There are industrious artists, and then there’s Richard Norris, whose breadth of work over the past 30 years or so with The Grid, Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve (with Erol Alkan), The Time & Space Machine and various other projects, is enough to fill an electronica edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. Starting off his musical career with…
Purple Disco Machine has been putting the funk back into house music for more than a decade now, with the producer behind the pseudonym, Tino Piontek, a regular on the international festival circuit, as well as boasting nine million monthly listeners on Spotify. He’s just released the latest single, Playbox, off his forthcoming second album;…
Few individuals have played as significant a role in the development of the modern DJ as John Acquaviva. As well as establishing seminal labels such as Plus 8 Recordings and Definitive in the 1990s (alongside Richie Hawtin, his long-term business partner), the Italian-Canadian went on to play a crucial role in the development of Final…
Few dance acts have experienced such a meteoric rise as Solardo, the Manchester-based outfit comprised of Mark Richards and James Eliot, which burst onto the scene less than five years ago and have since become festival stalwarts, as well as headlining some of the world’s biggest venues. Having broken through with 2016’s Tribesmen, recently the…
Having set the template for the ‘bleep’ movement with 1989’s The Theme, Unique 3’s combination of jacking house, urban hip hop and scything breakbeats made them one of the most influential groups of the acid house era. Comrpising Edzy (aka Adrian Collins), Cutz (Ian Park) and Delroy Brown, and signed to Virgin’s 10 Recordings, Unique…
The author F Scott Fitzgerald once remarked that “there are no second acts in American lives”, but Jamaica-born, New York-raised hip hop maestro Kurtis Mantronik would be likely to disagree. During the 1980s, Kurtis, born Kurtis el Khaleel, was responsible for some of the sickest beats in popular music as part of electro-funk duo Mantronix, a…
Switzerland is well established as a bastion of electronic music (home to Sonja Moonear, Deetron, Thomas Fehlmann and Yello’s Boris Blank, among others), and over a 30-year career, Philippe Quenum, aka Quenum, has proven himself to be one of the most influential artists to emerge from the mountainous nation. Having immersed himself in the French…
DJ, producer, vocalist, songwriter, label owner… Roland Clark may well be one of the hardest working individuals in dance music. Raised in New Jersey, Clark cut his teeth under pseudonyms such as Urban Soul, Jesus Jackson and South Street Player, with his productions interwoven with the New York dance scene of the late 80s and…
Gerald Simpson, aka A Guy Called Gerald, has been at the forefront of numerous musical genres over his 30-plus year career – having forged a path for acid house with Voodoo Ray and his work with 808 State, he followed that up in the 90s with arguably the best jungle album of all time, Black…
The world of techno is a more interesting place thanks to people like Jerome Hill, one of the true understated heroes of the scene. The London native has been destroying dancefloors since the early 90s, earning his stripes on the warehouse party circuit before establishing the pioneering label Don’t (which ‘stands against the blandness, false…
