Crack Issue 91

Rich Brian Crack Magazine | Issue 91

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32

021

Contents

Oneohtrix Point Never:

Munroe Bergdorf: 54

Shygirl 64

60

Rising: Men I Trust – p.29 Reviews – p.74

Recommended – p.26

Discover – p.31

My Life as a Mixtape: Bodega – p.73

Retrospective: The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill – p.83

20 Questions: Jake Shears – p.93

A Love Letter To: Now, That's What I Call Music! – p.94

CONTENTS

Editor's Letter – p.23

Lanzarote

08—18 MOTH Club Valette St London E8

lanzaroteworks.com #lanzaroteworks

Programming

Thursday 9 August

STANLEY BRINKS

Wednesday 26 September

STARLING

mothclub.co.uk Saturday 11 August Friday 10 August

THE SHAKERS

FEHM Monday 15 August

Thursday 16 August

KING TUFF

MEGA BOG

Thursday 4 October

WASUREMONO

The Lock Tavern 35 Chalk Farm Rd London NW1 lock-tavern.com

Wednesday 15 August Thursday 23 August

TIJUANA PANTHERS Wednesday 29 August

WHITE DENIM Tuesday 4 September

ANNA BURCH Thursday 6 September

PROLAPSE Friday 7 September

FENSTER Sunday 9 September

INFINITE BISOUS Tuesday 11 September

HOLY WAVE

Shacklewell Arms 71 Shacklewell Lane London E8 shacklewellarms.com Friday 3 August

HELICON Saturday 4 August

FIRST HATE

BABA NAGA Thursday 16 August

HILANG CHILD

Sunday 5 August

GHOST CAR Friday 17 August

CLAW MARKS

Tuesday 7 August

CULT PARTY Sunday 19 Augst

KRAUTROCK KARAOKE

The Waiting Room 175 Stoke Newington High St N16 waitingroomn16.com Thursday 9 August

LOS BITCHOS Friday 10 August

IL BOSCO Saturday 11 August

CAPABLANCA Sunday 26 August

ANA HELDER Wednesday 29 August

LOS SCALLYWAGGS

BRAND NEW FRIEND

Wednesday 8 August

Thursday 6 September

DJ. FLUGVÉL OG GEIMSKIP

Saturday 4 August

GIRL CRUSH

Thursday 9 August

CHARISMATIC MEGAFAUNA Friday 10 August

THE RICKY C QUARTET Saturday 11 August

VULGARIANS Sunday 12 August

YASSASIN Wednesday 15 August

ASTRAY Friday 24 August

JERSKIN FENDRIX Thursday 30 August

SABA LOU Saturday 15 September

STRAYLINGS

Crack Magazine Was Made Using

This month’s cover star was born in 1999.

(Feel old yet?) Rich Brian may not have been alive during hip-hop’s so-called ‘golden era’, but he became a sensation in 2016 with an absurd music video imitating hip-hop tropes and subverting Asian nerd stereotypes at the same time. His budding career is built on the kind of charming self-parody honed by formative years spent pulling faces on Vine. Essentially, he’s a product of culture absorbed through a digital lens.

The Internet La Di Da Childish Gambino Feels Like Summer Drake In My Feelings Christine and the Queens Doesn’t matter Kiana Lede Wicked Games Popcaan Dun Rich Tinashe Like I Used To Rich Brian Beam ft. Playboi Carti Body/Head Change my Brain slowthai Polaroid Yussef Dayes & Alfa Mist Love Is The Message ELIZA All Night Future Wifi Lit Suspect Right Now ft. Harlem Spartans Tirzah Holding On Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Cake of Light

The potentials – and pitfalls – of our proximity to the internet crop up throughout this issue.

London’s jazz upstarts note the role of streaming in the genre’s new wave; Munroe Bergdorf, a voice crucial to the LGBTQ rights movement, traces a journey from internet-borne activism to real world impact; while an essay from Warp Records visionary Oneohtrix Point Never probes into the sinister side of our eyesto-screen compulsions.

One positive of our insatiable digital consumption is the chance to infiltrate culture from even the most unlikely periphery. For outliers to take up space. As our cover story unpacks, Rich Brian is no longer on the outside looking in. He’s been propelled to broader audiences by the force of 88rising: part collective, part web-savvy creative agency, whose mission is to promote Asian culture through music. Together they are shattering the glass between themselves and hip-hop culture – one viral hit at a time.

023

August 2018

crackmagazine.net

Issue 91

Rich Brian shot exclusively for Crack Magazine by Charlotte Rutherford in London, July 2018

EDITORIAL

Anna Tehabsim, Editor

Wolfgang Tillmans

Episode Luz

&

II: Diaz Listen to the podcast exclusively on CrackMagazine.net

026

Recommended O ur g ui d e to wh at's goi n g on i n y ou r c i ty AJ Tracey XOYO 10 August

Honey Dijon Patterns, Brighton 18 August

Bishop Nehru Jazz Cafe 4 August

Bread&&Butter SOPHIE, Octavian, Shygirl Arena Berlin 31 August–2 September

The Black Madonna Clifton Street 4 August

Having grown up in the halcyon days of Chicago house music, Honey Dijon has danced alongside plenty of legends in her time. More recently, Dijon herself has become iconic.

Much like her hero Grace Jones, Dijon is unflappable, glamorous, and channels a magnetic energy through each performance – whether careening through classic house, techno or slamming acid. Her sets are peppered with the voices of disco’s most prominent divas too, as a capellas are woven into the deeper shades of her sound.

Get down to Patterns this month and belt your heart out alongside a true OG.

Princess Nokia O2 Kentish Town Forum 20 August Destiny Frasqueri is one of the baddest in the game. Having previously made music as Wavy Spice, in 2017 she broke through as Princess Nokia with her hit Tomboy, and she’s been paving the way for a new era of Afro-Latinx rappers coming out of Spanish Harlem ever since. You can catch her rapping about positive body image, cultural diversity, police brutality and intersectional feminism over hard, and, at times, avant-garde beats, all while maintaining her DIY ethic. This year saw her switch gears as she put out an emo mixtape – yes, emo – marking another chapter in her exhilarating career.

Fashion and music merge once again for Zalando’s Bread&&Butter, a weekend of style and culture which includes performances as well as pop-ups and product drops from over 40 clothing brands.

This year we’ll be hosting the Crack Magazine stage, and we couldn’t be prouder of the line-up, which includes recent cover star SOPHIE, emotive singer-rapper (and Virgil Abloh favourite) Octavian, Baba Stiltz, Jam City, Shygirl, a DJ set from Munroe Bergdof and viral rap star Jimothy Lacoste. See you there?

Death Grips Brixton Academy 30 August

So Solid Crew Wembley Arena 11 August

It’s near-impossible to define Death Grips. The Sacramento group have been putting out some of the most experimental music this side of the millennium. At its core, Death Grips perform alternative hip-hop, but reducing their craft to that feels like a disservice. From the offbeat time signatures borrowed from math rock to industrial electronic productions to abrasive hardcore punk breakdowns, their tunes take on a life of their own. 2018's album Year of the Snitch may be a little more melodic than previous efforts, but Death Grips' ferocious energy remains intact.

Sun Ra Arkestra Union Chapel 16 August

Lisb-On Jayda G, Mr. Fingers, Antal Parque Eduardo VII, Lisbon 31 August–2 September

GZA Islington Academy 25 August Helena Hauff E1 London 10 August

EVENTS

Shopping Oslo 11 August

Ariel Pink Heaven 14 August

It’s no secret that Lisbon has become one of the most appealing destinations in Europe, with cultural capital that expands day-by-day. So you can see why Lisb-On has made the city “centre stage” at the festival. Taking place in a sound garden in Parque Eduardo VII, Lisbon’s grand, sun-dappled public park, the festival strings together three day parties. First up, Jayda G, Sassy J, Antal and Byron the Aquarius bring the vibes, followed by Tama Sumo, Lakuti, Young Marco and a healthy dose of Portuguese selectors.

To cap it off Larry Heard lets his Mr. Fingers live set loose on the park. When you’re singing along to Mystery of Love in the sunshine, you can thank us.

Ariwo Jazz Cafe 16 August

027 Penya Archspace 18 August

Discwoman Presents Southbank Centre 30 August Last month the Southbank Centre kicked off the Concrete Lates event series with a lineup of cutting edge electronic musicians such as Laurel Halo, CouCou Chloe and Object Blue. Now they’re following it up with a party hosted by Discwoman – the collective of experimental artists and progressively-minded booking agents who graced the cover of Crack Magazine last year. This line-up includes NYC-based Discwoman artists Umfang and Shyboi as well as rising London-based DJ Peach and Kamixlo of Bala Club. Get together with like-minded people who are changing underground club culture for the better.

End of the Road Vampire Weekend, Feist, St. Vincent Larmer Tree Gardens, Wiltshire 30 August–2 September Sometimes you just need a big indie festival to warm your heart. Luckily for us, End of the Road has been a purveyor of all things guitar-based since it opened its door in 2006, and this year’s line-up proves their expertise is one that adapts with the times. With headline sets from avant-popper St. Vincent, tidy indie lads Vampire Weekend and folk royalty Feist, End of the Road is taking it back to basics. But if you want to shake things up, you can still catch the raucous political punk of IDLES, Ethiopia’s premier jazz legend Mulatu Astatke or the frantic Syrian folk of Omar Souleyman. Year after year, this is a festival to remember.

Outlook J Hus, Mist, Digital Mystikz Fort Punta Christo, Pula, Croatia 5–9 September Unified by a shared love of soundsystem culture, five UK promoters set up Outlook in 2008. Unbeknownst to them at the time, the festival would go on to usher in a new era of Croatian partying. 10 years on and they are still throwing up speaker stacks in the winding ruins of Fort Punta Christo, though the festival’s vision has shifted slightly. With dubstep pushed back to the fringes, the event now caters to the best in UK rap, bass music, and a sprinkling of dub for good measure. London rap titans J Hus, Mist, Stefflon Don and AJ Tracey join Bonobo, Digital Mystikz and Jah Shaka for a dusty throwdown in an abandoned fortress, ready to bring the heat at chest-rattling volume.

Dirty Projectors Village Underground 21 August

Fatima & The Eglo Live Band XOYO 15 August Seun Kuti Jazz Cafe 28 August

Phoebe Bridgers Scala 21 August

Waking Life Aleksi Perälä, Willow, Objekt Crato, Portugal 16–19 August As the name suggests, Portugal’s Waking Life festival is a gathering aimed firmly at the psychedelic raver. Located on the picturesque banks of a sleepy lake in the Crato region, the festival provides an opportunity to enjoy top tier experimental dance music alongside immersive performance art, creative design workshops and ayurvedic massage sessions. Much of the line-up centres in on the weird and wiggy, with highlights including Rephlex Records hero Aleksi Perälä, clicks-n-cuts specialist Jan Jelinek and gauzy ambient guru Huerco S. As the evenings progress, Crack Magazine favourites Willow, Call Super and Objekt will be on hand to up the energy levels.

Neopop Tijana T, Nina Kraviz, Ricardo Villalobos Viana Do Castelo, Portugal 8–11 August

Protomartyr Ramsgate Music Hall 26 August

We’ve had a soft spot for Field Maneuvers ever since its first edition. So we’ve been heartened to watch it grow from a bestkept secret to a sell-out festival. What’s driven it to this point? A refreshing anti-corporate approach and a sense of freedom that mimics the heydays of 90s rave culture. And it’s one of those rare festivals where the DJs seem to have as much fun as the crowd.

The selectors likely to get truly stuck in this year include Jayda G, K-Hand, Dr Rubinstein, Shanti Celeste, Powder, Eris Drew and many more. Party like it’s 1991.

Sauna Youth Redon 25 August Lydia Lunch Cafe Oto 14 August

Noname Koko 28 August

EVENTS

There can be therapeutic benefits to getting stuck into into a quality techno set, so you could consider booking a few days off work to head to a port town in Portugal and let your mind drift away with the music. This year’s Neopop line-up includes Jeff Mills, Nastia, Nina Kraviz and Serbian DJ Tijana T plus a live set from Dopplereffekt, meaning that there’ll be plenty of curious musical journeys to follow across four hot summer nights.

Field Maneuvers Shanti Celeste, Powder, Eris Drew Secret location one hour outside of London 31 August-2 September

In some ways, Montreal band Men I Trust are as elusive as their music.

The outfit are part of the city-wide movement that has thrust Canadian indie artists onto the musical map on a global scale, but their journey has been slightly different.

Words: Rachel Grace Almeida

Made up of bassist Jessy Cason, multi-instrumentalist Dragos Chiriac and vocalist and guitarist Emma Proulx, they released their first selftitled record in 2014. But they’ve kept themselves relatively understated, only coming up for air when the moment is right. This same method runs throughout their music. With smooth, chin-bouncing electronic beats, warm guitars and alluringly subdued vocals, it’s clear that longevity – in all its forms – is an underlying theme in their craft.

029

Rising: Men I Trust

At its most spacious, listening to Men I Trust feels like you’re gliding on a never-ending wave; at its tightest, they still provide pockets of time to catch your breath. “We like to use a lot of repetitive movements in melodies and chord progressions to give the songs a prayer-like rhythm,” explains Dragos over Skype. “This commits people more deeply into the song. People can’t avoid reading, so they end up reading the whole story. It’s a game of saying the most with the least words.”

To them, it’s important that no sound is fighting for the same place; everything must reflect the environment in which it was created. That environment is now Quebec, the idyllic French province of Canada that has not only been their home for the past few years, but

is also integral to the band’s visual aesthetic. This is especially evident in the music video for their breakout 2016 single Lauren, which features one long, ongoing shot of a woman riding her bike along a foggy mountain road with an unsettlingly calm look on her face. Underneath the shot, the song’s lyrics about realisation and defeat roll out. Dragos tells me that nature’s awe-inspiring beauty, in particular, is a source of inspiration. “We talk a lot about how we play our part in [nature] on a microscopic scale, and how we contribute to the macroscopic one. It's humbling and reassuring.”

As a band in a public space, Men I Trust’s ascent has been slow, measured and completely self-made.

They refuse to sign to a label, they don’t have a press representative, nor are they interested in being managed.

“It’s only significant to spread the band’s music and aesthetic – these things need constant work and cannot be given to someone else to do on your behalf,” Dragos asserts, making it clear that this approach isn’t going to change anytime soon. Given their independent success so far, they’ve proved that if you make a quiet sound, people will lean in to listen.

Sounds Like: Groove-laden indie dance bops Soundtrack For: Delirious summer days File Next To: TOPS / infinite bisous Our Favourite Song: Lauren

MUSIC

Where to Find Them: menitrust.bandcamp.com

a celebration of sound Art Ensemble of Chicago The Breeders Devendra Banhart Sons of Kemet XL Ebo Taylor Saul Williams & King Britt present ‘Unanimous Goldmine’ RP Boo Georgia Anne Muldrow Serpentwithfeet Kojey Radical Irreversible Entanglements feat. Pat Thomas JPEGMAFIA Pan Daijing presents: ‘Fist Piece’ GAIKA AMMAR 808 Ras_G & The Afrikan Space Program Hailu Mergia Islam Chipsy & EEK 700 Bliss Katey Red Kelman Duran Bo Ningen Rizan Said + many more 8 - 11 november 2018 Utrecht Netherlands leguesswho.com

031

Discover

Matty

We wouldn’t blame you for immediately doing a doubletake when you listen to Better Person – he is the spitting sound of George Michael, after all. Polish-born, Berlinbased musician Adam Byckowski has been quietly releasing 80s-tinged pop ballads that wouldn’t be out of place at a Euro dance club night. But that’s not to say his style of music doesn’t feel modern. Byckowski’s elegant, simple vocals paired with gliding synth lines and patient drums are tuned into the now, making it for a nostalgic-yetfuture-facing listen.

File Next To: George Michael / Porchesn Our Favourite Tune: Sentiment Where To Find Him: soundcloud.com/betterperson

File Next To: Mild High Club / Good Morning Our Favourite Tune: Clear Where To Find Him: soundcloud.com/mattytavares

S4U

Still Woozy Still Woozy’s music definitely lives up to its name. With each nebulously soulful, grooveladen track, it’s clear that Sven Gamsky lives in his own dream world. Trawling through flourishing electronic samples and galloping drum beats, his tunes sound comfortingly melancholic, asking for real human connection and distance in equal measure. If you’re into Homeshake’s woozy R&B or Cosmo Pyke’s jazzy bedroom pop, then this will be right up your street.

File Next To: Homeshake / Cosmo Pyke Our Favourite Tune: Goodie Bag Where To Find Him: soundcloud.com/stillwoozy

S4U sound like a rose-tinted dream. The London music and art collective, founded by Rosita Bonita and Prinz George, are making lo-fi, nostalgia-soaked R&B that twists and twirls with each listen. With fuzzy, broken beat production and smoky vocals, S4U perfected their sound on recent mixtape Heart 4 U – a sultry soundtrack for late, contemplative nights at home.

File Next To: TLC / Janet Jackson Our Favourite Tune: Twice Where To Find Them: s4ulondon.bandcamp.com

Squirrel Flower Growing up in a family of musicians, it’s no surprise that Ella Williams – who performs under the moniker Squirrel Flower – followed in her parents’ footsteps. She arrived in 2016 from Bostonvia-Idaho with her debut single Midwestern Clay, which ruminates on the environment she grew up in. Ella Williams’ music sways tentatively between reflective bedroom ballads and crushing indie rock choruses, exploring the hardto-navigate themes of intimacy, betrayal and love that we all have to deal with head-first when we’re growing up.

File Next To: Mitski / Girlpool Our Favourite Tune: Conditions Where To Find Her: squirrelflower.bandcamp.com

MUSIC

Better Person

You might recognise Matty Tavares’ from his main gig playing the keys for experimental jazz wonder-group BADBADNOTGOOD, but he’s also got some chops of his own. After feeling the effects of touring with BBNG, he took some time out to write and selfproduce his recently-released debut album, Déjàvu. The result is an intimate collection of neopsychedelic songs about love, self-examination and everything in between. Start out with soothing single Clear and let the vibes wash over you.

Rich

Brian’s

At 18 years old, Rich Brian represents a new chapter in hip-hop. No longer just a viral sensation, the Indonesian rapper wants you to see him – and his 88rising crew – as more than a novelty

Glow

Up

T-Shirt: Bianca Saunders Boxers: Bianca Saunders Jeans: Bianca Saunders Trainers: Swear Necklace and Bracelet: Mowalola Ring and Bracelet: Alan Crocetti

034 MUSIC

Suit: Kenzo Shirt: Kenzo Loafers: Tricker’s x Mackintosh Sunglasses: Gentle Monster

As it turns out, it’s neither. He has discovered US rapper J. Cole is also staying here and every time he hears an American accent his ears prick up, just in case. “I might have been stalking the corridors a bit,” he says, without a trace of embarrassment. Rich Brian, the Indonesian artist born Brian Imanuel, is a dyed-in-the-wool hip-hop aficionado, and he’s damn proud of it.

He has been a fan of the genre, he says, since the age of 11 or 12, having spotted a music video by Californian rapper Tyga on TV. He joined Twitter around the same time, drawing followers with surreal Vines, while also doing comedy rap and learning English via YouTube. It filled the large gaps of time in his days that came from being home-schooled from the age of around “seven or eight”, which gave him little contact with people offline. “I didn’t make friends until I was about 15,” he recalls blithely.

Times have changed. Brian now moves in wide circles in both his homeland and the US, and the latter includes his labelmates, such as Joji, NIKI, AUGUST 08, Higher Brothers and Keith Ape – the young rappers and singers on the Asian-focused label, 88rising. Theirs are the voices of not just a generation but of an entire race who have been woefully under-

represented in Western music and the visual arts. Rich Brian might be softly spoken in person, but his voice, amplified by 88rising’s savvy, selfmade visibility, is reaching millions of kids, teenagers and adults who in him see a facet of themselves they’ve been unable to find elsewhere in the mainstream.

This cultural impact started in February 2016, when Brian uploaded the now-infamous Dat $tick video to the platform, rapping like an OG over a doomy trap beat while wearing a bumbag and a pink polo shirt. It blew up – currently it stands at 98 million views – putting 16-year-old Brian in the spotlight for its visual absurdity, but also for his moniker at the time, Rich Chigga, and use of the n-word in the lyrics, which he censored after attracting criticism. Talking to Complex earlier this year, he admitted regretting it “almost as soon as it came out…

I was like, what was I thinking, just because I was totally not in a position to do that, honestly.”

His aspirations were not to remain a YouTube star but become a legitimate artist. He made that intention absolutely clear with his first selfproduced track, Seventeen, released in December 2016, as well as a move to LA and a management deal with 88rising, which has become his second family. Sean Miyashiro, Brian’s manager, founded the company in mid-2015 after realising the people around him were, in his words, “creating in different fields, from music to directing to graphic design, and they all happened to be Asian as well. But

there was no real home – whether it be a brand, a collective, a safe haven – where they could be celebrated and more people could understand what they’re doing.”

Rich Brian’s ingrained connection to 88rising is clear; the only piece of jewellery he’s wearing is a plain cast of the 88rising logo on a necklace. They’re all individual artists as much as they are a collaborative crew, the sum of which can be heard on Head in the Clouds, a new compilation album that showcases the 88rising roster as well as drawing an impressive number of features from the likes of Goldlink, Playboi Carti, BlocBoy JB and 03 Greedo.

88rising itself is becoming a formidable creative Hydra, a company that not only releases music, and creates videos and artwork, but is looking to expand towards TV. In May this year, the collective announced their first festival, which takes place in September in LA’s 18,000+ capacity State Historic Park.

Miyashiro’s unique platform grew from a grassroots level (namely his car, out of which he worked in the early days), while being accelerated by his enterprising spirit. In the case of Dat $tick, the reaction video he made, where the likes of Cam’ron, Ghostface Killah, 21 Savage, Desiigner and Flatbush Zombies are amused, taken aback, then impressed by Brian’s work, helped trigger the song’s viral explosion. “There’s so many boundaries or difficulties in breaking through that we may as well do it

MUSIC

Rich Brian keeps twisting his head around, checking out the hotel lobby behind him. Perhaps the incessant flow of chatter and suitcases is irritating him as he talks through his journey from viral sensation to bonafide hip-hop star.

Or maybe the 18-year-old is just bored.

035

Words: Taylor Glasby Photography: Charlotte Rutherford Photographer’s Assistant: Emmet Green Styling: KK Obi Hair: James Oxley

036 88rising founder Sean Miyashiro

ourselves,” Miyashiro tells me. “When I was growing up, the first time I saw an Asian person on TV in a cool way was Jackie Chan. Now I think we’ve flipped it on its head.”

Miyashiro’s knack for networking is clear from Brian’s quick succession of singles following Dat $tick, which included a remix of the track with Ghostface Killah, and new collaborations with Keith Ape and 21 Savage. These helped cement his status as more than just an internet personality. Most notably, Glow Like Dat, which promptly divided fans but was, he says, a turning point. “The Dat $tick fans were like, ‘What the fuck is this, this is so shitty, it's a soft love story about a girl and it's auto-tuned’.

But a lot of new people saw it and were like, ‘Yeah, I fuck with that’.”

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The reaction, and the leveraging of Rich Brian's self-confidence, came as a relief. “It's so hard to come out of your shell sometimes,” Brian says, sucking on his vape. “I'm trying to make new stuff everyday, but, for example, I can't tell what people like more – me singing or me rapping – there's some people who say, ‘Oh, you sound the same on every song’ and I'm like, ‘Oh shit, what do I do? I don't know what the fuck I'm doing wrong’. That's the stuff I think about.”

It’s a little disconcerting to hear such frank admissions of doubt considering his debut album, Amen, scored the #1 position on the iTunes Hip Hop Chart (making him the first Asian artist to do so), and peaked at #18 on the Billboard 200. Just before its release in early February 2018, having long been acutely aware of the backlash around his moniker, Rich Chigga, he’d also changed his name to Rich Brian, tweeting to his one million-plus followers on New Year’s Day, “Yes I now go by “Brian”...I was naive & I made a mistake. new year, new beginning”. Even now, he seems uncomfortable having used it for so long. “It's something I wanted to change even before Dat $tick. I felt like, 'this name doesn't fit me anymore'.”

Oddly enough, however, his evolution has confounded some. Is he still Rich Chigga but with a woke name change or is Rich Brian an entirely different entity? If his former persona was the imaginist, the joker, and the real person behind it a serious one who lives for music, then it’s fair to say Rich Brian embodies the best of both.

He points out that interviewers have asked if he’s still a comedy rapper because he has “some funny lines”.

Thus far, his lyrics have been a mix of fictional (the sex-gone-wrong story on Kitty) and autobiographical (Flight, which charted his arrival in America), shot through with his distinctive, wry outlook. “I'm like, just because you have witty lines doesn't make you a comedian,” he says with incredulity in his voice. “Rappers like 2 Chainz, Drake or Kendrick have some ridiculous lines where I'm like, ‘I can't

believe this is real’. I love being witty, I like entertaining people, and that's where that comes from.”

His fans get it. Not far from the hotel, under a blistening afternoon sun in London, they’re already lining up at the venue to secure a spot though he won’t hit the stage until nearly 10pm. It’s a mixed crowd, but there’s a predominance of young Asian fans, both men and women. He’s a famous, 18-year-old, chart-topping Indonesian rapper and very much someone his fans aspire to. He also looks like he could be one of the guys in the audience, and that’s a reason they love him.

“I have a lot of Asian fans but they're also from all over,” Brian points out, smiling. “I went to this Japanese barbecue place one night and this 40-year-old lady, who was super drunk, came up and was like, ‘Rich Brian I love you so much, I wanna kiss you right now’. But in Albuquerque there were like 10-year-olds in the front row.”

Fame, of course, comes with price tags and pitfalls. As social media removes personal boundaries, artists find themselves in situations that run from skeevy to legitimately terrifying.

“Sometimes people just straight up come over and, y’know…” He adopts a selfie pose. “And don't say thank you and I'm like, ‘dude’. One time this guy walked into my house in Indonesia. It was just me and my grandma, and she was downstairs, and he said he was my friend, so she let him in. He checked every room and came upstairs. I was in a t-shirt and boxers, working on music, and he was like, ‘I'm a fan of you, so I

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“There was no real home where these Asian creatives could be celebrated and more people could understand what they’re doing”

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Mac: Mackintosh Blazer: Olubiyi Thomas Shorts: Olubiyi Thomas Shirt: Bianca Saunders T-Shirt: Carhartt Trainers: Pregis Sunglasses: Gentle Monster

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Jacket: Fen Chen Wang T-Shirt: Carhartt Trousers: Chin Mens Shoes: Xander Zhou Belts: Xander Zhou

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“I want to star in a huge movie one day, and have that character that everyone can relate to, not just Asian people”

There are two very endearing elements to Rich Brian – contradictions and irony. Every time you think you’ve got him pegged, he throws a curveball at you. Unlike his name, he claims he’s “not rich, but doing pretty well” – enough to buy himself a house in Indonesia, to which he goes back every few months and where, he says, they’ve only recently begun to catch on to him.

Rich Brian

“When I started blowing up, no one knew I was from there. I would only sometimes say I was from Indonesia, so I remember playing my first festival there and people were like, ‘yo, Brian’s finally coming to Indonesia’. They had no idea. Now I’ve gotten offers to do television commercials and I don’t want to do it all. I’d hate to be the artist who’s just mediocre in other countries but on billboards in Indonesia. If I’m not at that level in other parts of the world, I don’t want to be on that level in Indonesia either.”

In LA he continues to live in Airbnb’s.

He doesn’t like it, mostly because he loves cooking, buys too many groceries and ends up abandoning them on the next move, which is usually once a month. Despite being young and moneyed, he’s uninterested in the trappings and toys of the wealthy – the watches, cars and designer clothes – and says he never buys anything except food and what he needs for work. Then he pauses. “Oh, and air powered guns.

I love them so much, I don't know why.

I fire them at stuff in my backyard. I'm a really good shot.” His father, like most,

constantly offers him financial advice.

“I take it but my least favourite thing is talking about money. It's so confusing sometimes and I just want to make music,” he laughs.

One of his favourite things to do is “read all my Twitter mentions and comments and stuff” where he’s grown adept at taking on constructive criticism while weeding out the “people who straight up don't know what they're talking about and just wanna piss you off. And I've been listening to Tierra Whack, she gave me my old vision back,” he says of the 22-yearold Philly rapper, whose latest album consists of 15 diverse one-minute songs. “There's been times when I've been making stuff and thought, ‘people won't like this’, and scratched it. But I listened to her and was like, ‘dude, it doesn't matter, I just want to make anything and put it out’."

Yet when it comes to meeting girls, social media is a no-go. He wriggles in his chair. “I'm not really that kind of person, strangers freak me out. Like, if I meet someone and talk to them, then that's cool, but I can't just DM someone on Instagram. I've never used Tinder in my life, that concept is weird to me.”

He stops to consider the fact that an internet-spawned artist recoils from the tool that made him. “Yeah, that's very ironic. But I hate people who do Instagram live streams all the time, it's just so stupid. I had this thought the other day, that there's so much to life but people can be so embedded in just one thing. Like, ‘I love chasing money’ or ‘I love being with girls, that's the one thing that makes me happy’, but there's a lot of things that can make you

happy. You have to go out and explore, and I kind of want to make a song around that.”

His desire to constantly learn and the rate at which he works spurs Sean Miyashiro to call him “a very serious recording artist. When I look at him versus a lot of the younger generation rappers, he’s in the studio, making his own beats, and becoming this very well-rounded musician and creator.

That’s really exciting.” Miyashiro mentions Donald Glover (Childish Gambino) as a yardstick for Brian’s future endeavours and Brian echoes the sentiment in terms of occupying a creative space.

“I want to make everything,” Brian tells me. “I'm gonna take acting classes soon. I used to be really into making short films. I want to star in a huge movie one day, and have that character that everyone can relate to, not just Asian people. I've never seen an Asian artist in America who is as big as Drake,” he continues, his eyes lighting up. “And I want to see that happen, to have other people see it and think: it's possible, I want to do it too.”

Head in the Clouds is out now via 88rising

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brought you some food’. I was super weirded out and pissed but I didn't want to freak him out. He kept saying, ‘I'm sorry, this is really creepy!’”

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The New Stories of UK Jazz

A swell of talent has galvanised the UK jazz scene. The faces of the new wave, Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia and Moses Boyd are breathing life into the movement MUSIC

Words: Gunseli Yalcinkaya Photography: Jackson Bowley

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“Jazz is a form of resistance,” says Gary Crosby, founder of Tomorrow’s Warriors, the London-based organisation committed to increasing diversity within jazz. “People are political and jazz can be used to make political statements.”

In a time of Brexit, increasingly harsh immigration laws and the Windrush scandal, resistance is of heightened importance in the UK. For the younger generation in Britain, this is manifesting in a deepened need for connection. “Jazz is for the community,” 26-year-old saxophonist Nubya Garcia tells us – and you can feel it. Across the city, young people are gathering in packed-out basements to listen to a new avant-garde movement in British music that’s not only expanding musical language, but also bridging generations.

Platforms like NTS and Boiler Room have helped to bring jazz into a wider context.

London’s club scenes have long been providing crossover appeal, with labels like Eglo, Bradley Zero’s Rhythm Section and 22a (run by jazz flutist Tenderlonious) promoting dancefloor tracks featuring elements of jazz. And in recent years, London house producer Henry Wu has stepped into the spotlight with his jazz project Kamaal Williams.

The musicians of the resurgence are young and from diverse backgrounds – mostly the African and Caribbean diaspora – and their style tends to slurp up various genres.

“The big ingredient is afrobeat,” continues Crosby, who is also a prolific bassist and a former member of 1980s group Jazz Warriors. “There is a strong African contingent and they’ve found a way to integrate it into their music.” Crosby is part of the older generation of musicians offering an alternative route into jazz with regular music workshops and live events, making the genre accessible to London’s youth.

Establishments like Ronnie Scotts and the Jazz Cafe are expanding their programmes, the Tate has just announced new monthly jazz sessions and large-scale festivals like Field Day and Dimensions are packing their line-ups with fresh jazz talent.

At the forefront of this diaspora-driven scene is 34-year-old Shabaka Hutchings, whose music is notable for its fervent politics. His latest album Your Queen is a Reptile with quartet Sons of Kemet questions the British monarchy – a system that defines societal status by birthright – by dedicating each of the record’s nine tracks to visionary black women, such as political activists Angela Davis and Harriet Tubman. Of his two other major collaborations, Shabaka and the Ancestors centres on South African music, while the Comet Is Coming is a dance-driven blend of afrofuturism and electronica.

Also reshuffling the decks is Nubya Garcia, whose solo EP When We Are combines jazz, neo-soul and gospel with electronic motifs learnt from her mentor Floating Points. Catford-born jazz drummer Moses Boyd is another central member of the scene.

The 26-year-old's sound is drawn from a fusion of jazz, grime, funk and Latin: “My music explores anything from outer space and the galaxy to my heritage,” he explains.

Each of these artists provoke, inspire and excite change. Across the following pages, we discover how they are expanding jazz’s cultural language along the way.

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Shabaka Hutchings

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I first got into jazz when I moved to England at 16 years old. I became obsessed with the public library – its catalogue was immense. I would borrow between four and six CDs every week for about three years and spent time intensely listening to all these new sounds. I grew up in Barbados, so until I moved, my access to music was limited to calypso, soca, reggae and hip-hop.

My music is intuitive. If I feel a project is nurturing me, I try to make it a part of my life. This is the case with Sons of Kemet, Shabaka and the Ancestors, and The Comet is Coming. I am trying to push black consciousness into the public sphere. Jazz musicians are people and people are governed by politics. If the function of artists in society is seen to reflect on and interpret the present – by studying the past and contemplating the future – then politics will always be reflected in my work. My third album Your Queen Is a Reptile with Sons of Kemet, for example, tries to use my position of visibility towards offsetting, in whatever small way I can, the patriarchal trends that relegate the lives of these important women to the peripheries of our imagination.

For me, there is a connection between an artist’s vision and the needs of a community. The artist is like an interpretative vessel for society who reflects the audience back to themselves. If we, the musicians, within this new hype bubble, can stay focused on exactly what we want to articulate, and to who this message is directed, then there can be a real shift in the mainstream musical landscape. This is important because at the root of our music is a message that speaks of a connection between people: a respect of the past, the wisdom of elders and the need to resist the numbness that pervades so much of society in times of hardship. This numbness is countered with more feeling, more intensity, and more soul.

Jazz is for the community. Historically, it is a celebration or a comment on something that’s happening. It’s there connecting you to something, whether it’s to your ancestors or simply a feeling.

I was first introduced to jazz at Camden Music Trust as part of a Saturday morning music group when I was 12. Later on, I went to sessions at the Roundhouse and I had a jazz group where I met Theon [Cross] and Moses [Boyd]. After that, I met Tomorrow’s Warriors and that’s how I met the people I play with now.

We are really lucky that the women I am associated with have a lot of support from our tutors and mentors and the guys we play with. It is very diverse and we’re friends – it’s normal. But it still has a long way to go and I think guys [should be] a part of that conversation, they have not been involved enough.

Nowadays, there’s more diversity in the age of jazz musicians. Younger generations are being represented in the audience and on stage, so I think more people feel connected to it, and the collaborations between genres have really helped this particular type of jazz to come out. It has highlighted the fact that loads of people have said that they don’t like jazz but maybe it’s because they don’t know what jazz is, beyond swing or traditional music.

I have so many visions that words are not good enough to express – I’d rather let the music do the talking. I just want to collaborate as much as possible while remaining with the musicians I’m working with now. I want to write music that means something.

There’s a lot of turmoil all around but there’s also a lot of joy, too. People want to come to live gigs to feel something, otherwise, they’d just listen to it in their rooms. People are aching for connection – I want to continue creating something that makes people feel.

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Nubya Garcia

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Moses Boyd

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It’s hard to pin the resurgence of jazz down to one factor. The way we consume music is very different these days – playlist-driven jazz has changed the way people see jazz and who hears it. Cosigns from people like Kendrick Lamar and David Bowie have given a great spotlight to artists like Kamasi Washington and Donny McCaslin, and opened the public to more leftfield sounds.

My music explores anything from space and the galaxy to my heritage. I am inspired by so many people like Duke Ellington, Bob Marley, Björk, MF Doom, Tupac, Squarepusher, Kate Bush and Andre 3000 – I love it all. As I’ve grown, I’ve learned and absorbed more influences into my writing and production. Recently, I’ve gotten really into modular synths, ambient sounds and punk music.

I’m glad to be a part of the creativity happening at the moment – I think the demographic of listeners, as well as the spaces it inhabits, has changed for the better.

Everything is more in sync and you can go to clubs or raves, or larger festivals like Field Day, and listen to jazz. It wasn’t like that when I came up. That representation is shifting everyone’s perspective and is constantly developing the genre musically and aesthetically.

Jazz is no longer seen as elitist and specialist music for concert halls and jazz clubs. An event like Steam Down in Deptford will show you how the music has returned to the people – we put on our own gigs and record and play with each other, pooling our resources and time to be more self-sufficient. Ultimately, we thought to change the status quo and do it ourselves.

Produced exclusively for Crack Magazine by Xavier Monney - @xaviermonney

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Paid Dues

20 years after RP Boo altered the fabric of dance music in his city, the Chicago native is recognised for his visionary mind

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“One of my main goals was to create more music with nothing but originality” Words: Steph Kretowicz Photography: Cooper Fox

“Nobody fuckin’ with meee in these streets,” proclaims RP Boo’s aptlytitled song No Body. The track, which kick-starts his new album I’ll Tell You What!, pulses on frenetic deep bass while sampling Broadway performers Jenifer Lewis and Roz Ryan singing gospel with 90s R&B icon Brandy. The audacious statement is fitting, because few underground electronic musicians command as much respect as RP Boo. But despite the combative style of the footwork pioneer’s music, in person RP Boo – real name Kavain Space – is reputably down-to-earth. “Before I started doing albums for Planet Mu, I always had a job,” Space tells me with a friendly grin through FaceTime, as he sits on the stairs outside his Chicago apartment. “I was getting smaller underground gigs here and there in Chicago, but that was if I had the time to do it. If I had an off day or it was late at night, yeah it was fine, but I would have to get up in the morning after and go to work. I was just so used to being a working person.”

It took Space 16 years to release his first full-length – a career-spanning compilation called Legacy – in 2013.

The so-called ‘Godfather of Footwork’ comes up behind his peers and trailblazers DJ Spinn and the late DJ Rashad as globally recognised names in the Chicago-born genre. Given these are the artists who made the syncopated rhythms, rapid BPM and impulsive sampling more palatable for an international audience, it makes sense that they’d be better known for producing footwork. The only thing is, RP Boo actually invented it.

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Footwork is an approach that emerged in Chicago in the empty shop fronts and school halls of the city. Dancers would compete with each other, moving and contorting to sample

music played at impossible speeds by a DJ. Space was just one of these DJs, playing ghetto house tracks that progressively got faster, upping the stakes and finally producing 1997 proto-footwork track, Baby Come On. It features a slower tempo and funkier groove than most contemporary forms of the genre, but it’s what many consider to be the first of its kind – a blueprint for the musical mutation we call footwork today.

“If [footwork music] was identified from the tempo, a lot of people wouldn't know that it was created from 135 BPM in its beginning stages, before it went into what we would consider the first generation when the South Side started expanding it,” Space breathlessly recalls, with the authority of a leader who has seen it all. “Once it got expanded, it went from 140 BPM to 145 BPM. Then, when it got its notice worldwide, it was at 160 BPM.” Space was laid off from his job at Lowe’s – a big box home improvement and hardware store in the US – two months prior to the release of Legacy.

Since then, his life has changed considerably. Space’s three children are all grown up and it’s just him and his wife now in Chicago. In 2013, he travelled outside of the US for the first time ever to perform at Unsound festival in Poland. Now, touring has become both part of the job and a source of inspiration for his musical output.

“The travelling gives me a more open perspective,” he says. “I’m always visual and I love to hear things.

Travelling gives me a better chance to incorporate what I see and what I hear to help me broaden and make my tracks come more to life, and be more able to share with the people in the world.” You can hear it in I’ll Tell You

What! track Flight 1235, where chaotic beats and a sliced, clipped and cut-up vocal sample plays over the sound of a jet engine.

RP Boo’s psychedelic mindset leads him to explore the most abrasive and avant-garde fringes of his genre, making his catalogue more comparable to artists such as his protégé Jlin – who’s collaborated with experimentalists like Holly Herndon and William Basinski – than smoothersounding footwork releases like the classic DJ Rashad LP Double Cup, or DJ Taye’s recent album Still Trippin’.

The ethos of broadening RP Boo’s sound palette extends to Space’s vocal performances – his voice is noticeably prominent on I’ll Tell You What! and he’s developed a penchant for lyrical pastiche. “That was the mystery for people to catch,” says Space, explaining the track Bounty, where lyrics from Blondie’s One Way or Another meet James Brown’s Get Up, and more. “To be able to say the way I’ve quoted it will fit into another realm; [so] when you listen, you learn from what came before you.”

But for all the referentiality of his music, Space is becoming decidedly less dependent of sampling. “One of my main goals was to create more albums to be nothing but originality”, he says, audibly proud of I’ll Tell You What! – which is his first full length of brand new material. “That’s all me, from the voice to the beats, everything.

That’s the gift that I have and what I need to express.”

I’ll Tell You What! is out now via Planet Mu

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Sisterhood A guide to allyship and action from social activist and model Munroe Bergdorf

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Words: Otamere Guobadia Photography: Tom & Denelle Ellis Set Design: Lucy Cooper Styling: Luci Ellis Make-Up: Bianca Spencer Hair: Alexis Day

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Vest: adidas Originals Blazer: Pepe Jeans

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She is the voice that launched a thousand thinkpieces. In a world of Trumps and Theresas and the kind of polite ineffectual centrism that lets Nazism and white supremacy thrive unchallenged, Munroe Bergdorf is gunpowder, treason and plot. A model – part it-girl, part agitator – she found herself at the centre of a cause-celebré a year ago, when her unapologetically strident polemic about the passive complicity of all white people in white supremacy was leaked to right-wing media by someone with a personal vendetta. It was an attempt to weaponise the fury of the press and get her – L'Oreal's first trans model – fired.

Bergdorf's firing was part of a long media tradition of painting antiracism activists, and particularly black women, as irrational anti-white furies. But where the threat of scrutiny, anonymous threats and tirades of abuse would silence, Bergdorf got louder. Seizing control of her narrative and firmly turning the gaze back on white Britain, she called out their prejudices, their complicity and their refusal to acknowledge the elephant in the room — that racism was alive and well in today's Britain, and they were simply not doing enough to end it. If the Daily Mail wanted her rabid destruction and silent acquiescence, Bergdorf proved that she was nothing if not on the rise.

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Since the scandal, she's walked runways for the gender-queer fashion collective Art School, strutted for Gypsy Sport in New York, and produced and starred in her own Channel 4 documentary What Makes A Woman examining her personal journey, as well as what life is like for trans people in the UK today. Showing absolutely no signs of slowing down, her fierce politics, unapologetic blackness and her spirituality remain woven into everything she does. Be it calmly facing down unrepentant transphobes on live television, or deconstructing white supremacy and misogynoir to her 80k-strong Instagram audience, Munroe Bergdorf is a renaissance woman for a brave new world.

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Nightlife has always borne a particular primacy and importance to queer people and to queer people of colour especially, but the London queer nightlife scene often struggles to give space to the most marginalised of our community. How did you find a space that not just tolerated but embraced your blackness and your womanhood?

When I first started transitioning I was working in the gay scene in Soho. I started off feeling really at home, like I had found my people, but the more I started to embrace who I was, the more that started to shift. I wasn't very self aware of my intersections. My dad's mum came from the Windrush generation, and a lot of that legacy was about assimilation and erasing difference. It was about becoming part of the Empire, and not necessarily practising ancestral culture. I grew up in a predominantly white area, so by the time I got to London, I wasn't really aware of my blackness.

As I began to transition, I started embracing that more and started appreciating it and not looking at it as something that I should hide, so I just started becoming a lot more unapologetic and talking through my identity with my dad. I joined a femme collective called Pxssy Palace, alongside Nadine Artois, Skye Cooper Barr and Kesang Ball. That was the reaction to the resistance I experienced when I started embracing my blackness and my transness. It was a reaction to not being able to be in these spaces without encountering misogyny or racism.

of [camera] phones we just see it a lot more. Seeing black trans women consistently being murdered around the world got to me. I felt like no one was really saying anything, and while I didn't really have any of the answers at that point, I just felt really helpless but thought maybe I could do something. I had a bit of a platform in the community and I wanted to use that to learn more and make a difference.

What has the last year of your life taught you about the struggle for racial justice, gender equality, and trans justice?

As a new generation we need to take the power into our own hands. I don't think we can wait around. It doesn’t necessarily mean breaking the law, it means not pandering and not waiting for other people to change our lives.

And that’s why I’m noisy, that’s why I’m constantly pushing and constantly speaking about the things I think need to be talked about. That’s probably the biggest lesson I’ve learnt: not to wait on anybody and not to expect anything from anybody. Go out and get it.

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When I transitioned I was aware of the misogynoir I'd face as a visibly black woman and the transmisogyny that would compound that. It forced me to look a bit deeper into my own identity and Pxssy Palace provided that safe space for me to explore my identity, and it still does. I'm no longer involved with Pxssy Palace but we are still super best friends and I still go every now and again. It's just such an amazing space for queer, trans, non-binary, people of colour – if you are marginalised then it is a space for you to be yourself. You will be believed, you will be encouraged, and you will be loved. I’m so thankful to have been part of it.

You've had public dialogue with people who have expressed trans-exclusionary views such as Venice Allen and Sarah Ditum. What would you say to those who say arguing with these people in any public environment is giving their views exposure?

Disengaging when something is going ahead anyway is going to hurt our communities. If there are no representatives for us in the room we are just going to be without a voice completely. I was part of a discussion on Channel 4 about self identification and the Gender Recognition Act. That conversation was going to go on anyway – they had a huge budget – and they were insistent that it was going to happen with or without the right people in the room. There was no doubt in my mind that I didn't want to do it, but if I hadn't stepped up, they were going to get somebody who isn't well versed in the way media works and doesn't know trans issues. So I just felt like with my profile and my platform it would be silly if I didn't. I don't think that we should always engage but I think it is a case of measuring up whether something is going to go ahead anyway or if it can be stopped from happening at all.

What would you say radicalised you as an activist? Were there any defining moments that made you think, ‘I need to fill this role, I need to be this activist now’?

It really was a reaction to the way that the world has always been. I think police brutality and the way that the police treat black and brown bodies around the world has been a factor.

Our bodies are being treated like animals to uphold a system of white domination. With the advancement

I don't really care what a cis woman has to say about my trans experience because she doesn't know. I would never tell a cis woman how to navigate childbirth or her menstruation cycle.

These are things that don't affect me but they are still important. Having anybody tell somebody that what they're going through isn't important, that they shouldn't have access to places and spaces that help us — yeah, I have a big problem with that, but I don't really care about what they

have to say about me.

After everything you’ve been through, what words would you say to young queer people of colour, trans people and queer activists?

Don't you dare give up on yourself.

Other people might give up on you, but do not give up on yourself. Everything that I have managed to do this year, after being dragged through every single right-leaning newspaper, is a reaction to me not giving up on myself.

If I had given up on myself then I don't know what I would have done. Because there is no chance I would have been able to get a regular job, without being recognised or without employers being biased about who I was as a person before I had even got into the interview room. It affects relationships, it's affected friendships, it's affected how I've seen myself. But the one thing that I stayed consistent in was the belief in myself. Find what you know to be true and stick to that and make sure that it is positive and constructive and loving.

Don't you dare give up on that because you can achieve anything.

If people want to be good allies in the fight for race, equality, gender equality, the trans fight, what can they do right now to help us QTIPOC? Do research yourself, don't wait on other people to educate you. I feel that most of my people are educated by default because wider society expects us to educate them and tell them our first-hand experience of things. I think they're being lazy – especially in a world of Youtube where so many marginalised folk have put their neck on the line giving accounts of coming out stories, first time stories, hormone journeys. You really don't have an excuse to wait around until you meet a trans person and then all of a sudden ask all of these burning questions.

I think that the best thing to do is educate yourself and then treat that person just like anybody else.

When your work is done what would you like the sphere surrounding you, your immediate community, or even the world to look like?

I would love to sit back in an armchair, be surrounded by young people, and think about how the world was – to remind them not to make the same mistakes we're making now. You know, the same way that our parents told us about how women used to be treated, how black people used to be treated – black people are still being treated badly, but not in the same way they were in the 50s. I want to be able to know that we've made a difference, that the world has changed.

And I really feel that young adults now are going to make that change. They are already so fluid. There's so much more interest in so many other people’s cultures, they're more expressive

visually and sexually. Young adults are coming out as gay or queer before they even get to high school and that's amazing.

We're gonna look completely different in about 70 years as a global society, so I'm looking forward to us all not necessarily mixing with whiteness but dissolving those boundaries, to us all mixing as a global world community.

Less discrimination. I'm looking forward to people just becoming much more fluid when it comes to gender identity, when it comes to sexuality. I'm looking forward to them all becoming a lot more blurred.

Munroe Bergdorf DJs at Crack Magazine’s party at Bread&&Butter, Berlin, 31 August. Follow Munroe Bergdorf on Twitter and Instagram @MunroeBergdorf

“I want to be able to know that we've made a difference, that the world has changed.

And I really feel that young adults now are going to make that change.�

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Age of Excess As the grip of internet culture tightens, Oneohtrix Point Never scours the depths of our endless scroll

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Daniel Lopatin is all too frequently referred to simply as a “producer” when that tag barely scratches the surface of his work. Over the course of eight studio albums as Oneohtrix Point Never, Lopatin’s narrative focus has crystalised with each release. However, it’s between 2013 and 2018 – between R Plus Seven and Age Of – that Lopatin has really found his niche; that his somewhat circular obsession with our grotesque fixation with the internet and the vulgarity of social media has become most clear. In this essay exploring our internet-based compulsions, the Warp roster stalwart is as lucid as ever on his bleak assessment of our social predicament.

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Illustration: Orron Fearon Words: Oneohtrix Point Never As told to Karl Smith

Every morning, it’s like part of the ritual is getting acclimated to the day breaking by looking at this other source of artificial light coming from your phone – an immediate connection to language or desire to get you basically going. I think that's when I started piecing it all together.

It's absolutely some kind of crazy secretive addiction that everyone's aware of. I find myself having to systematically wean myself off of it like a drug, which is a really, really bad and uncomfortable situation – why you would feel that way about a platform to share and see people's words and images is beyond me. Just the amount of social engineering that takes place in society without these applications is already so extreme and nefarious. Then there's this, which is just so blatantly manipulating you and so blatantly has all the properties of a really negative, addictive drug. You know, hopefully we're also able to shed certain habits quickly. But I'm finding it pretty difficult.

I got home from tour and I was so happy to have high speed internet again. There was all this stuff I wrote down that I wanted to look up and research. Have you ever gone on to ‘Instagram Explore’ just because it's right there? It's tempting you. It's just right there. I used to just be like, ‘I'm just going to do it for cheap thrills, let's just watch the most throwaway garbage possible’: someone catching some stupid fish or some America's Funniest Home Videos shit. But I just wish there was a way to deactivate that button because what still exists even

though I know it's intellectually bad is my addiction to it just being there.

We can’t not push the button. We're just proving to Silicon Valley that we're these really dumb pets.

With the 2016 US election, as much as I think that being politically passive in 2018 is reprehensible, I equally think that sort of being active through the idea of media channels and through the register of media is as equally reprehensible – so it's difficult to find the real source of things. When I was young, Bill Hicks was a comedian that pointed out certain ideas to me. His distrust of the world, his distrust of the government, his distrust of the media.

And that affected me so I've always had that inherent distrust, or that inherent mistrust. I'm just in a perpetual state of weariness and mistrust whenever I look at information flows.

It's like that with the prevalence of memes, too: symbols are manipulative.

They're extremely powerful. They're the stage of all kinds of dreaming, projecting – that's why we love them so much. We make them, regenerate them, we constantly change their meanings. We trade them in for other ones, we creep ourselves out with them, we use them as a source of tribal identification and all kinds of codes. So it's obviously no surprise that something would emerge from this world of memetic iconography that would actually infiltrate the consciousness or the status quo.

Because one of the practical sites of all this fantasising on the internet is expressing very complicated, very textured ideas through a very basic set of icons. The utility of those things is just completely chaotic.

In a sense, much of what Garden of Delete was addressing is this sort of American adolescent disenfranchisement, but also the disenfranchisement that a teenager will have from their future body or their past body. They're stuck in between

these states and only able to translate it through various allegorical registers, the things they love. Of course they gravitate towards things that represent that kind of violence, so of course they turn to violent music and violent television or violent film. On some level, you have to look at the situation on the whole, with all of this propagandistic but also sardonic ideological waste, trash, toxic-ass shit that's happening on the internet which is being generated by maybe less than 100,000 people worldwide as this intense cry for help. Because that's what it feels like, that's what it looks like.

When you have no sense of community and no sense of tether, no hope for the future, no understanding for the past because you weren't taught it and you have no pathway to the future because there are no opportunities for you, you turn to cynicism, you turn to comedy, you turn to fantasy and you spin out of control. It just kind of came into everyone's living room a little bit more in recent years but it's really nothing new.

How many of these dystopias do we have to fantasise about before we realise it's reality and not a dream? I've always felt that was really important about 0PN world building: not to show

dystopias as a fantasy, as a narrative that exploits your escapist tendency, but to show them as active nutrients in your life right now. To try to show them as things that are ingrained in the way that we live, not in the way that we choose to avoid life.

Now, when I turn around at 35 years old and see I'm an internet addict – increasingly self-absorbed, increasingly vain, made sick by this thing – I'm able to deal with it as something that needs to be addressed and corrected practically. I've trained myself through the music to approach these things this way, to think about things, to stage them as fun experiments. Whether or not that translates artistically, I can tell you there's very little appeal for people to explore these aspects of themselves because it's really implicit. That's the point of art – to look under the hood, things you can't define.

Oneohtrix Point Never's new album Age Of is out now via Warp

MUSIC

There's this lyric on my album Garden of Delete. It was about this idea of these lovers waking up every morning, they're facing the other way, they're looking the opposite direction of each other, looking at their phones. I thought that was really poetic, but I think that was also just me reflecting a little bit on behavioural stuff I was seeing happen in my own relationship.

Shygirl

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Jacket: Diesel Earrings: FEIHEFEIHEFEIHE

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Words: Niloufar Haidari Photography: Yiskid Photographer’s Assistant: Renate Ariadne Styling: Dariusz Kowalski Stylist's Assistant: Anna Heronimek Hair & Make-Up: Luz Giraldo

As one quarter of NUXXE, the London-based collective made up of Coucou Chloe, Oklou, Sega Bodega and Shygirl herself, the group’s icy, cybernetic club tracks and aesthetics wouldn’t feel out of place in the world The Matrix is based in. Although they have become known for all-black looks, Muise at least is in no way averse to colour. Her hair is dyed a bright orange, and on set today she wears a hot pink matching Adidas tracksuit with poppers down the trouser sides, teamed with patent heels and a host of pearl accessories. “I wear loads of colour in the summer,” she muses. “In the winter I tend to just be in black, but it's seasonal.”

Shygirl’s first EP, Cruel Practice, came out earlier this year. Coming in at just under 13 minutes of gurning, anxious beats with Shygirl’s deadpan but assertive vocals over the top, the EP opens with the chilling synth-strings of Rude – a warped version of the infamous score to the Psycho shower scene. Closing track Asher Wolfe is darkly euphoric; Burial’s Rival Dealer but for the PDA crowd.

Muise describes her own sound as “a culmination of all these club sounds I used to listen to before I could even get to the club”. For this EP, however,

she says she was influenced hugely by grime artists and UK drill, specifically in terms of the sparse, London-centric lyricism. “When I was finishing the EP I was listening to a lot of Loski, 1011 and (Zone 2). I like the playfulness of slang – being able to produce a sentence and make it really flowery and also being able to do the opposite.” Lyrics like ‘One round with me/ You'll fully slew/ Oh, got pussy on lock/ Out here tellin’ bare man/ Wots wot’ on track O display her hard, confident, Londonbred brand of sexuality at its best.

The Shygirl persona is a place where Muise can take herself to the next level; not so much an alter-ego, but an extension of her personality where she can say whatever she wants to say with no repercussions. Her lyrics come from personal experience; they’re a cathartic, exaggerated release of feelings she’s had and situations she’s been in. “Most of that EP is about a couple of boys I was dating. I was like ‘OK, if I'd been that ‘crazy’ person in that moment, how would I have spoken?’ I never let that emotion out, and I chose a different route because I'm a rational human being, but if I wasn't, this is what I would say.”

More than anything, Muise dresses for comfort, but not in a joggers-andslippers kind of way. “That is part of the culture of going out on a Friday and not coming back until Sunday. That's the basis of a lot of my clothing choices,” she laughs.

While performing, she has become known for her use of hand-held fans and ever-changing wigs, something she says is “very much part of the Shygirl project. I always have a handheld fan with me. I wear wigs, I wear hair pieces, I'm in clubs, it's hot! All the fabrics that I wear, or showing a lot of skin, it's very much based around not being hot.” Essentially, Shygirl is a true club kid, in the sense that both her music and aesthetic are products of that most hallowed and beloved of spaces: the club. In other words, “being practical but making it look good, you know?”

Shygirl appears at Crack Magazine’s party at Bread&&Butter, Berlin, 31 August

She uses Asher Wolfe as an example.

“In the song I'm talking as if I have total control of this person and they’re lost to me, but actually I was that person. It's something I never got to experience IRL, so I wanted to build that world for myself.”

This idea also bleeds into Shygirl’s sense of style. Although there are aspects of her in Muise’s everyday life, Shygirl is very much a character with an aesthetic that is made to match.

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Shygirl is setting up her new voiceactivated speaker in her East London room as we speak before Crack Magazine’s photoshoot. “I love it, I wanna be in The Matrix,” she exclaims.

The wish is an apt one for the underground artist – real name Blane Muise – whose music is a disorientating and futuristic mash-up of garage, grime, and general “club vibes”.

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Tracksuit: adidas Originals (Exclusively available at Bread&&Butter by Zalando) Earrings: Aleksandra Seweryniak Top: Fila Shoes: Hugo Boss

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Jacket: Weekday T-Shirt: Diesel Pants: The Ragged Priest Rings: Harumi Hatta Sneakers: Reebok Aztrek (Available at Bread&&Butter by Zalando)

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Necklace: Aleksandra Seweryniak Earrings & Rings: Harumi Hatta Coat: 2nd Day

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A BAND ON THE WALL FUNDRAISER PRESENTS...

Pop composer, sound sculptress, soundtrack artist and singer Jane Weaver presents an evening of unique atmospheric audio/visual segments performing solo variations of songs from her critically acclaimed albums The Silver Globe and Modern Kosmology.

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My Life as a Mixtape: Bodega

Words: Rachel Grace Almeida Photography: Mert Gafuroglu

him. It’s one of the most brutal moments I’ve heard in song.

Brooklyn art-punks Bodega are fearless. The five-piece, once known as Bodega Bay, have been making snappy, propulsive post-punk that is coloured with wryly self-aware lyrics about the evils of capitalism, our online lives, and justice for Jack in Titanic (fair).

With slashing, low-slung guitars and deadpan speak-sung vocals a la James Murphy, they’ve nailed the perfect balance between unadulterated fun and the need to self-question. Singer and guitarist Ben Hozie speaks to us about the records that got him there.

A record that reminds me of the Internet Jay-Z Big Pimpin [Roc-A-Fella, 2000]. I had a hip babysitter download Napster on my parent’s computer in 1999 right as I was getting into pop music. It took about 24 hours to download a single mp3, but I still remember the rush when the bar reached 100%. Pretty much all of the lyrics went over my head. I had no idea what a pimp even was – something adults did? – but the music was so futuristic-sounding and I felt like a God when it was played loud.

A song that reminds me of my first love I’m in Love with a Girl by Big Star [Ardent, 1974]. This is one of the most beautiful recordings ever. So simple but so true. The melody really captures that perfect teenage buzz you feel after staying up for a few days high on teenage lust dopamine. I once visited Japan with a girlfriend and an MP3 player filled with the Big Star discography and when I hear this track now I visualise a combination of inane eight-hour landline conversations and rural Japan from a speeding train window.

A song that makes me feel really bitter Of Montreal Imbecile Rages [Polyvinyl, 2003]. I am a big fan of the diss track – it’s really empowering to listen to somebody use their tongue to tear down a target in song. One of the best at this is Kevin Barnes. In this track, he’s more petty and pained than sharp – the lyrics read as a real-time conversation that I feel, but don’t fully understand. At the end when he belts ‘I have no hope for you anymore’. I mostly just feel sorry for

A record that soundtracked something really reckless Baba O’Riley by The Who [Track, 1971]. When I was 19 I was arrested for resisting arrest in South Carolina.

Instead of stopping at a police checkpoint, a very high teenage Ben decided to speed off in the other direction to the safety of my stepmother’s garage. I was promptly chased down, yanked out the driver’s seat, and thrown into a cop car. I kid you not, as I was handcuffed in the backseat of the ride en route to the station, the older arresting officer decided to turn on the area’s classic rock FM station only to hear ’teenage wasteland, teenage wasteland, they’re all wasted!’. I was smiling from ear to ear. My life had never felt more like cinema. The officer immediately turned off his stereo and began scolding me: “I bet you think that’s pretty funny, you punk’. But inside I know he was laughing, feeling closer to me than he’d admit.

Endless Scroll is out now via What’s Your Rupture?

MUSIC

A song that makes me despair John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band Mother [Apple, 1970]. This track is such a raw, beautiful piece of music – the dark cousin to Paul McCartney’s Let it Be. John performs self-therapy and becomes a wide-open child, screaming for attention and affection. This kind of return-to-innocence is one of the my favorite things a tune can achieve. Since my mom passed I’ve only been able to listen to it all the way through once.

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Live

REVIEWS

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In Partnership with Polaroid Originals

Love International Tisno, Croatia 27 June–4 July

organisers were rewarded two-fold for their new, updated vision: the event completely sold out and the age range of the crowd was visibly broad.

Having taken on the mantle from Garden Festival three years ago, 2018 represented a transition for Love International, which now stands as its own, separate entity.

One of the festival’s highlights was Joy Orbison pulsing out a set of inspired cross-genre madness that included wine-inducing dancehall, ragga and 140 BPM techno. Four Tet played the first grime track I’ve ever heard in Tisno, while Avalon Emerson and Call Super reaffirmed why they’re two of the most exciting DJs around, providing

mesmerising sets between tough-edged house and techno.

Emerson was on particularly playful form later in the week, cranking up the levels of fun to the absolute maximum with Roi Perez aboard the annual Crack Magazine boat party.

The festival’s decision to extend the opening hours of the Olive Grove on Sunday morning proved a smart move.

Following on from the superb Idjut Boys and Octo Octa’s much lauded and energetic live set, Bristol promoter Dirtytalk’s takeover with rave stalwart Andy Blake and the brilliant Tom of England provided a unique moment to remember: when the weather set in at around 6am, those still standing removed the parasols from the beach to

create a dance shelter that felt reminiscent of a free party, with the sounds continuing deep into the morning.

Over at Barbarella’s, Roman Flügel’s Technicolor sound lit up the space. His drop of Smith N Hack’s remix of Easy Lee caused particular mayhem, but it was the six-hour back-to-back session between Ben UFO and Craig Richards that drove the atmosphere to fever pitch. With UFO ditching the UK-influenced sounds he’s associated with, the in-demand selector opted for more minimal explorations akin to Richards’ staple sound.

The set was polarising for some, with an emphasis on groove and carefully deployed heaters rather than bangers, but for others this approach

was mesmerising, with tracks that wandered into stranger, undefinable territory, such as Richards’ own Sleeping Rough.

Each year the story is slightly different, but Love International has crafted a winning formula that makes it a highlight on the calendar year-on-year. ! Thomas Frost N Polaroid Originals Crack Magazine teamed up with Polaroid Originals to shoot our annual boat party on the Adriatic. All photos were taken using Polaroid Originals Ice Cream Pastels Edition and classic Colour Film

REVIEWS

Love International can be slightly overwhelming. During its most intense moments, the wonderful swathes of colour, character and setting can be difficult to process. However, the festival’s vivid peaks are what lends the sprawling, week-long event its magic.

There’s the afternoons spent lying on a lilo in Tisno’s wooded outcrops, and the speedboat trips to remote islands with idyllic surroundings.

This was the year that Love International branched out. Dub and balearic-soaked sessions in the woods provided welcome, blissful early-morning vibrations, and the incredible outdoor Barbarella’s club boasted its most varied roster of selectors to date. The festival

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Live

Bilbao BBK Mount Cobetas, Bilbao 12 - 14 July

20 - 22 July Bluedot, now in its third year, positions itself at the intersection of science and music against the beautiful backdrop of Jodrell Bank Observatory. Brimming with exhibitions, talks and a line-up that includes The Chemical Brothers, The Orb, Gilles Peterson, Hookworms and Roni Size, the award-winning festival certainly stands out among the festival landscape.

In receant memory, the presence of orchestras at festivals has usually meant classical reimaginings of dance music classics. Bluedot did it differently: The Hallé Orchestra presented a live concert which soundtracked imagery from the BBC’s much-loved Blue Planet documentary series.

On a less meditative tip, Helena Hauff’s pulsating electro and ear-blistering techno was an apt choice given the cosmic surroundings of Jodrell Bank. Tracks from her forthcoming Qualm LP, including Hyper-Intelligent Genetically Enriched Cyborg, delivered otherworldly acid and breaks hewn from another galaxy. Elsewhere, Joy O melded world music and techno alongside warping jellyfish visuals. On the main stage, Future Islands’ brooding and often humorous set proved why they remain festival favourites, while Little Dragon stirred the Martian-dressed, glitter-coated crowds even as temperatures hit 30 degrees.

Once again, Bluedot 2018 proved a master in its field – capturing a unique sense of inquisitiveness through thought-provoking talks and crowd-pleasing music. They’ve already announced next year’s event, a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the moon landings. Count us in. ! Leah Jade Connolly N Jody Hartley

Wireless Finsbury Park, London 6–8 July In the weeks leading up to Wireless, the line-up looked slightly different every time you checked the website.

In the end, Cardi B couldn’t make it due to her pregnancy, the festival announced DJ Khaled’s cancellation on the day citing “travel issues” and then a “scheduling conflict” (hours before, Khaled posted a poolside pic with the caption “Still on vacation!!!!!!!!”). MoStack refused to perform during the England game on Saturday afternoon so switched to the Friday, Trippie Redd and NYC rapper Quay Dash simply disappeared from the bill while Fredo and J Hus’ sets were dropped a few days before the festival due to “unforeseen circumstances”.

During his first ever festival headline set on Saturday, Stormzy pays tribute to J Hus by leading a singalong to a medley of his hits (Hus was recently arrested for suspicion of knife possession, which you could speculate conflicts with the #TimetoStop antiviolence campaign Wireless has been supporting). As he flips between hard-hitting grime and more radio-friendly material, Stormzy lives up to his man-of-the people image, bringing out a kids’ dance group from Manchester for Return of the Rucksack and repeatedly urging the crowd to take pride in UK music instead of fawning over American acts.

Although the event quickly sold out, Wireless caused controversy online due to an appalling lack of women on the line-up. This prompted the organisers to eventually book the Smirnoff House stage, which is hosted by Julie Adenuga, promoted by Rinse FM and features an all-women line-up. With DJs such as Emerald and the Girls of Grime collective playing inside the shed-like structure, the stage is a laidback space away from the rest of the intensity and good-humoured dance-offs frequently break out.

Over at the main stage, the absence of women on the line-up leads to a testosterone overload despite what seems to be an almost equal gender ratio in the crowd. Playboi Carti, Lil Uzi Vert and Rae Sremmurd shun conventional machismo with their respective styles – bringing pretty, featherweight melodies and sugary poppunk into trap beats – but they all demand that the crowd open up huge moshpits for nearly every track, which is particularly exhausting in the 30 degree heat.

Later on, Giggs digs into his arsenal of road rap bangers like Talking the Hardest, Look What the Cat Dragged In and Whippin’ Excursion with an excited grin on his face, bringing out Dave for his slick verse on Peligro.

Once Giggs leaves the stage, a banner drops bearing the OVO owl with a Union Jack pattern on its wing, and Drake sprints on stage to the intense strings of KMT, instigating a staggering sense of euphoria. Taking the baton from Giggs, Drake tells the crowd he’s interrupted his holiday to be here, framing his six-song surprise set as a spontaneous favour to his UK fans. It’s an intense, unpolished finale to an energetic, chaotic festival. If the Wireless team can make more of an effort to rectify the gender imbalance on the line-up and be more transparent with the punters who’ve parted with their hard-earned cash to attend, then it will deserve its status as one of the most exciting music festivals in the UK. ! Davy Reed N Jordan Hughes

! Douglas Greenwood N Jordi Vidal

Farr Bygrave Woods, Hertfordshire 5–8 July At the heart of Farr Festival is a small, good-vibes DJ booth soundtracking a vast forest bunker. By 2pm, the people here are cheerful, gilded with sweat, drunk, decorated by woodland materials, and often topless, because the sun is devastating.

Nobody is not dancing, unless they have danced for so long that they are now on the floor, inhaling the dust kicked up by dancers around them.

The five main stages across this dusty festival are all midsize. Nothing beats the Campfire Headspace tent. It bears the closest resemblance to a club: dark and narrow, with a red light and articulate DJs whose sets allure, rather than snatch for attention. The music is all danceoriented but amply versatile with it. Josey Rebelle, at a side-stage in the woods, blasts out a raw set that feels like catharsis from the sun-blasted luxury. Mount Kimbie play a sequence of upscale pleasantries, sometimes resembling New Order minus serotonin. But by their 10.30pm slot on Friday night, it barely matters; a few in the crowd are already going nuts during soundcheck.

The de facto main stage is the Factory arena, a patchy field surrounded by shipping containers.

Octavian’s Factory set is an inspired Friday afternoon booking. He’s a sharp entertainer, singing in a blasé croak that, with each line, rises in hope and fizzles out like the end of a dream.

Halfway in, he pauses to recall a recent show in Ibiza alongside Stormzy. “And guess what happened?” he yells. “England won!” Waving his hands, he rockets around the stage and sings along to Three Lions, played in full by his DJ. The few hundred assembled lose their sun-stroked minds.

For some, the Factory’s unavoidable highlight, the following day, will be its broadcast of England’s World Cup quarter-final victory over Sweden. But in truth, it was just one wave of pleasure in a weekend-long tide. After the game, Gerd Janson in the Shack bunker is charismatic enough to drown out the chants of “It’s coming home.” He glides from labyrinthine techno to mystical disco, to a crowd that’s seemingly doubled overnight, full of ravers in spangly silver hats and bodysuits. Later on, New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle plays as blue, purple, yellow and green lights patrol the treetops, and for a few moments everyone is illuminated, ecstatically shaking the dust from their feet. ! Jazz Monroe N James North and Rob Jones

REVIEWS

Bluedot Jodrell Bank Observatory, Cheshire

It’s 4:30 in the morning and SOPHIE’s reeling off a heady mix of Charli XCX bangers to a crowd on top of Bilbao’s Mount Cobetas. Behind her, all you can see are faint lights in house windows, cascading down a mountainside with horses grazing in the distance.

This is the impressive setting of Bilbao BBK Live. A festival that takes its crowds to the serene settings above the Spanish city, and treats them to a line-up designed to draw in partygoers from, according to this year’s stats, over 120 countries from around the world. That gigantic pull from outside of Spain isn’t reliant on the promise of great weather though (the Basque country’s climate is notoriously wet), so it has used its failsafe headliners – Florence & the Machine, The xx and Gorillaz, all delivering sets worthy of their slots. But the festival’s must-see act was Childish Gambino. The audience had the honour of being the first to hear his latest two singles Feels Like Summer and Summertime Magic live, but waited to go off for his obvious closer, This is America, by which point he had revellers seriously under his spell.

For its flaws – it can take up to two hours to get to the festival’s main site after you’ve faced the queues for the shuttle service – Bilbao BBK redeems itself for knowing what its audience wants. The cleverly laid out programme was designed to cut clashes (Noel Gallagher’s nostalgic sing-along show overlapped with a Latin dubstep-rapper named Bejo, for example) and you can’t sniff at the ticket price: starting at €105 for a whole weekend with camping. For anyone yearning for a Spanish festival trip who can’t stand the throbbing heat of Benicassim or Primavera, this cooler, Basque country equivalent is a worthy option.

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Bristol punks IDLES wield the radical power of joy

09 IDLES Joy as An Act of Resistance Partisan Records

IDLES’ 2017 breakthrough record Brutalism established the Bristol outfit as contenders to Britain’s long-rusted punk throne. Their missives on Tory rule and the destruction of socialist ideals makes for unlikely hooks – hit up any European festival field last summer and you’d surely have heard Mother’s leftleaning chorus “the best way to scare a Tory is to read and get rich” echoing around the site. Their second studio album, Joy as An Act of Resistance, comes 18 months on, and cements their position as one of the country’s finest prospects: brutalist thrashers with a heart of gold, documenting the dissolution of established order with a glint in their eye.

No song better captures that sense of chaos than opener Colossus, a clattering two-parter, split between an industrial punk admission of guilt and a fast-and-furious rejection of toxic masculinity’s many tropes. Frontman Joe Talbot compares himself to totemic figures like Stone Cold Steve Austin

That fiery energy is buoyed by Talbot, the undoubted star of the show. A witty, absorbing character, he’s Jonny Rotten without the need to flog butter; Mark E. Smith with a bright-side sense of moral conscience. The brilliantlytitled Never Fight A Man With A Perm finds him documenting a bar brawl with “a heathen from Eton”, lashing out with his barbed tongue as much as with his fist, while the snotty I’m Scum rejects the notion of the working classes as lacking in emotion and compassion.

Elsewhere, he takes on racist Brexiteers, offering up countless more unifying mission statements on Danny Nedelko and Great – with all the vim and venom of that Mother hook.

Talbot doesn’t only lash outwardly, though. June, the record’s grisly centrepiece, finds him lamenting the stillbirth of his child. “Dreams can

be so cruel sometimes,” he groans, before a doomy, detuned rumble segues into one of the record’s most haunting moments: Talbot wailing the Hemingway-attributed shortest horror story ever written, “baby shoes for sale, never worn”.

But IDLES seek to offer hope, too.

For every acerbic takedown á la Samaritans’ rebuttal to stiff-upperlip mentality, there’s a counterclaim, such as Cry To Me’s shoulder-tolean-on riposte. Television is perhaps the best marker of IDLES’ vision for a better world though. “If someone talked to you the way you talk to you, I’d put their teeth through,” Talbot declares, commanding the object of his affections to “love yourself”. It’s a statement thousands of disillusioned men across the globe could do with taking to heart.

IDLES’ return feels like a record born to soundtrack – even attempt to save – this era of broken, brawling and Brexiteering British masculinity. A heady, confusing rush of present-day fury and hope for a brighter future, Joy as An Act of Resistance is a record that bristles with the political and emotional energy of punk's very best.

REVIEWS

Words: Tom Connick

and Fred Astaire, citing their support of gay marriage and flamboyant dancing respectively. The whole band exercise their rage throughout, drummer Jon Beavis coming off like Animal from The Muppets, and Slinky-necked guitarists Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan slicing through countless strings as they wail on their instruments throughout the record.

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06 07 Interpol Marauder Matador

Mitski Be The Cowboy Dead Oceans

REVIEWS

“For this new record, I experimented in narrative and fiction,” says Mitski Miyawaki.

There are certainly plenty of literary devices at play on her fifth LP, Be The Cowboy. It is full of adroit, vivid metaphors, opening with her as a ‘geyser’, unable to hold everything in any longer. We are told lost love is a pearl that we roll around endlessly in our minds.

Later, Mitski asks someone to “toss their dirty shoes into her washing machine heart”.

The unfolding narrative reveals a character looking for control amongst the loneliness and disarray of life. It’s a neat trick, allowing Mitski to delve into aching emotional territory while still keeping at a knowing distance. There’s also a certain sense of growth from her breakthrough album, 2016’s Puberty 2 – this is bolder, more ambitious and experimental. Songs veer between plaintive piano ballads and a flood of horns, synths and handclaps soundtrack our omniscient narrator attempting to understand desire, love and growing old. But as the guitars crash over Remember My Name, she acknowledges that “I need something bigger than the sky” – a realisation that acceptance, rather than answers, are all we can hope for.

Since releasing his debut LP Where We Come From in 2014 via Brooklyn-based label Mixpak, Jamaican artist Popcaan has enjoyed international recognition, collaborating with the likes of Jamie xx, Gorillaz and Giggs.

Having been sampled and referenced by Drake, Popcaan’s vocals were unfortunately scrapped for Drizzy’s single Controlla. That hasn’t hindered his ascent, mind. As he remains under the Mixpak banner it’s clear Popcaan – once a protege of Vybz Kartel – is enjoying the fruits that come with being dancehall’s poster boy on Forever.

Here, Popcaan mirrors his effortless bravado with sensitivity. The chest-inflating Superstar sees Popcaan proudly boast of his stature in pop’s upper echelons, but on romance riddims like Mi Luv Yuh and Through The Storm he delivers arms-out-wide proclamations of love.

It’s not all heat – at times, the record fails to justify the hefty run time and its lyrics sometimes fall hollow. But for most of the album, the sweet signature sound of Dre Skull’s production shines brightly, and Forever is an album that sees Popcaan gaze beyond his own hype.

Nostalgia is a killer – and Interpol should know more than most. Last year they took their iconic debut album Turn On the Bright Lights for a 15th anniversary victory lap around the globe, celebrating their position as one-time leaders of NYC’s indie rock scene. The record’s success has dogged them ever since, and following up a return to the glory days such as those is no mean feat – a pitfall Marauder is testament to.

For what it’s worth, Interpol’s sixth full-length is not a total flop. The surging, high-gain guitar work that propelled them to indie-rock royalty back in the early 00s is present and correct on the likes of If You Really Love Nothing and stomping lead single The Rover, while Stay In Touch rollicks like a dusty, Deep Southern wrestler’s intro theme.

Elsewhere though, it’s less of a fighter. Where former bassist (and long-time band albatross) Carlos D’s old basslines felt urgent, Marauder’s feel like an afterthought – a likely byproduct of Banks’ on-the-job learning of the instrument, and their refusal to draft in a more experienced four-stringer.

Marauder is a mixed bag. A tick-box of Interpol’s best bits, with none of the magic of their heyday. And for a record named after – and supposedly about – a rampaging inner demon, it just feels so very safe.

! Danny Wright

! Jack Needham

! Tom Connick

Popcaan Forever Mixpak

Various Artists Studio Barnhus Volym 1 Studio Barnhus

Sometimes it’s good to get your face rubbed in the dirt, and Helena Hauff is happy to oblige on her second album, Qualm. The track titles alone (Primordial Sludge, The Smell of Suds and Steel, Fag Butts in the Fire Bucket) create stark and gritty imagery to warn a listener: ‘don’t get comfortable.’

The top-tier electro DJ’s affinity for battered-sounding hardware remains potent. And while she isn’t the first in recent years to shun hi-tech production tools, Hauff makes her machines bleed better than most. Qualm kicks off with Barrow Boot Boys – a grizzly, blown-out drum track that runs the levels straight into the red, before Lifestyle Guru steps up the tempo and introduces raw, troubling layers of synth. At its peak, it positively buckles under the weight of its untreated parts, over-saturated and reminiscent of straight-to-tape techno.

Hyper-Intelligent Genetically Enriched Cyborg is a highlight – an acid-soaked stomper which quite suddenly morphs into a glorious italo-style workout. There’s a demolished quality of the record and a couple of overly-indulgent moments mean there’s no point in pretending Qualm is for everyone. But maybe that’s the way club music should be.

For a label with 60 releases to its name, it’s surprising that this is the first full-length compilation Studio Barnhus has released, especially given its propensity for championing new and emerging artists from its home city of Stockholm. Volym 1 continues to do so, also enlisting some older affiliates for a snapshot of the scene’s left-of-centre music makers from Stockholm and beyond.

Each of the label’s three heads appear, with Pedrodollar’s Reality World in particular capturing the offkilter jubilance of the collection at large. DJ Koze’s Hawaiian Souldier is a typically selfreferential outing and album highlight from a man enjoying a purple patch after his brilliant album Knock Knock.

There are a couple of turns away from typical Barnhus fare: Qaadir Howard’s skittish storytelling is a welcome outlier, while second single Currency Low by new ‘supergroup’ Off The Meds brings some South African swagger and breakbeats under the label’s umbrella: another highlight. Consumed in full over 90 minutes, a few tracks wash by and fail to capture the imagination, but those who pick this up will add to their collection a varied encapsulation of the label’s quirky, exuberant aesthetic.

! Xavier Boucherat

! Theo Kotz

Helena Hauff Qualm Ninja Tune

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07 Ross From Friends Family Portrait Ninja Tune

Over the last couple of years, pan-Asian hip-hop collective 88rising have been building something special. The selfdescribed “hybrid management, record label, video production, and marketing company” have got Eastern rap relentlessly penetrating the US charts, blazing a big trail in the process.

Head In The Clouds is their hugely-awaited compilation album, a body of work that sees their entire roster jumping into the studio, including Rich Brian, Keith Ape, Joji, Higher Brothers and August 08, plus an impressive roll call of international guests – Playboi Carti, GoldLink and the recently incarcerated 03 Greedo.

The album’s stylistic switchups save the 17-track record from feeling bloated: Poolside Manor, by NIKI and AUGUST 08, winds seductively like a nu-age Cassie jam, Rich Brian’s History samples the Ski Safari 2 Shop Theme for breezy, non-shit elevator music.

NIKI’s Warpaint is stadiumsized pop, while the Rich Brian and Playboi Carti collab Beam comes courtesy of top tier rap producers Murda Beatz and Southside.

The collective gathered in the sunny climes of LA for a couple of months to record, and the end result is a versatile, carefree pop-rap vibe that feels like swimming pools and day-drunk bliss. If Head In The Clouds proves anything, it’s that 88rising are far from a summer fling – they are here to stay.

Despite all the in-joke song titles and stand-offish, John Connor from Terminator 2: Judgement Day vibes, there’s an unmistakable appeal to Menace Beach – a reliable unpredictability. Their new record represents another novel turn, building on the more off-kilter elements of last year’s peculiar Lemon Memory to great effect.

Comparisons can be made to everyone from Anna Meredith (Satellite) and Leeds stalwarts Cowtown (Black Rainbow Sound), to even the nagging, taking-the-piss riffs of Primus (Tongue) and the more accessible end of Throbbing Gristle (Hypnotiser Keeps the Ball Rolling). There’s also plenty of scope to mention experimental pioneers Silver Apples, and electro-Tory Gary Numan. If the occasional guitarbased tracks like Mutator are on safer, less imaginative ground than the rest of the record, the superb (Like) Rainbow Juice, featuring Brix Smith on spoken-word vocals, ends things on a promisingly intense, voltaic note. The Leeds duo have seemingly been embroiled in frank discussions regarding ‘direction’ — namely whether to pursue a guitar-based or electronic sound. The latter won out here, and Black Rainbow Sound is an industro-futurist racket of analogue synth, drum machine and tape loops as a result. Let’s hope Menace Beach continue to explore their cyber-industrial complex.

Ross From Friends – Felix Weatherall’s alias – has amassed a headspinning list of cultural touchpoints in a short space of time. With early releases on the influential Lobster Theremin label and gigs at Panorama Bar, this is an artist – ironic pop culture moniker included – with no problem finding the zeitgeist.

But Weatherall’s material, far from being achingly ‘now’, is in fact a timeless and otherworldly proposition, and his debut album feels poignant.

Weatherall cites the influence of his dad’s hi-NRG, Italo records growing up, but for the most part, Family Portrait is deft and hypnotic house music. The soft pads and hazy, bucolic samples explain why his work has been tagged as part of the lo-fi scene, but there’s a lineage here that reflects more of house and electronic music’s recent history. Pale Blue Dot draws on the meticulous and melancholic work of Gold Panda, the shuffling soft-shine melody of Thank God I’m a Lizard recalls leftfield disco like Maurice Fulton, and on Don’t Wake Dad, the more cluboriented side of Mount Kimbie.

Project Cybersen is one of the strongest tracks, as it evolves into a bleeping, saxophone-led rumbler. In a good way, this has got the gentle John Talabot touch – The Knife in particular captures the delicately anthemic style of Talabot’s work. ‘Emotive’ is a word that’s used a lot about Weatherall’s work, but the gently polished alchemy on Family Portait is about much more than pushing emotional buttons. Filled with shimmering, dusky melodies that are only ever half in view, this is a powerful debut.

! Felicity Martin

! Jon Clark

! Adam Corner

Various Artists Head in the Clouds 88rising

Menace Beach Black Rainbow Sound Memphis Industries

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Wild Nothing Indigo Captured Tracks When Jack Tatum released his third record as Wild Nothing two years ago, it appeared he might be running out of ideas – or, at the very least, struggling to open a genuinely new musical chapter. After making his gorgeously dreamy debut Gemini in his university dorm room, he followed it up in 2012 by pursuing the obvious counterpoint; the shimmering Nocturne was made in a conventional studio and came with all of the associated trappings – a string section, polished vocals, a broadened instrumental palette.

2016’s Life of Pause, though, felt like the sound of Tatum throwing as many different things at the wall as possible and hoping a few stuck. So it’s a relief to hear him streamline his sound with quickfire follow-up Indigo, on which he no longer merely flirts with his retro influences – he’s practically shacked up with them. Roxy Music loom large throughout, as do The Cure’s breezier moments, particularly on the handsomely melodic tracks Oscillation and Letting Go. Tatum finds room to step out of comfort zone, too, pulling off jazzy brass inflections with both Through Windows and The Closest Thing to Living. Less successful are his thematic preoccupations with the role of technology in our lives. There are incisive flashes (the lyric that the album’s title is plucked from uses the indigo glow of a phone screen on a human face as a sharp metaphor) but too often, the message is too hazy to really strike home.

Still, Indigo suggests Tatum has finally mapped out Wild Nothing’s future – more records as sonically slick as this one would be no bad thing.

With 2016’s Spaghetto EP, GAIKA claimed his position as the Dark Wizard of dancehall. His first release for Warp interweaved gothic soundscapes and pulverising beats, creating his own distinct brand of the genre infused not only with his politics, but also with a true sense of longing and melancholy.

If Spaghetto saw GAIKA ascend as rightful heir to power, Basic Volume sees the Brixton-born artist asserting his dominance and establishing a dynasty. Calling on the kind of downbeat industrialism that made previous releases so uniquely captivating, the opening title track Volume and Hackers & Jackers are further testament to the idea that intensity and tempo are not necessarily linked: even the gloomiest of beats have an insatiable brutality.

There is a thickness to Basic Volume, too, which runs through the entire album. A humidity created from the swirling, storm-like ambience of its soundscapes and the haze of its everpresent autotune. Perhaps most notable, though, is what GAIKA has achieved with his collaborators. SOPHIEproduced Immigrant Sons is the album’s most daring point – bringing together the seemingly disparate and distinct sounds of PC Music and dancehall to create something staggeringly contemporary. Like the album itself, it’s unafraid, not only to defy convention, but also to turn its hand to rewriting it for those who would dare to follow suit.

Dorian Concept’s 2014 album Joined Ends is a masterclass in delicate-yet-epic electronics.

The artist behind Dorian Concept, Oliver Johnson, referred to the record’s sound as ‘chamber music’ – an excellent description of its jittery, harpsichord-driven melodies. It is also where his new album The Nature of Imitation picks up. Although the star-gazing melodies have been superseded by something more lithe and laissez-faire, and Johnson’s highly processed vocals play a more central role. In other words, it’s lighter and jazzier, reflecting the Brainfeeder company he keeps, and opener Promises falls endlessly sideways as it snakes towards its rhythmic completion.

Somewhere in the musical progression between his first and second albums, the comforting naivety of Dorian Concept’s melodies has been swapped for a percussive technicality that maybe doesn’t offer quite such a rich sonic seam. But tracks like Self Similarity and Angel Shark chart a course that is endearingly emotive and also steeped in the progressive songcraft that Brainfeeder is renowned for.

! Joe Goggins

! Karl Smith

! Adam Corner

GAIKA Basic Volume Warp

Dorian Concept The Nature of Imitation Brainfeeder

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ANA MATRONIC

DREAMLAND VARIETY GET YOUR OWN BACK

SARA COX PRESENTS OUT D L SOGET ENOUGH 80S JUST CAN’T

(DJ SET)

WITH MARGATE PRIDE + BETSY

24TH AUGUST

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25TH AUGUST

RONI SIZE ‘NEW FORMS’ LIVE LTJ BUKEM (EVENING)

WITH DAVE BENSON PHILLIPS

25TH AUGUST

RAY KEITH AFTER PARTY LSB (NIGHT)

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07. 09.09. 2018 ALTER SCHLACHTHOF, EUPEN, BELGIUM

Meakusma Festival

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The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill Commemorating the graceful strength of an essential LP Words: Briana Younger

In 1998, hip-hop was still scratching its way into mainstream acceptance and commercial viability, accelerated by the

Original release date: 25 August 1998 Label: Ruffhouse / Columbia

gaudy-glam style of P Diddy’s Bad Boy label. It was a year that yielded seminal albums like Jay Z's Vol. 2... Hard Knock Life, DMX's It's Dark and Hell Is Hot, Juvenile’s 400 Degreez and OutKast's Aquemini. But it took a certain amount of fortitude to make The Miseducation because there were no guarantees – a woman in rap begins with the deck stacked, and nothing said this diaristic style of writing would translate to a mass audience that tended to crave the shiny and the superficial.

The album’s lyricism was razorsharp, the singing soul-churning, the instrumentation warm and enveloping.

As we got older, we came to understand the holiness of Ms. Hill’s purge – an everywoman bringing the blues to the hip-hop era. The way she could lick her wounds and praise love in the same breath or wield her tongue as a dagger and an elixir was stunning.

And in setting the most intimate details of her life to music, she found an appeal that transcended gender qualifiers, genre and time itself.

The great writer Amiri Baraka’s son Ras leads the interludes and part of the album was recorded in Bob Marley’s legendary studio Tuff Gong.

The lyrical screeds Lost Ones and Doo Wop (That Thing) handed listeners game in the form of life lessons while confirming Ms. Hill as one of the greatest rappers to ever hold a microphone. Slow burners like Ex-Factor and When It Hurts So Bad portrayed heartache with textures that were recognisable to anyone who’s ever known what it is to feel destroyed by the person they desire. Her ode to motherhood, ushered in by Carlos Santana's honeyed Spanish guitar, materialised on the devastatingly gorgeous song To Zion. The song revealed how outsiders suggested she terminate her pregnancy and choose her career before her son. It remains a monument to her resistance, and to the still revolutionary decision to be a mother in the midst of great professional success.

In the wake of the album's success, Ms. Hill’s own lyrics seemed to turn on her. She learned just how much money really does change the situation – how quick the same people who once called her "genius" were to call her "crazy" when she failed to behave in the manner they expected. But she’d built a career around the refusal to honour any truth but her own.

In spinning this intricate web of her life, Ms. Hill channelled the lifeblood of black political figures: the album’s title, for example, can either be a nod to the autobiography The Education of Sonny Carson or to W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Miseducation of the Negro, or both.

The album’s title track doubles as its powerful anchor. The resolution of the album’s narrative arc, it’s also one of her most powerful vocal performances. Within it, she offers the perfect closing affirmation: “But deep in my heart, the answer it was in me,” she sings. “And I made up my mind to define my own destiny.”

Lauryn Hill was grace and strength rolled up into one: teacher and student; vulnerable and protector. She was everything to everyone in a way that only a black woman could be. She knew well the euphoria of love, the torment of heartbreak and the tyranny of an oppressive industry and world and she mined each of those things for beauty. It was, in many ways, her undoing. But for 80 minutes on The Miseducation, it was also her greatest triumph.

REVIEWS

"This is crazy because this is hip-hop," a stunned Lauryn Hill announced as she accepted her Album Of The Year trophy at the 1999 Grammy Awards.

Her victory marked the first time any rap album won the night's top honours; the first time a woman had earned five awards in a single ceremony. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill was that kind of album: historic.

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BlacKkKlansman dir: Spike Lee Starring: John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier

Whitney dir: Kevin Macdonald Starring: Whitney Houston, Bobbi Kristina Brown, Cissy Houston

! Louise Brailey

Hotel Artemis dir: Drew Pearce Starring: Jodie Foster, Sofia Boutella, Dave Bautista Hotel Artemis, the directorial debut from screenwriter Drew Pearce, is a pulpy action film which never manages to develop its premise, or promise. Set in the near future, the residents of LA are rioting due to diminishing water supplies. In the midst of the revolt stands a once grand hotel turned high-tech triage centre, run by a harddrinking nurse (Jodie Foster) and her musclebound assistant, Everest (Dave Bautista).

Together, the odd couple patch up everyone from bank robbers (Sterling K. Brown) to international hitmen (Sofia Boutella). The operation is funded by a crime lord known only as The Wolf King of LA, played by Jeff Goldblum who’s currently enjoying a career renaissance with cameo roles, most recently in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

Jodie Foster, on the other hand, hasn’t appeared in film since 2013’s Elysium, and it’s great seeing her back on the big screen. She plays her part excellently, shuffling from patient to patient, listening to The Mamas & the Papas and swigging whisky in between. Boutella and Brown are equally impressive, and afforded their own plot lines, while Bautista supplies the right blend of action and comedy that suggests that he’ll be muscling in on territory occupied by Dwayne Johnson before too long.

There are stylistic similarities with John Wick and Atomic Blonde and the action is confined (for the most part) to the hotel, echoing Dredd and The Raid. Disappointingly, despite ratcheting up the tension, Pearce doesn’t know where to take it, leaving the film limping towards a conclusion.

A shame – Hotel Artemis is a neat concept, and watching a cast of this calibre is a treat. If only they had been serviced with a better story, this could have been a standout film. As it is, you’ll check out of Hotel Artemis as soon as the credits roll.

! Tom Bond

Leave No Trace dir: Debra Granik Starring: Thomasin McKenzie, Ben Foster, Jeffery Rifflard In a year populated by films concerned with working classes and communities outside the city, it just feels right that Debra Granik would return with Leave No Trace, her first fictional film in eight years. The premise could be compared to the recent Captain Fantastic, but this has a different rhythm; as with Winter’s Bone, Granik is more invested in gently exploring outsider communities rather than just using them for a dramatic hook.

With its stripped back style and resistance to Oscar reel-ready moments, Leave No Trace is closer in tone to another 2018 release that depicts people living in the American wilderness, Andrew Haigh’s Lean On Pete.

Leave No Trace opens with young Tom (Thomasin McKenzie) and her father Will (Ben Foster) living in a forest just outside Portland.

Explanations as to why are slowly unravelled over the course of the film, but before we find out, the two are caught by the authorities, subjected to tests and eventually re-homed. It’s here that Tom and her father’s interests begin to split: Tom craves community, while Will needs isolation. It’s not a toxic relationship, but one that is marked with an expiry date.

While McKenzie’s heartfelt performance is revelatory, Foster plays Will with far more distance.

This makes sense – his character is drawn to isolation – but combined with understated dialogue, some of the more emotional moments don’t entirely land. It’s a gentle performance, but one that’s just a little too opaque to truly connect with.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Leave No Trace is the empathy and compassion with which it portrays all of its characters. There are no villains to be found here, not even the social workers, who within the context of the film could be perceived as a threat. Their only problem is a system that feels impersonal and pre-packaged, a condemnation of bureaucracy rather than the people acting on its behalf. ! Kambole Campbell

! Joseph Walsh

REVIEWS

In May this year, Pusha T stoked controversy with the cover of his latest album. The rapper had used the infamous National Enquirer photograph of Whitney Houston’s bathroom, marble surfaces strewn with drug paraphernalia. As sure a sign as any that the intervening years since the superstar’s death have done little to curb fascination around her troubled life.

It’s certainly enough to sustain two documentaries in the space of a year (Nick Broomfield’s Can I Be Me was released last July).

Kevin Macdonald’s scrupulously researched take has the feel of an investigation, with access to archive footage as well as family members and close friends. Among them, her mother, Cissy Houston, who set her on her path to superstardom, and Bobby Brown, here, as in collective memory, blamed for putting her on quite another.

Unsurprisingly, these bystanders prove unreliable narrators. What’s more, Macdonald’s narrative hints that Robyn Crawford – close friend and assistant – was her true love and potential saviour, rejected for the destructive but normalising relationship with Brown. Crawford has always kept silent on these longstanding rumours and, through not appearing in the film, remains unswerving in her loyalty.

There are great moments in Whitney. The segment covering Whitney’s iconic Super Bowl performance of The Star Spangled Banger is mesmerising, showing how a switch in time signature made the anthem resonate with black Americans for the first time. But such lucidity is rare. Macdonald, like many who gaze on the carcrash lives of tragic female icons, seems to care little for her art, viewing her talent and career highs through the prism of her downfall. Isn’t it time for another story to be told?

It’s hard to know how to react to the racism of the resurgent far-right. For every inhumane immigration policy or neo-Nazi march, there’s a speech defending it so contradictory, partisan and downright stupid that you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Spike Lee offers both options in this hard-hitting action-comedy that finds him on career-best form.

Ron (John David Washington) is the first black cop in Colorado Springs and with the help of Flip (Adam Driver), a non-practising Jew, the pair infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan in an audacious use of secret identities. Even more incredibly this plot is based on a true story, providing inspiration for an intelligent, hilarious and ambitious look at race, identity, and how both are still under attack today.

For many filmmakers this straightforward doublecross would be enough, but Lee complicates the narrative brilliantly via Ron’s encounters with local black activists, particularly his love interest Patrice (an excellent Laura Harrier). He’s not white enough to have an easy life at the police station and he’s not black enough to pass comfortably with Patrice and her friends either.

The biggest criticism to be made of BlacKkKlansman is that it’s a little too clear-cut in its portrayal of good and evil. No one’s asking for Sam Rockwell to be cast as a Klan member who learns the error of his ways, but if there’s one thing our current political climate shows it’s that fascists don’t (normally) announce their intentions in broad, villainous brushstrokes. They slither in, promising greatness and glory to those who feel it’s been taken from them, until suddenly the news is full of the kind of carnage seen in Lee’s gut-punch finale: Klan marches, innocent people murdered, and a fascist sitting in the White House.

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TUE.20.NOV.18 FRI.21.SEP.18 SAT.22.SEP.18 TUE.27.NOV.18 FRI.19.OCT.18 SAT.20.OCT.18 THU.20.SEP.18 THU.29.NOV.18 SAT.20.OCT.18 TUE.04.DEC.18

THU.20.SEP.18 FRI.21.SEP.18 SAT.22.SEP.18

TUE.23.OCT.18

FRI.07.DEC.18 MON.24.SEP.18 THU.25.OCT.18 WED.12.DEC.18

WED.26.SEP.18

THU.25.OCT.18 THU.13.DEC.18

WED.26.SEP.18

THU.01.NOV.18

THU.27.SEP.18 TUE.18.DEC.18 THU.01.NOV.18 MON.01.OCT.18 FRI.15.FEB.19 THU.08.NOV.18 THU.04.OCT.18

THU.08.NOV.18 THU.04.OCT.18

FRI.09.NOV.18 SUN.07.OCT.18

SAT.23.FEB.19

July / August

tue.14.08 FLOORPLAN (ROBERT HOOD b2b LYRIC) LEO POL live ROOTSTRAX (WORLD PREMIERE) AURELIAN AKA KM3 JONTY SKRUFFF (SISYPHOS)

wes.01.08 woodfloor *free

wes.11.07 [HAIKU] *free fri.13.07 PERC SHLØMO b2b ANETHA CIEL OHES

fri.03.08 ANTIGONE b2b KR!Z Ø[PHASE] live NEEL SELVAGEM

wes.18.07

[TEALER] *free

wes.15.08 woodfloor fri.17.08 PAUL RITCH ANTHONY PARASOLE KAS:ST live BEHZAD & AMAROU SNOWBALL

All Night Long

All Night Long

sat.04.08 FRED P MOOMIN DAN SHAKE CARLOS SOUFFRONT MARINA TRENCH b2b INES AFS

sat.18.08 LEON VYNEHALL SESSION VICTIM live S3A ARTHUR LASTMANN & STEP DAW ANA HELDER HOLDTIGHT

wes.22.08 woodfloor

2 8 H O U R PA R T Y P E O P L E wes.04.07 [DISTRIKT] *free fri.06.07 SPEEDY J FJAAK live BEHZAD & AMAROU LEGITIME b2b BENOUA All Night Long

sat.07.07 ELLEN ALLIEN SHDW & OBSCURE SHAPE VOISKI live FAREED GREGO G

samedimanche.14-15.07 SETH TROXLER APOLLONIA (SHONKY, DAN GHENACIA, DYED SOUNDOROM) JACKMASTER DJEBALI LOVEFINGERS S.O.N.S SWEELY live THE PILOTWINGS live PLAYGROUND PARIS (S!ZE b2b SERRAW b2b SACHA GRYN)

fri.20.07 TAMA SUMO DJ SPRINKLES TOO SMOOTH CHRIST G'BOÏ & JEAN MI b2b MALOUANE LOWRIS All Night Long

sat.21.07 TRUSS PARANOID LONDON DEENA ABDELWAHED LEMAIRE GEENA ELEN HUYNH

All Night Long

wes.25.07

live

sat.28.07 CABANNE FUMIYA TANAKA ION LUDWIG live DENIS KAZNACHEEV

ULTRAKURT N'ERIC

b2b

PIT SPECTOR

All Night Long

wes.08.08 woodfloor *free fri.10.08 MADLIB & FRIENDS sat.11.08 DJ SNEAK JAMES DEAN BROWN BEN VEDREN live FUNK E MELINA SERSER MEHDI DLP

fri.24.08 GESLOTEN CIRKEL live DJ STINGRAY OKO DJ SHLAGGA b2b ISRAFIL FOLAMOUR ETHYENE sat.25.08 TINY b2b MOLLY ISABELLA CHARLOTTE VANNUCHI b2b ABI

wes.29.08 woodfloor

JULIANO

fri.31.08 MAGDA (DJ SET) BLOTTER TRAX live (MAGDA & TB ARTHUR) PATRICIA live YOUSUKE YUKIMATSU MUD DEEP OXYD

All Night Long

All Night Long

[POSSESSION] *free

fri.27.07 MARCEL DETTMANN FRANÇOIS X INGA MAUER

www.concreteparis.fr

Crack Magazine Open Air Saturday 11 August, 2pm ELSE, Berlin Tickets available from: crackm.ag/openair

Olof Dreijer Omar Souleyman Willow Orpheu The Wizard Darwin Alison Swing

Now That’s What I Call Music!

Words: Beth McColl Illustration: Chris Wright

My first Now That’s What I Call Music!

CD was a Christmas present. It was 1999 and for the first time my sister and I had a stereo in our shared room.

The disk featured both Britney Spears and Sporty Spice. An unthinkable, impossible thing in the late 90s – a time when I was still untangling cassette tapes with a pencil and could only hear my favourite songs by sitting for hours by a radio and hoping for the best.

I can also credit Now! with my love for making mix-tapes and compilation CDs. I have a crush on you? You’re getting a mix. Looking a little sad? Mix coming your way. You smile at me in a supermarket? IT’S MIX O’ CLOCK. My Spotify library is littered with halffinished playlists I made for half-loved men, birthday mixes that have been swelling in size since 2012 and about a dozen sleep playlists that I listen to in rotation.

Auspiciously enough, my first Now! CD – number 44 – was their most successful volume and the most purchased compilation album of all time. Not bad for something I accidentally stepped on two weeks later. But by then it didn’t matter, because it had done its work. Like a shiny circular angel, it had redefined music for me. It was no longer something alien and inaccessible. The door was open and I was dancing my way through it.

Even this week as I carefully curated a housewarming playlist, I found myself referring back to track lists from Now! CDs that came out before my parents had even met. Try it yourself. Throw on the first ever Now! CD at your next party and thank me later. Turn up to Phil Collins. Get in your feelings to UB40’s Please Don’t Make Me Cry. Text your ex to Baby Jane by Rod Stewart.

Dance drunkenly to Karma Chameleon before earning yourselves a few noise complaints scream-singing Bonnie Tyler.

OPINION

For many of us, Now! was an entryway into “trendy” music. It was gold dust for kids who couldn’t afford to regularly buy CDs, or who didn’t get an iPod until years after everybody else. It taught us what we liked and it taught us what we should pretend to like to make headway with cooler kids at school. Growing up, a Now! CD played in the car on a long journey had a placating and unifying effect that would have been impossible with almost any other disc. In the early 2000s, my parents said nothing while I bopped along in the backseat to Bootylicious, knowing that when Lighthouse Family played I wouldn’t beg them to change it. That was – and still is – the natural give and take of a Now! anthology.

And was any of it ground-breaking?

Not really. Was it culturally myopic?

Perhaps. But nobody buys a Now! CD expecting to discover some under the radar hit. It’s a celebration of the popular, the catchy, the play-it-onrepeat-until-your-dad-bangs-on-yourdoor-and-tells-you-for-the-love-ofgod-turn-it-off. Historically Now! CDs hovered perennially at the edges of uncool, but never really settled there.

Doubtless it was far more questionable not to have at least a small stack of them by your CD player.

It’s 2018 and Now! 100 is on course to be the year’s best-selling album.

Featuring a mix of new hits and classics

from their own back-catalogue, it’s a worthy tribute. They’ve had our backs for more than three decades. Only one of the Now! compilations didn’t make it to number 1, and that was Adele’s fault.

Beloved, scheming Adele; we forgive you.

We have the Now! series because of a funny poster and a good idea. The poster: a Danish advert for bacon featuring a pig and a singing chicken, bought by Richard Branson and hung above a desk to brighten a co-worker’s day. The good idea: put a bunch of hit singles on a cassette or a double vinyl LP and sell it. Not the first to do it, but the first to do it well. And 35 years, 9 formats, 120 million sales and 654 weeks at number one later, they’re still running this show. Now that’s what I call one Hell of a legacy.

Alexa, play Angels by Robbie Williams.

AUGUST 10TH