Thunderdome: the Dutch rave with the world's fastest, hardest music

Thunderdome launched with a giant octopus on an ice rink – and created the Netherlands’ biggest youth culture movement. Three decades on, it’s stronger and tougher than ever

Last weekend, Thunderdome made history: 50,000 ravers massed at a convention centre in Utrecht for the biggest indoor hardcore dance event ever staged, breaking its own record set two years ago when it pulled off the mother of all comebacks, and reclaimed its crown as the world’s greatest living hardcore rave.

The site is mapped out like a theme park, with six areas of music ranging from the slower early rave sound of the “Thundergods” to the 200+ beats per minute blasting from the Tunnel of Terror. Tonight we’re paying homage to the most significant youth culture movement in the Netherlands, gabber, which is why there’s also a gabber museum, displaying limited-edition Nikes and multicoloured Australian-brand jackets – the gabber uniform – plus a tattoo station inking diehards with Thunderdome’s iconic Wizard logo, and a gabber barber serving up undercuts.

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by Holly Dicker via Electronic music | The Guardian

Tricky review – a bizarre but brilliant enigma

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
After a year of tragedy, the spotlight-shy producer stays in the shadows during this erratic yet utterly mesmerising set

Tricky has always been allergic to celebrity. When his 1995 debut album, Maxinquaye, went No 3 and made him a media darling, his horrified reaction was to dismiss the “coffee-table” record and the trip-hop movement it birthed, and to move his music firmly left field to evade unwanted critical hyperbole.

Related: Tricky: ‘I’ve lost people before and bounced back. This is different’

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by Ian Gittins via Electronic music | The Guardian

Sudan Archives: Athena review – Afro futurism goes mainstream

(Stones Throw)

Although her name suggests a gem unearthed by the crate-digger label Awesome Tapes from Africa, Sudan Archives is an artist of now. Based in Los Angeles, the 24-year-old producer combines genre-defying sound with non-standard violin-playing and an Afro-futurist sensibility. Two previous EPs chart her journey from bedroom experiments with a loop station to fully realised, roots-inflected R&B tunes. So while Sudan Archives bears comparison to other queenly outliers like Solange or FKA Twigs, her sound has remained resolutely individual, informed by the electronic experiments of Cameroonian Francis Bebey.

On this debut album, Sudan’s sphere expands further. From the opening pizzicato plunk of Did You Know to the sultry distortions of Pelicans in the Summer, the variety of modes on offer has pixelated. Tracks like Confessions find western classical strings scything across a song about personal exile, while party grooves like Glorious boast a swirling north African motif on the fiddle. The album title takes its inspiration from Black Athena, a controversial scholastic work on the Egyptian influence on ancient Greece, though the songs often lean more towards the arty end of the mainstream, losing touch slightly with the startling radicalism of Sudan Archives’ early sound.

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by Kitty Empire via Electronic music | The Guardian

Wah Wah Radio – October 2019

Listen again here!

Funk Factory – Rien Ne Va Plus

SAULT – Living in America

Brainstory – Mnemophobia

The Midnight Hour – Harmony

Natalie Cole & Peabo Bryson – What You Won’t Do For Love

The Milk – Never Come Down

Kavinsky – Nightcall

Velvet Underground – Rock & Roll

Duke Ellington – Jeep’s Blues

Chet Baker – The Thrill is Gone

The Milk – Colours

Joanna Newsome – The Book of Right On

The post Wah Wah Radio – October 2019 appeared first on Wah Wah 45s.

via Wah Wah 45s

The month's best mixes: digital sludge, techno slammers and Kylie

In our dispatches from the edges of dance culture, Florentino, Oli XL and Boomerang condense tracks into hyper-dense raves while Mx Silkman spreads out into dub

Oli XL — Lily Mix (on NTS)

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by Tayyab Amin via Electronic music | The Guardian