The iCrates Magazine: News and insights into the international vinyl scene, including stories, reviews, interviews and the hottest record stores on the planet.
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Spicelab - A Day On Our Planet

Spicelab – A Day On Our Planet

Oliver Lieb is responsible for an enormous amount of extremely high quality techno/trance, and his Spicelab album A Day On Our Planet, is up there as one of his best and most ingenious. Released in 1994, a year even before his groundbreaking Rendezvous In Outer Space, this second Spicelab album A...
Interview: Jean-Jacques Perrey - The Elephant Never Forgets

Interview: Jean-Jacques Perrey – The Elephant Never Forgets

Well-known as one of the earliest pioneers of electronic music, Jean-Jacques Perrey has always believed in space as a perfect companion for his work. The friendly and inspiring 82-year-old Frenchman also invented a technique which imagines music in the most spatial way: he dreamed of cutting and glueing analogue tapes,...
Scientist and Artist: Eduard Artemiev's Space Odyssey

Scientist and Artist: Eduard Artemiev’s Space Odyssey

Eduard Artemiev inhabits the space between science and art, between the electronic avant-garde and popular music. Known best as the composer for Russian sci-fi classic Solaris, Artemiev also pioneered one of the first synthesizers and puts his central role in electronic music down to the finely honed calibrations of the...
Spinvis: The Dutch Astronaut

Spinvis: The Dutch Astronaut

His name is Erik de Jong. His name is Spinvis, Dutch for ‘Spiderfish’. This is his alias, his nationally famous one-man band. iCrates takes a look at the life and musical career of Spinvis, the “Dutch Bob Dylan”. At first glance Erik de Jong seems to be quite the ordinary...
Retro-Futurist Cover Art

Retro-Futurist Cover Art

Vincent Lopez – Music Out of Century 21, Released in 1962 on World’s Fair Records Retro-futurism is an artistic style influenced by portrayals of the future and of outer-space conceived of before the 1960′s. These depictions were often fantastical and utopian, optimistic of mankind’s future in the final frontier. Of...
The History of the Synthesizer featuring Roger O'Donnell

The History of the Synthesizer featuring Roger O’Donnell

When Joe Meek recorded the 1962 hit, “Telstar” with his band The Tornados, he used the distorted tape recording of a toilet flushing in his house to recreate what he believed to be the sound of outer space, which was then used in the intro of the song. The rest...
Interview: Idris Ackamoor of "The Pyramids"

Interview: Idris Ackamoor of “The Pyramids”

When a young Idris Ackamoor was given the opportunity to travel to Europe with a saxophone and a tape recorder, there was only one thing he was going to do: form a jazz band. Contemporaries of Sun Ra and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, The Pyramids created a unique avant-garde...
Interview: Martin Gretschmann aka Console

Interview: Martin Gretschmann aka Console

Martin Gretschmann spreads his talent widely. An integral member of groundbreaking German bands The Notwist and 13&God, he also pursues several electronic projects, most notably under the monikers of Console and Acid Pauli. Softly spoken, Martin welcomed iCrates into his new studio in Berlin, where he has recently become a...
The RAH Band Re-edited

The RAH Band Re-edited

The RAH Band were a studio group put together by the English producer Richard Anthony Hewson. Now 67 years old, Hewson drew dubious inspiration from his initials and formed the band in 1977, putting together and releasing singles comprising a mixture of collaborative live performance and rudimentary electronic synthesis and...
Interview: Beppe Loda and the Birth of Afro-funky

Interview: Beppe Loda and the Birth of Afro-funky

DJ Beppe Loda is one of Italy’s pioneer DJs of the 1970s. His fusion of sounds from German space electronics to African percussion tracks have earned him a reputation that led to the foundation of a scene and even a genre; Afro-funky. Between the mid 80s and early 90s Beppe...
The Life and Death of Ziggy Stardust

The Life and Death of Ziggy Stardust

“I fell for Ziggy too. It was quite easy to become obsessed night and day with the character. I became Ziggy Stardust. David Bowie went totally out the window. Everybody was convincing me that I was a Messiah, especially on that first American tour. I got hopelessly lost in the...
Thundercat - The Golden Age of the Apocalypse

Thundercat – The Golden Age of the Apocalypse

Just when you thought the Brainfeeder camp was becoming the benchmark for what many a blogger likes to refer to as “Glitch Hop” and “Wonky”, the label headed by Steven Ellison (better known as Flying Lotus) took a couple of unforeseen left turns and released a string of albums that...
The Aesthetics of Afro-futurism

The Aesthetics of Afro-futurism

A spaceship lands on American grassland and a black pharaoh with platform shoes and a farcical colourful robe steps out of the swirled-up dust followed by an equally bizarre entourage. He sits down at the piano and starts to play mind-altering avant-garde jazz, even more bewildering than his appearance. It...
Sun Ra: Space is the Place w/ Marshall Allen

Sun Ra: Space is the Place w/ Marshall Allen

Sun Ra was born Herman P. Blount on May 22, 1914, in Birmingham, Alabama, but this is something he categorically denied, even in his later years. To that end, on May 30th 1993 he did not die but returned to his home planet Saturn. A Jazz pianist, band-leader and philosopher...
Music And Space

Music And Space

What does “space” mean in music? Space, in its simplest and broadest terms, is crucial to the existence of music insofar as sound is a play of distances in frequencies and loudness. Space has always had its place in music, long before trends made it the well-known prefix of genres...
Issue #15 : The Space Issue

Issue #15 : The Space Issue

Welcome to the new issue of iCrates magazine. For those of you unfamiliar with the format, each month iCrates publishes articles under a theme, which brings together a diverse mixture of genres and eras united by that theme. Over the course of the next month, we will be publishing stories,...
Latest entries
Skylarking by Horace Andy

Skylarking by Horace Andy

The man, the voice – the living legend that is Horace Andy here on one of his most infamous and rare outings: Skylarking on Bongo Man! This rare label is of course a Studio One imprint and ,contrary to other claims or credits, would have been a production of Clement “CoxSone” Dodd This 45 was...
The Vinyl-Only Sessions #08: Red Robin

The Vinyl-Only Sessions #08: Red Robin

Sessions #08 | Red Robin – Expect the unexpected… For our eighth instalment of our vinyl only sessions, our old friend Red Robin takes out some of the very special and precious records that have accompanied him all along his musical career. Every single one having a deep and and personal meaning to him. The...
A Glorious Dawn by Carl Sagan ft. Stephen Hawking

A Glorious Dawn by Carl Sagan ft. Stephen Hawking

Welcome to the future and welcome in 2012! I guess it’s just in time for the Glorious Dawn of our Space Issue, that i dug deep and came up with the most fitting 45 on this anti-matter … First of all though: here is my own feeble attempt at “photoshopping” a “spacey” little picture to...
Red Robin: The Vinyl Harem

Red Robin: The Vinyl Harem

Famous Bar 25-DJ Red Robin talks to iCrates about DJing, his special mixing technique and why vinyl records are like women...
Let There Be Death [Vol. III]

Let There Be Death [Vol. III]

And so to the final category of the Let There Be Death series – a sideways glance at the making and breaking of the musical legacy. We’ve loitered in the graveyard long enough to know that not even death can rescue a career from catastrophic implosion. This installment thus features all those who reached the...
Back Beat Records, Amsterdam

Back Beat Records, Amsterdam

Introducing Dick, Ed and Jeanet of Back Beat Records in Amsterdam… a cosy shop with heaps of character and a superb collection of jazz, funk and soul. Their answers may be somewhat enigmatic, but who cares… they own a shop that was opened by soul legend Arthur Conley. Nuff said, as they say… Please introduce...
Chico Hamilton - The Dealer

Chico Hamilton – The Dealer

Tim from Rubber City Review takes a closer look at the iconic album The Dealer by legendary drummer and bandleader Chico Hamilton and featuring a young Larry Coryell in his first recording. The Dealer reaches out from jazz to soul jazz to psychedelic/free jazz and back to blues -- a milestone album for both artists....
Funky Drummer by James Brown

Funky Drummer by James Brown

Here is the Original Extended Unedited Studio Cut, as released on the “In The Jungle Groove” Lp at the beginning of the nineties to satisfy the hip-hop generations huge demand or material by the Soul Brother No. 1: Unfortunately the Original Single Edit is withheld from view due to copyright restrictions on Youtube. Pay close...
Crystal Stilts: Don't Forget to Dream

Crystal Stilts: Don’t Forget to Dream

The days after Christmas can be a funny time. Having hung your brandy-soaked body out to dry, it is not uncommon to be hit with a little dose of winter depression. Sometimes we just need to be reminded of these darker times in order to overcome them. New York’s Crystal Stilts have unleashed a clutch...
Kitty Wells and the art of the noble retort

Kitty Wells and the art of the noble retort

That Kitty Wells was a great cook, with a stable family life and a good husband doesn't make her any less of a revolutionary. In fact without these attributes it is unlikely that she would have been able to kick down the many barriers that she did. That she firmly suggested that the gates of...
5 Years on and Christmas has never been the same: R.I.P. James Brown, the Godfather of Soul

5 Years on and Christmas has never been the same: R.I.P. James Brown, the Godfather of Soul

It was the morning of the 25.12.2006 – Christmas Day and the news spread like wildfire. I was listening to London’s Heart FM with some friends and having a merry little get-together enjoying the smooth soul and funk as usual until the DJ announced that James Joseph Brown Jr. born near Barnwell, South Carolina, USA...
Pearl Jam - 'Vitalogy' Remastered Audiophile Vinyl Edition

Pearl Jam – ‘Vitalogy’ Remastered Audiophile Vinyl Edition

Ten, as we know now, was something of an aberration. For sure Pearl Jam had the innate talent to repeat it, but the desire to spread and experiment was always foremost in their minds and history has shown that the success of Ten led the band to recoil, regroup and flex their creative muscles. Vs...