While visiting Los Angeles in March this year, Eric Coleman (co-founder of Mochilla) played me demos of a new project between rapper Krondon and producer Shafiq Husayn. They called themselves White Boiz and the music sounded great. …

Timing is everything. Working on the oral history of illbient last year, I was struck by was how this particular musical and cultural movement had fallen through the cracks of modern history. Despite happening just as the internet (as we know it today) was revving up, it wasn’t extensively documented…

What happens when corporations replace major labels as patrons of independent music? — As the recording industry and its flagship major labels wither on the vine, a new hand has come to tend to independent music scenes. From rock to hip-hop, corporations such as Red Bull, Hyundai and Converse are supporting independent, often niche, artists by providing them with recording studios, bookings and…

“This town is coming like a ghost town” Everywhere looks the same these days. The uniformity is depressing. Walking around the Bywater neighbourhood in New Orleans my wife and I stumbled across a corner that held a yoga club on one side, a bizarre art gallery on the other (open…

George was right. Much as it might annoy me, or any journalist, to admit it, he was right. It’s all just public relations, unless you’re publishing something that someone does not want printed. The idea that a journalist might be just another cog in the PR machine is anathema to…

Following on from the history of the rewind, I wrote a similar piece for RBMA on the history of the Scorpio break. It was published last week as part of their Loop History series and while it’s a lot lighter than the rewind feature I wanted to do another liner…

Dilla Month and hip hop revisionism — This article was originally written in February 2013, and published by Playground Magazine. It has been edited and is republished here two years later as I feel its message is still relevant. It is not meant as an attack or dismissal of anyone working to keep the memory of James…

Medium’s Cuepoint magazine just published “Wheel It Up: History of the Rewind,” a feature I’ve been working on for a couple of months that involved a lot of research. Considering the scope of the feature and some of the elements left untold, or just touched upon, here are some of…

When the DJ stops the music and spins the song back, energy shoots through the crowd and Jamaican sound echoes across genres — Jamaican sound is the heartbeat of modern music. Of the many practices to emerge from sound system culture and take hold across music genres, one remains most arousing and the most maligned: the rewind. For the uninitiated, the rewind is the act of stopping a song—generally playing on a vinyl…