Underground Resistance: McCarthy, Easterhouse and The Enemy Within
McCarthy and Easterhouse were two underground bands that shone out amidst the sludge of anodyne 80’s pop both musically and lyrically, and were inevitably ignored by the record-buying public in part for the political content of their music. Both had very contrasting styles, yet shared a common ideological grounding and world view and were among...
Funk and the Favelas: Talking Baile Funk with DJ Daniel Haaksman
DJ Daniel Haaksman hasn’t looked back on baile funk since his first trip to Brazil in 2004. Grimy, loud and frenetic, it’s a sound that speaks directly from the favelas of Brazil about the plight of the working poor. He talked to us in Berlin about this cheeky Latin American genre’s circuitous story. Baile funk...
Latin American Revolution Rocks
Across the history of Latin American music there have been remarkable bands and composers that have stood for an ideal and have screamed for revolution and change. Playing a major roll in transmitting political awareness to people, these musicians raised the hopes and beliefs of countries suffering under the tyranny of tough regimes and their...
Aussie Hip Hop – The Next Generation with The Tongue
Australia is a country which isn’t usually associated with hip hop, but with the growing popularity of a diverse range of artists out there, ‘Aussie Hip Hop’ is on its way to becoming one of the most popular genres on the Australian scene. With the help of independent record labels – set up by the...
Contemporary Protest Music in the United States of America: A Critical View
Pick any demonstration in New York City and there will be a group of bedraggled old men with boom boxes, playing The Clash and The Sex Pistols as loud as they can. There may even be a black flag raised behind them, with a giant white A enclosed in a circle. Over the loud speakers,...
Sing It Loud: Jazz and Protest in the Music of Nina Simone & Billie Holiday
Nina Simone and Billie Holiday are two of the greats. Matriarchs in a long line of enlightened performers. They are remembered for the fire in their bellies as much as the warmth in their hearts, and embody the ability female jazz singers’ have to deliver clarity on the social issues peculiar to the black female...
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 cosmos. Early in the 1979...
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 of the song was played...
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 fantasy” - David Bowie (1976) What do...
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 is Sun Ra, the extraterrestrial...
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 Sun Ra was a law...
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 like space funk, space rock...
