of the calibre of Fatboy Slim, the Ragga Twins and Eats Everything have played out of the HomeBass van. There have been festival takeovers, thousands-strong pop-up raves and subsequent police shutdowns; Sony, MTV and Universal have enlisted HomeBass to add spice to album releases, a record label is in the works and US promoters have been in touch. This weekend they head to a secret Manchester location.

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by Jessica Rawnsley via Electronic music | The Guardian

Clark: Sus Dog review – comforting weirdness you can’t get anywhere else

(Throttle)
A majestic title track is the centrepiece of the electronic artist’s irresistible first vocal album in his 20-year career, with Thom Yorke executive producing

Once AI replaces us all, computers will review autogenerated albums for you – a floating head in a jar – to read. When that blessed day comes, there may be one quiet moment when a laptop cries to itself as it realises what we lost. Not reviews written by meatbags, but albums like this. Music as a measure of human growth, ambition. It’s more than 20 years since St Albans-raised Chris Clark’s Clarence Park debut, and only now has the producer made a vocal album. He says it sprang from the age-old question: “What would it sound like if the Beach Boys took MDMA and made a rave record?”

Thankfully, Sus Dog avoids answering it – dry-mouthed octogenarians arguing about royalties, most likely – and instead creates songs you’ll replay because you can’t get their comforting weirdness anywhere else. Clark’s falsetto, reminiscent of Caribou’s Dan Snaith or executive producer Thom Yorke, is used carefully as a texture that neither distracts nor dominates, counterbalancing the occasionally abrasive electronics. The title track is majestic, and a lively human intelligence animates Alyosha and Clutch Pearlers, wandering free from structure, deploying sunbursts of synths and metallic percussion, nailing melodies into your primitive brain.

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by Damien Morris via Electronic music | The Guardian

Four Tet review – Kieran Hebden’s spiritual techno lights up the room

Alexandra Palace, London
In collaboration with lighting artists Squidsoup, Hebden has found a way to make his wistful dance music seem thrillingly tangible

Four Tet’s shows have never had such a clash of audiences. Some know Kieran Hebden as the grandfather of a certain introspective strain of UK club music; others know him as part of a trio – alongside Britain’s new UK bass royalty Fred Again and dubstep antagonist turned man-bun enthusiast Skrillex – who headlined this year’s Coachella after subbing in last-minute for Frank Ocean. As such, the audience tonight is loaded with uni students keen to see Fred Again and Skrillex, and fortysomethings wanting to hear Rounds. It’s the latter who get their wish.

Far from the main-stage antics of Coachella, Four Tet’s latest concert in collaboration with lighting artists Squidsoup shows he is still in the business of creating sincere and disarming electronic experiences. A matrix of coloured lights hangs from the ceiling and surrounds the crowd. Young and old, excitement swells from the audience as they swarm in and out of the setup.

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by Nathan Evans via Electronic music | The Guardian

Never mind the Balearics: Ibiza icons A Man Called Adam tune into Teesside

They are the chillout masters famed for their blissful, sun-dappled sound. So why have the dance duo made an album inspired by the abandoned steelworks and poisoned shellfish of the north east?

Sally Rodgers and Steve Jones’s music has long been associated with blissful beach scenes. Early evangelists for the Ibizan Balearic aesthetic, and stalwarts of untold chillout compilations, as A Man Called Adam they make the sort of music people call “sun-dappled”. So it may surprise casual listeners to find that their new album, The Girl With a Hole in Her Heart, was inspired by abandoned steelworks, poisoned shellfish and the harsh North Sea winds of the Teesside coast where Rodgers grew up.

It’s not really a radical departure, though. It’s still full of disco, electropop and lush, lyrical downtempo moods – with the lyrics poetically abstracted rather than agit-prop or kitchen-sink realist. The pair first put it together remotely, during Covid lockdown, then together in north-east England just as allegations of corruption around Teesside’s de-industrialisation were emerging. And this, Rodgers says, “provided us with something to be angry about, something to be proud about, all kinds of emotions. It prompted me to write about my childhood, too, and gave this record a sense of place.”

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by Joe Muggs via Electronic music | The Guardian

Anohni on anger, empathy and trans rights: ‘The UK is one of the most misogynist countries in the world’

The spellbinding singer returns with an album of warm, empathic folk-soul – plus a screaming lemur – to salute LGBTQ+ trailblazers, Lou Reed and more. She explains why we must forgive our enemies if we are ever to make change

In the summer of 1992, Anohni kissed the hand of Marsha P Johnson. Then 21, the British-born singer had moved to New York to study experimental theatre at New York University and was beginning to piece together her chosen family. “I quite idealised her,” Anohni says today of Johnson, the renowned activist who fought in the 1969 Stonewall uprising against anti-LGBTQ+ policing in New York, and spent her life at the vanguard of queer and transgender liberation. “A lot of her innovations were unprecedented.”

Six days after Anohni met her, Johnson’s body was found floating in New York’s Hudson river in circumstances that remain mysterious. “That period of weeks changed the direction of my life,” Anohni says. Since then, Johnson has been something of a spiritual guide: Anohni named her band the Johnsons in tribute, and on her debut album, 2000’s Antony and the Johnsons, exalted Marsha on the chamber rock elegy River of Sorrow. “No precious liar or well-wisher / Can return the love that was stolen,” she lamented.

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by Owen Myers via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘We love life – but death loves us more’: the pain and power of Iraqi music

In the second part of a series marking 20 years since the Iraq war, genre-spanning artists explain the difficulties of working in the country – and the poignancy for those outside it

• ‘We are a forgotten people’: how rap music processed trauma in Iraq

‘I heard an American Humvee approaching as soldiers were patrolling our area in Al-Qa’im, close to the Syrian border.” The Iraqi music producer UsFoxx is recalling a childhood memory, from 2004, during the Iraq war. “Through the open windows I heard this infectious beat, which I later learned was 50 Cent’s In Da Club. My jaw dropped.”

This unexpected but inspiring encounter was the first step of UsFoxx’s journey to becoming one of the many prolific producers and beatmakers in Baghdad today. The position of music in Iraqi culture was badly distorted after the 2003 American-led invasion which silenced many voices or stunted their evolution, but 20 years later a new generation of eclectic artists has emerged – particularly in the aftermath of the political upheaval of the 2019-21 Tishreen uprising protests – with work spanning rap, techno, experimental music, jazz and beyond.

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by Christina Hazboun via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘Everyone is being frisked – how thrilling!’ Fred Again rocks the Outer Hebrides

The DJ is used to headlining huge stages, but fondness for these islands led him to schedule a three-date island tour here with euphoric results for a lucky few

Other than the odd piper or Gaelic singer, the Isle of Harris is a place usually short of much live music. Visitors comment on the almost eerie silence that covers the island from dawn ’til dusk. After dark, the best you can hope for is an appearance from the local covers band Passing Places – or perhaps a ceilidh in the village hall. So you can imagine the commotion when one of the world’s biggest DJs turns up to play for an audience of 200 vape-wielding teenagers and tattooed ravers on a Friday night.

Months after playing for an audience of 20,000 at Madison Square Gardens and closing Coachella with a main stage performance alongside Skrillex and Four Tet, Fred Again announced he would be coming to the Outer Hebrides. And not for a holiday: his three-date tour would see him play village halls on Skye and the Isles of Lewis and Harris, each venue more remote than the last.

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by Freya Parr via Electronic music | The Guardian

Overmono: Good Lies review – certified bangers galore

(XL)
The Russell brothers mix weapons-grade nostalgia with two-step, trap and sped-up vocals in a set full of emotional ambushes

The UK sets a high bar for new electronic acts. Hot on the heels of Bicep are another duo armed with a sense of rave nostalgia, an array of samples and nimble, fat-free productions. Brothers Tom and Ed Russell grew up in rural south Wales, hosting splendidly isolated micro-raves in woods and quarries (the duo take their band name from Overmonnow, a Monmouth suburb; amusingly, their forenames also echo the Chemical Brothers’).

Unlike Bicep, though, Overmono aren’t techno revivalists, but partial to old school syncopations: they fillet jungle, two-step and trap for beats, R&B and hip-hop for sped-up vocals, and then impose flirtation, dread or weapons-grade nostalgia on the results. Consequently, they are shaping up to be an albums act rather than just savvy dancefloor engineers. This is an album full of emotional ambushes.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Overmono: Good Lies review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

(XL Recordings)
Knitting garage with techno and chopped-up vocals, the pounding yet poppy debut album from Monmouth brothers Ed and Tom Russell is masterfully done

Overmono take their name from a suburb of their Welsh home town. You could take that as a knowing joke from a duo steeped in wilfully urban-sounding music, who specifically intended their celebrated 2021 Fabric Presents mix to evoke a winter’s night in south London. The idea of the authors of So U Kno, the reliably party-starting anthem that soundtracked the return of clubs and festivals after lockdown, naming themselves after a rural Welsh faubourg where, one assumes, there’s not much in the way of nightlife, is the dance music equivalent of a death metal band naming themselves Bourton-on-the-Water, or an anarchist punk collective called Little Missenden.

Or perhaps not. The Russell brothers only started working together after they had established themselves as producers in their own right: Tom as Truss, making punishing techno that found a home on Perc’s hard-edged Perc Trax label; Ed as the breakbeat-fuelled Tessela, his 2013 single Hackney Parrot the kind of undeniable tune that effortlessly crosses between scenes, a hit at grime nights and house clubs alike. But the music they make together seems weirdly informed by their rural roots. A decade older than his brother, Tom grew up on 90s mixtapes from Fantazia and World Dance, in an era when the music at those raves had split into two factions: jungle on one hand and the relentless four-four kick of happy hardcore on the other. But in a pre-internet age, Monmouth was apparently so far removed from the action as to render that factionalism – or any of the other boundaries that sprang up in 90s dance music – meaningless. “We didn’t have any ideas about where the music was from or how it was it made,” Tom told an interviewer last year: locally, all dance music was known by the catch-all title “rave”. Existing on a diet of records scrounged from his brother, or listening to him DJ through the wall, Ed was further removed still.

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by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian

How Daft Punk became my generation’s Pink Floyd | Ben Cardew

It took me years to come round to Random Access Memories, until I connected the dots to its unlikely cousin 40 years its senior, Dark Side of the Moon

Few records in the 21st century have divided a band’s fans as much as Daft Punk’s fourth studio album, Random Access Memories. While the reviews were largely positive, a significant swathe of the band’s fanbase wondered why they had swapped techno for soft rock. It took me years to come to peace with this beguiling, if confounding, album, until one day the refracted light came on and the pre-decimal penny dropped: Random Access Memories was the 21st century Dark Side of the Moon. And the 10th anniversary reissue of RAM, which arrives on 12 May (coincidentally less than two months after the 50th anniversary edition of Pink Floyd’s legendary eighth album) will help to prove it.

The inflection point in my thinking was Horizon, a Japanese-edition bonus track on RAM, which is getting a full release as part of the album’s extravagant new triple-LP reissue. It is one of the least electronic songs ever to be released by a duo of electronic musicians: four a half minutes of horizontal space vibes, which stretch out on a base of acoustic guitar, soothing keyboard trills and Greg Leisz’s celestial pedal steel. The subtle shade of a drum machine aside, Horizon could pass for a long-lost Dark Side outtake. (It is no surprise that an enterprising music fan has created a mash up of Horizon with the vocal from Pink Floyd’s follow-up Wish You Were Here).

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by Ben Cardew via Electronic music | The Guardian

SBTRKT: The Rat Road review – audacious electronic gems

(Awal)
Versatile composer and producer Aaron Jerome reaps beauty from a restless digital palette in his first album for seven years

Masked electronic producer SBTRKT came up in the 2010s, pioneering the enthusiastic cross-pollinations and collaborations that power pop today. Sampha and Jessie Ware were just two voices that benefited from this versatile London composer’s leg-up. New Dorp, New York (2014), with Ezra Koenig, still sounds cutting-edge now.

Six years on from 2016’s Save Yourself, SBTRKT is now openly using his real name, Aaron Jerome, bidding to be better understood as a creative force, rather than a springboard or remixer. His first official track back, the banging Bodmin Moor, channelled retro glitch and echoing dread with renewed aplomb. Scattered throughout this aurally erudite 22-track record are audacious exercises at reaping beauty from a restless digital palette: the spacious, wiggly drum’n’bass of You, Love outclasses much of the jungle 2.0 around now, while You Broke My Heart but Imma Fix It is so nimble and textured it’s impossible to pin down.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Fred again.. and Brian Eno: Secret Life review – dull ambient set reveals both men’s weaknesses

(Text Records)
While their signature sonic flotsam and spartan melodies are present, Eno’s contributions prove witlessly unimaginative while his mentee’s are trite

After recently closing out Coachella with UK bass rollers, heady trance and comedy dubstep in his trio with Skrillex and Four Tet, Fred again..’s next move is a quite colossal dynamic shift: releasing an album of ambient songs made with Brian Eno. The pair go way back, to 2010 and Fred again..’s mid-teens, when a mutual friend invited the boy who was then just Fred Gibson to join a singing group of Eno’s. Eno is not his godfather, as has been widely rumoured, but he quickly became a mentor, bringing him on to co-production projects. Gibson also went to a very posh boarding school and descends from an aristocratic family line: making an album with an axis of his already considerable privilege has already riled many in the dance underground.

’Twas ever thus in a scene that is, sometimes for worse but mostly for better, always patrolling the nebulous boundaries of the genre’s mainstream and suspicious of interlopers, particularly monied ones. But there’s a much larger audience on the other side of that wall: Gibson’s fanbase of young ravers who adore his garage-adjacent tracks and dextrous live drum programming, his most successful solo phase after years of also-very-successful pop and rap production for others including Ed Sheeran. With intensity and density maxed out, his work can be brilliant, as on tracks such as Delilah, Jungle and Baxter, which seem to fishtail through their respective raves. And even if his guest vocalists can let him down – such as the colossally annoying Blessed Madonna speeches on his big Covid hit Marea (We’ve Lost Dancing) – he often writes bright, insidious melodies.

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

Adjunct Ensemble: Sovereign Bodies/Ritual Taxonomy review | John Lewis's contemporary album of the month

(Diatribe Records)
Free jazz, opera, hymns, punk and newscasts intermingle in an oddly compelling sonic collage addressing issues of asylum and migration

Anyone who has heard the Beatles’ Revolution No 9 will be familiar with musique concrète: a compositional style based around the manipulation of existing recordings and found sounds, one pioneered by the likes of Pierre Schaeffer, Edgard Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Sovereign Bodies/Ritual Taxonomy is very much a sound collage in this vein: a jarring sonic montage assembled by Belfast-based composer Jamie Thompson featuring snatches of free jazz, opera, hip-hop, electronica, spoken word and broadcast news. It sounds like someone maniacally dialling between multiple stations on multiple radios.

Crucially, however, these disparate snippets of music have been specifically recorded for this project. And, as the album progresses, you realise that it is not random or formless, but a virtual audio drama themed around asylum and migration, displacement and assimilation, detention centres and perilous boat journeys. The few male voices here represent bureaucratic authority; the rest are female voices of resistance. The spoken-word poet Felicia Olusanya serves as a kind of narrator; the voice of operatic soprano Amy Ní Fhearraigh is put on to dubplates and manipulated by turntablist Mariam Rezaei; saxophonist Catherine Sikora Mingus howls over a doomy gothic chorale.

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by John Lewis via Electronic music | The Guardian

Soft Cell: ‘One day you’re smearing your naked body with cat food, the next you’re at the garden centre’

The synthpop duo answer your questions on the fight against homophobia, getting an OBE at 60 and why they never thought Tainted Love would be a hit

Marc, how important was the late 70s/early 80s Leeds nightlife and art scene in the evolution of Soft Cell? JacquelinePearce
Marc Almond: I studied fine art at Leeds Polytechnic through 1976-79. In my first week, the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy tour came to the poly. Punk showed us anything is possible: anyone can start a group, unbound by fashion, political orthodoxy or gender. This creative explosion was fuelled by the rising unemployment and urban decay of the 70s and a reaction to the years of terror of [serial killer] Peter Sutcliffe. Everything was simmering. So many bands and performers would rise out of that, unbound by the constraints of the previous decade.

Dave, I understand you spent your youth attending parties at the Highland Room, Blackpool’s legendary northern soul venue. Do you have a trusted repertoire of steps, shuffles, spins and kicks? VerulamiumParkRanger
Dave Ball: I remember the flat grey building, taking the escalator up to the Highland dancefloor that had tartan carpets to hear Colin Curtis and Ian Levine DJ. Ian Levine went to the same school as me in Blackpool, but was a few years older. Chris Lowe [from Pet Shop Boys] was in the year below. When he became successful with Neil [Tennant], I remember thinking: “That’s that guy who used to play trumpet in the school band.”

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by As told to Rich Pelley via Electronic music | The Guardian

Bleep it out! The bowel-quaking dance music of late-80s Yorkshire

Books and compilations are reanimating the overlooked sound of bleep: a speaking-smashing strain of DIY techno born out of breakdance rivalries and heavy industry

In 1989, George Evelyn was driving in a stream of shimmering headlights, in convoy, to a rave in a slaughterhouse in Blackburn with about 10,000 others. He recalls thinking: “This must have been what the 60s were like – I was convinced we were having a revolution.”

A few hours later, Evelyn was outside getting some air when he heard familiar bleeps and beats echoing through the evening air as screams of delight rang out. “We went in and, oh my God,” he recalls. “That was the first time I’ve seen shit like that.” They were playing his debut track as Nightmares on Wax, Dextrous. “It was pure euphoria and excitement,” he says. “But I was also scared – because we just existed in a Leeds bubble.”

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by Daniel Dylan Wray via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘There were no macho blokes. We were all one’: Gillian Gilbert on her journey with New Order

Taken from a new book about the women of the Factory Records label, the New Order keyboardist remembers her daunting start with the band – and their nights out to fetish clubs

Gillian Gilbert’s story as a musician – along with the numerous unseen women who worked for Factory Records – started well before the label became a sensation in 1983 with New Order’s Blue Monday. Gillian learned guitar and keys, occasionally played on stage with Joy Division, and later became a member of New Order – joining Stephen Morris, Bernard Sumner, and Peter Hook – following the tragic death of Ian Curtis in 1980.

I got to know everybody [in New Order] and the manager, Rob [Gretton]. It was the manager who suggested, when Ian died, to bring another singer in, which they didn’t want to do. Eventually he said: “Why don’t you just bring somebody in that nobody thought would be brought in?”

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by As told to Audrey Golden via Electronic music | The Guardian

Save the last dance: London superclub Printworks aims to reopen in 2026

The cavernous club in an old Rotherhithe printing factory closed on Monday amid regeneration of the area. Its operators explain how they intend to keep the party going

After six years in which it’s established itself as London’s most ambitious and visually impressive new venue for electronic music, post-industrial superclub Printworks – a hulking 6,000-capacity complex in Canada Water, once home to the printing presses of the Daily Mail and Evening Standard – closed its doors for the final time on Monday night.

Like countless inner-city club closures in recent memory, this was a decision prompted by the commercial demands of gigantic property developers: over the next four years the 53-acre site in which Printworks sits will be flattened and rebuilt by developers British Land and AustralianSuper, transforming it into a glittering array of upscale shops, restaurants, offices and luxury flats.

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by Ed Gillett via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘A big chunk of my motivation is vengeance’: Skinny Pelembe, the musical don of Doncaster

After leaving Gilles Peterson’s label, the artist felt adrift. But by drawing on a heritage that stretches from Birmingham to Mozambique, his new music is his most confident yet

‘Every problem you have is down there when you’re up here,” says Doya Beardmore, AKA Skinny Pelembe, overlooking his home town of Doncaster.

This hillside is key to his new album, Hardly the Same Snake, its exact position revealed in morse code during one song and via clues in the artwork. He came here to de-stress when his dad was ill, before he died, and he would love to lead his listeners here via the album for a special gig. “I bet only two fucking mega-fans would turn up,” he laughs.

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by Daniel Dylan Wray via Electronic music | The Guardian