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The Mire

You Tube linkage

Two highly recommended You Tube selections for you – on the Fact Magazine site Droid of the Woofah magazine and the Wearie website has selected 20 ridiculously good ragga tracks . I'm unacquainted with quite a lot of it, but there's several foundational beats here, including some of the rhythms that forged reggaeton. With artists with name such as Major Mackerel and Gregory Peck, you can't really go wrong. If your appetite was whetted for Omar Souleyman by Clive Bell's piece in The Wire 304, check out this video . I can hardly imagine how good weddings in Syria must be.

The Mire

Basic Replay

Honest Jon's night at Plastic People last night – Sleeparchive, DJ Pete/Substance and Mark Ernestus of Basic Channel, some of the best German electronic names essentially – had a strangely arse-about-face feel. Not that that's necessarily bad, far from it. Around 11.45pm Sleeparchive was banging out Minimal Techno, the crowd fully locked-in, although this was unapologetically functional music. DJ Pete then played solely dubstep for an hour or so. For the crowd, which thinned out noticeably, it was odd for someone to come all that way just to lay down the same stuff we're used to hearing week in week out. It was almost like the early 90s, when rock 'n' roll's original Killer, Jerry Lee Lewis, stooped so low as to profess a love of this new MTV fad. The set certainly 'worked' pretty well, with DJ Pete cranking the faders and EQs maniacally, gleefully unleashing fat basslines, locked in to the music. Strange, then, that the...

The Mire

Alexis O'Hara mix tonight

Just a heads up that I'll be playing Alexis O'Hara's special guest mix tonight (Thursday 7 May, 21:00 BST) on the Adventures In Modern Music show on Resonance FM . She's currently in the middle of constructing her Squeeque: Speakerbox Igloo (yup, an igloo constructed from speakers) at Galerie Skol in Montreal. The exhibition is up for just 2 days. More info here The tracklist for the mix includes, according to Alexis, "montreal musicians who are all my friends. it runs the gamut from bluegrass to electro to dance to experimental to noise to pop"...

The Mire

ad-miring the 'nuum

Here's my slightly revised presentation from last week's Hardcore Continuum seminar (thanks to Steve and Jeremy for making it all happen). I was actually going to do more revision, but as K-Punk reminds me, one can endlessly revise and then it'll never get posted or published anywhere. Plus, perhaps it'd be disingenuous to present something here superior to or bearing little relation to what was actually presented there. For anyone interested who couldn't make it, you can find Alex Williams 's and Blackdown 's pieces on their respective blogs already. As well, if you haven't seen it already, footage of Simon 's talk on the 'nuum from earlier this year can be found from FACT Liverpool's site here . And of course, his original articles which outlined his ideas about this have been made available on our own website, (introduction to the online re-publishings here ) Redefining Hardcore As an American living in...

The Mire

David Stubbs on The Today Programme

A (very) late notice to say that The Wire 's David Stubbs will be appearing on BBC Radio 4's Today programme tomorrow morning to discuss his new book, Fear Of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don't Get Stockhausen . He'll be on at 8:20, I understand.

The Mire

Wrinkles In Time

While I won't claim that early 90s junglists Tek9 aka 4Hero had the power to warp the spacetime continuum, "Del Die Gogo" from their recently reissued early Reinforced material certainly had me checking my iPod and counting out the beats to check it wasn't skipping. I think they've sampled the synth riff of Human Resource's "Dominator", but screwed up into micro black hole.

The Mire

It's The Neu Style

I can't be alone in noticing a subtle shift in the public appreciation of Krautrock. Press release after press release comes into The Wire HQ suggesting a group sounds like Can, Faust and Neu! – a ridiculous claim, as they hardly sounded alike in the first place. Nevertheless, the number of projects coping a Krautrock feel – The Horrors on their new album (after a pretty weak cover of Suicide recently – another act who are threatened with looming canonisation?), the Brand Neu! tribute album (title says it all), featuring Oasis, of all people (Neu! is "great tour bus music", I think Noel Gallagher was quoted as saying), and most bizarre of all, David Holmes . Add Portishead's Third into the mix, and it's almost ubiquitous. Generally they take only the most basic common denominators of German experimental rock – the motorik rhythm, the spiralling guitars, but particularly, motorik rhythm. What's going on here? Krautrock has...

The Mire

Ikki heintaður - non réclamé

Despite our best efforts, efforts to locate the elusive Pom Pom records (see The Wire 303, now on sale) in the Faro Islands have hit a dead end. The search continues...

The Mire

Sunny Murray screening competition

We're running a competition to win tickets for this week's screening in London of Sunny's Time Now , a new documentary about the influential drummer Sunny Murray, with a Q&A; afterwards with saxophonist Tony Bevan and Tony Herrington from The Wire . Here's the details: Win a pair of tickets to the London ICA Screening! The Wire presents: Sunny's Time Now + Q&A; London ICA, Cinema 1 18 April 2009 8:15pm £8/£7 Concessions/£6 ICA Members. "Bang! Let's go on. Like Louis Pasteur. They ain't fucked with the milk since then, except maybe diluted it a little bit." Sunny Murray Sunny's Time Now retraces the rough-and-tumble life and career of influential free jazz drummer Sunny Murray. Directed by Luxembourg film maker Antoine Prum, this documentary includes interviews with key witnesses (including Cecil Taylor, Val Wilmer, Robert Wyatt, William Parker, Grachan Moncur III) and exclusive concert footage of Murray in performance with the likes of...

The Mire

Bushwacked

Good article from the New York Times on Lloyd Barnes of the Wackies label fame.