Whereas the dance music most immediately associated with South Africa are the forms that have arisen from the country’s townships and underground spaces, Portable (AKA Alan Abrahams, AKA Bodycode) has taken things in a different direction. Based in Paris, the South African DJ and producer has typically grappled with reconciling
Acid House / ambient / electronica / experimental / House / Techno
London producer and DJ Breaka is part of that generation of millennial provocateurs who are totally unafraid to reference and counter reference, an iconoclastic approach that is arguably the result of a myriad of influences having grown up in the age of pop consumerism and Postmodernism. For Breaka, this has
Breakbeats / dembow / Garage / Jungle / kuduro
DOSS has always let her music speak for itself. Infamously elusive, she set the internet alight last year with tastemakers and underground club communities all in a quandary over the identity of the producer who dropped the sticky hyperpop-adjacent banger Look in April. That song would land a spot on
In 2005, grime pioneer Wiley explained his music to Spin magazine. “Everyone’s so angry at the world and each other. And they don’t know why.” Rage is at the core of grime. Born in the early 2000s post DnB and UKG, grime is the pulverising, aggressive love child of jungle,
Bass / experimental / grime / Jungle / post-club
The future as prophesied by works of science fiction has never felt more likely to transpire. In the past year alone, we’ve come closer to the sort of tech-dystopias as foretold by H.G Wells than ever before. There’s Zuckerburg’s unveiling of the Metaverse, a chilling new reality that once seemed
Alt-Pop / ambient / experimental / glitch pop / hyperpop / trip-hop
The moment that Japanese-American singer Hikaru Utada (aka Utada) crossed over from moderate success in her home country to full blown J-pop sensation came at around the same time she decided to start producing her music herself. In taking this creative control, Utada crafted a new direction for her sound
Acid House / House / J-pop / Pop
Last year, Pan Daijing delivered the haunting and beguiling album Jade 玉观音. Her third effort, Jade 玉观音 was steeped in a sort of uncanniness that made it creep through your veins long after it had finished playing. At the centre of this was Daijing’s voice. Mournful, pensive, and sometimes bizarre,
Seven years ago, the name Soichi Terada was thrust back into the cultural zeitgeist. Up until that point the Japanese producer had mostly stayed quiet, but this downtime was not undeserved. After all, Terada was one of the artists responsible for pioneering the direction of Japanese house in the late
The origin point of house music can be traced definitively back to Chicago, where the form arose as a reaction to disco and became popularised by its Black, mostly queer, progenitors at the South Side’s The Warehouse nightclub from which the genre takes its name. But house would also find
Last year, Martha Skye Murphy released the triptych Concrete; an EP of three, icy pieces of baroque pop featuring production from FKA Twigs. Gravelly, astral, and ethereal, Concrete was as expansive as it was fleeting. Gone in just over twelve minutes, Concrete gave credence to Murphy’s skill as writer and
