'My home got raided seven times': the Criminal Justice Act 25 years on

Labrynth promoter Joe Wieczorek looks back at a career of antiestablishment mischief-making, and the moment 25 years ago when British dance music was politicised

Joe Wieczorek, long-time rave promoter and serial thorn in the side of the establishment, is marking the 25th anniversary of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (CJA) by cheerfully miming the insertion of a solemn legal document into a sensitive part of a policeman’s anatomy. The founder of the east London rave Labrynth, Wieczorek remains one of dance music’s most unique characters, all spiky irreverence, Cockney enthusiasm and relentless disdain for authority. Many of his peers have settled comfortably into rave’s middle age, but Wieczorek gives the impression that the culture’s real value lies in putting powerful noises out of joint.

“We employed someone called Brian: Mr 10%,” he remembers. “Drove a turquoise and grey Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, and he’d managed to get ‘the Right Honourable’ and ‘Sir’ put on his driving licence, so his sole purpose at Labrynth parties was to front the police when they showed up.”

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by Ed Gillett via Electronic music | The Guardian

Stereolab: 'There was craziness in getting lost and dizzy'

Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier pick their favourite tracks and reflect on two decades of pioneering electropop

Stereolab aren’t on the same page about why they’re touring again after a nine-year hiatus. “We’ve got seven albums coming back out...” says Tim Gane. “For the money,” Lætitia Sadier says simultaneously. They are the core duo of one of the best bands of the turn of the century: blending lounge-pop, punk, tropicalía and political poetry, they stuck out like a sore thumb during the Britpop era.

As Gane says, most of their albums are being reissued. But the pair were in a relationship for 16 years, separating in 2004; they weathered the sudden death of their bandmate Mary Hansen, and years of touring that Sadier describes as “crushing and exhausting”. So perhaps her deadpan cynicism has a grain of truth.

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by Ben Beaumont-Thomas via Electronic music | The Guardian

One to watch: O’Flynn

Flitting effortlessly between Afro disco and acid house, this young London producer is dancefloor dynamite

Nope, it’s not somewhere you’d end up on a wild out in Benidorm: O’Flynn is the alias of electronic music producer Ben Norris, purveyor of nimble, globetrotting house and disco jams. Since 2015, when James Blake played his track Oberyn on Radio 1, O’Flynn has been steadily releasing low-key secret weapons in DJs’ record bags. There’s Tyrion – inspired by the percussion he heard while on holiday in Morocco – which Four Tet dropped in a set on the streaming site Boiler Room. Or TKOTN, included by Bonobo on his mix for London nightclub Fabric’s esteemed compilation series.

O’Flynn’s music flits between contemporary takes on the Afro-disco revival and even, as on his recent Ninja Tune release, acid house. It calls into question the ease with which (largely white, usually male) music producers are using African samples (a children’s chant; a polyrhythmic drum beat) for some quick “exotic” flavour. But O’Flynn does it rather seamlessly, like a boogie-fied Auntie Flo. He has said his passion for African music runs deep and, in 2016, he was involved in recording the mataali drum and vocal troupe Mubashira Mataali Group in Uganda.

Aletheia is released on 6 September on Silver Bear. O’Flynn tours the UK from 16 September

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by Kate Hutchinson via Electronic music | The Guardian

The month's best mixes: blood-pumping beats and meditative techno

UNIIQU3 gives retro sounds a new sheen with her AFROPUNK mix, while MssingNo devastates with his glorious melodrama

Dazed Mix: Anthony Naples

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by Tayyab Amin via Electronic music | The Guardian

‘Dummy wasn’t a chillout album. Portishead had more in common with Nirvana’

On the 25th anniversary of their classic debut, Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley reflect on how the album came together

Twenty-five years ago, during the summer of Blur’s Parklife and Oasis’s Definitely Maybe, a darker, stranger record was released that would soon become huge. Its title and mood was inspired by a 1970s TV drama of the same name, about a young deaf woman in Yorkshire who becomes a prostitute. The lyrics spoke of emotional extremes, sung in an extraordinary, rural-tinged, English blues by the Devon-born Beth Gibbons, of “the blackness, the darkness, forever” in Wandering Star, or of the feeling that “nobody loves me, it’s true, not like you do” in Sour Times.

Its sound, woven together by Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley, helped define what is known today in music as hauntology, the sampling of older, spectral sounds to evoke deeper cultural memories (Boards of Canada’s TV-sampling electronica, Burial’s dubstep, and the Ghost Box label’s folk horror soundworlds would follow their lead). But despite its starkness, Dummy became a triple-platinum seller and a Mercury prizewinner, perhaps because it struck a nerve in what Barrow calls our “sonic unconscious… when sounds can merge with other sounds from somewhere else, and ultimately create emotion”.

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by Jude Rogers via Electronic music | The Guardian