INTERVIEWS

Aphex Twin - Transparent Messages

17 March 2007 Words: Rob Young

Music is finding new ways to simulate dream states, the latest being the twilight zone sonic reveries of Richard James, aka Aphex Twin.
Writer's dream I am descending upon a distressed landscape of mud and dung. It is a muddied and muffled dream - shapes pushing up through the sodden, shapeless turf; cows' heads, body parts, boxy shapes, sludge and slush, all brown-coloured, embedded in a slurry of shit and mud, rain bucketing down overhead; no visible sky. Very close-up vision, as if I too am being drawn down into the muck. The feeling is not desolate, but promises impending revelation.
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Coil - Obscure Mechanics

17 March 2007 / Words: John Everall

Drawing on esoteric notions of alchemy and magick, the music of Coil maps a hidden world of altered perspectives and arcane practices.
In an age of mercurial genre-crossings and mongrel hybrids, Coil remain pure, uncontaminated; pursuing a singular vision in documenting an unconventional, yet enormously valid, world view. "Certain tracks on certain Coil records are designed to trigger altered states, whether this happens or not is to some extent up to the listener," states the group's John Balance, outlining one of Coil's fundamental concerns.
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DJ Shadow - Down With The Programme

17 March 2007 / Words: Chris Sharp

DJ Shadow's abstract beat collage is a mutant strain in the HipHop nation.
'TripHop': as an example of journalistic shorthand, it feels like a casual pun, a throwaway spurt of second-rate insight. But however approximately, this dumb little phrase has somehow managed to define a genre, and as soon as that happens an inevitable slew of misbegotten chancers is just a stack of major-label cash away. That the perpetrator deserves to be burned alive on a pyre of Ingrid Schroeder records is beyond doubt, as is the fact that one of the effects of the term was to drive a wedge between DJ Shadow's then-revolutionary brand of instrumental HipHop and the street culture that effectively gave birth to it.
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Timbaland - These Beats Work

17 March 2007 / Words: Sasha Frere-Jones

Defying the wisdom that HipHop innovation equals ugliness, Timbaland's euphoric productions prove that experimental music doesn't have to wear a hairshirt.
It's raining furiously the night I visit Manhattan Center Studios for an audience with R&B/HipHop producer Tim Mosley, 26, aka Timbaland. The scene inside hardly resembles your usual HipHop session. There are plenty of young men milling around but there's no blunt smoke, and everyone's dressed in clothes their mothers would approve of. Timbaland's brother greets me warmly and passes me a soda, reaching over the head of someone getting a haircut from a man armed with electric clippers. No one has cursed and I've been in the room almost ten minutes.

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ARTICLES

A-Z of Electro

17 March 2007 / Words: David Toop

In its original incarnation, Electro was black science fiction teleported to the dancefloors of New York, Miami and LA; a super-stoopid fusion of video games, techno-pop, graffiti art, silver space suits and cyborg funk. Now that Electro is back, David Toop provides a thumbnail guide to the music that posed the eternal question: 'Watupski, bug byte?'

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New Complexity Techno

17 March 2007 / Words: Rob Young, Tony Herrington

The combination of digital technology and the easy accessibility ofsamplers and computers have irrevocably changed the way sound isproduced and perceived. As electronic music moves further away from theconventions of the club culture that spawned it to become a profoundmeans of expression in its own right, a new breed of musician isemerging to forge new directions in Ambient and Techno with the parallelsciences of multimedia and electronic networking. Here we profile foursuch
acts: Global Communication, The Black Dog, Bedouin Ascent and theShk collective.

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