Issue 93 - Christine and the Queens

Crack Magazine | Issue 01 93

Christine and the Queens

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MARTIN KOHLSTEDT MON 8 OCT ST PANCRAS OLD CHURCH DILLY DALLY TUES 9 OCT OUT LD SEBRIGHTSO ARMS NEGATIVE GEMINI FRI 12 OCT THE SHACKLEWELL ARMS 77:78 MON 15 OCT OSLO HACKNEY GWENNO THURS 18 OCT ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL PALACE THURS 18 OCT OUT HOXTON HALL SOLD STEADY HOLIDAY THURS 18 OCT THE ISLINGTON RINA SAWAYAMA FRI 19 OCT HEAVEN LEYYA TUES 23 OCT SEBRIGHT ARMS OKAY KAYA TUES 23 OCT CHATS PALACE SAM EVIAN TUES 23 OCT HOXTON HALL GIANT PARTY WED 24 OCT THE LEXINGTON SOLOMON GREY THURS 25 OCT UNION CHAPEL

BC CAMPLIGHT THURS 25 OCT OUT OMEARA SOLD PALM THURS 25 OCT MOTH CLUB LORD HURON FRI 26 OCT ROUNDHOUSE GOLD STAR MON 29 OCT THE WAITING ROOM SERPENTWITHFEET THURS 30 OCT ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL LUCY DACUS WED 31 OCT ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL THE KVB WED 31 OCT CORSICA STUDIOS THE GARDEN WED 31 OCT & THURS 1 NOV THE GARAGE SNEAKS THURS 1 NOV THE ISLINGTON

CURTIS HARDING THURS 8 NOV KOKO CAR SEAT HEADREST THURS 8 NOV O2 ACADEMY BRIXTON WOVOKA GENTLE THURS 8 NOV ICA OLDEN YOLK SAT 10 NOV SEBRIGHT ARMS PARQUET COURTS MON 12 NOV ROUNDHOUSE LAURA JEAN TUES 13 NOV SEBRIGHT ARMS FLASHER TUES 13 NOV THE LEXINGTON PELUCHE WED 14 NOV THE PICKLE FACTORY KELLY LEE OWENS THURS 15 NOV VILLAGE UNDERGROUND

VICKTOR TAIWO THURS 1 NOV BERMONDSEY SOCIAL CLUB

MADELINE KENNEY THURS 15 NOV SEBRIGHT ARMS

GOAT GIRL FRI 2 NOV KOKO

W. H. LUNG THURS 15 NOV CORSICA STUDIOS

INSECURE MEN TUES 6 NOV QUEEN ELIZABETH HALL

OH PEP! FRI 16 NOV THE ISLINGTON

ANDY SHAUF TUES 6 NOV OUT SOLDCHURCH ST. MATTHIAS

TIRZAH MON 19 NOV OUT SOLD VILLAGE UNDERGROUND

LUKE HOWARD TUES 20 NOV BUSH HALL GLORIA WED 21 NOV THE LEXINGTON JUNIORE THURS 22 NOV DALSTON VICTORIA THE WAVE PICTURES THURS 22 NOV KOKO SUBURBAN LIVING FRI 23 NOV SEBRIGHT ARMS HOOKWORMS SAT 24 NOV O2 FORUM KENTISH TOWN MY BRIGHTEST DIAMOND TUES 27 NOV OSLO HACKNEY HUGAR WED 28 NOV ST PANCRAS OLD CHURCH HINDS SAT 1 DEC EARTH JOCKSTRAP THURS 6 DEC ST PANCRAS OLD CHURCH JUNGLE THURS 21 FEB ALEXANDRA PALACE MOTHERS WED 27 FEB OSLO HACKNEY BEDOUINE FRI 22 MARCH PURCELL ROOM BC CAMPLIGHT THURS 11 APR SCALA

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Christine and the Queens:

021

Contents

Brockhampton's Dream Came True 36

Jonathan castro has wild visions 44

Yoko Ono is reimagining her world 54

Brooke Candy 58

The kaleidoscopic world of Courtesy 50

Editor's Letter – p.21 Reviews – p.72

Recommended – p.22

20 Questions: Shanti Celeste – p.95

Rising: – p.25

Discover - p.27

A Love Letter To: fabric mixes – p.96

CONTENTS

crackmagazine.net

28

GIGS Concrete Lates x Hayward: Lorenzo Senni, Gigi FM, SHYGIRL, Astrid Sonne and Body Motion

Insecure Men

Federico Albanese

6 Nov Queen Elizabeth Hall

2 Dec Purcell Room

26 Oct Queen Elizabeth Hall

Hidden Orchestra 30 Nov Queen Elizabeth Hall

Iglooghost 30 Oct Purcell Room

Visit southbankcentre.co.uk for tickets and to sign up for the latest announcements

Mala & The Outlook Orchestra 2 Dec Royal Festival Hall

Crack Magazine Was Made Using

Christine and the Queens might have been expelled from stage school for insubordination, but she still sees theatre everywhere.

Specifically, she spots the ways we perform a version of ourselves every day. The veneer of the identities we present. Unveiling this daily performance shows us the world’s a stage and we all play our parts. But it also highlights our ability to change. To slip and slide into agile new identities. To take down and rebuild.

Robyn Honey Puma Blue Midnight Blue Eris Drew Trans Love Vibration (Eris Goes to Church) Ariel We Bring Our Friends BROCKHAMPTON J’OUVERT Yves Tumor Recognizing The Enemy Objekt Secret Snake Dominique Dumont Le Soleil Dans Le Monde Vitalic My Friend Dario Dean Blunt NBA Young Thug High ft. Elton John Lana Del Rey Venice Bitch Shacke Automated Lover LD Stepped In ft. Dizzee Rascal A Guy Called Gerald The Nile Brassfoot Surfing On Haemoglobin

This month’s cover star understands the power of transformation – an idea on the minds of the artists in this issue. Of all the moving pieces in our daily masquerade, it’s the facade of gender that’s fuelling her new incarnation as Chris.

With her latest album, the French pop star uses the teasing complexity of her new, sexually charged persona to wrestle with expectations and bulldoze through stereotypes. Elsewhere, Brockhampton, the game-changing collective reshaping the concept of the boyband, offer a glimpse into their universe. We meet Berlinbased DJ Courtesy, whose radiant sound – and that of her hometown Copenhagen – brings a different flavour to the techno scene. And Yoko Ono ruminates on change and evolution following her album of reimagined material, reminding us that it’s possible to continually redefine ourselves. Essentially, you don’t have to stick to the script.

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October 2018

crackmagazine.net

Issue 93

Christine and the Queens shot exclusively for Crack Magazine by Michelle Helena Janssen in London, September 2018

EDITORIAL

Anna Tehabsim, Editor

024

Recommended

Jorja Smith Brixton Academy 17 October

O ur g ui d e to wh at's goi n g on i n y ou r c i ty

The Hydra presents Todd Terje Printworks 27 October

William Basinski The Jazz Cafe 28 October

Beach House Troxy 17 October

Simple Things Slowdive, Helena Hauff, Octavian Various venues, Bristol 20 October Since Crack Magazine first got involved with Simple Things in 2013, it’s safe to say that it has become one of the most loved alternative music events in the UK (honestly, Google last year’s reviews). With the Colston Hall’s main rooms closed for refurbishment, this year Simple Things has planned for a more intimate experience. Split into day and night for the first time, shoegaze legends Slowdive are heading up the former with the help of forward-thinking jazz project Kamaal Williams, as well as lo-fi pop songwriter Tirzah, viral rap star Jimothy Lacoste and the raucous math-noise band Black Midi.

The night event goes on from 10pm until 8am, and it will see former Crack Magazine cover star Helena Hauff play on a bill with masked electro veteran DJ Stingray, the widely-respected Night Moves boss Jane Fitz, Mafalda plus a live set from punk-techno rascals Giant Swan and more. We’re expecting a sell out – get on this quick.

Rina Sawayama Heaven 19 October

serpentwithfeet O2 Islington Academy 30 October

If you think about it, there wasn’t a single party in 2014 that didn’t drop Inspector Norse. The “danceable elevator music” hit (Terje’s words, not ours) became quickly-iconic for its joyous exploration in cosmic disco, with propulsive house beats and the kind of fruity, melodic swooshing that could revive the dead.

A cold weekend in October seems like the perfect month to inject some of Terje’s sunny energy into your life. Joining the Norwegian DJ at this Printworks all-dayer are the likes of experimental techno maven Roman Flügel, Ninja Tune’s Romare and eclectic R&B producer Jacques Greene.

If you need a healthy dose of some musical Vitamin D, this is your best shot.

Four Tet Brixton Academy 13 October

Movement Torino Nina Kraviz, KiNK, Lone Lingotto Fiere, Turin, Italy 12-13 October

Josiah Wise is one hell of a performer. The NYC-via-Baltimore musician, who makes subversive gospel music as serpenthwithfeet, bares his soul onstage with stunning vocals and raw emotional lyricism, swiftly slipping in a little camp comedy club humour to keep the spirits in the crowd high. While this year’s debut album soil may not have been the commercial breakthrough some were hoping for, it’s not everyday an act this special is in town. We must protect serpentwithfeet at all costs.

The European sister festival of Detroit’s iconic electronic music festival, Movement Torino is back for another rush of dance heavy hitters in the heart of the charming Northern Italian city. Running for over a decade now, the two-day event takes place in Lingotto Fiere, Turin’s vast, futuristic exhibition centre-cum-club venue. The diverse line-up spans across veterans and newcomers alike – here you can catch the likes of Detroit pioneering techno legend Derrick May, Russian head-spinning techno producer Nina Kraviz, glitchy soundscape savant Jon Hopkins and groovedriven acid house expert KiNK, just to name a few. An inner city shakedown never sounded so appealing.

The Black Madonna + Honey Dijon Printworks 13 October

ReBalance Sessions #1 Old Blue Last 22 October

EVENTS

DJ Boring Phonox 19 October

MIRA Festival Barcelona MIRA Festival Barcelona DJ Stingray, Yves Tumor, Avalon Emerson Fabra I Coats, Barcelona 8-10 November If you think the world doesn’t need yet another festival celebrating the intersections of music, technology and art, think again, because MIRA Festival is essential. Originally founded in Barcelona in 2011, the eclectic festival is bringing another packed-out year of audiovisual shows, digital art installations, 3D and 4D sound shows, presentations and educational workshops. Catch Swiss DJ Aïsha Devi’s notoriously tense A/V show; watch Tennessee native Yves Tumor seamlessly blend R&B grooves with dissonant, warped noise; dance along to a head-pounding set from Detroit legend DJ Stingray. Whatever you choose to do, you can rest assured it’s going to push the boundaries of music and art as you know it.

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Speedy Ortiz The Garage 17 October

Khruangbin Roundhouse 24 October

Blood Orange O2 Shepherds Bush Empire 29 October

SHYBOI The Pickle Factory 19 October

From Dev Hynes’ early days shredding in dance-punk outfit Test Icicles to his saccharine indie bops as Lightspeed Champion, he has been an iridescent force in experimental British music. His project as off-kilter R&B crooner Blood Orange, however, has been his mainstay since 2011. Since then, he has been confronting important social issues like institutionalised racism, police brutality and queerphobia through his hazy neo-soul sound. He’s collaborated with Solange, A$AP Rocky, Skepta and produced hits for Sky Ferreira and Kylie, all while never compromising his leftfield take on pop-leaning music. If any of his previous live shows are anything to go by, you can expect special guests, and most importantly, a true sense of community.

Discwoman, the New Yorkbased creative collective at the forefront of the fight for gender equality in electronic music, are master curators.

Always elevating non-male DJs, producers and bookers, they roll with some of the best talent in the game. Discwoman crew member SHYBOI, the queer Jamaican-born, Brooklynbased DJ, producer and visual artist is heading to The Pickle Factory for a high-intensity club workout of glitchy breakbeats, hip-hip and uptempo kuduro, all nodding to the outlaw culture she’s inspired by. A night for the rave crew.

Men I Trust Oslo Hackney 4 October

Yussef Dayes Scala 2 October

Connan Mockasin Barbican Centre 3 November It’s no secret that Connan Mockasin is indie’s resident weirdo. From his languid, almost cartoon-like vocals to his soulful spin on lo-fi, wonky pop, the New Zealand native has always done things his own way. Ten years deep in the game, he’s about to put out Jassbusters – his fourth studio album under the moniker Connan Mockasin – which is a sonic extension of a strip of comics and short films he made 20 years ago. The film is centred around an eccentric pack of high school music teachers played by Connan and his band, who will give a live debut to new songs off the album. The rest is a surprise.

Expect things to get freaky.

IDLES O2 Kentish Town Forum 18 October

Sons of Kemet KOKO 23 October

Snail Mail The Dome 25 October

Love International presents: Powder Five Miles 13 October

Mahalia Electric Brixton 11 October

WHP curated by Daniel Avery Warehouse Project, Manchester 20 October Daniel Avery has carved out a solid place for himself in the UK’s electronic scene. Since his debut record Drone Logic arrived in 2013, he’s taken his eclectic acid techno blasts to dancefloors all around the world. Fleeting between big room energy sets and more muted, atmospheric soundscapes, Avery’s taste for curation has remained unrivalled. Bringing that same expertise to Manchester’s beloved Warehouse Project, he’s presenting a line-up of Berlin techno legend Marcel Dettmann, soulful selector Daphni, wizzy newcomer Avalon Emerson and many more. You won’t want to miss this.

Le Guess Who? Sons of Kemet, Pan Daijing, The Breeders Utrecht, Netherlands 8-11 November

Hot Chip Megamix Dreamland Margate 27 October

This consistently credible, city-wide festival is looking especially appealing this year with a line-up part curated by UK jazz torchbearer Shabaka Hutchings, Devendra Banhart, radical poet-rapper Moor Mother and the RVNG Intl label. Together, these adventurous minds have booked a programme that includes Hutchings’ Sons of Kemet band (who are bringing four drummers with them, may we add), The Breeders, South African duo FAKA, Los Angeles folk artist Jessica Pratt, Mica Levi collaborator Oliver Coates and Eartheater alongside grunge mainstays Mudhoney, serpentwithfeet and Baltimore rap experimentalist JPEGMAFIA. This will open your mind.

Nakhane Village Underground 15 October

Pan Daijing Barbican Centre 7 October

EVENTS

Presented by the masterminds behind beloved Croatian electronic festival Love International, a stellar line-up is pulling up to new North London jaunt, Five Miles. The club, quietly tucked inside an industrial estate in Seven Sisters, is hosting a night with Powder, the Japanese producer and DJ that stole the show at this year’s festival.

Gliding through glistening textures, rich melodies and club rhythms, Powder’s wide range of influences – deep house, minimalist composition and J-pop – will no doubt manifest into a larger-than-life set. Don’t miss it.

FRI 05 OCT

FRI 02 NOV

SAT 17 NOV

ANJUNADEEP A-Z [LIVE] BEN BÖHMER DOM DONNELLY JODY WISTERNOFF LANE 8 PENELOPE YOTTO

COMMON GROUND ABOVE & BEYOND OLIVER SMITH SPENCER BROWN SOLD OUT

GLITTERBOX DIMITRI FROM PARIS THE SHAPESHIFTERS MELON BOMB SOLD OUT

SAT 13 OCT

FRI 02 NOV

JUST JACK HALLOWEEN: RETURN TO THE LASERDOME BEN UFO DJ BONE TAMA SUMO VLADIMIR IVKOVIC BUFIMAN TOM RIO JETHRO DAN WILD

SUN 18 NOV

BUGGED OUT PRESENTS: TO THE RHYTHM EROL ALKAN [ALL NIGHT LONG]

FRI 19 OCT

ANNIE MAC PRESENTS ANNIE MAC GERD JANSON HORSE MEAT DISCO KRYSTAL KLEAR HAAI

SAT 20 OCT

RTRN II JUNGLE [DJ SET] CHASE & STATUS & RAGE DILLINJA CONDUCTA BROCKIE & DET & SKIBADEE SAXON SOUND CRITICAL IMPACT & MORE SOLD OUT

FRI 26 OCT

SAT 03 NOV

IN:MOTION PRESENTS [LIVE] DEADMAU5 & SPECIAL GUESTS SOLD OUT

FRI 23 NOV

IN:MOTION PRESENTS KRAFTWERK RE:WERK [ LIVE AV SET ] MAX COOPER

FRI 23 NOV

THE BLAST HALLOWEEN CARNIVAL OF THE DEAD SHY FX CASISDEAD KAHN & NEEK CHIMPO & KILLA’S ARMY SICARIA SOUND SPECIAL GUEST CHILDREN OF ZEUS KASRA ED RUSH ENEI FOREIGN CONCEPT HALOGENIX HYROGLIFICS KLAX B2B SHYUN NINA LAS VEGAS SHARDA & MORE

HOSPITALITY HALLOWEEN HIGH CONTRAST CAMO & KROOKED DANNY BYRD FRED V & GRAFIX METRIK KINGS OF THE ROLLERS UNGLUED [JUNGLE SET] S.P.Y B2B NU:TONE B2B HIGH CONTRAST RANDALL FABIO [FULL CYCLE SET] KRUST DYNAMITE GQ & MORE SOLD OUT

SAT 27 OCT

KNEE DEEP IN SOUND HOT SINCE 82 [LIVE] KINK MELÉ FORT ROMEAU LA FLEUR PBR STREETGANG CHRISTOPHE

SUN 28 OCT

IN:MOTION & GOLDENVOICE PRESENTS [LIVE] GEORGE FITZGERALD + SANDUNES

FINAL TICKETS AND MORE INFO:

LOVE INTERNATIONAL [DJ SET] TODD TERJE MOODYMANN JOY ORBISON CRAIG RICHARDS B2B NICOLAS LUTZ JOSEY REBELLE SAOIRSE RUF DUG DAVE HARVEY CHRISTOPHE ELLIE STOKES

SAT 24 NOV

CLAPTONE AND THE MASQUERADE CLAPTONE & SPECIAL GUESTS

FRI 09 NOV

SULTA SELECTS [4 HRS] DENIS SULTA VIRGINIA SKATEBÅRD [LIVE] LEO POL SALLY C CROMBY SOLD OUT

THU 29 NOV

GA TWENTY ONE [LIVE] GROOVE ARMADA & SPECIAL GUESTS SOLD OUT

FRI 30 NOV

SAT 10 NOV

DRUMCODE ADAM BEYER ALAN FITZPATRICK ENRICO SANGIULIANO ELLIE STOKES IDA ENGBERG LAYTON GIORDANI WEHBBA SOLD OUT

SAT 10 NOV

JUNGLE JAM CONGO NATTY RANDALL [JUNGLE SET] SERUM BENNY PAGE CHOPSTICK DUBPLATE DAZEE JUNGLE JAM DJS INJA NAVIGATOR JAKES

PERPETUAL PRESENTS [4 HRS] MACEO PLEX [4 HRS] DANNY DAZE

FRI 30 NOV

IN:MOTION PRESENTS [ ALL NIGHT LONG ] MR SCRUFF

SAT 01 DEC

RUN X PLAYAZ X DIMENSION: UK TOUR X V RECORDINGS DJ HYPE DJ HAZARD PROBLEM CENTRAL SUB ZERO B2B DJ LIMITED CRITICAL IMPACT ANNIX TYKE KINGS OF THE SHADOWS DIMENSION TURNO CULTURE SHOCK 1991 BENNY L D*MINDS SKANKANDBASS & MORE

BRISTOLINMOTION.COM

FRI 07 DEC CRUCAST SKEPSIS DARKZY BRU-C MR VIRGO TS7 WINDOW KID LAZCRU SPECIAL GUESTS FLAVA D P MONEY & MORE

FRI 07 DEC

FUSE ENZO SIRAGUSA ARCHIE HAMILTON SEB ZITO RICH NXT ROSSKO

SAT 08 DEC

CRACK MAGAZINE JEFF MILLS MOTOR CITY DRUM ENSEMBLE COURTESY UMFANG POWDER GIDEÖN IZABEL DANIELLE FACTA DAVID J BULL

SAT 15 DEC

IN:MOTION PRESENTS PATRICK TOPPING [ ALL NIGHT LONG] SOLD OUT

WED 26 DEC

SASASAS PRESENTS: NXT LVL - BOXING DAY SASASAS THE PROTOTYPES LOGAN D & EKSMAN BASSBOY MAMPI SWIFT B2B CRISSY CRISS DISTRESS SIGNAL: K MOTIONZ, SIMULA, KANINE & IC3 AFT SHOWCASE THE BLAST DJS CARASEL TEXAS

SAT 29 DEC

OPEN TO CLOSE [ ALL NIGHT LONG] SKREAM MELLA DEE ALEX VIRGO

MON 31 DEC

NEW YEARS EVE TO BE ANNOUNCED

TUE 01 JAN

NEW YEARS DAY TO BE ANNOUNCED

Words: Shakeena Johnson

In the bougiest Nando’s in Soho, HoodCelebrityy reveals her mantra for success while digging into chicken and chips. “You’ve got to believe in yourself, everything starts with you. You gotta make you pop because no one is gonna do it for you,” she says of her hustler persona. “When I first came to New York from Jamaica, I never expected to be living the life I am now.”

027

Rising: HoodCelebrityy

As we speak, that life includes touching down in London for her live UK debut at Notting Hill Carnival.

HoodCelebrityy, real name Tina Pinnock, is a perfect fit for an event borne from a melting pot of cultures. Born in Jamaica’s Portmore neighbourhood, Pinnock moved to New York when she was 12 years old and credits her cross-cultural upbringing for her incendiary sound – a blend of dancehall, trap and reggae.

Living in The Bronx, she also formed a tight friendship with a young Belcalis Almanzar, now known to the world as Cardi B. The stars rose together: Pinnock jumped on Cardi B’s song Back It Up and Cardi returned the favour by featuring on Pinnock’s Island Girls. Nurtured and inspired by her close-knit community, Pinnock’s stage name suggests that HoodCelebrityy isn’t just an artistic outlet, but an ode to her home.

Sounds Like: Dancehall riddims over hard trap beats Soundtrack For: Power anthems for kicking men to the curb File Next To: Stefflon Don / Popcaan Fun Fact: HoodCelebrityy used to play the violin in high school and meditates daily

This summer, Pinnock repped her neighbourhood by performing at Summer Jam, Hot 97’s iconic hiphop festival. “It was a big thing for me and my family, just seeing how New York supports me. Summer Jam was something I always wanted to do.”

And while the epic glory of Summer Jam might stand in stark contrast with the view from the stage at this year’s mud-splattered Carnival, Pinnock was hyped over the rowdy crowd dutty wining in the pouring rain. “People out here in the UK just don’t give a fuck, everybody’s just living their best life,” she tells me, before doubling down on her ambition. “My hope is for dancehall to be the biggest sound in the world.”

EVENTS

Where to Find Her: @HoodCelebrityy

The Pickle Factory

Autumn 2018

05—10—18

Bruce Hessle Audio Album Launch with Pearson Sound, Danielle, Bruce

06—10—18

Commercial Suicide with Very Special Guest, A.I, Klute, Dom & Roland, Hydro, War, Flava. Hosted by: Agman Gora, Voice MC

12—10—18

The Pickle Factory with Night Moves (Jane Fitz & Jade Seatle), Joe Delon, Gwenan

19—10—18

The Pickle Factory × Josey Rebelle with Shyboi, Brassfoot.

Hosted by: Marshmello

20—10—18

Cosmic Slop

26—10—18

The Pickle Factory × I Love Acid with DMX Krew Live, Carl Finlow Live, Kirsti, Posthuman

27—10—18

The Pickle Factory × 20 Years of Ghost with Slimzee (00–04 Set), El-B, Benny Ill, Perception

02—11—18

Body Hammer with Special Mystery Guest

09—11—18

The Pickle Factory with Margaret Dygas, Junki Inoue

16—11—18

The Pickle Factory × Timedance with Batu b2b Simo Cell, Deena Abdelwahed, Lurka

17—11—18

Neighbourhood with Sunil Sharpe, Forest Drive West b2b Tasha

23—11—18

The Pickle Factory 3rd Birthday with Donato Dozzy, Very Special Guest, Hamish & Toby

24—11—18

Heels & Souls with Mark Seven, DJ Slyngshot & Brudenell Groove

30—11—18

The Pickle Factory with XDB b2b Jane Fitz All Night Long

01—12—18

The Pickle Factory with Nicolas Lutz All Night Long

14—12—18

The Pickle Factory x Tangent with John Gómez & Nick The Record All Night Long

15—12—18

The Pickle Factory with Josey Rebelle All Night Long. Hosted by: Ragga Twins

21—12—18

The Ghost & Friends Christmas Party

www.thepicklefactory.co.uk

picklefactoryE2

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Discover

Pearl De Luna

What were you doing with your spare time as a teenager?

19-year-old West Londoner Finn Foxell has been making lo-fi hip-hop since the tender age of 16, independently releasing music with his tight crew of up and coming London producers and MCs, which includes the likes of Lord Apex and South London’s DC Scribbla. Foxell’s thick, deadpan British vocals layer over slow-moving, melancholic beats à la Yung Lean for a cloudy listen that never relents its razor-sharp London wit – you only have to look as far as 2018 single Cool. Bless. Safe. to see it for yourself.

File Next To: Yung Lean / Loyle Carner Our Favourite Tune: Cool. Bless. Safe.

Where To Find Him: soundcloud.com/finnfoxell

File Next To: Erykah Badu / Banks Our Favourite Tune: London Lullaby Where To Find Her: soundcloud.com/pearl-de-luna

Sunken

Peluché Peluché are infectious. And joyful, and unpredictable, and straight-up weird. The London trio – made up of friends Rhapsody Gonzalez, Amy Maskell and Sophie Lowe – are mixing funk, dub, psychedelia and erratic pop to create a sound that is entirely distinctive to them. Spidery guitars, jazz-tinged drums and hushed, Cocteau Twin-esque vocals characterise their repertoire, evoking sensations of bewilderment and attunement in equal measure.

File Next To: ESG / Neneh Cherry Our Favourite Tune: Swim Where To Find Them: soundcloud.com/pelucheband

Contributing to the much welcomed laidback, soul-jazz renaissance of South London is 17-year-old Poppy Billingham, aka Sunken. A new face on the scene, Billingham explores tentative romance and self-love in track Over The Days, all through the filter of toasty, embracing synths, minimal guitar work, mellow saxophones and soothing falsetto melodies.

An ode to wistful longing and lazy evenings, Sunken is providing the perfect soundtrack to keep you warm this winter.

File Next To: Charlotte Day Wilson / Yazmin Lacey Our Favourite Tune: Swoon Where To Find Her: soundcloud.com/sunken-music

Sally C Belfast-born DJ and producer Sally C is a shining light in underground dance music.

Planting her DJ roots in Dundee, Scotland where she lived for five years, Sally C submerged herself in the local scene, running and playing parties at widely-loved club haunts The Reading Rooms and Sub Club. After relocating to Berlin in 2015, she’s continued to bring her timeless house cuts to capital stalwarts Griessmuehle, Chalet and ://about blank, infusing her sets with 80s and 90s tribal-influenced house and oddball breakbeat groovers. A promising rising selector.

File Next To: Denis Sulta / Brame & Hamo Our Favourite Mix: Vinyl Frühstuck Where To Find Her: soundcloud.com/sallycberlin

EVENTS

Finn Foxell

Pearl De Luna’s single London Lullaby bares it all. It’s a soulful, lulling hymn to the bustling, often-hostile city she spent her youth in, with one sparkling piano loop repeating over and over throughout the entire song – like a lullaby. The 22-year-old singer-songwriter, daughter of legendary rock photographer Dennis Morris, is a fresh face on the UK R&B scene, but she’s already demanding attention with her intimate sound. If you need a moment to step away from the madness, find comfort in this year’s debut EP Synesthesia.

A portrait of Chris

With her latest album, French pop star Christine and the Queens has transformed, summoning the swagger of a thousand heart-throbs to unlock a bold, seductive new persona

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Words: Sophie Wilkinson Photography: Michelle Helena Janssen Styling: Ade Udoma Stylist's Assistant: Euloge Zola

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“Masculinity needs to be defused. It all needs to fall down and be rebuilt”

The mood in Salle Pleyel is serious as we wait for Chris – the musician born Héloïse Letissier – to debut her sophomore album, also called Chris.

Phones have been confiscated, drinks are banished from the auditorium and, like waiting staff at a posh restaurant, ushers personally guide ticket-holders to seats at the slick wood and slateblack Paris venue. The event feels like it’s taking place inside a Bang & Olufsen speaker.

But just when the formality seems too much, the opening synth burst of Comme Si, a luminous and coolly euphoric track deserving a spot opening a forgotten John Hughes film, sends vibrations through the crowd.

Chris and her dancers – the troupe (LA)HORDE – compete with each other, and she charges about with all the scamp and puckish charm of an adolescent boy. Strutting in whopping white sneakers, she chucks her bravado about like she’s Back to the Future-era Michael J Fox. Or Leonardo DiCaprio in Romeo + Juliet, or Justin Bieber, or James Dean, or Michael Jackson circa Off the Wall, or any other passionate heart-throb at his peak.

Halfway through the show, she undoes her billowing red shirt just enough to expose a simple black bra, and the audience whoops, before checking themselves and laughing at their own boorishness.

It wasn’t always like this, Chris explains a week earlier in an east London restaurant. The first Christine and the Queens album – 2014's Chaleur Humaine – sold one million copies worldwide and attracted over 194 million streams by January 2017. Alongside critical acclaim, and appreciation for its subversive and candid exploration of gender, sex and humanity, it won Chris four Victories de la Musique, awarded by the French government’s department for culture.

Chris, though, is far more “grounded”.

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“There is a physicality… it’s sweat and muscles,” Chris tells me, fresh from Crack Magazine’s cover shoot in a long-sleeved black T-shirt with a dogcollar neck. “Before, I was dreaming of being nothing – not in a bad way!”

At this point, she pauses, adopts a high-pitched hyperactive squeal and exclaims, “She just wants to be nothing, a mist!” before resuming: “the

second one brought me back here.”

She taps her fingertips so hard on the table between us, her knuckles whiten.

Chris is reminiscent of early Madonna, both Janet and Michael Jackson, Cameo, Shannon and Chaka Khan, themselves influenced by the hipthrusting power of tough basslines and 80s drum machines. The result is a record drenched in sexuality, supercharged with desire. It’s a bold step away from her former presence – all languid movements and hazy vocals – and it feels iconic.

This new incarnation of Chris represents a willingness to wrench gender from its two fixed binaries.

Letissier has long referred to herself as genderfluid and much has been made of the new album’s promotional material. In some instances, the “tine and the Queens” is scratched out to leave a simple “Chris”, and visuals feature a fresh-faced Chris frowning, in neutral, functional shirts, vests, heavy tweed coats and baggy trousers. She’s got “masculine energy”, “big dick energy”, and, according to her, she is “obsessed with the idea of macho”.

This is revolutionary in the context of her French homeland. In France, attitudes towards women’s sexual freedom have been hotly contested, most recently evidenced by an open letter attacking #MeToo. Co-signed by 100 of the country’s most iconic entertainers and businesswomen, it highlighted the reactionary views of France’s cultural elite, who seem to relish having views as retrograde as the manual doors on the Parisian Métro. Does Chris take pleasure in confronting such reactionary views on womanhood? She’s not exactly Dan Bilzerian, but somehow her butchness, in this landscape, is still disarming.

“I’m surprised at how easily disarming it is, because I don’t think I look overly…” Chris raises her hands into Popeye fists and flexes, adding: “and people took the haircut as a statement of ultimate masculinity. But I was like, 'Dude, I just have short hair.’”

Chris’s hair looks kind of Mia Farrow today anyway, I suggest. She breezes past the compliment, getting straight to the theory: “Because I’m talking about gender and its construction, at

Jacket: Michael Browne Top: Stylist's own Trousers: Acne Studios

The finest example of this on the record is Damn (What Must a Woman Do), an ear-wormy Yazoo-does-dubstep ode to lust. On it, she whispers “Let me taste on a butch babe in LA” before her bluesey vocals wail “Damn what must a woman do/ Para follarse” – the latter words translating in Spanish as “for a fuck”. However, when Chris performs this at Salle Pleyel, she prowls after her male dancers, pulling them in close then pushing them off, taunting them with her assertive sexuality. Does Chris – who’s watched Netflix comedy special Nanette, where Hannah

please don’t tell me it’s marketing, darling,” she camply explains, drawling the ‘darling’. “Thank you very much, bye bye!”

“A rebrand? Masculinity needs to be defused. It’s not even about rebranding, it all needs to fall down and be rebuilt and restructured.”

“When you are an outcast, queer, different,” she continues, “you get to defuse violence by getting to know where it comes from. Even now when I’m talking about the album, dudes can be aggressive with me. I’m like, ‘My desire, unabashedly exposed, is an aggression to you? It’s not about me, it’s about how I make you feel… it was about what I represent.”

The video for Girlfriend, where a lithe and muscular Chris scrambles around the construction site of a 1930s skyscraper, pestering the men working on the erection of this giant phallic tribute, now clicks into place. Perhaps “rebrand” is too much of a marketing term, I concede. “Sometimes people in France tell me, ‘enough about the gender marketing’,” Chris replies. “But I was born having to think about that, having to think outside the norm. So

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Gadsby says she dresses like a man because “you guys need a good role model” – think masculinity needs a rebrand?

Chris is waging a gendered landgrab on all the bros by producing her music and pinching qualities that have, arbitrarily, been reserved for them. The result is liberation: as she straps into a Mapplethorpe retrospective’s worth of bondage leathers in the video for 5 Dollars, she gets to possess her own sexual objectification, snarling at herself in the mirror, pointing angry little gun fingers at herself, like DeNiro in Taxi Driver. “I actually feel more comfortable with patriarchal tropes, with them, we [women] can take more space, we can be desiring without being shamed. And if I get to explore them as a woman, I’m not turning into a man, I’m just using that theatricality for myself, because why should they be the only ones using it?”

There is a limit, though. As the tragic video for Doesn’t Matter shows, a woman can play along with the boys, but it doesn’t mean they’re given the same rules. The man she prances about with eventually hurts her, and all she can do is rage at the injustice.

Chris, who grew up in Nantes with a teacher and lecturer for parents, first wanted to make it in theatre, but was ejected from the École normale supérieure de Lyon for insubordination after defying a tutor who insisted women couldn’t direct. “It’s not me being aggressive,” she says, calmly but quickly. “If me just saying it loudly is aggression to some people, it means that we have lots of work to do.” So she started making music in 2011 with her folksy, piano-heavy debut, the self-released EP Miséricorde, and from then on, it was all on her terms.

“Sometimes it’s hard, because you know you’re going to sound like a bossy bitch."

“The great thing women have to unlearn – and it’s not our fault – is the idea of never displeasing. It’s like a fucking disease that we have, especially when we want to assume power. Getting rid of that was a big challenge for me because I want to be nice.” She pauses, then adds, in her clipped English: “To a point.”

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one point people asked me if I was transitioning. I was like, ‘Have you seen the breasts on the poster?’ I just have short hair as a woman.” Femininity, to Chris, is “so small and easy to break out of. Just like masculinity!”

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Crop Top: Stylist's own Trousers: Acne Studios

Though Chris is like Madonna, the eponymous 1983 record, both musically and in the way it tugs on the constraints put on female sexuality, lyrically, it goes far darker. On The Walker, she sings of bleak isolation, Doesn’t Matter is about death and female vulnerability, and Goya Soda is based on a Goya painting of Saturn eating his son. Even 5 Dollars, with that kinky video, has the refrain “I grieve by dying every night, baby”.

Jacket: Alex Eagle Trousers: Acne Studios Trainers: Magnum

“Chaleur Humaine was sad, sad, sad, and Chris is more like, sadness is a weird thrill and it sets you into motion,” Chris explains, keen that she isn’t depicted as maudlin. “On Doesn’t Matter, it’s precisely because the beat is aggressive and walking tall and being tough that I can allow myself to be completely vulnerable.”

The record is a celebration, then, of all of life’s emotions, especially, “extreme sadness and extreme horniness. This album is very much #AllTheFeels. And the stamina gives me the right set-up to be exhilarated by feels. I am very much in love and in lust – I wouldn’t be at this table otherwise.”

Plus, who says it’s all about her anyway? She cites her namesake, Chris Kraus, who noted in her 1997 book I Love Dick, that women aren’t considered capable of writing through others’ points of view in the way men can. “Even in art women are refused the apersonal, meaning that I’m writing or you’re writing and if you’re a woman it [must be] true, because we’re incapable of sublimating anything in the imagination.”

“People say to me, ‘Don’t you think you’re giving away too much of your private life?’ And it’s like, ‘How can you tell it’s even private? Don’t you think I’m a good storyteller?’”

In Paris, as Chris stomps around the Salle Pleyel, she’s telling a new story.

This time as the leader of a pack of lads. Together with Chris, they look like Peter Pan’s lost boys by way of West Side Story. As they bop and lurch and swagger, arms crossed, brows furrowed, they make a beautiful mockery of masculinity’s sincerity, the pageantry of its toughness. And the crowd erupts.

Chris is out now via Because Music

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Chris featured Perfume Genius as the only guest on her 2014 debut album, and has maintained this collaboration quota on Chris, only inviting LA funk producer Dâm Funk to work with her.

Would features be more appealing if she could produce others’ records, rather than slot into the mould of a young female artist singing over a male producer’s backing track? “It depends on the person. I think it’s easier for me to collaborate when I’m friends [with the other artist]. I still have self confidence issues and issues with shyness. I’d love to write a monologue for Madonna. I’ll never ask her and it’s incredibly pretentious for me to say, but I see theatricality there – it’s more than just writing a song!”

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“Extreme sadness and extreme horniness. This album is very much #AllTheFeels”

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BROCKHAMPTON’S DREAMS CAME TRUE MUSIC

Introduction: Douglas Greenwood Photography: Damien Maloney Styling: Ashley Guerzon Studio: Forge LA

From top-left, clockwise: Jon Nunes, Joba, Romil Hemnani, Kevin Abstract, Bearface, Matt Champion, Merlyn Wood, Jabari Manwa, Dom McLennon, Robert Ontenient

San Marcos, Texas has all the hallmarks of a sleepy American town: a library, a university, a shopping mall or two. It also happens to be the adopted birthplace of the greatest boyband on earth.

Four years ago now, a pack of young men from across the sunscorched states centred on the city, creating a musical project that – whether they knew it or not – would eventually become one of the most talked about hip-hop groups of the decade. Their name is Brockhampton, and they’re America’s strongest creative brotherhood.

Since that moment, kids of the internet and hip-hop heavyweights alike have embraced them: a group that steadily rose from their humble beginnings on a Kanye West fan forum (where founding member Kevin Abstract put a call-out for musicians wanting to start a band) to tearing up Coachella and performing primetime TV. Their ascent is particularly profound thanks to Abstract’s gay identity.

The 22-year-old’s lyrics are laden with allusions to the man he loves and flagrant fellatio gags, but they also dwell on the pressures of being ‘othered’ – like so many of the Brockhampton boys – by the environment he grew up in.

Now located in LA, they’ve closed the door on the past few years of hysteria (chronicled on 2017’s energetic and hookish Saturation album trilogy) and started a new chapter that sees them ruminating on sudden change: the recent removal of founding member Ameer Vann following accusations of sexual misconduct and signing a major label record deal.

Recorded at London’s Abbey Road Studios, the band’s fourth fulllength LP iridescence is a singular hip-hop record shaped by the emotions of young men occupying a scrutinising and unfamiliar spotlight. It’s complicated and incensed, experimental and sad, but after years of clambering their way to the top, Brockhampton finally know we’re listening. It’s time for everybody to take note.

ROMIL HEMNANI

“There is a lot of freedom. I get to live with my friends and do what we want all day. Obviously in the beginning it was a struggle because we were broke and worked jobs we didn’t want to work. But we made it here, we dropped everything, we left our whole lives [behind], let’s fuckin’ go all out. Leave it all in the music.

We have nothing to lose.”

Shirt and Shorts: Round Two Vintage

KEVIN ABSTRACT

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“We’ve had a little bit of time to reflect on our growth instead of making a bunch of fun stuff over and over. We’re trying to find a balance between fun and maturity.

It’s real life.”

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MATT CHAMPION

“Moving to San Marcos, I learned a lot about everything that year. We’d all moved in together and it was my first time moving out. Being with people made it a lot easier to make that switch. For me, I feel it was a lot of figuring out who I am – myself and musically. Having people around me who understood me that well, it was the perfect thing to happen to me.”

Jumpsuit: Dickies

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DOM MCLENNON

“I think Brockhampton is helping people see things exactly as they are. The identity that we represent revolves around transparency and honesty and sometimes that’s really abrasive and imperfect, and sometimes it’s really beautiful and clean.

I think we do a great job at capturing it all on this album.”

JOBA

"We all support each other. Growing up in therapy and having mental health issues – someone’s gonna come with just as much vulnerability and stand beside me on stage, so I don’t have to be the only one being honest about shit. We’re celebrating high moments, it goes hand in hand. We’re celebrating together.”

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Sweater: Round Two Vintage

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JABARI MANWA

“Before I’d even decided to be a music producer, it was just in me to write a lot of melodies and riddims. Now, it feels like I’m living a dream, everyday. I’m making money with my friends and I’m making music that impacts people. It’s everything I always wanted to do.”

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“We’d never met before, we all knew each other from the internet, and then we all met each other and now we’re best friends and live together. It’s genuine friendship. And it’s possible for this to happen again. There are kids who are meeting on subreddit, Twitter, group chats – kids are already inspired to start their own group.”

Sweater: Nike

BEARFACE

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MERLYN WOOD

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“My time in Ghana completely flipped my perspective on music. Because people in the country are much more involved in enjoying and creating music, it permeated through the culture everywhere. I learned that that’s what I want to do with my life – provide people with joy through music.”

Jonathan Castro

The designer marries traditional Peruvian motifs with high-intensity art

Words: Rebecca O’Dwyer

Survivals of the past - Cruel Letter exhibition in St. Petersburg, Russia

048 Illustrations for Borshch Magazine #3

Over a wide-ranging Skype conversation, Castro tells me the main idea guiding his work is to communicate a kind of “spirit”. What he wants to avoid making, by contrast, is something “made without love, without emotion”. His background might help put this into context: Castro spent his early childhood in the highlands of Peru, cared for by his grandparents.

Central to this remote existence, he tells me, was a deep and respectful connection to the natural world.

Properly embedded in this place, his grandparents – and particularly his grandmother, who he describes as “kind of a shaman” – knew the properties of every plant, what to seek out and what to keep at arm’s length.

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Unsurprisingly, it came as something of a shock when Castro later moved with his parents to Lima – a chaotic but thrilling megacity home to 10 million people. In the city, his role in a wider context, so obvious in his earlier

rural life, became much more difficult to trace: “too much information,” he says. Connection was finally grasped in the city’s heavy metal music scene, introduced to him by an older cousin.

As a tide of economic liberalisation threatened the fabric of Peruvian society, music was a way of expressing political dissent. Castro found community here, first as an observer and later as a musician. In his eyes, the scene’s DIY ephemera, fanzines and posters resembled propaganda for an alternative Peru.

In a sense, contemporary social media offers a similar way of locating yourself, socially, in a world that often feels vast and indifferent. For an enthusiast like Castro, it is just another way of accessing community. From his previous home in Peru, Instagram in particular allowed him to make contact with new artists, designers and clients – often ones who, before social media, would only have been accessible in person, if at all. In the past, this has involved working with Metahaven, the Dutch critical design collective much more interested in government surveillance and the cloud than finding the perfect type.

While he admires the purity of minimalism, it is definitely not Castro’s chosen path. His Peruvian heritage, his interest in animism, and his formation in Lima’s metal community, rings out in a colourful and maximalist approach to design. Whether he is creating posters, clothing, design identities or magazines, he is always trying to make objects that affect. The idea of a pure

style is replaced by something that is as “multi-vocal” as Castro’s home city – “it's not about style anymore,” he says, “it's about 'what do you want to say with that?’”

At its heart is this concept of community: that the person looking at his work will feel addressed by it, called to decipher it like his grandparents interpreted signs from the natural world. Recurring features – vivid and clashing fonts and colours, nods to traditional Peruvian textiles and design, bright swashes of flat gradient, along with elements of DIY metal and zine culture – are distilled into a language left for us to crack. “Nowadays,” he says, “it’s really difficult to talk about something that is really pure… nothing is pure any more.” For Castro, impurity is a much better fit. jonathancastro.pe Simple Things takes place in Bristol on 20 October

Titles for 88rising and Skechers China

Fans of boundary-pushing design will likely already be familiar with the work of Jonathan Castro. Born in Peru and now based in Amsterdam, Castro’s instantly recognisable work – flitting between animation, graphic design, music and video work – has appeared in collaborations with Boiler Room and Ssense, and in magazines like Borshch, Tunica and 032c. Taking his cue from 90s album sleeves and retro sci-fi book covers like William Gibson’s Neuromancer, he is also behind the kaleidoscopic, rave-inspired artwork for the upcoming Crack Magazinecurated Simple Things festival.

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Chaos/Entropy exhibition in Shanghai

“Nowadays, it’s really difficult to talk about something that is really pure... nothing is pure any more.”

Produced exclusively for Crack Magazine

e by Jonathan Castro - jonathancastro.pe

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The kaleidoscopic

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world of Courtesy

The DJ and labelhead injects the techno scene with colour and flair

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The DJ and labelhead injects the techno scene with colour and flair

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Words: Maya Roisin-Slater Photography: Julian Mahrlein

Colour plays a big part in Vestbirk’s relationship to sound. When she closes her eyes and listens to the music she plays, visions of bright shades float past. Many of Vestbirk’s sets and mixes evoke a similar feeling; they’re fast paced and splashy with an emphasis on rhythm. “More and more I like to play music that’s positive. I like to bring positive vibes into the [dance] floor,” she says.

scene. “I convinced a bar that we were actual DJs when we weren’t. We showed up and we didn’t even have headphones because we didn’t know you were supposed to bring your own headphones to the club,” she laughs.

Of course, Vestbirk has come a long way since then. The scene she came up through in Denmark was a tightknit one, with the capital city housing only half a million people. The sound that has emerged from that scene in recent years – blistering techno which averages a pace of 140 BPM – is one Vestbirk has been integral to introducing to the rest of the world.

Born in Greenland and raised in Denmark, Vestbirk made her name as a figurehead of Copenhagen’s quickly expanding dance music scene. She rose to prominence as part of the collective Apeiron Crew, going on to create techno label Ectotherm with fellow member Mama Snake, all the while fostering her reputation as an internationally known solo DJ.

“People are, like, there’s always been fast techno. Yeah, but when we first started releasing those Ectotherm records four years ago, you couldn’t find any contemporary techno that was 140 [BPM],” she says of her label’s early releases. Despite its successes in putting Denmark’s distinct sound on the map, the label closed up shop earlier this year, leaving space for Vestbirk to go out on her own and start a new project. Taking the Danish word for colour – Kulør – as its name, this new label will be exploring sounds that reach beyond the techno wheelhouse, with the curation of visual content given equal importance as the music.

But Vestbirk’s career wasn’t always this slick. In the beginning, odd jobs and flyering at local parties funded the equipment she needed to kickstart her career. “I spent my savings on a DJ setup and a friend gave me this book called How to DJ that had a guide on how to beatmatch. I didn’t know any DJs, I didn’t have a mentor at that point at all,” Vestbirk explains. Starting the duo Ung Flugt with her highschool bestie Johanna Schwensen, the pair set out to make their mark on Copenhagen’s music

Kulør’s first release will feature work from graphic design studio Spine Studios and photographer Fee-Gloria Groenmeyer. The fresh aesthetics are just one of the ways Vestbirk hopes to establish a modern identity for the project, far from the popular throwback approach. “For me, techno culture – and maybe broader electronic music, but particularly techno – is a monoculture that rewards people that copy other people,” she explains. “I want to do something that’s different.

I want it to look different, I’m not

interested in releasing electronic music that is still just a throwback.”

Where the jobs of label head and DJ intersect is in their emphasis on mediation. Both rely on pinpointing the best music from past and present and finding a relatable way to present these finds to a greater audience. Kulør’s first release, a compilation featuring the likes of Schacke, IBON and Sugar, is an homage to her city and embodies this connecting spirit. “Basically the whole [Copenhagen] scene is contributing more or less with a track.

That’s been a very wonderful thing to present to people and every single person on the release is a friend,” she says. “They’re running the scene; the Copenhagen scene is them. I’m good at getting shit done and I’m curating the whole affair but they’re making the music and they’re throwing the parties.”

The overwhelming respect Vestbirk has for her peers and collaborators is something that comes up again and again. She waxes poetic on artists she’s released or tracks she’s played with a visible passion. Throughout our interview she’s sure to mention key members in Copenhagen’s scene by name and before I leave asks me to go over the spelling of these names with her by email because she “wants to make sure the Copenhagen shout outs are right.” Community, after all, is a key part of why she’s pursued this career. “For me, being in music is about collaborating with people. I’m not a producer. I don’t DJ so I can sit in the studio. Every project I do is about how we can play with music together.”

Kulør 001 is released 11 October Courtesy appears at Club to Club, Turin, 1–4 November

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Sitting in the Berlin bedroom of DJ Najaaraq Vestbirk, better known by her stage name Courtesy, the presence of colour is notable. The sofa in the corner where we sit is a deep teal that matches the silk blouse she wears, tied at the front over blue trousers. Above the desk where her laptop sits – on a stand surrounded by hand-scrawled notes about visa applications – hangs a colourful wall tapestry, beneath our feet a similarly vivid woven carpet.

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“I want to do something that’s different. I’m not interested in releasing electronic music that is still just a throwback”

Words: Anna Tehabsim Design: Caterina Bianchini

On 11 November 2016, Yoko Ono tweeted a 19-second recording of herself crying out in agony. Following the US Presidential Election result, the caption read: “Dear Friends, I would like to share this message with you as my response to @realDonaldTrump love, yoko”. After demanding peace for over 50 years, Ono is – understandably – upset at the current state of things.

An avant-garde icon, Ono has traced various shifts in culture. Her unflinching activism, largely indivisible from her art, has found a new audience with each generation – from the ‘bed-in’ and War Is Over! signs to recent campaigning against fracking and calling out her critics’ ageism shortly after her 80th birthday (“You don’t get that way, with

Iggy for instance, a grand rocker, who is creating his own brand of Rock, just as I am,” she wrote on her Imagine Peace blog.)

Now 85, and staring down the barrel of our turbulent political landscape, Ono has channelled her rage and hope into Warzone, an album of ‘remakes’ – 13 reconstructions of her older material.

It even re-imagines Imagine, the John Lennon classic on which Ono was recently recognised as a co-writer. An urgent record taking in issues like the environment and feminism, Warzone crystalises her ongoing call for an end to global conflict. As she suggests in our email exchange, despite her dismay, Ono is still dreaming of a better world.

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058 What can we learn from Warzone?

You will learn what is happening now. Some people don’t think it’s happening.

Why did you choose to reconstruct your work for Warzone?

I was writing that when things in the world were not this crazy, most of us were not living right in the war zone, but we are now.

Things are changing for women in the arts. What’s left to change?

Everyday change is happening to all of us, and that is good. The accumulation of the change, by 10 years later, will be incredible.

We talk about the 60s and 70s as a period of revolution. What were the successes and failures of the era in your opinion?

We are animals that are always breathing, and after you breathe you have a second where you ponder.

That’s how we animals are.

In what ways do you think we’re currently going through a revolution now?

We are going through a revolution, but the change will last if we think in terms of evolution.

What do you think about social media – both its potential and its impact on our lives?

I think it’s beautiful and it was in our minds until it happened.

How do we give women more power in 2018?

Now that the situation is on all our minds it will not take too long for it to change for the better.

Do you believe in astrology? What can the stars teach us?

Astrology is a very delicate, difficult thing. You can interpret it in the wrong way as well, but I think that it’s very important.

Where do you turn to for inspiration these days?

I don’t turn to anything, it just comes to me.

How do you maintain peace and strength in a world with so much negativity?

PEACE is POWER. We need more of that power.

As one of your track titles asks, where do we go from here?

That’s why I put Woman Power right next to it. Woman Power is the answer.

Warzone is out 19 October via Chimera Music

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Brooke Candy Words: Marta Bausells Photography: Tom Blesch Styling / Direction: Jamie Shipton Set: Ash Halliburton Hair: Jake Gallagher Makeup: Mattie White

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Jacket (as blanket): Leeann Huang Thong: Stylist's own

Candy’s visual language is certainly supersaturated, and has been defined in ways including “stripper-meetsTumblr”. She defines her artistic persona as “surreal and bizarre”, but day to day she’s just about tattoos and “dirty t-shirts”. She’s just been to New Orleans, where she got 70 tattoos in four days. “Lately I’m obsessed with covering every inch of my skin in them.

I don’t know where it comes from.”

In many ways, her look matches her music. Both are constantly shapeshifting and experimenting. After leaving Sony last year, she is about to launch her EP War, a follow-up to her 2014's Opulence. We settle in for the interview at the same time as she is naked and being body-painted by two artists (the crew later decide to scrap that look) but she is focused and unfazed. Candy explains that she is loving this new phase as an independent artist: “I felt like my soul had been ripped away from me. I’ve always made art on my own and it was how I express my emotion. And when I signed, that was taken from me.

So I had nothing. I felt dead inside, for a while I hated waking up in the morning.”

Her latest single, My Sex, was written

by Charli XCX, MNDR and Peter Wade with Pussy Riot in mind, but when they played it for Candy, she “had a meltdown” and wanted to work on it.

She gave it her signature industrial-punk meets raw dance sound and added Mykki Blanco to the mix, on which Nadya from Pussy Riot already featured.

The result is a “sex-positive anthem” and a celebration of non-binary bodies, and the video is a 3D-animated visual explosion featuring sex dolls, latex, aliens and dildos.

Growing up in the suburbs outside of Los Angeles, Candy felt like a “psycho” she says. “The suburbs are more bizarre than any real strange subculture, because they’re so far removed from culture and very homogenised.”

She wasn’t really included in her peers’ activities, and she didn’t quite understand their bubble either. She then moved to San Francisco, where she came into her queerness. “I was surrounded by an amazing, strong, supportive queer community there that really helped raise me.” Moving back to LA around age 21 after that experience, she says she felt “more confident and free to explore different mediums of art.

I started to make music at the same time that I started to strip, which is bizarre. I was just really exploring myself!”

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Brooke Candy is all laughs. She’s wearing zebra crocs, a tiny pink skirt and cleaning gloves out of which sequin fringes cascade. She’s posing for the camera while holding and pretending to lick a cake with her own face on it, while her actual face and half-naked body are covered in shaving cream. For another artist this might sound eclectic or a bit on the nose, but for Candy it’s just an average Thursday. “Is this even a cake?

It fucking better be a cake,” she says.

Luckily it is: the entire crew eats it when that particular look is wrapped.

Candy rose to prominence when she starred in Grimes’ video for Genesis.

She explains that they ran into each other at a party at a warehouse her friend owned where “all the weirdos in LA dressed up, got wasted and made art.” The night they met, Candy “was dressed as a robot for no reason, with long braids, and [Grimes] came up to me and was like ‘dude, you look so crazy’ and a month later she texted me one night and asked me to be in the video, which was shooting a day later.”

Right now, she is excited by porn – “I prefer to talk more about porn than my music!” – and she’s just directed a queer porn film for PornHub. It’s inspired by 70s porn, an era she wants to bring back. “It was more decadent, kind of cheesy, there was a plotline, and it was more aesthetically pleasing. Now, no one cares: 'we’re going to film in the Valley with a handheld camera and that’s all the public’s going to get'.”

In line with the recent wave of ‘ethical porn’, the film, which is corny and fluffy in an unironic and sexy way, feels part of the “visual activism” Candy says she aspires to do by centering queer bodies and stories. She enlisted a crew of visual artists, none of whom had done it before either, and it was, she says, “the most therapeutic, bizarre and creatively fulfilling thing I’ve ever done. Making that porn, I felt like I was living in harmony, like it was my purpose. I’m already talking about making a sequel.”

Dress and Jacket: Lado Bokuchava Shoes: Yeezy

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My Sex is out now via WonderSound Records

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Top and Skirt: George Keburia Gloves: Adriana Hot Couture Sunglasses: Poppy Lissiman

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Gloves and Skirt: Adriana Hot Couture Earrings: Tatyana Yan

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Dismantling dance music’s boys club

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH SMIRNOFF The Black Madonna

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How can peer groups help bridge the gap for women in electronic music?

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Words: Niloufar Haidari

These changes are driven in part by engineered peer groups such as the Smirnoff Equalising Music campaign, of which The Black Madonna is a key participant. Set up last year to combat sexism in the music industry, the initiative is a three-year campaign for gender equality on club and festival line-ups by 2020, following female:pressure's bi-annual survey which found only 19% of headliners are female. The mentoring programme at the heart of the campaign – with mentors including Peggy Gou, Honey Dijon, Artwork, and Nastia – is an effort to bridge the gap.

The programme gives 10 aspiring young women a chance to gain first-hand advice from successful figures. For one of the mentees, DJ and producer Jade Cox, it offered the chance to play her tracks for Honey Dijon and receive feedback, along with the confidence boost of Honey

playing one of those tracks during her closing set at a Barcelona festival.

For Josie (Jay Carder), who played Snowbombing alongside her menteepair Eva (Crystaltips) a mere week after being accepted into the programme, she received support from mentor Artwork when her gig was suddenly cancelled. “I messaged him, 'what would you do in this situation?' and he made me feel so much better. Having a mentor there to tell you it's fine was so helpful.”

A word that comes up again and again during a roundtable discussion with the mentees is confidence, arguably the most important benefit of the scheme.

“It goes back to validation,” says Alexis, whose mentor is Peggy Gou. “Having talented people behind you definitely boosts your confidence, especially with most of [the mentors] being powerful women.” Jaguar, mentored by The Black Madonna, agrees: “Because most of the time you are surrounded by dudes, it’s quite intimidating. The fact that all the mentees are girls, being in this room now feels very welcoming.”

For Alice (Kiia), who identifies lazy promoting (male promoters booking their male friends) as a major setback for women within the scene, the connections made have been invaluable. The Black Madonna is also quick to point this out: “Most men benefit from mentorship naturally, in an organic way. On the other side of that there is gate-keeping and boundaryenforcing. Mentorship, peer groups, all of these are essential components of

learning and practice, and there's no reason we shouldn’t benefit from them too.”

In October the acts will play alongside their mentors at a Smirnoff Equalising Music event at Printworks London.

They’re all – obviously – excited, if a little nervous. “All 10 of us are gonna be there, it’s a celebration of the whole scheme,” says Jaguar. Alexis’ parents have bought tickets to come and see her play. “It’s a venue that I've partied at a lot, and to be on the other side of it... it somehow feels right?” muses Josie.

“I'm just so grateful for the opportunity,” she adds, and everyone in the room murmurs their agreement. They might be anxious, but Nastia has high hopes for the talent. “After spending two days with the girls,” she says, “I believe our future is in a good hands.”

Smirnoff Equalising Music Presents takes place at Printworks, London, 13 October

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As more doors unlock for women and marginalised groups in electronic music, it’s important to keep them wedged open. After all, what good is success if you can’t offer others a leg-up on your way to the top? For The Black Madonna, a fervent advocate for inclusivity in the scene, this strategy is essential in levelling the playing field.

“Mentorship is something I was always passionate about,” the DJ says. “I always had this theory that just like in any other field, if we were able to take a systematic approach to a systematic problem, that we would see changes, and we have.”

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH SMIRNOFF

“Mentorship, peer groups – all of these are essential components of learning and practice, and there's no reason women shouldn’t benefit from them too”

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Surroundings:

Words: Duncan Harrison Photography: Ben Brook

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The bass music aficionado channels the glorious noise of London

071 “I was born in Bournemouth. It was a dead town to be honest,” Flava D, real name Danielle Gooding, tells us in her London flat. “I was a hermit in my bedroom on my PC learning to make beats with Channel U on my TV. I didn’t have a job, so all I was doing was waking up, making beats and messaging MCs to ask for vocals.”

Completely self-taught, production skills weren’t the only hurdle which stood in Gooding’s way. “I didn’t come into the music industry with any contacts, I was just this random woman in a male-dominated scene.”

With a father obsessed with mid90s garage and a mother who kept Euphoria trance compilations in the glovebox, Gooding was always drawn

to inner-city clubs. She moved to London at the end of her teens and became sonically attuned to what she describes as “a more aggressive environment”. As well as connecting her with a musical family via the Butterz label, London gave Gooding a raw, grittier palette which still informs her sound.

Crack Magazine went to meet Gooding in Lewisham, South London. We spent the day walking through her neighbourhood for Surroundings – our collaborative series with Shure, where producers capture sounds from the cities they live in and incorporate them into brand new tracks. Gooding used vocals from a busker, noise from the DLR and recordings from Lewisham market to produce a highimpact UKG banger.

A self-made artist creating dynamic, imaginative British bass music, Gooding has now joined the ranks of the figureheads she once learned from.

“Whether I was getting paid or not, I still believe I would be in my bedroom

making music and putting it online,” she tells us, reflecting on the most essential driving force in her journey.

“I genuinely love making beats. It’s like self-medication. When I’m making my music I’m expressing myself and I need that to stay balanced.”

Flava D recorded her Surroundings using the MV88 microphone and the Shure Plus MOTIV app. Listen to Flava’s track and watch how she made it at CrackMagazine.net

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Flava D hustled hard to become one of the UK’s most respected DJs. Though she’s now operating across UK bass and grime’s top table (her recent 13week London club residency welcomed guests including Wiley, Heartless Crew and AJ Tracey), her musical journey began in slower settings.

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH SHURE

“I didn’t come into the music industry with any contacts, I was just this random woman in a maledominated scene”

Words: Rachel Grace Almeida

A true raver at heart, Marina Rubinstein – aka Dr. Rubinstein – has been masterfully constructing her own blend of hypnotic acid, 90s rave and louring techno since she relocated to Berlin from Tel Aviv in 2012. Making her mark on the German capital, sets at the likes of Berghain have brought her dynamic vision to life. Here she discusses the tracks that inducted her onto the dancefloor.

A track that reminds me of my formative clubbing experience I heard Speedy J’s Something for Your Mind (Exposure Remix) [Music Man Records, 1992] for the first time when I first saw Ron Albrecht closing Berghain.

I had just moved to Berlin and had just started DJing and Ron's set was so different to anything I’d heard… so ravey! He played so many old school acid tunes that I had just started discovering. Back then most people played straight forward techno and his style was so similar to my music taste, but with 20 years more experience than me. I love rare remixes of famous tracks like this. When you dance to them, it's like a surprise: you know it, but at the same time you don’t.

A track which reminds me of my early years DJing When I came to Berlin to visit around seven years ago, I went to Hard Wax

and bought six records. These were the first records I ever bought, and one of them was Renaissance by Vince Watson [Planet E, 2006]. It is a very beautiful and melodic long journey of a track. It’s even a bit cheesy at first, but the groove is just so good and makes everyone dance every time. I used to play this a lot when I just started DJing, and I always knew this track would work. I still love it!

A track I've been closing my sets with recently Generation Voiron [Craigie Knowes, 2018]. Voiron is one of my favourite artists at the moment. I love tracks with this kind of humorous vocal sampling. To me, it sounds like an old interview gone wrong. And the track itself sounds so epic with really powerful 90s-style UK breaks, floating acid, techno moments and even a hoover! A perfect ending for an intense techno set.

A perfect track for a summer set Sweet Sanctuary [3024, 2016] is such a beautiful, melodic, breaky, and melancholic track from Doms &

Deykers, a collaboration between Steffi and Martyn. It is so timeless, you can barely tell exactly when or where it was made. Perfect material for the very end of a closing set, Sunday morning sunshine vibes!

A track I would like played at my funeral Years ago I listened to DJ Sprinkles’ album Midtown 120 Blues [Comatonse, 2008] like a gazillion times, and Sisters I Don't Know What this World is Coming to was definitely my favorite. I just love this track and how it’s made. There is a vocal sample lifted from The Soul Children and Jesse Jackson’s I Don’t Know What this World is Coming to that floats and echoes in between flutes and a classic soul guitar riff. It’s emotional, not sad, but moody and political. It gives us a chance to think about life and the world around us.

Dr. Rubinstein appears at The Warehouse Project, Manchester, 20 October

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A track that made an impact on me growing up A lot of quality pop music in the 90s influenced me as a child. Obsession

by Army of Lovers [Ultrapop, 1991] was one of my favourites. In the music video, there were three bizarre, over the top characters that stood out to me.

Growing up, I felt different from all the other kids at school and was bullied a lot. Watching these complete weirdos being themselves and making such cool music spoke to me.

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My Life as a Mixtape: Dr. Rubinstein

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Crack Magazine at Bread&&Butter

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In August, Crack Magazine hosted the official afterparty for Bread&&Butter

by Zalando. Touching down in Berlin, we welcomed SOPHIE, Jimothy Lacoste, Jam City, Octavian and Munroe Bergdorf – figures who exist at the intersection of fashion and music. Though disparate in sound, their shared spirit of innovation and artistic independence shone through as they all delivered high-energy sets to the packed-out room. From SOPHIE airing unreleased Charli XCX cuts to Octavian conducting moshpits for Revenge, it was a night of fearless sounds from a cast of artists committed to leaving a mark.

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Festivals

Atlas Villa Janna, Morocco 30 August-2 September

Berlin Atonal returns for a sixth time to Kraftwerk, an abandoned power plant that once served the East German regions of the capital. Inside its cavernous main rooms, the harsh air of industry remains. Atonal can be a similarly harsh environment: artists know that here, they’re free to try things they might otherwise avoid, and few hesitate to push things into more challenging territory. High-concept club sounds, improvised electronics and punishing soundscapes all feature. It’s by no means an easy festival, but judging from the thousands that pile through the doors over the course of five nights, it’s one that’s needed and wanted.

A bill of 170+ artists is a daunting thing to summarise, but one thing that makes this year’s roster particularly exciting is the commitment to truly weirdo selectors, whose sets are a reminder that beat-matching is just a tool, and neither a requirement nor the hallmark of a good DJ. A great example is Netherlands-based DJ Marcelle: playing vinyl across three decks in Ohm, she creates a joyous mess of worldly, bass-driven sounds incorporating far-flung disco and DIY dance tracks. Then there’s Osaka-born Yousuke Yukimatsu, who brings avant-leaning bangers from across techno, electro, ambient and beyond.

He works at a furious pace, changing things up so quickly, frequently and unexpectedly that you get the impression it could all come off the rails at any minute. It’s exciting DJing.

Some standout live performances this year include Japanese duo Group A, who deliver the festival’s most merciless experience: dressed all in white, they conjure a storm of heavy-handed industrial rage, before mounting the tables to raise hell. But one brand new collaboration proves a weekend highlight, and it comes at the very end. It’s still not clear who comprises LABOUR – all I can offer is one of them looked a bit like William Basinski – but their performance closes the main stage. Together they blend harsh electronics with mournful, droning sax. On a few occasions, the performance is interrupted by a brief but thunderous blast of live drums, and the music changes direction. It's an erratic and stirring performance. As the musicians leave the stage, hidden above the crowd in the darkened stairwells and rafters, some 10 to 15 performers play call and response with each other, a chorus of blows that reverberates through Kraftwerk.

Stood in the dark, it’s the stuff of nightmares, and the perfect finish to what remains one of the city’s most important festivals: one that would never dare to insult the intelligence of its attendees. ! Xavier Boucherat N Frankie Casillo

Dimensions Fort Punta Christo, Croatia 29 August-2 September Unlike its sister festival Outlook, which – in recent years – has seen a shift from dubstep to grime, Dimensions curates a more multifarious range of genres. This is best felt at the opening concert: a line-up of Nubya Garcia, Nils Frahm and Kraftwerk isn’t your typical mash-up of artists, but they pull it off. All prolific in their fields, the first artist to kick things off is north London jazz musician Nubya Garcia.

Her music – a heady mix of neo-soul, electronic and gospel influences – lights up faces in the crowd. German pianist Nils Frahm’s performance switches from artful noodling on the grand piano to noodling with various synthesisers.

As night falls, a spaceship appears behind four podiums on stage to signal the arrival of man-machines Kraftwerk. Their post-human visuals are pulled directly from the 1970s: Space Odyssey-style graphics and computer readouts jump out of the stage with the aid of 3D glasses. Kraftwerk’s vision of the future ended decades ago, but listening to core tracks like The Robots, Autobahn and Tour de France feels like a time warp.

For the late-night sets, women reign strong. Helena Hauff packs out the stage with her industrial brand of neo-goth techno, while Peggy Gou delivers a staunch, heavy set. Unfortunately, the magic gets lost somewhere in a crowd of drunken chants, but a thriving party is recovered at the Moat Stage with Jlin, whose minimalist take on footwork takes on a new life between sparks of lightning from the thunderstorm above.

Dimensions, with its excellent programme and dreamy fortress location, remains a tour de force of curation. ! Gunseli Yalcinkaya N Perry Gibson

Field Maneuvers Undisclosed location near Oxford 31 August-2 September Good parties essentially boil down to two components: the music and the people.

The former is something organisers can mostly control. Programmers book DJs they trust to do what they do and feed off each other for a sense of coherence, and good equipment and imagination make the setting. The latter is slightly more elusive.

The team at Field Maneuvers, though, continue to pull off filling their “dirty little rave” with an intimate crowd of festival-goers. The staff, almost all volunteers, set the tone for this from the off. From bartenders spraying water over sweaty dancers to fire marshals resting on hay-bales and staff handing out sweets to people flagging on the sweltering Sunday, there’s a sense of being looked after and the result makes good on the festival’s preferred reference to punters as ‘family.’ Diversity plays a part, too – the line-up here makes a mockery of those that lean too heavily on cis white men and this translates to a sense of inclusivity and freedom.

Of the other component of a good party, Field Maneuvers also seemingly ran without fault. The main tent sounded crisp, loud and warm, with mesmeric visuals that complemented a programme of DJs that seemed to lean toward the deep and trippy.

Jane Fitz and Jade Seatle on Friday played a blinding set of this ilk on Friday night, as did Nick Höppner, who dropped Elles x Violet’s A Life Lived in Fear is Like a Life Half Lived (Etbonz Remix), shortly before striding the short distance to the Ambient tent.

There, the ambient intro to Djrum’s Showreel pt.3 was teased without flowing into its gabber and jungle finale. Sputnik’s Dome, however, was the festival’s ace up the sleeve, much like Glastonbury’s NYC Downlow, with smoke so thick you could barely see those in front of you, and a comedic amount of lasers. Here, 2 Bad Mice, Violet b2b Photonz and Eris Drew’s ascendant sets all rained down euphoric hardcore of the highest order.

Moments of pure magic came thick and fast this year, but the standout came when original rave don Mark Archer played Sunday afternoon tunes in the sun. Whilst it was tempting to lounge in the summer heat, the soundtrack to 2001: a Space Odyssey came rumbling from the speakers in all its glory. All around grins were spread wide and we dragged ourselves to our feet for the final evening and night ahead. We didn’t look back. ! Theo Kotz N Mike Massaro

Morocco and the Netherlands go way back – something Atlas Electronic has been a part of for the last three years.

The event takes place in the idyllic Villa Janna, an ecolodge dug out of the La Palmeraie oasis just outside Marrakech.

Usually functioning as a peaceful, pricey, 32-person Airbnb getaway, for four days the six-acre site becomes occupied by a 2000-strong mix of local and international artists and attendees spread over three distinct stages (plus a low-key ambient room which appeared at some point over the weekend).

The stunning Amphitheatre Stage takes most of the shine – a large but intimate space carved out of the earth. Lined with a patchwork of carpets, it was just as suited to taking in some of the earlier, more gentle performances as for the dance in the early hours. The Red Light Radio Stage, perched on the roof of the main building, allowed for spectacular views across the sprawling desert and was soundtracked by their notoriously eclectic schedule.

The highlight of the stage, and of the entire festival, was Asmâa Hamzaoui & Bnat Timbouktou, a six-piece group of women playing Gnawa – a traditional, spiritual music found throughout Morocco. Hamzaoui absolutely shreds the sintir (a three-stringed bass lute), while her quietly powerful voice is met in response by the others as they keep time with their handheld, cymbal-like krakebs.

The music is in turns both hypnotic and euphoric as the assembled crowd erupt into song, applause and, eventually, something close to moshing.

It can be hard to put into the words the uniqueness of the location, the feeling of inclusivity and the considered scope of the festival’s nature, but it’s easy to see that Atlas Electronic has built something truly unique out in the desert – shining a light on Morocco’s rich traditions while cementing itself on the international stage. ! Graeme Bateman N Tim Buiting

REVIEWS

Atonal Kraftwerk, Berlin 25-26 August

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Kode9 and Burial's Fabriclive 100 raises more questions than it answers Words: Josh Baines

Expectation, anticipation, hope – these are the things which ultimately cause us to feel that life is unjust. Our needs are rarely met, let alone our wants. The second we imbue anything, or anyone, with desire we are setting ourselves up for a fall. This, Johnson’s eponymous prince learns, is simply the way of the world. It cannot, and will not change.

Our enjoyment of art and culture is always tinged with the anxiety of anticipation. We want to feel monumentally moved in front of a Rothko, or to walk out of a late-night screening of a Jean-Luc Godard film seeing everything anew. This need for the transformative experience is, in essence, why those of us who’ve taken to clubbing spend the bulk of our weekends shuffling around dark rooms in various states of disrepair: perhaps it is here, tonight, that the longed-for sense of total release will materialise. And then it doesn’t. So we do it all over again.

Kode9 & Burial FABRICLIVE 100 Fabric

It isn’t often that a mix CD sends you scurrying back to the library to find a yellowing and sun-warped copy of Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, but then again it isn’t every day that a mix

by Kode9 and Burial hits the shelves.

With this final roll of the Fabriclive dice, the artists – one, head of the boundary-pushing label Hyperdub and the other, electronic music’s most mythologised figure – have offered listeners everything. The result is something easier to admire than to love, a mix that’s more intriguing than it is entertaining.

Fabriclive 100 was never going to be the epoch-defining moment in musical history that even the most cynical of us sort of wanted it to be. The idea of it was too rich, too heavy with possibility, to ever find itself living and breathing in reality.

It isn’t that it’s technically messy, or unimaginative, but the scope of what the pair are trying to achieve leads them to hopping between subaqueous gqom, brash electroclash, skittering jungle, slippery footwork, and a few weighty slabs of nosebleed rave warehouse wreckers. It feels, and

sounds, like a series of mini-mixes threaded through with the occasional slither of sodden ambience that Burial’s used as a sonic crutch for over a decade.

In this way, it implicitly asks the listener what they expect from a commercially released mix. Compared to other mixes in the fabric franchise – Michael Mayer’s lush microhouse trip on fabric 13, say, or the bludgeoning grime excursion that is Elijah & Skilliam’s Fabriclive 75 – it feels skittery and slightly unsure of itself. Certainly, few mixes released this year have raised so many questions. Doesn’t this, though, more accurately reflect the kind of set you’d expect to hear Kode9 himself play out? Why didn’t the mutated, heavenly gospel-juke of TEDDMAN’S Baby become a global smash? Will Burial get a new sample set to play with soon? When did we decide that the mix was an exclusively linear experience? And why do we demand total cohesion at all costs?

Fabriclive 100 doesn’t answer many of these questions. But as a curtain call, it’s a brave one. Fabric has decided to let two of the most influential names in recent British music history do what they want for 75 minutes. What they’ve done is attempt to condense a few hours in a club, and a few decades of the culture around them, into a single disc that’ll be stuffed into the final batch of those iconic metal boxes.

Considering the hype built around it, the result was always going to feel a little bit underwhelming. Maybe we only have ourselves to blame.

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Moses Boyd Displaced Diaspora Exodus Records

Jlin Autobiography Planet Mu

Buttechno Cherskogo Drive Cititrax Neneh Cherry Broken Politics Self-Released

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This era of jazz belongs to London – or at least it feels that way when you listen to Displaced Diaspora, a project led by Moses Boyd and recorded in 2015. A key player in the South London jazz circuit, Boyd is known for incorporating elements of hip-hop, grime, Afrobeats and dub into his distinct sound.

Much like his fellow jazz aficionados Theon Cross and Nubya Garcia, who feature on the project, Displaced Diaspora is a product of – as the name suggests – a displaced generation of namely Caribbean and African descent.

But while traditions are honoured, Displaced Diaspora feels remarkably fresh.

Yoruba chants intertwine with parping basslines and field recordings of London, with police sirens and underground announcements of “please mind the gap”. Tracks like Rye Lane Shuffle use syncopation and free improvisation to lock the listener, with Boyd’s hyperkinetic drums traversing between polyrhythmic patterns that sounds like two people playing at once.

Jazz is often said to be a genre of the past, but Boyd’s vision of displacement is rooted in a matter-of-fact attitude that celebrates the present while setting a new agenda for the movement.

At this stage in her career, referring to the music of Jerrilynn Patton – aka Jlin – as “footwork” feels a little reductive. That’s not a slight on any of the Teklife lot, who still regularly release some of the most head-spinning club music imaginable, but more of a reflection on Patton’s confident strides into the avantgarde end of the electronic music spectrum.

This follow-up to last year’s extraordinary Black Origami album is a soundtrack for a ballet choreographed by Wayne McGregor. Autobiography sees the producer conjuring harsh, metallic structures out of stutters and stammers of rhythm, an all-enveloping sonic world that sucks the listener deep into its jagged core.

This LP is the sound of Patton exploring the limits of dance music, or, more accurately, danceable music.

She flitters between vast experiments in just how far percussive propulsion can be pushed, and the sort of pseudo-ambience that often accompanies contemporary dance performances, with tracks like Anamnesis Part 2 and Second Interlude The Choosing in particular reflecting the taut undulations of ballet itself. With Autobiography, Jlin’s managed to make an artform as old as ballet sound like the future.

“Life is funny, then you die,” Neneh Cherry announces nonchalantly on her fifth solo album. Teetering between doom, urgency and playfulness, it finds the Swedish artist taking stock of the current state of the world, serving up bleak truths when you least expect them.

For Broken Politics, Neneh Cherry tapped Four Tet to produce once again (he also produced her 2014 album Blank Project), writing with partner Cameron McVey and recording at a studio co-founded by the jazz pianist Karl Berger – who incidentally played in bands with Cherry’s father, Ahmadu Jah, and her stepfather Don Cherry.

Together, the team have developed a style of electronica which feels distinct to Neneh Cherry.

The hyper-saturated arrangements are left slightly wanting, and an occasional lightness wouldn’t go amiss.

But the album is grounded in surprising lyrical imagery: bird shit-splattered sleeves and twisted knickers have never sounded so lusciously complex.

Broken Politics doesn’t claim to hold the answers to repairing the fractures of the world, but Neneh Cherry nails the strange sensation of searching around for them anyway.

As an artist, Sean Bowie — aka Yves Tumor — has always been hard to pin down. Not “difficult” necessarily: challenging, definitely, but far from inaccessible. An Yves Tumor album has always been more of an invitation in itself. A sincere promise from Tumor that, as long as you enter this bargain with good intentions and an open mind, you’re about to receive something special. This has never been more the case than it is with the Berlin-based artist’s latest release: the aptly named Safe In The Hands of Love.

The album moves between dark throbs and genuine bangers without either ever feeling out of place. Sonically diverse, Licking an Orchid and Lifetime have a Tame Impala — even Modest Mouselike — feel to the rhythm section, where lead single Noid taps into a warm mud bath of R&B with its splashy cymbals and high-end strings. The album is, however, more than just a patchwork of influences. This is a mission statement from an artist who knows that the trademark of their sound is not so much the sound itself, but its ability to take hold of the listener and bring them into the fold. It is the manifestation of a vision, now fully realised, projected to us from within.

Pavel Milyakov’s string of EBM-influenced releases have shown him to be a master of an intentionally ugly craft. The Moscow DJ/producer’s barebones take on techno is a defiantly unpleasant one that has the power to turn club into apocalypse.

This LP retains that sense of gnarliness while adding an unexpected – and unexpectedly delightful – level of sheen.

Opener March Cherskogo is a slab of militant bleep and bass weirdness that comes on like Milyakov left his arpeggiator to rot under acid rain. Back 2 the E is a clanking, minimal, bell-heavy roller that could conceivably drip from the Funktion-One at DC10 – on a particularly weird morning.

Elektroshirka is the kind of subaquatic threadbare electro that, in lesser hands, usually sounds sub-Drexciya, but here is slinky and sparkling.

The LP’s second half is just as satisfying, with the wonky, early Warp vibe of Slow Durk running into the seasick and skeletal AXF like a hyperactive child hitting a brick wall at full pelt. The Russian producer rounds things off in typically brutal fashion with the bumping, and aptly named 808 exc dirty, all low end rumble and whiplash toplines. Cherskogo Drive is a solid contender for the best home-suitable, club-ready LP of the year thus far.

! Gunseli Yalcinkaya

! Josh Baines

! El Hunt

! Karl Smith

! Josh Baines

Yves Tumor Safe in the Hands of Love Warp

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Ancient Methods The Jericho Records Ancient Methods

! Steve Mallon

! Thomas Frost

Connan Mockasin Jassbusters Mexican Summer

Marie Davidson Working Class Woman Ninja Tune

Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs King of Cowards Rocket Recordings

07 Fucked Up Dose Your Dreams Merge Records

Marie Davidson is a sucker for self-scrutiny on her fourth solo LP, Working Class Woman.

As with 2016's Adieux Au Dancefloor, Davidson evaluates the toxicity and vapidity of dance music culture. On opening track Your Biggest Fan, she assumes the guise of vacuous troll, doling out spoken text insults as bright trance synths flutter in the background, while Workaholic Paranoid Bitch explores the strains of being a musician. Here, Davidson brings her acerbic wit to a topic that has been thrust into the public consciousness in recent years.

At times, Davidson takes self-parody to extremes. So Right suggests a euphoric dancefloor celebration, but it's rife with tongue-incheek affectations (“Sexual/ Conceptual/ Tell me are you/ Conceptual”). Elsewhere, the album’s title is a bold statement, but its political implications could be explored more within the context of the LP. Working Class Woman showcases the breadth of Davidson's poetic imagination and analogue skillset. There's an urgency to Davidson’s new sound that we haven’t quite heard before.

Here's hoping she goes even deeper next time.

Speaking to Crack Magazine earlier this year, Adam Ian Sykes, one of the two guitarists in Geordie five-piece Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs (that’s seven pigs), set out their manifesto: “In the studio is where you write the gospel… on stage is where the slaughter takes place.”

King of Cowards, the band’s second gospel, tries to take their exhilarating live shows and make them flesh. In the main it works: songs sound like molten tar oozing out of the speakers, capturing the lightning of their white knuckle delivery in the proverbial grimy bottle.

Singer Matt Baty takes on all seven deadly sins as he howls through GNT which revels in its Black Sabbath rattle, while A66 pulverises with raucous, hedonistic venom.

While it doesn’t always hit as hard as those incendiary live shows, swaggering closing track Gloamer is where the word is set. Matt Baty lays down his commandments “Gods don’t walk this earth/ Eat your forbidden fruit/ Guilt doesn’t know you now” before guitars tip the track tumbling into the abyss for four minutes as demented guitar relentlessly hammers your head until it falls apart. To conclude this religious analogy, they prepare you to worship at the altar again.

Against a broken heart, Fatima’s voice is her greatest weapon.

And Yet It’s All Love, the London-via-Stockholm artist’s second album, documents the rise and fall of a romantic relationship. With classic soul and R&B it created its own unique sense of timelessness.

But ultimately, it’s Fatima’s direct and expressive vocals that cut through. May I and Movie in particular – both composed of a simple piano riff and delicate layered vocals – pack a substantial punch.

Following on from her debut LP Yellow Memories, this album finds Fatima updating her complex soul sound. Refusing to stick to the same formula, And Yet it’s All Love is a portrait of Fatima using her vulnerability to heal and grow – both as a person and an artist.

Fucked Up have always brimmed with ideas. The Canadian group’s eclectic tastes have often defied the catch-all term ‘punk’, packing in flute solos alongside furious screams. Fifth album Dose Your Dreams may be their most experimental effort to date.

Dose Your Dreams changes tack at every juncture. House of Keys is a doomy midpoint lament, which argues into the title track’s space-funk odyssey without coming off all Jamiroquai. The likes of The One I Want Will Come for Me and Came Down occupy an anthemic, Americana-esque world that The Hold Steady would be proud of. Gothic electro-rock also finds a place on Mechanical Bull and Accelerate, the latter even featuring a sonic nod to fellow hardcore-punk innovators Refused’s New Noise.

There are moments where Dose Your Dreams’ ambition dips, the record’s first third clogged up in narrative and a relatively forgettable run of less boundary-pushing numbers.

Above all, though, it’s a record that proves Fucked Up are still guitar music’s greatest anything-goes innovators: punk in spirit, if not always in sound.

! April Clare Welsh

! Danny Wright

! Natty Kambasala

! Tom Connick

Fatima And Yet it’s All Love Eglo

REVIEWS

New Zealand psych-pop savant Connan Mockasin’s latest record, like most of his work, fabricates an aesthetic world from the trippy hinterland of his imagination. The first Connan Mockasin album to be recorded with a band, conceptually Jassbusters is made by a group of fictional music teachers from his new film Bostyn ’n Dobsyn, a five-part melodrama about a music teacher, Bostyn, and his student, Dobsyn. Once again, Mockasin strays dangerously close to novelty territory – with track titles like Sexy Man and a spoken word monologue about getting good grades – but somehow walks away unscathed, in part due to the easy-going appeal of his silky sound.

Jassbusters might be Mockasin’s most palatable work yet. Gone are the spindly guitars, clattering percussion and Salad Fingers falsetto of his first album Forever Dolphin Love. Instead, it’s replaced by a feeling of weightlessness and self-assured calm. In fact, the songs feel so effortless it’s hard to imagine them being written at all. So despite Jassbusters' initial charm, Mockasin’s approach to songwriting seems to have been too lackadaisical, leaving this album lacking in hooks that stay in your memory.

You have to applaud the conceptual vision of Ancient Methods (aka Michael Wollenhaupt). His first fulllength album, The Jericho Records sonically portrays the biblical battle of Jericho.

Although there’s a level of ambiguity as to what is being explored here, Wollenhaupt’s versatility across the album is impressive. The clank of machinery within industrial techno is replaced with the banging of marching drums, for example, and it’s these subtle changes that give the concept weight without betraying the audience with cheesy Middle Eastern BC pastiche.

Split into three sections (The City of Jericho, the Battle, the Aftermath), the opening of the record is the most varied segment with homages to the bazaar in The City Awakes. The album retains Ancient Methods’ gut-clenching rawness on tracks like Treason Creeps in and House Rahab, suggesting that conflict is imminent – a theme present in most of Wollenhaupt’s music. The battle section contains a typically raucous and dancefloor-ready grind in the form of Crack and Collapse in The Storm of Lights yet finds space for oddity. The final chapter of the record showcases Wollenhaupt’s mastery of production beyond noise, with 80s German proto-techno gem Walking on a Cursed Soil being a real standout on this inspired and ambitious record.

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083

Bikini Kill, Pussy Whipped

Words: Hannah Ewens

The Washington band's disruptive debut paved the way for a new feminist punk movement Original release date: 26 October, 1993 Label: Kill Rock Stars

As excellent as Hanna was at being a leader, it was already testing her by 1993. The press were using ‘riot grrrl’ as a buzzword, and demonised her before Bikini Kill had even released their debut album, Pussy Whipped.

The album, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this month, was the legitimate full-release critics and hostile oppositionists had been waiting to tear into after the band’s year-long media blackout. The record succinctly captured the specific riot grrrl sound: purposefully amateur and primitive DIY punk, with dirty grunge undertones that carry the same weight as the confrontational lyrics. Guttural, “girly” vocals screamed, growled, delivered from the pit of the stomach.

Pussy Whipped is defiantly messy, lo-fi and imperfect. Songs are immediate

and blurry, lyrics more abstract and surreal with Hanna’s political and personal life experience.

In Alien She, Hanna wants to destroy the traditional socialised female part of herself (“I want to kill her/ But I’m afraid she might kill me”) that feels contradictory to the thirdwave feminism she’s driving forward.

Hamster Baby and Star Fish jab at the music and press industries they’d collided with. Hanna in particular was attacked by journalists who framed her as a ridiculous girl prancing around in her underwear or misprinting what she’d say, taking quotes deliberately out of context. Star Bellied Boy articulates the sexual dysfunction, pain and dissatisfaction after abuse: “I can’t/ I can’t/ I can’t/ I can’t cum”, Hanna shrieks, while Sugar rejects the pornographic sexual narrative men have fed women, asking “Why can’t I ever get my sugar?” and proposing that, in a new female-led fantasy, she can almost reach orgasm “now now now”.

Of course, it features an early version of Rebel Girl. The iconic anthem for female solidary and it opens with a narrator riffing off a gossiping female stereotype (“That girl thinks she’s the queen of the neighbourhood”) only to subvert it by triumphantly praising her. A play on words, not only is the feminist and queer revolution on its way, but it’s building in the sexual revolution of rebel girl’s winding hips, until Hanna’s climactic scream: “I

taste the revolution!” Despite the darkness of everything riot grrrls were combating, Pussy Whipped highlights the tenacious beauty of friendship between feminists.

The language and ideas of Pussy Whipped are so commonplace to us now that, every single day, feminism and zine culture are co-opted by big brands on Instagram or billboards.

The lineage is clear in collective Western movements like Slutwalk or #freethenipple or activist groups like Pussy Riot (there’s literally an old photo of Hanna with ‘Pussy’ and ‘Riot’ written on her arms in sharpie).

Bikini Kill championed control over the means of production to spread a feminist message. Subsequently, feminism is far more inclusive than when Bikini Kill were active – a fact Hanna acknowledges, rightly condemning lyrics that were reductive and lacking in intersectionality. A quarter of a century on and Pussy Whipped feels urgent, especially sifting through the debris of 2017’s #MeToo movement. It’s in the lyrics, the violence, the repetition and fragments of messages that both fight and question at once. Still, we hear the revolution coming.

REVIEWS

Every front person directs their words to someone. Kathleen Hanna says she always sang to “an elusive asshole male” in Bikini Kill, but the painful truths were for friends and fans to hear and feel vindicated. At the start of the 90s Bikini Kill double-dared women to do whatever we wanted – women had been called to the front of shows, and there the microphone was passed around to allow them to speak about their experiences. Through meetings, zine fairs and collectives focused on supporting and organising women in music, Hanna co-founded one of the most crucial and insurgent feminist punk movements of all time: riot grrrl.

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Film

08 07

First Man dir: Damien Chazelle Starring: Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Kyle Chandler The news that Damien Chazelle’s next film would tell the story of Neil Armstrong and his part in the space race felt unexpected. After the jazz-focused Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, Whiplash and, of course La La Land, First Man felt simultaneously too safe (a biopic?) and beyond his comfort zone (about space travel!).

In fact, the film fits perfectly into a body of work that’s fascinated with men pursuing ‘greatness’. Ryan Gosling plays Neil Armstrong as a determined, extremely reserved man, with a drive that stems from the tragic loss of his daughter while he was still a test pilot. He’s adrift when not working towards the goal of reaching the moon, often placed in shots with an abundance of negative space in the rare moments he is at home.

The film opens in the midst of Armstrong conducting a test flight, not unlike The Right Stuff, another film about the lengths that men go to for greatness. Once the film takes to the skies it’s all grainy, tight close-ups and a lot of shaky cam; a big aesthetic departure for Chazelle and a dizzying experience. The visuals are backed by a remarkably melodic score from Justin Hurwitz, finally getting to play with a completely different style than in Whiplash or La La Land.

Claire Foy makes an excellent counterpoint as his long suffering first wife Janet, frustrated at his inability to be emotionally honest. Screenwriter Josh Singer ties in a study in toxic masculinity with a propulsive plot, as well as a deconstruction of nationalism, and the pride and self-centredness that ties the two together. In short, First Man is another assured, technically brilliant film from Chazelle that tells the story of monumental human achievement through a deeply personal lens. !

Kambole Campbell

08

The Wife dir: Björn Runge Starring: Glenn Close, Jonathan Pryce, Christian Slater Living with a secret can be a tough task, but when that secret lasts a lifetime it will make you totally miserable. Just imagine, a toxic piece of knowledge slowly burning through the back of your brain. How long could you keep schtum – a day? A month?

A year? What about 50? That’s the fate of Joan Castleman in The Wife.

Based on the best-selling novel by Meg Wolitzer, the film follows a dedicated spouse (Glenn Close) as she travels to Stockholm with her husband Joseph (Jonathan Pryce) – a celebrated author set to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Once a budding writer herself, Joan abandoned her dreams so that Joseph could pursue his. Now, as he achieves their shared ambition, Joan starts to question every decision she’s ever made.

Intensely gripping and deeply stressful, this is a tense marital drama with a twist. Glenn Close is best-known as the bunny boiling Alex in Fatal Attraction, but here is a more nuanced role. Her eyes still burn with that furious rage, but it’s a muted passion locked up behind years of resentment. As her mental stability deteriorates, the camera closes in – increasingly focused around her anxious face. Let’s be clear, this is a career-best performance, but one that’s made by its modesty, rather than its bravado. Of course, some will moan about The Wife’s slow pace and one-note plot, but with a performance this good there’s still plenty to write home about. !

Alex Flood

Crazy Rich Asians, the first mainstream film to feature an all-Asian cast since 1993’s The Joy Luck Club, has raised important questions surrounding representation in Hollywood. While it won’t win any prizes for originality, the movie’s success lies in the re-contextualisation of romcom clichés which, when placed in an Asian setting under the direction of Jon M Chu, results in a film of ethnic comedy; one that’s laden with Chinese humour and, for audiences starved of representation, ultimately cathartic.

It doesn’t matter that the plot, featuring a wedding and Mean Girls-esque ring of jealous socialites, is paper thin. Beyond the competitive circles of women and the disapproving mother (Michelle Yeoh, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Crazy Rich Asians taps into zeitgeist-y conversations surrounding diaspora and people of colour living in the west. There's mahjong and dumplings, Chinese folk songs and the Tan Hua flower, traditional ideals and filial piety.

It raises interesting points on the question of identity too – something which plagued the film’s production when the casting of half-Asian actor Henry Golding sparked criticism online. Lead character Rachel claims she’s “so Asian”, being an economics professor with lactose intolerance, but she finds herself amongst a clash between individualistic and collectivist cultures. To her beau’s mother, Rachel is “Chinese American”, a discerning factor that throws her validity into question.

The film isn’t without its downsides; Nick (Henry Golding) is unfazed by the troubles his girlfriend has to face, but the film’s triumph comes when Rachel faces the domineering matriarch with a speech claiming her identity as the “low class immigrant”. A film of representation where Asian people make the jokes instead of being the joke, where an Asian woman wins, and where a proud immigrant is the heroine of the story – that speaks volumes for today, and for Hollywood. !

Vivian Yeung

09

Mandy dir: Panos Cosmatos Starring: Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough, Linus Roache Mandy begins in the woods of Shadow Mountain to the sound of King Crimson’s Starless, primed with the last words of an executed criminal. Set in 1983, like his debut, Beyond the Black Rainbow, Panos Cosmatos draws on the magic of this era, from the Drew Struzan-style poster and horror-fantasy themes to the heavy metal mindset of the main characters Red (Nicolas Cage) and Mandy (Andrea Riseborough).

Mandy is saturated in colour, light and wonderment, playing out like a video nasty with art-house pacing. Cosmatos hates the rapid-cut edits of modern cinema, preferring to let his work ‘breathe’, slowing you down for maximum impact; a dreamscape of dread that unfolds with Red’s ultraviolent revenge after Mandy is tortured and killed in front of him. Jóhann Jóhannsson’s haunting synthesiser score pulses with warmth when it’s not erupting with doom, courtesy of Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley.

Riseborough is enchanting, invoking a Shelley Duvall-like plaintive innocence. Linus Roache channels Dennis Hopper’s psychotic Frank from Blue Velvet with equal mastery as cult-leader Jeremiah Sand. As for Cage, he’s explosive; tormented and demented and at his absolute finest as he takes revenge on a murderous religious cult and Cenobite-ish mutant bikers in a substanceinduced rage as he wields a hand-forged, shining silver axe.

Playful, surreal, emotional and conceptually epic, Mandy pays homage to the best, drawing upon the techniques of the finest horror/action films ever made, yet delivering a truly original, hypnotically captivating cinematic jewel. !

Lara C Cory

REVIEWS

Crazy Rich Asians dir: Jon M Chu Starring: Constance Wu, Henry Golding, Michelle Yeoh

fabric mixes

Words: Thomas Frost Illustration: Turbo Island

When you’re young, you look for windows into other worlds. For a wideeyed 13-year-old buying Mixmag with his paper-round money, photographs of clubbers representing their disparate musical tribes provided images and sounds that Boiler Room later made kinetic. Similarly, the Mixmag covermounted CDs provided the soundtrack to the images – hard-house workouts to accompany day-glo revellers and garage anthems for the London crowds dripping in designers. The mystique of the rave steadily decreased. Everything was on display and not all of it was pretty.

A dark labyrinthine club that’s challenging for photographers to shoot, it’s hard for fabric to reveal all of its secrets. As an even more wide-eyed university student shedding his indie skin in favour of beats and ecstasy, the music played at fabric was as mythological as the geography of the club. This resulted in the frequent scouring of line-ups for artists I’d never heard of to further my electronic education. As an extremely badlydressed hyper-active 19-year-old, I first visited fabric for a 2ManyDJs-curated Friday night and my obsession with the club began. I subscribed to the fabric CD series immediately.

OPINION

This was in the early days of the internet we know now. At this time, a lot of today’s popular mix series hadn’t begun. Beatport was in its infancy and most artists posted music on their MySpace page to attract attention. As a result, the fabric mix CDs became

essential pathways into previously undiscovered musical worlds.

I joined the party at fabric 32 by Luke Slater. Having never really listened to trippy, minimal techno – or really any techno – before, the new textures on this mix came thick and fast. (Even now, this mix remains an incredible entry point to a new landscape.) This was a virile time in electronic music, during which the series traced some major changes in electronic output.

Caspa and Rusko’s Fabriclive 37 was a pivotal dubstep compilation and thrust the genre in a controversial direction.

The free-flowing liquidity of Marcus Intalex’s Fabriclive 35, the dark heady techno of Ellen Allien’s fabric 34 and the wild, spacious repetition of Ricardo Villalobos’ entry mix on fabric 36 each expanded horizons.

Looking back at the Fabriclive catalogue is a nostalgic trip. It’s a history lesson in the sub-genres that have formed the primary sounds of UK club culture over the last two decades.

There are a number of breakbeatindebted compilations in the early years of the series (Meat Katie’s Fabriclive 21 and Adam Freeland’s Fabriclive 16 are particularly strong); fidget-house is fully

represented when it had its moment on Sinden’s Fabriclive 43; then the full spectrum of drum’n’bass, which remained a fixture throughout.

However, it was the Saturday nightinspired fabric compilations that informed my listening for years to come. Techno clubbing was a new concept to me and conjured dreams of extended raves in Berlin, Amsterdam and beyond. The CDs were windows not just to the club itself, but to a world that, as a teenager, was beyond me and also ahead of me. While a monthly CD delivery might seem archaic today, each time the iconic tin dropped through the door another world was unlocked. My visions of distant dancefloors moved closer into focus.

Fabriclive 100 mixed by Kode9 and Burial is out now

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