Irish rockers U2 have teamed up with Dutch DJ and producer Martin Garrix to release Fireflies, a new single that was premiered during Garrix's headline set at Tomorrowland festival last weekend.

The show featured a surprise appearance from The Edge, who had previously collaborated with Garrix on U2 tracks such as 2019 hit We Are The People and Scars, which features on the band's latest EP, Easter Lily.

“We go back a long way with Martin, and there’s always a sense of adventure whenever we get together," The Edge said.

"Playing Fireflies for the first time at Tomorrowland, in front of one of the most passionate festival crowds anywhere, was such a rush... in fact I might have enjoyed it a bit too much. It reminded me of why I love playing outdoors. I like it better when there’s no ceiling."

The single comes as U2 gear up for the release of their first original new album in almost a decade. Timeline details are hazy, but rumours suggest a new record by the end of the year.

The band recently released a rousing music video for new track Street of Dreams, filmed in Mexico City with original drummer Larry Mullen Jr. back behind the kit having recovered from the major back and neck surgeries that caused him to leave the group temporarily.

It's unclear whether Fireflies will feature on U2's forthcoming record, but either way, it's clearly a meaningful release for everyone involved.

"Fireflies has a very unique mood. It's a special song we started working on six summers ago," Garrix said. "It felt electrifying and very surreal to finally debut it at Tomorrowland with The Edge."

He added: "I've worked with Bono and Edge before, but working with the whole band I got to get a glimpse of their chemistry and why U2 are who they are. It has been an absolute honour to work with them again."

Diplo has DJed all over the world and at some pretty high class events during his career, but his gig on Saturday (May 23) was the one he’s calling “the most exclusive party of the year” – his own son’s kindergarten graduation.

Yes, the 47-year-old producer, known to his own mum as Thomas Wesley Prentz, was behind the decks, spinning tunes for 6-year-old Pace and his friends, who, as you can see in the video, are seen leaping around and enjoying themselves.

“Adding my son’s kindergarten graduation to the list of most important sets of my career,” he captioned the clip on Instagram.

And being the always-on pro that he is, Diplo even managed to sneak his new single, titled Two Steppin’, into the video. “Are you ready to go crazy?” he asks the youngsters, waving his arms in the arm and hyping them up like any good kids entertainer worth their salt.

Social media seemed to love it – ‘lucky kids’, ‘this is the sweetest cutest thing ever!’ and ‘this is so great’ were some of the reactions. But whilst his classmates also seemed to be having fun, young Pace’s own reaction is not known. Is dad ‘sooo embarrassing’? Or does this 6-year-old now think he’s actually cool...?

A new study has shown that moving about to electronic music can have positive effects when it comes to how the body deals with stress.

It was conducted by Professor Paul Dolan of the Behavioural Science faculty at the LSE in collaboration with AlphaTheta, the company formerly known as Pioneer DJ, which claims to “make meaningful contributions to the world through innovative technology and high-quality audio equipment, software, and services.”

In each of the two hour-long studied sessions run by Emma Marshall, the founder of a project called Music and Movement Is Medicine, a group of 60 participants was guided through a structured experience – from quiet listening and breathing exercises, through seated micro-movements, to standing, marching, and ultimately free dance. Using devices to measure their heart rates, a picture was built up of the minute changes to the human body when dancing and moving to music.

And what did they find out? Well, it’s all good for you. During the ‘guided breathing and seated’ stages, there was an 18.5% rise in heart rate variability, a sign that the nervous system is shifting to a calmer state. Meanwhile, during the free dance sections, participants' heart rates reached 75% of their personal heart rate – in other words, they were doing vigorous exercise.

(It should be pointed out that we don’t know exactly what genre of electronic music was used in the study. Had Ms Marshall used bangin’ techno or gabba the results may have been entirely different.)

Self-reported data collected from the participants reinforced the findings. Apparently, anxiety scores fell, joy scores rose, and feelings of connection to others increased significantly from before to after the session.

Paul Dolan welcomed the results and said in a statement: "Thanks to these data, we can see how the body immediately reacts to changes in BPM. It turns out the DJ is doing something physiologically significant – not just playing music but guiding the nervous system. This opens up new ways of thinking about electronic music."

Emma Marshall added: "This isn't just about dancing. When the music and the experience are structured in a specific way, they guide the body through a clear cycle – calm, build, peak, and recovery. The data shows measurable stress regulation happening in real time, not as a side effect, but as the direct result of how the experience was designed."

So the take-home message would appear to similar to the one that the hosts of Strictly have traditionally left us with: keep dancing.

Over the past decade, British producer and DJ O'Flynn has carved out a distinctive sonic identity, sitting somewhere between the melody-rich electronics of his past collaborators Bonobo and Barry Can't Swim and the more bass-driven sound of artists like Floating Points or Caribou.

Following releases on Ninja Tune and Blip Discs, this summer O'Flynn returns with his third LP, Kairos, on his own Hundred Flowers label.

We visited him in his London studio to watch him build a track from scratch and break down the elements of new single Sekete. This is what we learned.

Don’t worry if something is “good” while you’re making it

Being too critical of your own work can be one of the quickest ways to kill creative momentum. As O’Flynn explains while sketching out the idea for a new track, it’s important to get your ideas recorded – you can worry about whether or not you think they’re any good later.

“I don’t know if anything’s actually any good when I’m making it,” he explains. “I think you’ve just got to get stuff out, not think about it too much and, you know, play it to a few mates after you’ve made it. Then see if it’s good, rather than worrying about if it’s good when you’re doing it.”

Sampling from vinyl adds ‘warmth and texture’

Sampling is at the core of O’Flynn’s production style. Although he doesn’t religiously stick to a single source – often pulling samples from YouTube, sample packs or field recordings – he says there’s something special about capturing sounds from vinyl records.

“When you sample from vinyl, you immediately just get so much texture,” he tells us. “It’s all been run through really expensive compressors and mixing desks, sometimes recorded to tape as well. So you just got this really nice, warm sound, which just lacks in a lot of sample packs.”

Work on music while you’re “not working”

One of the downsides of crate digging for vinyl to sample is that it can be incredibly time consuming. Even when you’ve got your hands on some records with potential, the process of listening through each track to identify breaks or vocals can be laborious in itself.

O’Flynn uses downtime away from the studio to listen out for samples, making quick notes that he can return to later.

“When I’m cooking or playing FIFA or cleaning I’m listening to records, it’s a great time to sort of work whilst you’re not actually working,” he says. “Every time I hear a sample, I will then make a note on a sticky note. It’s a really easy way to do it, so I don’t have to immediately sample it. Then I can just come back to it.”

Using external processing to bring a bassline to life

In the video, O’Flynn demonstrates how he uses external hardware to create a more vibrant, humanised version of the bassline he writes in Ableton Live. He does this by duplicating the MIDI part and sending it out via an External Audio Effect device.

“I send external MIDI out to this Moog Mother‑32 and then record the bass through the Kaoss Pad,” he explains. “It can do some mental stuff, basically… it’s really fun to suddenly make a bassline feel alive.”

Rather than replacing the existing bass part, O’Flynn layers the new recording on top, creating a thicker bass that has lots of top-end interest but also has a solid sub foundation.

When you’re bored, add something

Turning a great loop into a full track is often easier said than done. O’Flynn’s approach is simple: when you grow tired of one section, add something new.

“I think [the answer to] trying to get the full track from the loop is to, first of all, extend it and then listen to it” he tells us. “Then when you realise you’re bored by one section, you need to add something to it. That could be more percussion, another vocal chop or whatever.”

In the case of his new single, Sekete – which he talks us through in the video – that meant adding a completely different bassline for the second half of the track, creating a B section with a whole different feel.

It’s been announced that Chase & Status are to join the cast of the upcoming James Bond video game, entitled 007: First Light.

Yes, whilst Amazon – who now hold the rights to the film franchise – take their time in sorting out a new Bond film, fans who need a fix of 007 action will have to make do with the game. It’s being developed by a Danish firm called IO Interactive, who confirmed the news about the dance duo’s involvement via Twitter/ X yesterday.

“From underground beats to high-stakes espionage, get ready to turn the speakers up,” it posted. “Chase & Status are stepping into the world of 007 First Light and this re-imagined origin story for James Bond.”

The British DJ duo are the first big name in dance music to sign up for the 007 game. Last month it was confirmed that Dimitri Vegas will also be a part of the game, along with his exclusive remix of the James Bond theme.

The game is set to be released on May 27 on Xbox, Playstation and PC,. Apparently 007: First Light will focus on the origin story of Bond (did Ian Fleming know he had one?) during his early days with MI6. You can see the trailer below:

This isn't the first time IO Interactive have not only used dance music but depicted the club world in a video game. Aficionados of the form may remember Hitman 3 from 2021. That featured a level in which players could explore a certain venue called Club Holle (Club Hell), which has a number of similarities to Berlin’s iconic Berghain.

SUPERBOOTH 2026: It is now a full decade since the first dedicated Superbooth show took place in Berlin, but the origins of the event date back further than that.

Founded by the team behind Berlin instrument store SchneidersLaden, Superbooth grew out of the now-defunct Musikmesse show in Frankfurt. Since 2017, Superbooth has taken place on a regular basis in the tranquil, wooded grounds of the FEZ centre south of Berlin city centre.

Part industry trade show, part synth nerd jam session, the three day event plays host to many of the biggest brands in music technology, but also numerous smaller, newer and often innovative outfits.

More so than the NAMM Show – which takes place in California each January – Superbooth has become the de facto event for music tech brands to announce and showcase new gear.

This year's show is happening between 7-9 May. We'll be on the ground to bring you all the most exciting news.

What to expect?

Superbooth is always packed with new music tech announcements, including synths, drum machines, controllers, software and a whole load of weird and wonderful innovations.

Although there are often a handful of reveals from the 'big name' brands – the likes of Moog, Korg and Novation have used Superbooth to launch new gear in the past – much of Superbooth's most exciting action often comes from smaller, independent developers and new technology brands.

Modular and Eurorack gear is a big deal at Superbooth too. It’s safe to say that you can expect a lot of new module announcements over the course of the next week.

In previous years, Superbooth has been where we’ve got our first look at interesting new products or technological ideas from brand-new startups and fledgling developers – often long before they're ready to hit the market.

Who'll be there?

The full list of exhibitors can be found at the main Superbooth site, which includes hundreds of brands.

Notable names at this year's show include Elektron, Arturia, Teenage Engineering, Korg (and Korg Berlin), Polyend, Novation, Sequential and Roland. Berlin is a major hub for music tech brands and local outfits such as Bitwig, U-He and Native Instruments will be at the show too.

On the modular front, notable names such as Make Noise, Buchla, Tiptop Audio, Intellijel and countless others will have their latest releases on display.

Unlike other 'trade shows', Superbooth also pulls in an interesting lineup of live performances scheduled across its stages.

Highlights this year include Monolake (aka Ableton co-creator Robert Henke), multifaceted DJ/producer Polygonia and techno figureheads Lady Starlight and Rødhåd performing together as part of the latter's WSNWG project.

There's also a solid line-up of workshops and talks. Find the full listings on the Superbooth site.

Can I get a Superbooth ticket?

Yes! Unlike some more industry-focused events Superbooth is open to the public, and there’s a lot to appeal to both pro and amateur musicians.

Naturally, the event is a great place to get hands on with new gear, but also offers the opportunity to speak directly to designers, developers and experts who can offer advice and answer questions.

Head to the Superbooth site to buy tickets, which start at €41 for individual days. 3-day tickets are also available, as are discounted rate tickets, as well as tickets for individual workshops and DIY sessions.

For those that can’t make it to Berlin, you can keep up with all the latest news, gear demos and oddities in our rolling live blog.

What happened at Superbooth 2025?

To get an idea of the general vibe of Superbooth, revisit our 2025 show report.

Now here’s a curious tale. There is a scam promoter operating under a number of aliases in Glasgow who books events that never happen, hooking in dozens of young DJs.

Some digging by local news website The Glasgow Bell has uncovered the man's identity as Kieran Wells. Wells has attempted to put on a number of events in the city over the past few years, it seems. But a familiar pattern has emerged: DJs are recruited via social media, Wells adds them to line-ups and associated group chats and encourages the starry-eyed spinners to source venues, design artwork and in some cases cover upfront costs for venues or sound systems.

Then the events are suddenly cancelled, with the covering story often being a family emergency. And those chats and social media trails disappear into thin air.

It remains unclear what exactly Wells gains from this. None of the DJs, venues or managers The Bell spoke to said that they gave him any money. If Wells thought that by cancelling these events at short notice he’d keep the ticket money, he’s sadly mistaken, too – the ticketing platforms automatically refund punters.

But if no-one has actually lost money, it does affect the reputation of a lot of up and coming DJs as well as being waring emotionally. "It got my hopes up," said one DJ. "I don't know what he gets out of it."

One thing’s for sure: he has pissed off a lot of people in the Scottish dance scene. These are some of the epithets various people have used about him: “troublemaking prick”, a “tool”, a “fuckinging chocolate”, a “scumbag”, an “absolute joker”, “a blagger”, “a fuckin roaster”, a “clown”, a “whoppa”, a “sneaky snake”, a “bag a bawz”, a “fucking melt” and a “complete jakeball”.

Eventually, The Glasgow Bell caught up with Wells. He denied taking payments and said that ‘financial difficulties’ meant he often ended up having to cancel events. "I'm not a scammer," he protested. "It's just stupid… I've pissed off a lot of people." He said that doesn't plan to promote events in future.

Sounds like he needs a change of career...

Born in Belfast and now based in Glasgow, DJ and producer Hammer (aka Rory Hamilton) spent his formative years establishing the influential Feel My Bicep blog, alongside school friends Andrew Ferguson and Matthew McBriar, who would go on to DJ and produce as Bicep.

Over the years since, Hamilton has become a key player in Glasgow's vibrant dance music scene, developing his skills as a DJ and producer, blending elements of classic house and techno with influences from disco, UK garage and beyond.

For our latest track from scratch session, we linked up with Hammer in his hardware-focused Glasgow studio to watch how he creates music.

Don’t stare at a blank DAW – rework an existing project

One of the most distinctive aspects of Hammer’s track from scratch session is that he doesn’t, technically, make a track from scratch. Sure, it’s arguably cheating a little, but we’ll allow it because it’s actually a pretty handy workflow hack.

“I don't strictly ever make a track from scratch,” he tells us. “Here I’m starting with a previous track I made with Lili Chan.”

Hammer’s approach is to load up the DAW session from a previous release and start deleting elements until he’s left with a few bare bones sounds to inspire a fresh idea.

“I love the drums in that track, so I just start by stripping it back. I always find it makes my productivity a bit quicker, faster, better, more creative.”

It’s a neat way to avoid the daunting prospect of staring at an empty DAW timeline, as well as creating sonic continuity across projects – effectively using your last track as a template for the next.

Record long takes and then chop out the best bits

Hardware synths are the cornerstone of Hammer’s studio setup.

For the session, he uses classic hardware including a Roland TR-808, SH-101 and Yamaha CS1x. He uses these to generate raw sounds for the track, sending clocks or MIDI from Ableton Live and recording long takes while tweaking filters, envelopes and other parameters.

“Normally I just record about 10 minutes of this and then chop it all up later,” he tells us.

Although he chops out small sections of these longer recordings to use as loops, he doesn’t waste the rest of the clips, saving elements for builds, breakdowns or alternative sections later in the project.

“Right now I just need to find a nice part of this bassline. But obviously use the rest of it later on somewhere,” he says.

Commit effects to audio

One upshot to Hammer’s hardware-heavy approach is that he commits a lot of sounds to audio early, which limits the ability to endlessly adjust sounds later on.

This is true of synth sounds, but also effects. In the video he uses hardware effects including Strymon Volante and Eventide Space pedals to process synths. Rather than record the parts dry and apply effects later, he captures the wet version and commits.

“I'll probably just not even record the original, just keep the effected version,” he says.

Use Valhalla Shimmer to bring vocal chops to life

One of the hookiest elements of Hammer’s track sketch is his use of chopped vocal adlibs, saved from his previous project with Lili Chan.

These vocals are edited in a classic dance music manner – roughly sliced and rearranged, creating a human, melodic tone but not a discernable lyric line.

The secret to getting these rough edits to gel, for Hammer, is using ValhallaDSP’s pitch-shifting reverb Shimmer.

“I always put a bit of shimmer on these crazy vocals,” he explains. “Valhalla Shimmer. That's my best friend.”

Embrace mess – and delete ruthlessly

The process that Hammer demonstrates in the video is one based around experimentation and hands-on tweaking of synths and effects. It is, as he says, a little messy.

“I have a pretty messy process, but it's nice using all the outboard equipment,” he says.

This isn’t necessarily a negative though. As the expression goes ‘write drunk, edit sober’. Or to put it another way, throw ideas at a project while you’re feeling inspired, then work out what’s worth using and what needs deleting later.

“I just try to keep on working and working on [an idea] and see where I could take the track,” Hammer explains. “I’ll work out what bits are best. Delete loads of bits. Keep moving forward, basically.”

A good techno track can appear incredibly simple, but techno is not necessarily a simple genre to produce. From club-moving subs to subtly shifting percussion, there's a lot of nuance and skill that goes into creating a good techno track.

To help you improve your techno productions and inspire new ideas, we’ve compiled more than 40 minutes of essential techno tips, which you can watch in the video above, all drawn from our In The Studio series.

Between MusicRadar, Future Music and Computer Music, our team has been visiting electronic artists in their studios for decades. These are eight of our most insightful techno-focused sessions from our back catalogue.

How Tom Hades creates techno rumble

Belgian techno maestro Tom Hades has released tracks on labels including Drumcode, Suara and Rhythm Converted. Back in 2018, Computer Music visited him in his studio to watch him build a club-ready track from scratch, resulting in a session packed with techno production knowledge.

Particularly insightful is his approach to creating the genre’s distinctive low end ‘rumble’. The process starts with a solid four-to-the-floor kick, which doubles up as a sub bass using some creative effect processing.

He processes the kick with heavy saturation and compression, bounces it, and then sends it to a return track.

"Afterwards, what I do is I just put a lot of effects on the return track,” he explains. “An overdrive, a convolution reverb, a filter delay, and then I will finish with a simple filter, which gives me the typical techno rumble."

He then uses sidechaining tools to have the sub bass element duck out of the way of the original kick.

"This rumble is very nice because it's not really a character sound,” he says, “but it will give you the power of the kick underneath."

Matador’s drum layering

Irish DJ and producer Matador, aka Gavin Lynch, is known for his stripped-back, hardware-focused take on techno. Future Music visited him in 2015 to watch him break down the making of his track The Enemy featuring Felix Da Housecat.

In the video Lynch demonstrates his approach to creating layered, intricate percussion. He explains that, for him, the secret to thick-sounding drums is to layer multiple hits that occupy different elements of the frequency spectrum.

In his example a tight 909 kick is augmented by claps, hats and percussion lines sitting on top of one another. The clap, for example, is layered with a tambourine, while the hats are thickened with shakers.

To have everything sit together neatly, he runs the sounds through analogue-style processing, using EQ and compression. The effects are merely acting to gel everything together though, rather than reshape specific sounds.

"Instead of loads of EQs on one particular channel, I’ll layer up, say, two or three different hats and work on it that way,” he explains. “You get some original thickness there, so we're not depending on plugins."

Secret Cinema builds tracks with randomisation

From 1991’s hardcore sounds through to his more recent deeper, darker output, Jeroen Verheij has been a key figure of the Netherlands’ techno scene. His formidable discography includes releases on labels as diverse as Rotterdam, Cocoon and Drumcode, under pseudonyms including Meng Syndicate, Point Blank and his most well-known moniker, Secret Cinema.

In 2017, Computer Music magazine met up with Jeroen in his then recently-completed Amsterdam studio to find out how he used a sophisticated combination of software and hardware to create his tracks. In the video, he walks through the process of building a track up from its initial idea, into what would eventually become Ex-Drummer from his Seance EP.

As part of the creative process, he demonstrates how he uses the randomisation tools in Bitwig Studio to create spontaneous melodic ideas and percussion lines.

He does this by sending CV out to a modular synth, driven by a randomised LFO. A scale device is used to control the pitches being sent to the synth.

"If you're a drummer, you will always hit that snare drum on a different setting… which makes that one drum loop so interesting," he explains. “What I want to do is use all these little tricks with LFOs and random step sequencers to make those drum loops humanised again."

Paranoid London's studio jam strategies

When hardware-loving UK acid duo Paranoid London released their album Arseholes, Liars and Electronic Pioneers in 2024, Future Music magazine visited their London studio to catch up with band member Quinn Whalley, and find out how their proudly old-school, raw and analogue take on house and techno comes together.

As Whalley explained during the studio session, the band’s creative process is built around studio jamming and hands-on creativity. Key to making that approach work is having a handful of instruments and effects that the pair know really well – and sticking with that limited setup.

"I'm not a massive fan of using loads and loads of gear,” Whalley explains. “We don't really use a lot, each time we do a track we'll only have a couple of little things."

He also explains that, for Paranoid London, a lot of the magic happens when it’s least expected, and it’s important to capture everything.

"Record everything all the time, and keep it all,” he advises. "You can drag something that you did, like, three years ago, over whatever you’re doing now. When you take a bit of [something old] and put it over something that's in a different tuning or whatever, that's when weird stuff starts happening."

Luke Slater’s (Planetary Assault Systems) outboard effect processes

British techno legend Luke Slater is a man of many aliases. He’s probably best known for his work as Planetary Assault Systems, a moniker under which he’s been releasing tough, drum-machine-focused techno since the mid-’90s.

Slater’s prolific body of work also touches on ambient electronics, acid, house, psychedelic dance music and crossover electro-pop, working as aliases including The 7th Plain, Clementine and LSD, as well as under his own name.

In 2024, Future Music visited him in his hardware-packed studio as he prepared to release a new album under his L.B. Dub Corp alias via Dekmantel.

Among a whole host of production insights, he explained the important role that outboard effects play in shaping his sound.

"Most of this gear is actually made for rock and roll,” he explains. “But I just find it amazing when you put electronic music through it. You can get results that are sometimes amazing."

In the video he demonstrates how he uses things like Pultec EQs to shape his master track, the Overstayer compressor to apply overdrive and tone shaping, and a Culture Vulture to turn a 909 kick drum into a booming techno bass.

Creating rolling techno percussion with Wehbba

In 2017, Future Music paid a visit to Brazil-born techno producer Wehbba in his Barcelona studio, to break down the creation of his track Fake, released on Drumcode.

Tying the track together are lines of rolling percussion, which Wehbba explains are created using heavily processed drum machine rimshots.

"I really love rim shots, and I use them extensively in my production," he says. "This part was from a big jam on the TR‑8. I chopped up the bits I liked and picked different loops out of them.”

Wehbba then demonstrates how he adds body, character and movement to the percussion line. First he applies saturation, reverb and EQ. He then adds ValhallaDSP’s free FreqEcho to create an ensemble-like effect using frequency shifting.

Finally, he tames the sound using limiting and filters.

Less-is-more techno arrangement with BEC

Berlin-based techno producer BEC, real name Rebecca Godfrey, creates hypnotic, groove focused techno. Back in 2021, as she had just released her Pleasure Seeker on Pan-Pot’s Second State, Future Music visited her in the studio to find out how she created the trance-influenced track, Trusting the Mystery.

One particularly distinctive feature of the track is its simplicity.

"It's probably one of my most simple tracks ever,” Godfrey explains. “15 elements, and that's including three kicks, so there's actually 12 separate sounds in here. I think there's beauty in simplicity."

She demonstrates how the arrangement is built using a two-note melody and simple bassline, along with short, looping percussive patterns.

The tension comes from shifts in effects and automation, with reverb added to create space towards the drop, and the synth line’s filter cutoff opening as the track rises.

Tomy DeClerque's techno mastering tricks

In a classic 2012 studio session, Future Music visited Eastern European techno producer and DJ Tomy DeClerque in his studio.

One particularly noteworthy tip shared during that session is DeClerque’s approach to mastering. As the producer explains, he would often do a ‘mastering pass’ on a track at an early stage.

“Everybody else is doing the loop, then they create the song, then create the mix, and then they do the mastering,” he explains. “I prefer to do the mastering early in the stage."

This approach, he explains, helps him identify issues with the mix and production early on, that he can then fix.

"The mastering always brings up some frequencies you don't know,” he says, “so I prefer to do the mastering thing, break everything up, make it loud, and then go back and repair the things that mastering has brought out."

Cast your mind back a few years and it would have been hard to imagine that, by the mid-’20s, one of the more fashionable sounds to reference in pop music would be that of British dance music duo Basement Jaxx (Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe).

And yet here we are. Jaxx references are scattered all over Brits Producer of the Year PinkPantheress’s 2025 mixtape, Fancy That, and their influence can be heard elsewhere, too. It’s hard to imagine that Confidence Man and Jade weren’t aware of the duo’s 2005 hit Oh My Gosh when they wrote and recorded 2025 single Gossip, for example.

Discussing PinkPantheress’s endorsement, Buxton told The Sydney Morning Herald earlier this year: “She sampled us in four tracks on her mixtape [Girl Like Me, Stars, Nice To Know You and Romeo], so that’s really nice. She’s part of the new generation, so it’s nice to get the props.”

The relationship goes deeper than that, though – PinkPantheress actually credits Basement Jaxx with helping her to hone her production skills, having spent time with them in the studio.

“They were very pivotal in my learning,” she told Mixmag last year. “I went in there to make beats and songs with them, but I ended up just seeing their creative process and style and picking their brains… I ended up sampling them. I don’t want to leak how they work, but just seeing how they reach certain sounds or develop ideas was really interesting.”

PinkPantheress might be keeping shtum, but speaking to Future Music in 2015 – following a five-year hiatus, Basement Jaxx had returned with their seventh and still most recent album, Junto, in 2014 – Simon Ratcliffe was willing to offer a little insight into the Jaxx workflow.

At the time, they’d just moved to a larger facility: "We used to work together in the studio, but now we have the luxury of having a mixing room, a writing room and a vocal/live room,” Ratcliffe explained. “All of them are sizable and have computers in, so I'd say at least half of this album we were working in completely different rooms to each other. We'd swap roles and rooms, whereas in the past we'd always be stuck in one room together, hammering over something. Felix listens to one aspect and I listen to another, and he doesn't really hear what I'm hearing and I don't really hear what he's hearing, but it gets to a certain point where we both think it's cool."

Having built up a following on the mid-’90s UK house scene, Basement Jaxx made their commercial breakthrough with 1999's debut album Remedy, which spawned singles Red Alert, Jump n’ Shout, Bingo Bango and Rendez-Vu.

Reflecting on hearing that album for the first time, PinkPantheress told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe in 2025: “It blew me away, and I felt things that I hadn't felt before. And also, more than that, I felt like I was listening to something I'd never listened to before. I was like, ‘I've never heard anything like this.’”

Discussing Basement Jaxx’s origins, Ratcliffe told Future Music: "I met Felix through friends of friends; he was putting on parties around London and was really into the New York/Chicago house sound. He came to my studio with his mates and wanted to make a track, so we did a few sessions. I charged £100 a day, which Felix thought was a good deal, and we seemed to have a good understanding, so eventually it kind of filtered down to just me and Felix.”

“With Basement Jaxx, we were forever trying to sound as cool and sophisticated as the American stuff, and we didn't, but in the process we ended up creating our own sound,” Ratcliffe continued. “If you want to create something, you will, but you'll make it within the limitations you've got. Presets can be great, but if you don't have that inquisitiveness and creativity to want to try and do other things, I don't think you're ever going to achieve that much, really. There's no secret, there's no magic key; the people who want to achieve things will do it because they're born to do it."

2001’s Rooty spawned more hits – Romeo, Jus 1 Kiss, Where’s Your Head At? (a huge presence on TikTok these days, confirming Basement Jaxx’s resurgence) and Do Your Thing among them. 2003’s Kish Kash gave us another in the shape of Good Luck.

Basement Jaxx’s status as a big-time singles band was confirmed by the success of a greatest hits album in 2005 (the aforementioned Oh My Gosh was a new track here), and they cemented their position in British dance music history with a headlining slot at Glastonbury the same year, replacing Kylie Minogue after she’d been forced to pull out following a cancer diagnosis.

Two more uptempo albums followed – 2006’s Crazy Itch Radio and 2009’s Scars – and there was also the chilled-out Zephyr, another 2009 release. In 2011, Basement Jaxx turned their hand to film-scoring, on Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block.

Reflecting in 2015 on why they returned to making bangers, Ratcliffe said: “We thought the musical landscape seemed to be in our ballpark - that groovy, soulful house vibe was all cool again, jazz is not a dirty word any more, and that aesthetic has shifted in our favour."

Basement Jaxx returned to touring in 2025, and are currently playing shows in Australia. They’ll be back in the UK playing festivals over the summer, and also have a sold-out Royal Albert Hall gig in London to look forward to.

Playing the hits is one thing, of course, but writing new ones is getting ever more challenging, a fact that Ratcliffe acknowledged even a decade ago.

“We constantly try to listen to the music around us to make sure that what we're doing is relevant, which, when you've been going as long as we have, becomes a bit more difficult,” he said. “You have to keep on your toes and keep referencing; it's all about the nuances in the sound and the sonics - that's more important now than ever”

PinkPantheress, of course, is having no problem staying relevant: her remix of Stateside, alongside Zara Larsson, is currently the biggest song in the world on Spotify. This is lifted from 2025 Fancy That remix album Fancy Some More?, and who else appears on that? Basement Jaxx, of course, on a new version of Tonight.

Pete Tong has been talking about hearing loss and the steps he’s had to take to ensure he can still DJ in his mid 60s: he has to wear a hearing aid these days.

In an interview with the Guardian, the Radio 1 stalwart – he’s presented a show on the station since 1991 – admitted: “I think there probably is a stigma – thinking that you must be old if you need a hearing aid. But then I’m not 20 anymore.”

About a decade ago, the DJ was diagnosed with hearing loss in his right ear. “I’d been in and around music since I was 15, so I guess I wasn’t surprised. I just started to become conscious of it.”

Tong started wearing earplugs, but they made him feel “quite cut off, because it totally changes the experience. You hear the music really beautifully, and you feel the bass, but you don’t really hear the crowd in the same way. (But) I psyched myself into: that’s my new environment, and it’s healthier for my hearing.”

The DJ has become an ambassador for Boots Hearingcare, to convince those who have grown up with him – those in their 40s and 50s who have spent their whole adult going to clubs and gigs – to take audiological tests and to use precautions like earplugs.

In the interview, Tong reveals he’s currently writing a book, which should be a fascinating read when it finally comes out.

He’s been a tastemaker at the cutting edge of British music for over forty years now – he was a soul DJ during the days of the 80s pirates (he span for Radio Invicta), but quickly signed up for the acid house revolution of 1988/89. Rave was “good for a while”, he says, “but then it got out of hand with the illegal nature, and it became more tabloid headlines, drugs, sensationalism.”

By 1991, he was at Radio One, where he’s been ever since. And as well as this he’s worked for London Records – he founded ffrr, which was the label’s dance subsidiary and signed Salt N’ Pepa, Orbital and Utah Saints amongst many others.

Somehow, through all this, he’s managed to avoid the hedonistic excesses that too many '90s DJs succumbed to: “I always had these things that keep you sane, keep you together,” he says, referring to his first marriage and his kids. “I never really burned out – I think just by luck as much as judgment.”

The best dance music records are often the ones that seem the most basic. Simple tracks built of little more than a few looped beats, melodies or perfectly-pitched samples, which nonetheless convey tension and emotion through subtle variations in each repeated motif.

Intro, by French musicians Alan Braxe and Fred Falke, is a prime example. Released in 2000 on Braxe’s Vulture Music label, Intro samples its refrain from The Jets’ 1985 hit Crush on You, that main hook augmented by crisp sampled percussion and a silky, grooving bassline played by Falke.

The two musicians began collaborating in 1999, but had met several years before during a stint of national service.

Braxe lived in Paris, and by the end of the 1990s had already had global success with Music Sounds Better With You as Stardust, a band Braxe formed for the one-off release with Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter and vocalist Benjamin Diamond.

He had recently released his solo debut Vertigo on Bangalter’s label Roulé, but was in the process of setting up his own Vulture Music label, inspired by the approach taken by Detroit techno icons Underground Resistance.

Having not seen each other in several years, Braxe chanced upon Falke in a secondhand instrument shop.

Falke, who is from Southern France, was forging a career as a session bassist, but a growing interest in synthesis and production had led him to hunt out secondhand gear to kit out his studio.

“Bass was my main instrument but I was also playing keyboards, I had a Minimoog,” Falke explains. “I started to do sessions for DJs, mainly trip-hop, hip-hop stuff. I would go to their place, play the bass on the track, but then they started to ask me, ‘Oh, can you replay this sample?’

“Doing that got me into the electronic stuff, and eventually I started to buy some equipment, like some samplers and stuff. I guess I was probably looking for some used gear when I bumped into Alan in that second hand store.”

The pair decided to try a few recording sessions together in Braxe’s home studio, at the time containing a fairly sparse setup of hardware tools.

“The centerpiece was the SP-1200 sampler from E-mu,” Braxe recalls. “There was another sampler, the ASR-10 from Ensoniq, which is a kind of workstation where you can sample and arrange, and do synthesis with samples. Then there was just a mixer and a very cheap compressor – the Alesis 3630 which is very well known for its pumping sound.

“There was one synthesizer, one multi-effects from Ensoniq – the DP/4, which has phasing, reverb, delays, all in one – and a turntable for sampling. That's it, there was no computer at all.”

Like many classic French house records, the creation of Intro started with a session of crate digging and sampling.

At the time, Braxe would make regular visits to record shops, buying 20 or more records with each visit, primarily from the ‘70s and ‘80s, before returning to the studio to listen and sample. It was during one of these sessions that he happened upon a hook in The Jets’ Crush On You.

“This bit was playing and instantly I felt like, okay, there is something there,” he explains. “This is a sample. It's easy to loop.”

Although the sample itself sets the mood for Intro, the use of the SP-1200 played an important role in the track’s character and tone.

“It has a very specific sound,” Braxe says. “The maximum sampling time you have in the machine is 10 seconds, and you cannot exceed two and a half seconds per sample. So at that time, the strategy to deal with this was to play the record much faster than its original speed.

“The record from The Jets was 33 rpm, so I played it at 45 rpm, thus you save time. Afterwards I detuned it, and when you detune the samples on the SP-1200 there are a lot of artifacts. It sounds very crispy.”

Braxe sampled the hook across four tracks of the SP-1200, sequencing the detuned samples one after another. The drum pattern, created on the same machine, is essentially just a sampled kick drum and a few tuned percussion hits.

With those sampled elements loaded onto a floppy disc, Braxe took the basic elements of Intro to Falke who wrote the iconic bassline.

“The idea was to just modulate [the root note of the] original sample. So, you work out it’s in F minor, and then you jam along,” Falke explains.

“Because the whole thing is just a loop, you want something that you can hear over and over and over again. I love bass parts that you can sing along to. I mean, Billie Jean, or Another One Bites the Dust. All those tracks, they start with this bassline, right? It's infectious.”

The recording of the bass part itself was as unfussy as the rest of the track. Once again, the bassline was captured using a sampler, this time the Ensoniq ASR-10.

“The bass was plugged into the sampler, and that's it,” Falke says. “There was no preamp, there was nothing else.”

Even beyond the samplers, little in the way of effects was used on either the bass or sampled elements. The bassline was run through a Mackie desk, with a little bass and high EQ applied, while the sampled hook was treated with a phaser from the Ensoniq DP/4.

The one secret ingredient, Braxe explains, was the notorious Alesis 3630 compressor.

“It played a huge role in the sound of the track,” he says, “because it makes it really pump.”

The beauty of Intro undoubtedly lies in this simplicity. It is a track made of a few brilliant core elements, with the confidence to let these stand on their own, bringing each part in and out one by one, rightly trusting that their interplay is enough to keep a dancefloor engaged for its five minute duration.

Even by the admission of its creators, writing such a simple dance music track isn’t as easy as it sounds, and it’s a tough trick to repeat, particularly now that more advanced production tools are so readily available.

“I think it's almost impossible,” Braxe says. “I'm very often thinking about that. When we did this 25 years ago, it felt like we had no clue of what we were doing. Even if you were to give us the same equipment now, I'm not the same person. I know how a computer works. I know what you can do with the computer. I know what AI can do. The context is completely different, so I'm not going to interact with that equipment in the same way.”

“A lot of younger artists or producers I'm working with ask me about this,” Falke says. “They might tell me they’ve bought an SP-1200. I tell them it's not about that [piece of gear]. It's a state of mind

“We had those machines back then, and they're great, but it’s just what was available. Most of them were used and cheap. That was the whole point – you were making something that sounds like a record in your living room with a handful of machines.

“So I tell them it's all about making decisions and not looking back. You can do that with any kind of equipment. It's just about like, a state of mind.”

On 20 March, Intro is being reissued on vinyl by Domino offshoot Smuggler’s Way to mark the track’s 25th anniversary.

As part of the release, both artists have contributed their own remixes as b-sides.

“You don't want to change it that much, but you do want to change it,” Falke explains of his remix. “I wanted to get the idea very fast, because that's the way I work, at least in the beginning. The idea was to start from the original bass, and then maybe make it a little bit different, so it's different but has the same flavour. From there, you have this unexpected analogue synth breakdown.”

For Braxe, finding a new way to reinterpret the original didn’t come easily.

“The original is good as it is, so it's not easy to approach this,” he says. “Instead of putting pressure on myself, I took it the other way. Sometimes before going to DJ, I’ll make edits in my hotel room – like very fast edits of tracks on Ableton. I said to myself, Okay, you should do this remix in the same way. Don't think too much. Make it very fast.

“I tried to keep the original intention of this type of music, which is: don't think, just do it.”

Alan Braxe & Fred Falke – Intro (25th Anniversary Edition) is out 20 March via Smuggler's Way

If you live in the UK, you will have doubtless heard much about the death of the British club scene and dire warnings about the future of the night-time economy. However, a new report into UK electronic music has revealed a much more nuanced picture.

The Fourth Electronic Music Report has been produced by the Night Time Industries Association and uncovers some interesting stats. Whilst UK clubs are undeniably struggling – since March 2020 we’ve lost 36% of our nightclubs, leaving just 823 in the whole of Britain – electronic music as a whole in the UK generated £2.47 billion in measurable economic activity in 2025, a rise of 3% on 2024.

In terms of the actual music, the UK continues to be one of the most influential countries in the world. It ranks second in the world for electronic artist development, with 13 of the global Top 100 DJs and 72 in the Top 500 and 11% of the global electronic music creators.

Breaking that down within genres, the UK has 30.5% of drum n’ bass artists and 14.7% of dubstep producers. Britain’s dance music exports account for some £86.8 million, an increase of 8% from 2024 and a cause for some cheer considering the increases in cost and red tape that Brexit has produced.

That’s the good news. Against that, clubs – traditionally the laboratories for dance music – are in difficulty. Just 15% of UK venues could now be described as ‘mid-range’, the crucial 500 – 2,500 capacity clubs. Below those, grassroots venues are operating on shoestrings – their average profit margin is just 0.48% - with their operators taking home an average £26,000 whilst working 60+ hour weeks. The super-club era of the 1990s seems a long time ago.

But people still want to dance. The survey has picked up a significant increase in free parties – a rise of 34% since 2024, with more events taking place in cafes, art galleries and record shops. Free events now account for 15% of all electronic music programming.

And the North is leading the way in this. For the first time since the survey began, a majority (51%) of dance music events take place outside London. The Northern region has seen an overall increase of 93% between 2022 and 2025, with events in Newcastle growing 72% between 2024 and 2025 alone.

In a statement about the survey, Michael Kill, CEO of the Night Time Industries Association said: “Electronic music remains one of the UK’s most powerful cultural and economic assets, but the domestic ecosystem that sustains it is now in crisis.

“We are seeing free parties rise, mid-tier venues disappear and audiences pushed out of licensed spaces - not because demand is falling, but because the sector is being squeezed by sustained economic pressure.”

He continued: “At the same time... this report shows extraordinary resilience, but resilience is not a policy. Without urgent reform - from VAT alignment and business rates relief to meaningful planning protections - we risk dismantling the very foundations that made the UK a global leader.”

Undoubtedly the most revered beatmaker in hip-hop’s five-decade history, James Dewitt Yancey - better known as J Dilla or Jay Dee - is one of those rare musical talents that forever alters the direction of not only his chosen genre, but popular music as a whole.

Through his solo releases, his work with Slum Village and his production for The Pharcyde, A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul and Erykah Badu (to name a few) Dilla’s influence has radiated outward through genres and generations, inspiring everyone from Michael Jackson to Kendrick Lamar. As his close friend and collaborator Madlib put it, "every producer bows down to Dilla, whether they like it or not".

Dilla's visionary approach to rhythm, his unparalleled ear, and his near-supernatural ability to make magic with an Akai MPC and a turntable sets him apart as a towering figure in musical history with a stature rivalling that of Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis and James Brown.

Testament to his genius is the fact that Dilla managed to achieve this level of impact while only in his youth: the producer died of a rare blood disease in 2006, just a few days after reaching his 32nd birthday, 20 years ago this month.

Born and raised in Detroit, Dilla soaked up jazz, soul, funk and gospel throughout his childhood, but was captivated chiefly by the nascent sound of hip-hop emanating from America’s East Coast: as he reached his teen years, hip-hop too was graduating from infancy to adolescence.

Inspired by acts like Run DMC and Whodini, a young Dilla began to make beats in the only way he could, using an improvised set-up consisting of two modified tape decks. Disassembling and tweaking the machines in order to slow the tapes down, he would sample tapes and build beats simply by using the pause and record buttons on his cassette deck, a technique called ‘pause tape’ production.

On hearing the quality of his pause tape beats, Detroit musician and former Parliament keyboardist Amp Fiddler invited Dilla to his studio, teaching him the basics of the then-revolutionary Akai MPC60, a new sampler and drum machine designed by Roger Linn, building on the innovations he had developed with the LinnDrum and Linn 9000.

Under his instruction, Dilla formed a lifelong bond with the instrument: though he experimented with a number of machines, including the E-mu SP-12 and SP-1200, Dilla ultimately settled on the MPC3000 as his sampler of choice, a machine that’s since become synonymous with the producer - his own MPC is now housed in the Smithsonian Museum of African-American History.

Dilla’s approach to beatmaking was almost ritualistic. Every morning, like clockwork, he would arise at 7AM, spending two hours cleaning up his basement studio while listening to an array of records for potential samples. Rather than skip through, hurriedly needle-dropping, Dilla would listen through everything in full, listening patiently for hidden gems buried in the mix.

The producer has been described as a human musical encyclopaedia: his thousands-strong record collection was meticulously arranged, ready to be plundered for the perfect cut the moment inspiration arose.

Much of the remaining day would be taken up by the assiduous crafting of beats, which Dilla turned out in their hundreds, often spending only fifteen or twenty minutes on each idea.

Through this rigorous method, he developed a proficiency with the MPC that enabled him to create a new rhythmic language, a unique approach to timing that stands as the producer’s most enduring contribution to popular music: the "Dilla feel", or Dilla Time.

Gloriously off-grid, Dilla’s beats combined rhythmic elements treated with varying degrees of swing together to produce a near-polyrhythmic take on the classic boom-bap template that was truly pioneering.

Though many of his beats were played in by hand and unquantized, key to Dilla’s rhythmic feel were the advanced sequencing capabilities of his chosen drum machine: unlike many other samplers popular with hip-hop producers, the MPC allowed the user to adjust swing values for each sound and each note individually, as opposed to adjusting the global swing of an entire beat.

While advancements in music technology had previously enabled producers to use drum machines to imitate real drummers, the MPC empowered Dilla to produce rhythms that sounded like nothing any drummer had ever played before - machine-programmed rhythms that would go on to influence how real drummers played.

Through precise adjustments to micro-timing - a kick hits 30ms early here, a snare drags by 20ms there - and the application of irregular amounts of swing to each element of a drum pattern, Dilla created a loose, wonky and instantly recognizable sound that was entirely his own.

Though they’ve since been studied by musicologists at universities across the globe, all it really takes to understand Dilla’s rhythms is to listen, and let your head nod along.

Four key releases in J Dilla's discography

1. The Pharcyde - Runnin'

Dilla was introduced to The Pharcyde through Q-Tip, who mentored the producer in his early years, before Dilla produced seven tracks on their sophomore album Labcabincalifornia.

One of his most recognisable productions, “Runnin’” is built on a fidgety, shuffling beat that stumbles over a sample lifted from Stan Getz’s “Saudade Vem Correndo”. Testament to Dilla’s knack for sample-spotting, “Runnin’” transforms a few notes from a jaunty bossa nova into a certified West Coast hip-hop classic.

2. J Dilla - Another Batch

Sampling everything from Philip Glass to Hall & Oates, this collection of 32 beats was never officially released, but gained a lofty reputation among fans and fellow musicians after being circulated by Dilla in the late ‘90s.

Many of these tracks were made around the time the producer transitioned from the E-mu SP-1200 to the MPC3000 and began to perfect his uniquely off-kilter sense of rhythm and timing.

3. Slum Village - Get Dis Money

Dilla formed rap trio Slum Village in high school with friends Baatin and T3. A highlight of the group’s Dilla-produced second album, Fantastic Vol. 2, “Get Dis Money” sees the producer upending hip-hop convention by refusing to place a kick on the downbeat.

Based around a decelerated and uneven seven-bar loop of Herbie Hancock’s “Come Running To Me”, the track’s unorthodox structure jumps between sections of irregular lengths.

4. J Dilla - Donuts

Released 20 years ago this month, Dilla’s final solo album was recorded in the weeks leading up to his death, much of it using a Boss SP-303 sampler hooked up to a portable 45-rpm turntable during the producer's time in the hospital.

Sampling records brought to him by his mother and friends, Dilla wove together samples both recognisable and obscure in a daringly eclectic collage that remains one of instrumental hip-hop’s most imaginative and influential recordings.

The career of London-based producer Ikonika (aka Sara Chen) has taken multiple twists and turns. From early dubstep releases on Hyperdub – the influential label that is home to the likes of Burial and Kode:9 – through tracks that have embraced elements of techno, grime, UK funky, gqom and amapiano.

Their latest release, Sad, is the boldest reinvention yet, seeing Ikonika step front and centre as a vocalist as well as a producer for an album that explores both their journey as a songwriter and their trans identity.

As Ikonika explains in our breakdown of album highlight Slow Burn (above), those different sides of Sad are inherently linked. The more complex, song focused structures of the tracks allowing Chen’s vocals to provide a narrative focal point.

“[Slow Burn] is very personal. It's about my transness,” they explain. “I'm a non binary person, and the track is kind of disguised as a poppy electronic track, but it goes through a certain transition towards the end.

“It kind of goes into a reprise and turns into a more dreamy, airy, fluid sort of piece of music. It uses my own vocals as well. The vocals are very airy, very fluid. They kind of meld or glue the track very well.”

We visited Ikonika in their London studio to talk about the album's creation, the challenges of working with vocals, and how the album translates to live performances.

How did you first get into music production?

“I first got into making music after dubstep changed my life. I just wanted to make tracks that were really bassy – really lots of sub bass and not much to it. Also, I'm a big fan of '80s pop, so I always wanted to have synths.

"I learnt DJing around the same time as I was going out to dubstep nights. From there, I got into grime and UK funky, then I started retracing the roots of electronic music. I got into Chicago house, techno, juke and footwork, and a lot of sounds from South Africa. Things like kwaito and bacardi and now amapiano and gqom. They're big influences and constantly make me want to make music.”

What is it about those South African genres that appeals to you?

“I think the first real genre that caught my attention was gqom, just because it kind of sounded a bit like grime, in a really weird way. I think it has the same feeling as grime and UK funky mixed together – sort of housey grime kind of stuff.

“I think, just dynamically speaking, it just had that bass that reminded me of dubstep nights and going to clubs with really nice sound systems, like Plastic People.”

You have a fair amount of hardware in your studio, did you use that in creating the album?

“Sad was pretty much made on my laptop in Ableton. Since having a child, I've downsized – so that's why I'm just purely in the laptop. I'm kind of loving it at the moment, because it reminds me of when I was a bedroom producer.

"It's nice having things that simple again. But obviously it comes with certain challenges. For example, CPU load now that I'm recording vocals and there's 40 or 50 tracks in a song.

“It's made me think about access to things. There was a time when I was collecting synths and trying to use as much hardware as possible. That was really fun and it was such a good learning process – just understanding how it worked, also just the physicality of things, like, actually touching buttons and knobs. I love that. But you know that's quite complex in itself.

“It's maybe a bit weird to downgrade from all of that into a laptop, but I'm really enjoying it.

"The only thing I kind of dislike is CPU load and having to think of workarounds. If a soft synth is bugging out with all the plugins I'm using, or if I have a very wild, overloaded chain going on – how do I work around that? Is it going to stop my creativity? At what point does it get a bit too much and what am I going to do to remedy that?

“Those are the kind of challenges I'm facing. But yeah there are always like workarounds.”

Sad is your first album to include your own vocals – how did that come about?

“I started exploring my vocals back during Covid. I was in a different studio then, and we had lots of nice microphones, but I wasn't really getting any vocalists in. It just felt like a waste to not use those mics.

“So one day, I set one up and just started saying stuff into the mic. It was kind of like, just chants, ‘yeah’, ‘hey’, ‘ooh’, some breath, that kind of stuff. Then I started thinking maybe I could try singing. I just gave it a go and kind of went from there.

“I released an EP with Hyperdub called Bubble Up that had my vocals for the first time. And then a few other tracks came out, like Details that came out on Night Slugs.

“After that I was just making more and more tracks with my vocals. I had a handful of them, and I kind of felt like maybe these weren't singles or an EP, and that there was a bigger story to tell.

“So that's when I started thinking about an album, and that's how Sad came about. It's just this collection of vocals that I didn't think would be useful in the club. They weren't traditional songs for the club. They had elements of pop and R&B, so it just kind of felt right to place them in an album format.”

How much of a challenge has it been incorporating vocals into your productions?

“It was like a whole new thing for me. I learned through a lot YouTube videos, a lot of TikTok videos, just to see how people generally do it, because I didn't really know fully how to track vocals, how to engineer them.

“When I started to learn that kind of stuff, like what you traditionally do to process vocals, I realised I could do things quite differently. One of the big things for me is I'm not too precious about having a clean, flat, dry, perfect sounding vocal.

“I realised that the microphone can pick up so many different things. I'm really into that actually, and not just with my vocals. It's like, when I'm recording little clicks or little claps or little just breaths or air, I'm really into the way, like the microphone receives that and translates it into the computer.

“I'm thinking about that journey that the sound is making. I'm thinking about it more not in a technical sense, but more as a living, breathing sort of thing. That's what I'm really enjoying right now.”

Tell us about the contribution of Tice Cin on the final track…

“The last track of my album is called Make It Better, and it features my friend Tice Cin. She is a writer, a DJ and a general music person. She wrote a book called Keeping The House, She kind of spat some bars on the last track.

“It's funny, because actually it was supposed to be an intro, but then we kind of felt it would be better as an outro, because it concludes the album very well. She's been there since the beginning of this album, so she's seen how it's unfolded and the way it's grown and turned into this thing.

“She also helped me with understanding the narrative of the album from a writer's perspective. We chose a train as the vessel for the narrative. So it was just simple questions at first: if this album is a train, what kind of things happen on the train? What happens before you get on a train? What happens on the train? What happens when you get off the train?

“She basically said, that's how writers write. Maybe try having that writer's mindset when thinking about the album.”

How are you planning on performing the tracks from Sad live?

“When I started performing these tracks it was more of a hybrid DJ situation. I'd be running playback on the CDJs and it would be mixed like a DJ set. I'm still keeping to that core – because being a DJ, that's kind of all I know – but I’m now using Ableton and a Push 3.

“I've been running Push in standalone mode for a few shows, which I think is really nice, but it also gives me anxiety, because I don't really trust it.

“The live setup is very simple. It's just a Ableton Push 3 and a microphone. Like my production setup, everything is in-the-box. It sort of has the same kind of feel as a DJ set – there's no gaps in it, and it kind of journeys from the more of the sadder tracks of Sad and then gets a bit uplifting.

“It’s stem based, so there's room to mix in different clips from different songs and different percussion elements and loops.

“For me, it's more important to get the vocal across while at the same time keeping that club energy.

“I'm now thinking about vocal coaching. I'm thinking about how to warm up my voice. I'm thinking maybe not to have too many cigarettes, and maybe just ease off the Henny.

“I'm thinking of all these kinds of things, because my body, my voice is the instrument and is the performance. I have to look after myself. I have to look after my health. I can't get a cold, I can't get a cough, chest infection, anything like that. So it is rather different from a DJ set.

“I'm trying to not rely on something like Auto-Tune, because I feel like it can go kind of a bit wrong sometimes. That’s where the vocal coaching comes in. I want to just actually learn my songs and not be pitch perfect but, you know, there abouts.”

SAD by Ikonika is out now via Hyperdub

Abbey Road Studios has a rich and storied history, but one thing it has never been in all that time is a venue for a rave. Until now.

Later this month Studio One, where Shirley Bassey cut Goldfinger, The Beatles laid down All You Need Is Love and countless movie soundtracks have been recorded, will host an evening curated by Soulwax under their 2manydjs alter ego.

Abbey Road is billing it as a ‘rave’ but it sounds a bit less chaotic than that phrase suggests. It finishes at 1am for starters.

The event, on February 21 will see Soulwax/2manydjs debut their new DEEWEE soundsystem, a speaker system modelled on the one used at New York’s famed Paradise Garage club.

The duo will also be playing new Soulwax music that they will have recorded in Studio Two the day before. According to Abbey Road, they'll be using the space as a “creative lab, experimenting with the studio’s vintage gear, tech and spaces. They’ll then cut new music directly to vinyl, which will be played out in Studio One on the Saturday night.”

There will also be special guests, which will be announced in due course and – oh yes – the whole thing will be filmed to be broadcast on Youtube on March 5.

In a statement, Soulwax’s David and Stephen Dewaele said: “It’s hard to say whether we have a perverse or healthy attraction to crazy ideas, that’s for other people to decide, really.

"So to be approached with a crazy idea is one thing, but to be approached with a crazy idea by the most iconic recording studio in music history is even more attractive. We embrace and accept this challenge and also sincerely hope this won’t be the last rave at Abbey Road.”

Abbey Road’s Director of Marketing & Creative, Mark Robertson, added in a statement: “Abbey Road After Hours is part of our mission to devise unexpected moments and creative collisions in our house.

"I’ve talked about hosting a rave for years, so it’s a genuine thrill for Soulwax to accept the invitation to curate the first night – which will include new music that they’ll record here the day before. Studio One has been home to countless era-defining firsts - from Elgar to John Williams - and opening the room to bold new forms of creativity feels both true to our heritage and audacious.”

It all sounds a lot of fun. Inevitably, entrance will be restricted, to just 300. Tickets then, are being distributed in a public ballot, which in a wonderful old skool touch is being conducted via phone (yeah, that old thing). So if you’re interested call the Soulwax rave hotline on 07886 072699 to enter. It’s open now.

It’s been announced that Mark Ronson will pick up the Outstanding Contribution to Music award at the Brits later this month.

The 50-year-old DJ and producer said in a statement that "This is the most meaningful honour of my career. I think of the times I've watched artists I revere accept this same award. The idea that I'm now standing in that lineage feels impossible."

"I left England as a kid, but this country runs through everything I've made. The UK artists I've worked with - their brilliance and refusal to compromise - shaped not just my work but how I understand what music should do. And more than anything, it's the crowds here who've sustained and showed up for me.

"The fans, the festival crowds, the record buyers and streamers - the love has always been overwhelming. I'm beyond grateful for all of it."

Ronson was born in London but raised in New York and has joint citizenship. Over the past quarter century, he’s managed to weave a unique path through music that touches on hip hop, pop, funk and soul.

He started out as a DJ – indeed wrote a memoir about his early days playing in 1990s New York last year – but soon move over into production and has worked with a small army of big names in his time – Amy Winehouse most notably, but also Duran Duran, Bruno Mars, Lily Allen, Lady Gaga, Queens of the Stone Age, Robbie Williams and Adele, to name just a few. He’s also released five albums under his own name, the second of which, Version, went three times platinum in the UK alone.

The Outstanding Contribution award has a long but patchy history at the Brits – it was awarded annually until 2010. Then, in 2014, it morphed into the ‘Icon’ award and has been given intermittently, often to international artists: Pink won it in 2019 and Kylie Minogue in 2024.

Some artists have been awarded it on multiple occasions. Bowie and Robbie Williams have all won it twice and Elton John and Paul McCartney three times – the latter twice with the Beatles and once as a solo artist.

Yet the BPI has, for whatever reason, chosen to snub some artists who, you would think, would be shoe-ins for such an award: UK acts that have sold millions of records all over the world, like Depeche Mode or Iron Maiden. Or Kate Bush, for example.

Anyway, they will all have to wait at least another year. Announcing Mark Ronson’s award in a statement, Stacey Tang, the chair of the 2026 Brit Awards Committee said the producer has "an extraordinary ability to elevate each project he works on… Mark’s creative influence spans every corner of contemporary culture.”

Apparently, Aphex Twin has more monthly listeners on Youtube than Taylor Swift.

‘What? How can that be?’ we hear you cry. Taylor Swift is the biggest pop star in the world and Richard D James, popular though he is, is nowhere near that league. Here, though, are the stats: Taylor Swift’s has 399 million monthly listeners on the platform’s streaming service Youtube Music whilst and Aphex Twin has 448 million.

However, the reason for this surprising stat could be the way that monthly audience is calculated. YouTube Music not only counts direct plays connected to official artists' accounts but also passive use on YouTube Shorts.

And it seems it’s one Aphex tune in particular that seems to have become a go-to for many many content creators – QKThr. It’s one of James’s shorter tracks – just one and a half minutes long – from the ambient end of his oeuvre and was originally released on his 2001 album Drukqs.

One DJ and commentator Ramon Pang has put an Instagram post up online analysing the phenomenon: “I’ve seen it soundtrack everything from postmodern corecore edits about the internet, stupid meme videos, subtle foreshadowing and hopecore,” he said.

“The track is emotional and soul crushing. It’s got this accordion in it,” Pang says, before wondering whether Gen Z or Gen Alpha will grow up to be nostalgic about a track that was originally released many years ago – and in some cases – before they were even born.

BEST OF 2025: Join us for our traditional look back at the news and features that topped MusicRadar's charts in 2025.

Once seen as sonic innovator and technological trailblazer – he was once praised by Roger Linn himself for the “unusual and creative” ways he used his LM-1 drum machine – Prince later seemed to focus more of his energies on extolling the virtues of good old-fashioned musicianship.

In fact, his relationship with technology appeared to be complicated. While he never completely retreated from using synths, drum machines and samplers on his records, Prince would frequently remind audiences at his shows that they were listening to ‘real music by real musicians’.

Having initially embraced electronic instruments, Prince seemed to view himself as the man who was pushing back against the technological tide, and he offered a telling insight into his musical mindset in an unearthed clip from – wouldn't you know it – 1999, when he was being interviewed by DJ/production duo Soulwax (AKA 2manydjs) on Belgian TV.

This, of course, was around the time when in-the-box production was just taking off – DAWs were becoming more powerful and soft synths were disrupting the whole music-making industry – so Prince was asked how he kept things interesting now that he was competing with “any kid with a PC in his bedroom”.

“There’s just one catch,” he interjects. “The kid with the PC in the bedroom can’t play his instrument. He can make some sounds, and then you can get a vast amount of repetition, but if they didn’t take the time to learn their instrument and their scales and to actually speak the language of music then they can’t play with someone like Sheryl Crow – all they can do is watch.”

The reference to Crow came because she’d just appeared on Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic, Prince’s guest-heavy album from 1999 (there were also appearances from Gwen Stefani, Chuck D, Eve and Ani DiFranco).

The record is something of a mixed bag – in fact, one of the highlights is a hidden track, Prettyman, which has Prince freeing himself from the R&B-pop-soul conventions of the rest of the album and going full James Brown.

And sure enough, when Soulwax asked Prince how he chose the Rave Un2… guests, it was the one on Prettyman that he seemed most immediately excited about.

“You heard Maceo Parker play before?”, he replied.

The Rolling Stones have finally cleared the release of one of the most talked-about bootlegs of the mash-up era: Fatboy Slim’s Satisfaction Skank.

The Brighton-based DJ (real name Norman Cook, of course) created the bootleg by combining the riff from Satisfaction with his own Rockerfeller Skank, after he said he grew “bored” of playing the original. But Stones' management, who have always tended to take a harsh view over unofficial uses of the band’s material, said no go.

"I got a call from Mick Jagger, and he said he'd heard it and he liked the mix," said Cook in an interview with the BBC. “But his management was just like, 'No, not even negotiable'."

This was back in the early Noughties, when hardly a week went by without the release of a new bootleg that co-mingled two contrasting pop hits.

Some producers made entire careers out of these – Richard X, who combined Adina Howard’s Freak Like Me and Gary Numan’s Are ‘Friends’ Electric to create We Don’t Give A Damn About Our Friends, ended up producing the Sugababes ‘cover’ of his mash-up and nabbed an album deal from Virgin out of it.

Soulwax, a somewhat drab Belgian indie duo, reinvented themselves as 2manyDJs and created whole mix albums out of the phenomenon.

Due to the Stones’ intransigence, they missed out on all this fun. Later, the band asked Cook to remix Sympathy For The Devil for a single release. Satisfaction Skank was due to be the B-side - but the deal ended up falling apart. "We've had a pretty flat 'no' for 20 years," said Cook. "I think we asked four times, and I wouldn't have dared to ask them again."

Recently though, the Stones’ management seem to have softened their stance on sampling. In 2019, they finally signed over their share of the publishing of The Verve’s Bitter Sweet Symphony back to Richard Ashcroft, after he had lost 22 years’ worth of royalties because of the sample of an orchestral version of The Last Time on the track.

It seems that the belated release of Satisfaction Skank was prompted by the Stones camp this time. They even gave Cook the master tapes of the song, so he could create a higher-quality version of the original mix.

In a statement, Cook sounded made up that the track will finally get a proper release: “Over countless years I have always dreamed of an official release for this mash-up. It has been a favourite in my DJ sets for over a quarter of a century, I can confirm it is thoroughly road tested and fit for purpose….”

Now here’s something you probably weren’t expecting to hear about this morning – an album of Autechre covers, but performed in finger-picking style on the acoustic guitar.

The album - with the Ronseal-like title of Autechre Guitar - is the brainchild of Shane Parish, a name to look out for. He’s a colleague of experimental guitarist Bill Orcutt in the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, and Orcutt released his 2024 album Repertoire through his Palilalia label.

Repertoire saw Parish interpret some of the giants of 20th-century experimental and leftfield music, including John Cage, Captain Beefheart, Charles Mingus and Aphex Twin.

Indeed, it seems that his cover of Aphex’s Avril 14^th (and Kraftwerk’s Europe Endless) has led on naturally onto this latest project, as he explains in a statement with accompanies Autechre Guitar.

“The seeds of this project were planted way back in 2002 when Courtney Chappell first introduced me to Autechre’s 1994 album Amber. The CD was on constant rotation in our basement apartment. It was bleak midwinter, and I sat there and slowly figured out how to play the 29-beat melody to the song Slip. I jotted down some chicken scratch tablature in a notebook and it sat on the shelf for over two decades, occasionally coming down to be tinkered with.”

He continues: “Over the course of that time, I arranged and performed hundreds of songs from different genres. In 2024, I recorded two pieces of electronic music on acoustic guitar - Europe Endless by Kraftwerk and Avril 14th by Aphex Twin - which appear on my album Repertoire.

"Engaging with these masterpieces of electronic music put the wind in my sails to pursue this much larger project of navigating the complexity of Autechre in album-length form.”

“Autechre Guitar is the result of my deep love and respect for this otherworldly music, and a desire to render its crystalline poetry as expressively as I can on the acoustic guitar.”

Orcutt is putting the album out through Palilalia again and writes on Bandcamp about the release: "Shane's been working on this one a LONG time. Transcribing music is his thing, but notating and arranging the dense soundscapes of electronic music duo Autechre for solo acoustic guitar has been his Everest."

Autechre Guitar also boasts sleevenotes by esteemed journalist and DJ Philip Sherburne who says of it: "This record shouldn’t, strictly speaking, be possible at all.”

Thankfully it does and if the idea of abstract electronica played on an acoustic tickles your fancy, head over to Parish’s Bandcamp here for more details.

Richard D James, aka Aphex Twin, appears to have uploaded two new tracks to his Soundcloud page.

That page isn’t officially under his name but simply ‘user18081971’ – James was born on August 18 in 1971, you see. Anyways, the two tracks are versions of the same song, titled, in the characteristic wi-fi password-style that Aphex has used for many a year, as ‘Zahl am1 live track’ and ‘Zahl am1 live track 1cf760m1 unfinshd’.

And written in the description is the following message: “Got many requests for this one from a few years back. Italy, pic with my love from Sicily recently. Need sun, relentlessly raining in the UK. Mixed down on the Zähl, think there are better mixes, will upload them if I find them.”

Next to the track, you can see a small pic of James and a young lady on a beach. As you can see, he’s either looking very good for 54, or it’s a photo taken a few years ago.

You can hear them below.

It’s the first new music James has released for a couple of years, although in that time he has put out Music From The Merch Desk, a compilation of the various limited edition vinyl singles he’s sold whilst on tour.

There have also been a couple of archival releases – a reissue of Selected Ambient Works Volume II and Surfing On Sine Waves, the 1993 album he credited to his alias Polygon Window.

The current pontiff – Pope Leo XIV - made a (virtual) appearance at a rave outside a cathedral in Slovakia earlier this month.

Unlikely as it may sound, this actually happened – on 8 November, at St Elisabeth’s Cathedral in Košice, Slovakia, where thousands gathered in celebration of Slovak Catholic prelate Archbishop Bernard Bober’s 75th birthday.

The crowds were also there to see Padre Guilherme, a Portuguese priest who DJs as a sideline. Guilherme’s story is a fascinating one. He was ordained back in 1999, but found his other calling - on the decks - while he was stationed in Afghanistan, organising social events for soldiers.

He dabbled for a few years, but during Covid began streaming weekly sets in which he mixed house with spiritual and folk music. Since then, he’s made quite a name for himself, in Latin America especially – he’s played Mexico’s Dreamfields festival and performed under the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio.

As any student of dance music knows, there is something of an overlap between house and (the) gospel – just think of classic tracks such as Someday, Promised Land, I Lift My Cup and, of course, God Is A DJ by Faithless.

Anyway, the event in Kosice saw Guilherme mix classic house with religious music, with strobe lights and projection-mapped visuals across the exterior of the cathedral. And during Guilherme’s set, Pope Leo made his appearance on the big screen and blessed the assembled massive, er, congregation.

As a backdrop to Leo’s speech, Guilherme played a remix of one of his own tracks, named Dear Young People. As you might expect, clips from the event have gone a little viral, with one user joking “definitely from Chicago” and another saying: “Us Chicagoans definitely built different.”

It all sounds very wholesome and a far cry from the last time rave culture crossed over into Christianity. Older readers may recall the Nine O’Clock Service, an evangelical movement in Sheffield which ran for a few years in the 1990s.

This mixed dance music and a religious message, but was closed down after allegations of sexual abuse by the vicar who ran it.

Only ​​36% of electronic music performances in the UK result in the correct creator receiving payment. That’s according to a new study published by Fair Play, an independent Berlin-based organisation aimed at overhauling the way royalties flow to creators of dance music.

In theory, when a DJ plays a track as part of their set in a public setting, such as a club, festival or on the radio, the creator of the track should earn a royalty. However, according to Fair Play’s report, in almost two-thirds of cases those payments fail to reach the correct creators.

Fair Play’s analysis estimates that £11.25 million of royalties are generated annually from UK nightclubs (PRS + PPL combined for electronic music nights). Of that money, approximately £8.89 million remains to be distributed to musicians after administrative costs. The report estimates that £3.2 million of that is correctly distributed, while the remaining £5.7 million is misallocated.

The problem lies in the fact that there isn’t an industry-wide standard for reporting what music is being played in clubs, and much of the reporting is based on manual submissions or extrapolated from other data.

According to Fair Play’s report, there are four main ways that royalty attribution is processed in the UK. The most reliable of these are music recognition technology (MRT) – ie tools that automatically recognise and take note of what tracks are being played – and voluntary submission of tracklists compiled by DJs or promoters.

Of these, MRT is said to be 90% accurate when used but covers less than 7% of the clubs in the UK. Voluntary submission, meanwhile, is reported to be 95% accurate, but only 5% of DJ sets are actually reported. Fair Play’s report also notes a significant discrepancy between the 42% of DJs reporting regular submissions and observed compliance.

The other major method used for assigning royalty distribution is analogous distribution. This involves using data from other sources, such as data produced by other venues and radio playlists, as a substitute. While rights organisations tend to stand by their methodology, Fair Play estimates that these methods are only 50% accurate, citing issues such as the fact that – according to existing research – the majority of club tracks never appear on the radio.

Rights organisations will also sometimes send staff to conduct in-person surveys, although this is estimated to cover only 0.4% of venues.

The report also identifies other structural challenges with the current system. For one thing, it claims that only 55% of music creators are registered with PRS, and this is heavily weighted towards veteran musicians, 68% of whom are registered, compared with just 22% of newcomers with less than 5 years of experience.

The report also claims that the current methodology results in smaller venues and underground scenes effectively subsidising mainstream producers and music makers, whose music appears more regularly on the radio and therefore gets assigned more weighting through analogous distribution.

This report is far from the first time these issues have been identified within the dance music scene. Back in 2022, American DJ Zak Khutoretsky – aka DVS1 – launched the technological startup Aslice in order to create a system for DJs to track playlists and distribute revenue more accurately.

“Imagine if a producer didn't have to DJ to make a living,” Khutoretsky said to us at the time, “if a producer could earn enough money from producing, then the DJs could stay relevant as DJs and producers could stay relevant. And if a producer is good and they can be compensated and they can spend more time in their studio, they're gonna become better producers, release more music, supply more DJs, And that ecosystem gets a lot healthier, not only financially, but also opportunity-wise.”

Sadly, Aslice’s revenue sharing platform closed last year, although Khutoretsky is now acting as an advisor for Fair Play.

So what can be done? According to the report, there are three “critical gaps” to be addressed. The first of these is expanding MRT coverage to more venues. The second is encouraging the 45% of unregistered creators to register with PRS. The final recommendation is that rights organisations adjust the weighting of their distribution methodology away from the current reliance on radio playlists.

The report also identifies recent incremental improvements, such as the introduction of AlphaTheta’s KUVO system, which makes use of DJ Monitor’s MRT to provide a more affordable automated solution for clubs.

You can download the report in full from Fair Play’s website.

Would you believe that it’s almost 30 years since the single release of Insomnia, by Faithless? The track is one of the most fondly remembered of the mid-’90s era of UK dance dance music, thanks to lead singer Maxi Jazz’s deadpan delivery and Sister Bliss’s instantly recognisable synth riff.

In tribute to the tune and the band that made it, classic house torchbearers Disclosure have now released a 2025 edit of Insomnia, which features beefed-up drums and an acid bassline. But if you’re thinking that you’ve already heard it, you might be right.

“Last year for our live show at Glastonbury, we made a live version of one of the greatest electronic music songs of all time - Insomnia by the legendary band Faithless,” say Disclosure. “To our delight, Sister Bliss reached out and suggested we put out the version we made as a collaboration for all our fans to enjoy. We couldn’t be more honoured to be asked and never thought reworking this track would lead to such a special moment for us”.

Commenting on the release, Sister Bliss says: “We are so excited to present Disclosure’s 2025 edit of Insomnia. It’s a great and funky tribute to Maxi and our beloved UK dance music scene, and a totally unexpected moment in their Glastonbury set that really touched us deeply. It’s a privilege to see our influence on the next generation of artists - Maxi would be very proud to see how much this song is still being enjoyed.”

Maxi Jazz died in 2022 of an undisclosed illness. Speaking to The Guardian in 2020, he said that he came up with the famous ‘I can’t get no sleep’ line after being kept awake by a tooth abscess, but came to realise that, to a generation of clubbers, it meant something else.

“Suddenly the song was being played to crowds who had arguably taken 50 quid’s worth of high-powered drugs and weren’t thinking of getting much sleep for days,” he noted.

Sister Bliss, meanwhile, said that they were inspired by Underworld to hold the big synth riff back until later in the track, and that arguably the most pioneering dance music track of them all gave her a musical idea.

“I remembered Donna Summer’s I Feel Love and how it goes from a major chord to a minor one, and did the same,” she revealed.

Insomnia (Disclosure’s 2025 Edit) is out now on streaming platforms and is also available to buy.

The trance DJ Armin Van Buuren has a new album out today (31 October). Nothing unusual about that, you might say - he’s released eight before, usually with one word titles (Shivers, Intense, Embrace, etc). But Piano is different: it’s his first venture into the classical field.

It’s also coming out exclusively on Apple Music and Apple Music Classical for a week and, to tie in with that, the Dutch DJ has given an interview to Zane Lowe of Apple Music 1 about the new project.

He admitted to feeling nervous about the whole venture, saying: “Playing the piano, I feel more naked than on the cover of Men’s Health magazine... If people will dislike this or be critical of this, because it’s so personal, that will hit me harder than when I do release another dance track. But I feel I’m looking for that vulnerability right now in my life and this is exactly where I need to be.”

(For those of you who are unfamiliar with Dutch men’s periodicals… Van Buuren wasn’t speaking metaphorically. He actually was on the cover of Men’s Health Magazine in the Netherlands earlier this year.)

The classical album, he explained, came out of a period of intense self-doubt. “The cave you fear holds the treasure you seek... really looking that animal in the face was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Who am I? What kind of person do I want to be? And yeah, I’ve hurt a lot of people… but most of all, I was hurting myself.”

He says that Covid felt like a relief. “All of a sudden, I didn’t have to play anymore. And that’s when I seriously considered quitting music.”

Van Buuren started piano lessons in 2018, which led naturally onto composition. “I feel a freedom behind the piano that I don’t feel behind the sequencer,” he explained to Lowe. “What I learned mostly recording all these pieces is the power of breath. There’s music without any note being played. And that’s something I didn’t understand being a DJ. Now I understand how fundamental that is and how all the composers already knew that, the power of breathing.”

Van Buuren said he wasn’t sure if Piano (for which every track was, remarkably, recorded in one take) marks a new chapter for him, or whether it’s merely an interesting diversion.

“At this point, there’s no plan... Everybody’s asking me, ‘Are you going to do the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam?’ (The city’s main concert hall). I have no idea. The only thing I can tell you is that it’s genuine. It comes straight from the heart and it’s in one take... It’s the most honest music I’ve ever made.”

As they prepare to kick off their North American tour, French duo Justice - Gaspard Augé and Xavier de Rosnay - have been discussing their approach to music making - specifically in relation to 2024 album, Hyperdrama - and explaining why they no longer sample other people’ records.

Asked by Rolling Stone if this is about having more control over their sound, de Rosnay replied: “100%. Sampling the traditional way gets frustrating fast: bad tuning, rigid tempos, weird textures that don’t bend. So we started recording our own source material – built for flexibility. It saves us 900 hours digging through crates.”

We can certainly see the benefits - no royalty payments to be made to other artists, for a start - but de Rosnay also admits that there are downsides: “No more surprises. No more accidents. That spark of stumbling on a forgotten gem… gone,” he says. “Daft Punk were the kings of that. They could turn half a second of groove into a global anthem.”

But it wasn’t just sampling that Justice shunned on Hyperdrama - de Rosnay says that they wanted to take a completely different creative approach to previous projects.

“From the jump, we wanted to unlearn what we knew,” he says. “Break the usual habits. Skip the expected resolution. What happens if you strip everything away – and let something else explode?”

Some things did stay the same, though: “We build around loops. Always,” says de Rosnay. “Then we stretch, bend, push – until something new cracks through. That one bass note, dropped three minutes in, that rewires the whole track; that’s our sweet spot.”

Another aim on Hyperdrama was to make it difficult for fans to spot its various sonic ingredients. “We didn’t want listeners thinking, ‘Oh, that’s a Moog bass, that’s a Juno pad,’” says de Rosnay. “The goal was fusion. No instruments, no stems – just one dense block of sound. Organic and synthetic, indistinguishable. Samples and live playing, melted together. Even what sounds ‘natural’ is often heavily processed.”

Of course, ‘heavy processing’ is part and parcel of a lot of electronic music making, but what about taking things a step further and letting AI do some of the creative legwork. While de Rosnay admits he finds it “intriguing” at this point, Augé argues that some kind of rubicon has already been crossed.

“Humans choose convenience,” he argues. “There won’t be a mass awakening like, ‘Wait! It was made by AI? I refuse to listen.’ We’ve already crossed that line. Some K-pop bands are fully generated – face, voice, video – and they’re killing it. But I do hope it sparks a punk backlash. A real DIY return.”

“That’s how it usually plays out,” reckons de Rosnay. “AI reminds me of frozen food in the ‘80s. People were amazed – ‘Just add water, voilà: powdered bolognese!’ Then came the moment: ‘Wait a minute … what if we actually cooked again?’”

Tour dates and ticket details are available on the Justice website.

Hey, do you live in Ibiza? Do you love and treasure vinyl? Then Seth Troxler needs you.

The DJ and producer who part lives on the Balearic island had over half his 12,000-strong record collection damaged in a recent storm – over 6,000 pieces of vinyl were submerged under water and Troxler is offering €10 an hour (that's above minimum wage in Spain, in case you were wondering) for anyone up to helping him salvage them.

Troxler made his offer on an Instagram Stories post, which has been reshared by I’ve Got It On Vinyl. “I need help from some people in Ibiza,” he pleaded. “Most of my record collection was basically nearly destroyed in the flood.

“I was just with my wife and some people trying to clean them and save stuff, but it’s just too emotional… it’s fucking me up.”

“If you love records and would love to clean an incredible collection and try to save some really beautiful covers, please reach out to me,” he added, urging his Ibizan neighbours to help.

He said that time was of the essence: “There’s only a little bit of time left because they might mould. So please please please reach out.” As you can see in the clip, at present he has thousands of soggy records stashed in supermarket bags ‘for life’ in what looks like his basement.

The storm that hit Ibiza was Storm Gabrielle at the end of September, which pounded the white isle with torrential rain and caused severe flooding.

Released in 1997, Colours, the debut album from Adam Fenton – aka Adam F – is an undisputed classic of drum & bass. Combining chopped breaks and synth basslines with jazz-indebted melodies and guest spots from the likes of Tracy Thorn, Grooverider and the late MC Conrad, the album showcased a song-focused, eclectic take on dance music.

“What's good about when you first make music is that it's coming from a very innocent place,” Fenton tells us, when we sit down to discuss that album’s creation. “It's very honest and it's very organic. And that's what the Colours album was about.”

Fenton wasn’t entirely inexperienced when it came to making his debut album. Adam comes from a musical family, including his father, the singer and actor Alvin Stardust, aka Shane Fenton. His formative years saw him playing a variety of instruments and experimenting with recording from a young age.

“I started making music when I was about 14 or 15,” Fenton tells us. “I guess back then, a lot of people had a reel-to-reel as a recording facility. I had a Tascam 388, which is a reel-to-reel with a built-in little mini mixing desk with eight tracks. My experience with recording artists or musicians or, you know, any kind of instrumentation or synthesizers was just from recording my own music. That's how I learned to record music.

“I was also in a funk band, and used to go around London and actually perform and play with live musicians. I'd sing at the front of the funk band. So I was used to playing with musicians and then recording my own music.“

Despite its influence, Colours has long been difficult to get hold of, either on streaming platforms or in physical form. This year, Adam F is tackling that head-on with the release of Colours Revisited, which sees Adam not only remastering the tracks, but re-recording much of the original material – even going so far as restoring the vintage instruments involved.

To mark its release, we met up with Fenton in London's World Heart Beat Studios for an in-depth chat about the original album and the process of reworking it. You can watch that interview in full in the video above.

Recording Colours

“The original Colours album was made in a bedroom studio,” he tells us. “I had analogue equipment. I had an Atari STe with Notator, which later became Logic and which had a giant dongle that you used to plug in to the side of the computer.

“Then I had an Allen & Heath mixing desk, which I loved for the analogue EQs. I had a few compressors, a DAT machine, CD player, a record player, Fender Rhodes, a vocoder, and a clavinet.”

It sounds like a fairly envy-inducing line-up of gear, particularly compared to the in-the-box home studios we’re used to today, but Fenton explains that the studio was slowly put together piece-by-piece.

“It sounds like a lot of stuff, but this was stuff that I'd earned and bought from working in my own stall at Camden Lock,” he says. “I used to sell tea and coffee, and walk up and down Camden Lock selling Rasta posters and records, and then busking in the evening. I'd then go to buy a bit of equipment and add it to my bedroom studio.

“There are a couple of people that have worked on the reboots for the new version of the album that used to come down to that bedroom studio near Watford and pay me £25 for the day to help engineer tracks together,” Fenton recalls. “Not only did I make Colours there, but I also made the hip-hop album Kaos, which is funny, you know?

“They both sounded massive and yet, it was all done in a bedroom studio; not all of the recording process, but the majority of it. Everything apart from recording some of the artists on there. We recorded live instruments at my house. The session musicians would come over and we'd record with saxophones and trumpets and flutes and everything in a bedroom with a very basic setup.”

Even when presented with the opportunity to step up to working in a world-renowned studio, Fenton found himself returning to the limited setup of his Watford studio.

“We even went to the Hit Factory in New York,” he says. “At the time it was probably, like 10 or 15 grand a day, to mix down tracks with LL Cool J, De La Soul, Redman. I preferred the mixdowns that I did in my bedroom in Watford to the ones we did there. I think that's because I knew what I wanted it to sound like. If you hand it over to somebody, they give their interpretation of it.”

“I've realised that you don't need the best studio in the world,” he continues. “You don't need all the latest plugins and everything else. I think that my best instrument is the mind and the concept and the vision for what you want to make.”

Circles, and the singles that led up to it, were created against the backdrop of a fertile London drum & bass scene built around a close knit community of DJs and club-goers.

“I was going out to venues at the time like Speed, seeing Fabio and Bukem. Then Blue Note for Metalheadz, which was a game changer” Fenton recalls. “That was a venue and period where all the artists would be there together, listening. So you'd stand around and there'd be Dillinga, Ed Rush & Optical, Goldie, Grooverider – everyone would be in that small environment hearing tunes for the very first time.”

The experiences and environment of those clubs provided the influence for early Adam F tracks including Brand New Funk and Metropolis, the latter of which appeared on Colours.

“Metropolis was inspired by standing in Blue Note. I just wanted to recreate that atmosphere,” he tells us. “I'm glad I didn't DJ at the time though, because otherwise I wouldn't have made Brand New Funk the way I did, or Metropolis with a minute string intro with nothing to mix in. I would have been conscious of that and then probably tried to do something different.”

While the tracks might not have been made with DJs in mind, they found a warm reception with the artists behind the decks at those influential clubs, with a rewind from Metalheadz boss Goldie providing a particularly memorable moment of positive feedback.

“I went back after making Metropolis,” Fenton says. “Because Groove had been playing Circles and really supporting me, I handed him a dubplate at the side of the decks at Blue Note. He took it straight out and put Metropolis on. I just saw this big hand come over with loads of rings on it and just stop the record. That was like my stamp of approval, you know?"

Re-Recording Colours

Despite its lauded status among DnB fans, the original Colours is surprisingly hard to listen to in 2025. It’s not available on streaming platforms and hard to get hold of physically.

“I realised that a lot of my early releases as Adam F were not available online,” Fenton tells us, “and it'd been a long time since the physical product was in people's hands.”

If you’re reading this wishing you hadn’t lost, sold or donated your copy of the original album, you’re not alone, Fenton has found himself in a similar boat.

“I didn't have any copies of my own music,” he says. “You tend to give everything away. Everybody always asks for a copy, and before you know it, it’s 10 years down the line and you haven't got a copy of any of your own music.

“I went online and had to pay £90 for my own album to get a copy of it. That just made me realise how good it was to have that physical copy. And I wanted that back.”

Getting fresh copies of Colours out into the public domain wasn’t a simple case of returning to the original masters and pressing a few new records though. Rights issues around the original recordings also proved to be a factor in the process.

“I wanted the rights back to my music,” Fenton tells us. “Nowadays, with ever changing music industry, it's great for artists to control their own writers, and have control of artistically, what they want to do with their music and how they want to present it.”

The solution to these problems arrives this month in the form of Colours Revisited, a reworking of the original record that goes beyond a simple remaster and sees Fenton – and a crew of collaborators including many of the original contributors – re-recording tracks from the album.

Doing so has not necessarily been an easy process, in fact, Fenton describes the new LP as a painstaking labour of love.

“The first step to working on Colours Revisited was to look at what assets we had, which wasn't very many,” he explains. “It was a combination of finding bags and bags of floppy disks, zip discs, and then machines that would actually load them up – samplers, outboard equipment, the original instruments, you know, clavinet and Fender Rhodes, vocoders…”

In many cases, although Fenton and his team had access to the original hardware, decades of wear and tear meant that significant work was needed to return the instruments to a usable condition.

“We basically went to recondition all of these instruments, which was a lot harder than I originally anticipated,” he says. “We’d take it to the specialist to get it reconditioned, and they'd be phoning us up, saying, ‘Where have you kept these? In the garden for 20 years? Because they'd be covered in mould’.”

Then there was the process of reassembling the diverse lineup of collaborators that worked on the original. The late MC Conrad re-recorded his parts before he sadly passed away last year, while Fenton’s wife Kirsty Hawkshaw – of Opus III – stepped in for Tracy Thorn’s parts on The Tree Knows Everything. They were joined by musicians including jazz great Julian Joseph and a number of new collaborators.

Fenton also had to grapple with the challenge of recreating his own parts, which wasn’t always as straightforward as it might seem.

“When I listened to some of the takes [from the original album], where I’d record stuff for an hour and a half, I was like, fuck, is that me playing?” he tells us. “I realized that, you know, people say you’ve got to play piano every day to keep up. It's like playing pool. If you don’t keep it up, 10 years later, you go, ‘I thought I used to be really good. Now I'm shit!’ And that's just what happens.”

Moving from drum & bass to hip-hop for Kaos

Despite the success of Colours and the growing popularity of drum & bass, Adam F made a surprising move for his second album by moving away from the genre in favour of the US hip-hop scene. Although the stylistic jump took some fans by surprise, as Fenton explains in the video below, it perhaps wasn’t such a radical change of direction for the producer himself.

Adam F’s Colours Revisited is out now.

Find out more about World Heart Beat Studios.

Mark Ronson may have got his first break as a DJ and then gone on to become a hugely successful producer, but this wasn’t how he initially wanted his musical career to turn out.

Speaking to the How To Fail with Elizabeth Day podcast, Ronson revealed that, when he was young, his dream was to become a guitar hero.

“I played guitar. I listened to Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix and Living Colour and all these kinds of shreddy bands and then Guns N’ Roses and I wanted to be like that,” he explains. “And I was in this band with another guitar player, who actually technically was ridiculously gifted and could play all those crazy solos, and I was the rhythm guitar player.”

Ronson came to realise that lead guitar playing might not be his calling. “I was coming to terms with the fact that I just didn’t have those chops,” he admits.

Further confirmation of this came from a familiar face: “My best friend, Sean Lennon, we were always about the same level as musicians and he came back from a summer, he’d been studying [guitar], and he was just so far beyond me I just remember thinking, ‘that’s what being a guitarist sounds like. I need to just find a new thing.’”

Fortunately for Ronson, this disappointment coincided with his music tastes starting to change.

“It just happened at the same time I was really falling in love with hip-hop music and I didn’t know anything about rapping or making beats - I was DJing. [I thought] ‘This is this one thing in this artform, in this music I love so much that I could maybe do.’ So it made me switch to DJing.

“But yeah, I had this ridiculous fantasy of being like Slash with the top hat, no shirt, on stage shredding a Les Paul, but that wasn’t supposed to be me.”

Despite this ‘failure’ as he sees it, Ronson’s time learning guitar - and also bass and piano - certainly wasn’t wasted, as even though he never truly mastered any of these instruments, the skills he did have helped him out when he eventually started his production career.

“I never had a virtuosic talent that pointed the way - ‘this is what you go do’,” he says now. “I had to find it and it took me much longer, but by the time I found it I had these little tools in my box because of all these other things I’d tried.”

Ronson appeared on the podcast as part of the promotional jaunt for his book, Night People: How To Be a DJ in 1990s New York, in which he also reveals a strange encounter that he and Sean Lennon had with Michael Jackson in the late ‘80s.

David Guetta has been crowned the World’s Number One DJ by DJ Magazine.

The dance music mag’s list of the Top 100 DJs is an annual affair usually confined to its pages. But this year it was part of an awards ceremony, held – where else? – in Ibiza. It was a busy night for the French producer, who also span a two-hour DJ set at the venue, alongside Armin Van Buuren, Miss Monique and Boris Brejcha.

It’s the fifth time Guetta has come out on top of the survey. He first won back in 2011 and again in 2020, 2021 and 2023. In a statement, he said: “To win Top 100 DJs again, for joint-record fifth time, is an honour, it means a lot to me because the greatest feeling in my life, truly, is playing new music for people and seeing their reactions.

"It might sound crazy, but I still make music every single day, because I see it as a hobby and a passion. The most exciting thing for me is being creative and going away from what everyone else is doing.”

Guetta has had a busy year. He’s released the trap-influenced track Lucky, with MORTEN, as well as collaborations with Afrojack, Martin Garrix, Hypaton, Nicky Romero and Fatboy Slim. He ran a successful Ibiza residency this summer and toured The Monolith, a large-scale LED-advanced show around the world’s stadiums.

The rest of the Top Five positions in the survey were filled – in descending order – by Martin Garrix, Alok, Dimitri Vegas and Like Mike and Armin Van Buuren. The highest place Brit was Calvin Harris at Number 16.

Other awards on the night were presented to Van Buuren for ‘World’s Number One Trance DJ and Outstanding Contribution’, Sara Landry (World’s Number One Hard DJ), Jazzy (Future Star), Dimitri Vegas and Like Mike (World’s Number One DJ Group) and Charlotte de Witte (World’s Number One Techno DJ).

Daft Punk may have ascended to that great scrapheap in the sky (or wherever robot-helmeted electronic duos go after they split up), but they’re set to live on – virtually, at least – in Fortnite.

The popular video game has teamed up with the duo to create the Daft Punk Experience. This is an ‘immersive’ tribute to their music, where, according to a Fortnite press statement: “players are taken on a cosmic voyage from the world of Battle Royale to the world of Daft Punk – a fully interactive playground that includes multiple rooms with different ways to experience the band’s music.”

So what does that entail in practice? Well, entering the Daft Punk Experience will allow a player to remix or create mashups of the band’s songs, create Lego-style videos featuring the duo or make their avatars dance at the Daft Club, which features footage from their groundbreaking 2007 Alive tour.

You can also buy a new bundle in the Fortnite Shop, which will be open from this Thursday (September 25 at 8pm ET). Among the accessories you can get your hands on are those signature robot helmets, outfits, instruments, and a Get Lucky jam track.

Of course, Daft Punk are far from the first music artists to hook up with the video game. Over the years, Fortnite has hosted in-game concerts with Travis Scott, The Weeknd, Eminem and Sabrina Carpenter to name just four.

Electronic pop star Little Boots - AKA Victoria Mason - has confirmed that she has a new day job: lecturing on the Commercial Music course at Bath Spa University in the south west of England.

“New era! Welcome Week at Bath Spa where I am joining as a lecturer in Commercial Music,” she wrote on Instagram. “Excited to meet the students and share my experience and I’m sure they will teach me a thing or two also!”

Mason (formerly Hesketh)/Boots first rose to prominence in the late ‘00s, when her synth-heavy releases led to her topping the BBC Sound of 2009 poll and being nominated for the Critics’ Choice Brit Award in the same year. Hands, her debut album, went Top 5 in the UK, and she’s continued to write and release music ever since.

In 2021, Mason revealed that she was set to play keyboards and sing backing vocals in the groundbreaking ABBA Voyage show. “I have been a lifelong Abba fan so it is an absolute honour,” she said of her new gig.

Although Mason sounds like the perfect fit to teach the Commercial Music course - it’s aimed at “songwriters, producers and session players who want to turn their passion into a career” - fans can rest assured that she’s not giving up what was previously the 9 to 5.

“Fear not: this is not the end of my making my own music,” she wrote. “In fact I’m pretty certain being around such inspiring people and surroundings will have the opposite effect and I will potentially actually get some new music finished.”

Tomorrow’s Yesterdays, the most recent Little Boots album, was released in 2022. Speaking to MusicRadar at the time, Mason revealed why she turned to crowdfunding to get the record made.

“I was a little sceptical at the start, but obviously when Covid hit, all of my gigs were cancelled overnight and I was wondering what on earth I was going to do,” she explained.

“Thankfully, the realisation that musicians were going to be screwed for quite some time seemed to resonate with a lot of people. I’d done a Kickstarter the year before and people had been saying I should give Patreon a go, so I gave it a whirl and got an amazing response. Luckily, the one thing that’s kept me going through the last decade or so is that I’ve got a really loyal core fan base to support me.”

Although she suggests that she’s struggling to get new music finished, Mason did recently release a single, the Kylie-esque Spin Back. This is a collaboration with Lord Leopard.

Sad news from Glasgow: JD Twitch, one half of the influential DJ duo Optimo has died, aged just 57.

DJ Twitch, whose real name was Keith McIvor, had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour earlier this year. His DJ partner in Optimo, Jonnie Wilkes (aka JG Wilkes) announced that he passed away on Friday in Glasgow’s Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice.

“In a 28-year partnership he changed my life immeasurably and together we took our work in directions and to places few people are lucky enough to explore,” Wilkes said.

“I am forever grateful for everything he bestowed on me, both as a partner in music and as a friend.”

McIvor was one of the generation of DJs whose lives were changed forever by the acid house explosion of the late 1980s. He founded Pure, a members-only Edinburgh club that was central to the growth of the dance scene in Scotland. But he quickly grew bored with that scene’s musical homogeneity, and in 1997, together with Wilkes, founded a new club in Glasgow, named after a track by early '80s band Liquid Liquid.

Optimo became known for its diverse music policy, which covered funk, punk and the emerging electroclash scene. McIvor and Wilkes began recording and remixing under the Optimo name and launched an Optimo label. The club itself ran weekly for over a decade, until 2010.

Tributes have been coming in from friends and contemporaries. David Holmes wrote on Instagram: “It was an honour to know this beautiful soul. RIP you wonderful man.

"We have lost a true great. Yr legacy will live on forever. Sending sincere condolences to Keith’s family and inner family circle.”

Meanwhile, Daniel Avery has written of McIvor: “He was an all-time great. Together you gave countless people endless hours of joy, excitement and togetherness. That’s not to mention the generations of DJs you inspired. Sending all of the love to you, my friend. You will no doubt continue this legacy.”

Bicep said that: “We are both utterly heartbroken. The impact Keith and Optimo have had on us is immense, he was a titan of UK music and culture. He was such an incredibly kind, warm, genuine, caring person. Gone far too soon.

"We love you Keith. Sending all the love in the world to you Jonnie and Keiths family. Thinking about yous every day.”

Wilkes ended his tribute to his creative partner by thanking the hospice staff and saying: “Keith left us far too soon. He will go now to travel those space-ways but I know his energy remains in every one of us who had the privilege of knowing him. I love you forever Keith.”

Now here’s a positive news story. British producer Fred Again played a gig in Naples, Italy this past weekend. He had just finished the show – an open air event in the city centre - and the crowd was dispersing, but Fred wasn't done.

No, instead of chilling backstage, he rushed up to a fan’s rooftop - which overlooks the piazza - and put on another show. A full hour-long performance, which he put on YouTube yesterday.

The clip begins with Fred ending the public show, then dashing round to Fede’s (the fan in question's) house. You can see them embracing in the lift. Then, an out of breath Fred staggers to where his equipment is all set up on the rooftop. And starts again.

Why, you might ask? Well, Fred provided an explanation of sorts in the description to the vid. He wrote: “After a show I never quite know what to do. Like you go from being filled with the most adrenaline ever, to suddenly being like alone or basically alone. Often I just play songs I’m working on and jam on my keyboard to try ideas out to try and calm down and stuff, cos I can’t really be social often.

“So when I saw Fede commenting on a post that he had a rooftop that overlooked the show I thought 'wow ,this could be like my dream afters'. Just going straight up there and get to play songs on my ones and still get to see and feel the energy of the show as everyone leaves! I played this whole set just to Fede and the beautiful Nonna who also lives in this building. It was a lovely sight to look up occasionally and see them both there. Him dancing and her sitting. Me a bit of both. Thank you to Fede.”

A lovely gesture, then, and a cracking view.

British producer Danielle Gooding, aka Flava D, has had quite an impact on UK electronic music over the past decade and a half.

Growing up in Bournemouth on the British south coast, Gooding got her start as Flava D via MySpace. At the time she was creating grime instrumentals – teaching herself to recreate the sounds she heard via Channel U in an early copy of Ableton.

After sending messages to scene originator Wiley via the social media platform, she began creating beats for MCs including him, Ghetts and Merky Ace. Eventually she linked up with Butterz, the influential label helmed by Elijah and Skilliam that spanned the realms of instrumental grime and underground dance music.

By her own admission, some of those early ideas were fairly rudimentary in how they were made.

“I didn't really know what anything was in terms of, like, compression, echo, reverb,” she explains when we visit her in her studio. “I didn't even know how to use a delay. I would literally copy and paste my hat to create a delay, when I could have just put a delay plugin on there to do it for me.

“I was doing all this really OTT manual stuff that would just take me forever,” she continues. “I wouldn't use, like, loops of shakers, because I just didn't have the samples back then. You couldn't go on a website and buy these massive catalogues of samples. It was just MSN and you had the odd group. So I was trying for hours to make my own shaker loop.

“It was a lot of manual, DIY and very time consuming stuff. At the same time it was a really cool learning experience. I think you always take those skill sets with you.”

Flava D’s productions have come a long way since then, both in terms of style and technical ability. Following her start in grime, Gooding began to DJ and started moving more into the realms of UK garage and bassline. Her latest stylistic shift has seen her embracing drum & bass, landing on the influential Hospital Records for her newly released album, Here & Now.

As she tells it, each genre move also required a step up in her production skills.

“I think when I transitioned into garage from grime, that was my first step into really thinking about structures and mixing down,” she tells us. “I was starting to DJ in 2011 and had my first gig, I played some of my grime stuff out, and I was just thinking it sounded awful compared to the tunes I was playing before and after, which were properly mastered and mixed.

“My structures too,” she continues. “I didn't have hi-hats in some of my intros. It wasn't DJ friendly. The bass just wasn't standing up – it wasn't moving the venue. That was a big eye opening point of, like, 'Okay, I need to go home and really go back to the drawing board and think about not just being a bedroom producer'.”

As Gooding explains in our video interview, as she began making more explicitly dancefloor-focused music and playing more DJ gigs as a result, it required an increasing focus on the technical aspects of structuring and mixing tracks.

“It's been this constant journey of trying to get better,” she says, “because the more you get into your career and begin playing more shows you just constantly want to get your music sounding better.”

For Flava D, drum & bass is the apex of that production journey and the most significant challenge so far.

“I felt like each genre that I've gone into is a step up,” she says. “It's like, garage has to be better than grime, now DnB, for me, is the ultimate learning curve.

“It's one of the most advanced genres in terms of sound design,” she explains. “I might have thought I was amazing at making garage, then I tried to make DnB – it's such a big sound. And people are serious nerds with mixdowns. It's insane. I'll never stop learning how to make something sound good through trial and error.”

The move into drum & bass not only necessitated learning new skills, but also upending some of the techniques she would rely on in other genres.

“When I first went into DnB, I was used to making garage where you have a very big, solid kick and snappy drums,” she explains. “With DnB, it’s all about having a small, poppy kick and a massive sub. It’s the opposite way around.

“That was quite interesting, because a lot of my DnB stuff in the beginning was quite low-end heavy compared to other productions. It probably took me a good year to rewire my brain in that sense. You just have to go into each genre as a different entity.”

Despite the steep learning curve, the journey into drum & bass has led to the creation of a full length album that shows off the depth of Flava D’s skills as a producer.

“It's quite a versatile record,” she says. “It's quite a broad project, which I'm really happy about. I feel like it's something that I would listen to in the car or on the train, but also in the dance. I feel like it ticks a lot of the different boxes of what makes me, me. It's got liquid on there, it's got a bit of harder stuff, it's got some really cool collaborations as well.

“It's got the sweet and sour elements, which is how I wanted it to be. It's quite an emotional project.”

Flava D – Here & Now is out now via Hospital Records

It’s well-known that Mark Ronson grew up around a lot of famous musicians - his stepdad is Foreigner’s Mick Jones and one of his best childhood friends was Sean Lennon, for starters - but he’s now been telling the story of a slightly bizarre in encounter with one of the biggest pop stars of them all, Michael Jackson.

Speaking to Rolling Stone as he promotes his upcoming memoir, Night People: How To Be a DJ in 1990s New York, Ronson says that his meeting with Jackson happened when the King of Pop stayed with Sean Lennon and his mother Yoko at the Dakota building in New York during the Bad tour. Ronson was there too - he would have been around 13 at the time - and suggests that, initially, Jackson’s behaviour was as eccentric as you might expect.

“He just wanted to throw soggies out the window,” says Ronson. “Soggies are when you take a giant mound of wet toilet paper and then just chuck. Sean lived on the seventh floor. He wasn’t chucking [them] at people, but it was hitting the street and sounding like bombs were going off.”

What larks, Michael… but even at that stage of his ‘career’, Ronson’s musical brain was whirring.

“In my mind, I was like, ‘This is all really fun, but I just need to get a hit song out of Michael Jackson,’” he says. “That’s all I care about. I was already, I guess, at that age more producer-minded. I remember me and Sean being like, ‘Michael, Michael, sing us a bassline!’ I’ll never forget, he did the whole thing, like the hand out with the snap, and started to sing this bassline. That’s how he wrote music. He usually didn’t write stuff down. He would have somebody come and he’d sing them all the parts, at least that’s what I heard.”

Sensing that he had something - let’s not forget that Jackson had previously composed the iconic basslines for the likes of Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough, Wanna Be Startin’ Something, Billie Jean and The Way You Make Me Feel, among others - Ronson decided he was going to turn Michael’s low-end musings into a song.

“We went back to my studio the next day - my stepdad had his home studio - and we made this song,” he says. “It was pretty much just seven minutes of [Michael singing the bassline]. Thinking about it now and while I was writing the book, I was like, ‘Oh, he just kind of gave us some Smooth Criminal leftover.’ But whatever, it’s still a bassline from Michael Jackson. We put some horns on it, some sample ‘80s horns.”

Ronson doesn’t say whether or not the track still exists, but he does confirm that he played it to - you guessed it - another famous star on the evening of the day he created it.

“That night, we went to the Michael show,” he remembers. “And because Sean also lived in the same building with Roberta Flack, she took us to the show. I know these stories sound so fucking crazy. Sean was like, ‘Roberta, listen to this song that we made! Michael gave us this bassline!” After the third minute, she’s just like, ‘I mean, it’s the same thing for a while, but James Brown did that. So you never know!’ She was just trying to be friendly. And I think after like one more minute, she [hit] eject.”

Tough crowd, but as we now know, Ronson would go on to hone his skills and become one of the most sought-after producers in the industry. If you want to find out how he got his start, you can pre-order Night People: How To Be a DJ in 1990s New York now - it’ll be released on 16 September.

When we think of music for babies, we usually think of nursery rhymes or songs with the simplest of structures.

Now, a Dublin-based producer, Graham Smyth, has spotted a gap in the market and released an album specifically designed for the youngest of minds, which their tired parents will also appreciate.

The self-explanatory Music For Babies To Rave And Sleep To was written on piano and kalimba and features one side of tracks to stimulate babies and then another side of quieter, slower tracks to relax them and (hopefully) send them off the sleep.

Talking to Irish online cultural magazine District, Smyth revealed that the project was inspired by a new arrival in the family: “My sister was having a little fella and I wanted to introduce him to music I was into (and also save my sister and brother-in-law the torment of listening to sonic abominations about coconuts, melons, and an infant fish and its extended family for the next eight years or so).”

Although old skool rave often leant into child-like themes – think of the wave of so-called ‘toytown’ techno that threw up tracks like Trip To Trumpton and Sesame’s Treet – those were designed to appeal to adults’ nostalgia, rather than kids themselves.

“There seemed to be a real lack of electronic music that was suitable for young people that adults could also enjoy,” said Smyth. “Through this project, I finally found a purpose.”

Before he commenced work on the album, Smyth consulted child psychologists and did his research: “Babies’ heart rates are 50% faster than adults so the music should reflect this, hence the drum ‘n’ bass inspired beats on Toy Pianonono.

"The percussion is even influenced by how young children interact with instruments. If you give an adult a keyboard, they’ll probably try to bang out a hesitant version of Chopsticks, whereas a child might throw it, bang it, rub it or hit it.

"So I thought that all the typical sounds that children make when interacting with the instruments should be included in the production.”

And Teletubbies-style, Smyth has deliberately used track titles that puts the kids’ perspective front and centre: When I was an infant, I used to pronounce ‘helicopter’ as ‘helicolcol’ so with the titles of the songs I was fishing for something unique that mimicked how children naturally take a word and try to say it any way they can.

"Toy Pianonono and Kalimbarama followed that line of thinking and, ironically, I have come across a few adults who find it tricky to pronounce them!”

The album was released last Friday on Practise Music. For more details head over to Smyth’s Bandcamp page.

Fatboy Slim was supposed to do a secret set at the Irish festival, Electric Picnic, over the weekend. But it never happened – too many fans found out about it and the idea had to be abandoned.

The DJ was one of the headliners of the event, in County Laois, alongside Chappell Roan, Hozier and Sam Fender. But he was also due to play an extra 90 minute set on the smaller Salty Dog stage. However, as promoter Melvin Benn explained to Irish newspaper The Journal, that didn’t happen.

“Unfortunately, it was supposed to be a secret,” Benn lamented. “I don’t know why I keep believing that I could keep a secret in Ireland.”

“It would have been amazing, he was going to play a different set for 90 minutes,” the promoter added. “He was hugely disappointed and in all honesty, I think I’ve let him down, but I’ve let all the fans down as well.”

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But being a responsible promoter, he explained he couldn’t let the gig go ahead. “We have to keep safe, and ultimately the decision was taken on safety grounds and that was the right decision, as disappointing as it was for me and for him.”

Other than the headliners, the festival’s other big draw were Kneecap, who used their platform to accuse the Irish government of “being complicit in genocide” because they “facilitate the sale of Israeli war bonds”.

Benn had said upfront that unlike other festivals he would put no restrictions on what Kneecap could and couldn’t say, and was rewarded by the band thanking him from the stage.

“I was a little surprised that Kneecap made a reference to me actually,” Benn said.

“It’s different in the UK; I’ve had to spend time in their dressing room reading them the riot act about what they can and can’t say in England. But of course, those restrictions are not here in Ireland.”

Sheffield born producer Silva Bumpa is one of the fastest rising names in UK dance music. Known for his tracks that touch on bassline, house and classic UK garage, his sound blends infectious drum grooves with vivid and nostalgic synth lines.

We recently sat down with Silva Bumpa in the studio to watch him break down his joyous club track Feel Da Same, and to pick his brains on his go-to studio tools and techniques.

While synth lines and vocal samples often provide the hooks for his tunes, at the heart of any classic, garage-influenced club track is solid bass and a swung drum groove. For Silva Bumpa, getting these elements right comes down to writing and experimentation more than specific tools.

“I always like using good subs and separating them out,” he tells us. “I use a plugin called The Sub [by Iceberg Audio] and I use the SH-101 – a classic sub sound – quite a lot.”

As he explains though, it’s the composition of the bassline itself, and its relationship to the melody of the track, that makes a sub work on a club sound system.

“I like to write stuff that I think sounds good on speakers,” he says. “I try to be very aware of the key of the song. So if I'm writing in D minor, for example, I know that D and E and F, those kinds of notes hit really well for sub sounds.

“If the melody is moving too far up, I might then sort of compromise the key of the song to make sure that the sub is hitting in that 48hz region, just because I find that that works well on the sound systems.”

As well as having a sub that works at the right frequency, Silva Bumpa layers his bass sounds with other elements to add texture and presence.

“It's mostly about the melody and the writing,” he continues. “I think that layering is everything too – separating out the sub and having a mix of stuff that gives punch, gives texture, and stuff that gives powerful sub energy, so that it can hit on a sound system. It's all about hitting on a sound system for me; that's the thing that I'm mixing for.”

As for the drums, despite garage being a genre known for its shuffle, getting the right groove isn’t a simple case of ramping up the swing parameter.

“I often start by just getting the core elements of the drums down, that being the kick, the hat and the clap, and then, depending on where the tune is going, that will then dictate how much swing I'm using,” he tells us.

“If I'm making, like an old school garage or house tune, I’ll probably have a lot of swing. But if I'm making more of a techy, jacking, modern kind of tune, I'd probably use less swing and try to apply it in different ways.

“Something that I do quite often is have ghost snares that are more swung than my shakers. A lot of the time my shakers are actually quite straight, if not actually bang on, not swung at all.

“I might just have one open hat that's swung. I’ve found sometimes that swinging all the elements of the drums doesn't make it groove better.”

Elsewhere in our interview – which you can watch at the top of the page – Silva Bumpa reveals his favourite instruments and effects, how his home town of Sheffield has influenced his sound, and where he sees the future of garage and bassline heading.

When a Justin Bieber impersonator managed to convince security at The Wynn nightclub in Las Vegas to let him and his entourage in, he really committed to the bit.

Rather than trying to blend into the background, lest his cover be blown, the bootleg Bieber - believed to be one Dylan Desclos - decided to chance his arm and get his ‘team’ to ask the night’s DJ, Gryffin, if he could come on stage and sing Sorry, his 2015 hit.

Sensing a viral moment, you suspect - though not the one he’s ended up with - Gryffin agreed, and was also completely fooled.

To his credit, rather than trying to distance himself from the whole embarrassing incident, Gryffin has embraced it by uploading footage of it to social media (every disaster as an opportunity, after all).

Here, we see him getting word that ‘Bieber’ is in the building and wants to perform. “Little did I know I was about to be sorry,” he quips in the caption. “The place went wild, and after 4 minutes and 27 seconds of what sounded like Justin Bieber, I found out the worst news imaginable.”

We wouldn’t quite go that far, but we do see the moment when a buzzing post-show Gryffin’s bubble is well and truly burst as he learns that the man he’s just shared the stage with is “a complete fake”.

Reflecting on the incident later on, Gryffin suggests that he always had his doubts. “I literally thought, ‘Damn, he put on a lot of weight since the album dropped,’” he admits.

Swag, the album in question, was released last month, and features an eagerly-awaited contribution from Mk.gee. He co-wrote and co-produced Daisies, which is proving to be the record’s most popular song.

As for the fake Bieber, The Wynn told Consequence that he’s now been banned from all of its properties for life. “After an elaborate and multi-step ruse by him and his advance team, a Justin Bieber impersonator was granted access to the XS stage,” it said in a statement. “As soon as the error was recognised, he was removed from the resort and denied future entry.”

Calvin Harris has dismissed any suggestion that he has some kind of ‘beef’ with Miley Cyrus after he teased a new song featuring singer Jessie Reyez that he previously previewed with vocals from the Flowers ‘hitmaker’.

That first teaser, with Cyrus singing a song believed to be called Ocean, came in May 2024, when Harris suggested that he was trying to get it released. However, the DJ/producer later removed all social media posts relating to the track amid reports that it had been discarded.

Now a new teaser has dropped, though, with Reyez’s vocals. Asked on social media what had happened to the ‘Cyrus cut’, Harris initially played dumb by saying “I do not know,” before agreeing with someone who suggested that the new version is better than the Miley one.

Sensing scandal - when one fan wrote that they only wanted Miley’s vocals, Harris replied with “off you pop then” - the Scottish star was eventually asked what he has against Cyrus. At which point he confirmed that he has nothing but love for her, praising her “amazing voice”.

In fact, Harris was happy to take the blame for the collaboration being teased in the first place - “It was my bad… crossed wires,” he wrote, suggesting that, for whatever reason, Cyrus’s camp felt that last year wasn’t the right time to release the song with her vocals on it.

And the truth is that this happens all the time: famous artists and producers frequently work together and then set aside what they’ve done. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve fallen out.

What’s more, it seems that Reyez - a talented artist in her own right - was probably involved from the start. She’s worked with Harris several times before, including as a co-writer on One Kiss, his 2018 hit with Dua Lipa.

As for whether the Miley version of Ocean will ever be heard… well, that seems unlikely. Asked if it will be released, Harris replied “I’m afraid not,” going on to say that it’s “not possible”. A release date for the Reyez-sung version is also TBC.

Sampling and remixing is at the very core of dance music culture. Genres like house, garage and jungle owe many of their stylistic traits to the way pioneering producers reworked sampled sounds such as funk drum breaks, disco strings and R&B vocalists.

Relying heavily on sampling comes with numerous pitfalls though. For one thing it can result in copyright issues, creating a need to haggle with the owner of the original source material in order to release your track and potentially end up giving away a chunk of the royalties. It also means relying on the same pool of classic recordings as every other producer out there.

The approach used by rising UK producer Silva Bumpa for his speed garage-influenced track Feel Da Same seems like a smart middle ground.

When we sat down with Silva Bumpa for our latest track breakdown video, he explained how he wanted to capture the sound of classic R&B-sampling garage records of the early-’00s. Rather than dig out an old school R&B track to work from, he opted to make his own with the sole purpose of remixing it into something with a higher tempo.

“The sound I was going for was like the classic sort of garage and bassline sound,” he explains. “All the R&B acapellas were sped up, so the runs and vibrato and the slides in the vocals were kind of accentuated. It just makes it sound more like the music that I grew up on – the music that kind of made me fall in love with dance music.”

By his own admission, this approach of recreating and remixing his own source material isn’t anything new.

“Last summer I was hanging a lot of old school bassline producers,” he says. “I was in the studio with this guy called TS7, who's like a legend to me. He's made loads of classic bassline tunes. He was talking me through how they used to make R&B instrumentals and then they’d almost like, remix those old R&B instrumentals.

“I was itching to try this, and I was actually in the studio with [vocalist] Carla Monroe the week after. So I had this piano melody already written, I exported it, pitched it down and slowed it down so that I could write to it.”

The piano loop is pitched down by two semitones and slowed down to a more R&B-like speed of 105BPM. It’s in this state that Carla Monroe recorded the vocal hook that runs through the finished version of Feel Da Same.

By pitching the vocal up to a higher tempo, it takes on more of a warped and wonky quality reminiscent of classic turn-of-the-millennium dance tracks. Silva Bumpa helps to maintain this by keeping the processing rough-and-ready.

“I was just trying to make [the vocal] sound almost a little bit cheap, in a way which is kind of the vibe that I was going for. It's like that cheap, YouTube-ripped style of acappella that I like built my entire sound from.”

In the video, he demonstrates how the vocal was layered with retro house pianos, swung drums and old-school organs to create the track's infectious, high-energy sound.

Watch more track breakdowns on our MusicRadar Tech YouTube channel.

All successful artists feel burdened by the necessity of playing the hits, or in some cases THE hit, the one that launched their career and catapulted them into the public consciousness. Some, with various levels of enthusiasm, embrace it. Others, like Eric Prydz, run away from it.

The Swedish DJ hadn’t played Call On Me, his 2004 Number One for over 20 years, describing it as “super lazy”. Often this stance hasn’t done him many favours – at one gig in Quebec City, Canada in 2008 punters bottled his decks when he refused to play it – but through two-decades of DJ gigs, high-concept A/V shows and a multitude of aliases, Prydz has succeeded in becoming known for things beyond his breakthrough hit.

But he now appears to have softened his stance. In a new interview with Billboard, Prydz revealed why he played Call On Me at a show in Austin this March, mixing it into Steve Winwood’s Valerie, the original '80s song from that provides that track's central sample.

“I was just flicking through my SD card looking for music and I saw a special edit of the track I have,” Prydz told the magazine. “I turned around to my tour manager like, ‘Stefan, should I play ‘Call on Me’?’

"It was almost like a joke. He looked at me, like, ‘Yeah, go for it.’ I was like ‘Are you sure?’ I was like, ‘Well, it’s in the same key as the track I’m playing now,’ so I just played it. There was no planning. I was as shocked as everyone else.”

As you can see from the video below, the punters, predictably, went bananas.

Prydz said that playing the track felt “weird” and suggested he might wait another 20 years before he played it again. Not so, it seems – he played it again at a gig in Brighton just two weeks ago.

Call On Me, you may recall, reached Number One in the UK in September 2004. Apart from the sample – which Winwood re-recorded especially for the track – the track was memorable for its notorious ‘sexy’ aerobics video, which even then-Prime Minister Tony Blair saw fit to comment about (“The first time it came on, I almost fell off my rowing machine.”)

Different times, eh? Different times.

Tomorrowland, the Belgian dance music festival which lost its main stage to a massive fire last week, went ahead as planned over the weekend, thanks to... Metallica.

Truly, saviours don’t come more unlikely than the thrash metal veterans. But with the main stage reduced to a smouldering cinder just hours before the festival was set to open on Friday, organisers brainstormed and asked if they could borrow Metallica’s stage, which just happened to be in storage in Austria. One phone call later and the stage was air-lifted to Belgium in time for Friday evening.

The DJ Martin Garrix, who played the festival on Friday, took to Instagram and posted a photo of himself with Lars Ulrich: "I cannot believe I’m actually typing this… but my set at Tomorrowland is still happening!" he wrote. "Massive love and a big shoutout to the incredible Tomorrowland team for pulling off miracles – and to Metallica for coming through with the new stage parts."

And Metallica responded in the most Metallica way possible - answering with a single black heart emoji.

The stage was being kept in Austria after the band’s M72 world tour finished at the London Stadium a couple of weeks back. Rather than take it back to the US, the band decided to keep it in storage in Europe before they resume the tour in Australia this autumn.

Anyway, the Tomorrowland punters were stoked that the fest went ahead as planned. One wrote on social media: “Metal + Dance Music unite forever!” Whilst another posted: “Makes me so proud to be a Raver AND a Metalhead.”

“Imagine all the hate Metallica or Lars gets all the time,” wrote another. “This is why their peers are always talking positively about them. Metallica has been doing stuff like this behind the scenes for years. They have their own charity @allwithinmyhandsfoundation . I just wish the fans would be more appreciative.”

In 2025, the intersection of electronic and classical music is nothing particularly unusual. From Floating Points scoring a ballet to the likes of Goldie touring with orchestras, the collision of dance music and orchestral composition is no longer the unique novelty it once was.

Back in the mid-‘90s, however, those two realms felt far more separate. It was only the most adventurous musicians on either side of the divide that could see any potential for collaboration with artists from the opposing camp.

It’s hard to think of many artists more adventurous, in classical and electronic music respectively, than Philip Glass and Richard D James. Glass, the American composer and pianist, is a figurehead of minimalism and one of the most influential figures in contemporary classical music.

Richard D James, meanwhile, has earned almost god-like status amongst electronic music fans thanks to his prolific back catalogue of mind- and genre-bending dance tracks released under a multitude of aliases including Aphex Twin, AFX, The Tuss and Polygon Window.

Back in 1995, the two artists collaborated on an orchestrated version of the Aphex Twin track Icct Hedral, which first appeared on the Donkey Rhubarb EP. The track is a reworking of the electronic original, lifted from James’s album …I Care Because You Do, which switches the original’s sampled stabs and rasping, reverb-soaked electronics for orchestrated strings and eerie choral lines.

As Glass explained to Future Music magazine, when the pair were interviewed for the October ‘95 issue, the meeting of minds came about after James wrote an uncharacteristically forthright letter beginning ‘Dear Phil’.

“He got in touch and wondered if I was interested in doing a remix with him,” Glass explains. “He evidently knew my music. I didn’t know him; he’s quite a young guy… Richard James is quite a nice young man.”

As it transpires, it didn't take much effort to get Glass onboard with the idea.

“They sent me a tape and I listened to it;” Glass explains. “But I would have done it anyway because I was interested in him. The only way to find out about these things is to jump in and get your feet wet. You can’t theoretically understand them: you have to get involved. That’s the way I work.”

While Glass was open to the idea of collaborating anyway, he admits that there was also something special he heard in James’s music.

“I heard the music and thought, ‘Yes, I can do something with this.’” Glass explains. “[There was] just a kind of intelligence and musicality – basic stuff like that.”

In retrospect, a collaboration between the two musicians makes a lot of sense. Glass’s minimalistic approach to piano compositions might be different in timbre and energy to the ambient techno of early Aphex Twin, but the two styles share an emphasis on simple looping motifs and subtle shifts in rhythm.

Even then, Glass was no stranger to synthesizers either, regularly using them in compositions and live performances. He’d previously worked with pop acts from Linda Rondstadt and Paul Simon to Mark Moore of S’Express.

As he explains in the interview, however, in the mid-90s at least, Glass felt most at home working with the piano.

“Although I've done a lot of synthesizer playing over the years, I guess the piano is a fundamental musical instrument in terms of my own technique,” Glass explains, “but I'm often in situations where the synthesizer is better.

“There's a kind of a swing between the hi-tech world of modern synthesizers and going back to musical instruments. I really travel between the two and I do it very rapidly. Within the course of a year I'll do it two or three times.

“The interesting thing about the piano is that, for the performer, it’s the most responsive equipment,” he continues. “I can control the piano; I can control the sound. On an individual level I can shape the piano in a live situation better than I can with a synthesizer.”

From Richard D James’s point of view, the idea of working with Glass came from a fairly obvious motivation – he was a fan.

“I wanted someone to orchestrate the track Icct Hedral. I had quite a few of his records – about ten – so I thought I'd get in contact with him,” he tells Future Music.

On the whole, it seemed the electronic artist enjoyed the process of working with his classical counterpart across the pond, although in the interview he does raise a few misgivings about the quality of the recording.

“I’m very happy with it,” he explains. “The only criticism I had was that the way they recorded music from real people is different from me. I’d record all the scrapings of the string from a violin, say, and the non-musical sounds. They’d try their best to avoid that and end up getting something ‘perfect’ that sounds like it comes out of a sampler.”

As for the man himself, James repays Glass’s compliment with characteristic playfulness: “Philip Glass is quite a nice old man.”

Given the looming threat of AI, you’d have thought that the ‘is using synth presets cheating?’ debate would be over by now. Making your own music with pre-rolled sounds is practically ‘grafting’ these days, isn’t it?

Some would still argue, however, that if you don’t create your own patches from scratch then your tracks are somehow diminished, however good they are and however many people like listening to them.

Barry Can’t Swim, though - AKA Joshua Mainnie - isn’t one of them. Speaking to the Tape Notes podcast about the making of recent track Still Riding, from his new album, Loner, he admits that full-on sound design isn’t really his thing.

Asked how much he leans on presets and to what extent he tries to make them his own, he says: “I'll mess around with them - as in I'll definitely automate them - but I'm really not one who kind of gets in and builds a sound from scratch. I'm very happy to just use presets and go, ‘this is cool.’ If it sounds good, it sounds good. And then I'll kind of mess around with it from there and maybe effect the dynamics and things like that or I take it where I want it to go.”

Addressing the argument that, for true authenticity, artists should create their own sounds, Mainnie says: “I use a lot of presets all the time. There's sometimes a bit of a taboo around that but I don't know why - there's no shame in that. I think if it sounds good, it sounds good. Like, that's the only thing that really should matter.”

Mainnie also suggests that, if you’re the kind of person who hates on a track just because you find out that it was made using presets, you should probably have a word with yourself.

“If the finished thing sounds good, that's all that matters,” he says. “No one's going away from listening to a song going, ‘I used to like this, but he didn't make that sound’. And if they do, fuck them, man. Those aren't the people you want to be serving anyway. Do you know what I mean?”

You can check out the full Tape Notes interview with Barry Can’t Swim wherever you get your podcasts.

David Guetta has been answering the internet's questions about the art of DJing, and has expressed bafflement at the idea that anyone would think he would play a pre-recorded set.

The accusation that sets are prepared and recorded in advance - so that all that’s really required is to press play - is one that’s been levelled at many famous DJs down the years, but Guetta suggests that, with today’s technology, there’s simply no reason not to play live.

“I never played a pre-recorded set,” he tells Wired. “I hear so much about those stories of pre-recorded sets - I think it's absolutely ridiculous, because beat matching is so easy. Like, I can teach a kid that is 10 years old how to beat match in a couple of hours, because today it really became easy. So, I don't know why people are talking about this.”

Guetta goes on to say that, although he does prepare what he calls the “skeleton” of his set, he’s always ready to switch things up if it’s not going down as well as he’d hoped.

“Let's say I'm playing my set that I prepared, but I see that when I play an underground record, they’re really into it,” he suggests. “So, I have my underground playlist, I'm gonna add some of this.

“Or let's say I play an underground record and it's a disaster, they only want hits, and singalong and feelgood music. OK, no problem.”

But although Guetta is keen to stress that he’s definitely selecting and mixing the music ‘as it happens’, he does admit that there can be a certain amount of “bullshit” going on in the booth.

Take the flicks of EQ knobs, for example, performed in a way that implies that the controls are red hot to the touch.

“If I'm totally honest, some of it can become like a trick to do that, and some of it is a little bullshit part of the show,” Guetta admits. “I put the EQ straight because you have the craziest engineers that are coming into the club. So, unless the club sucks, you don't need to do all this show with EQ.”

Elsewhere in the Q&A, Guetta gives a demonstration of just how easy it is to beat match these days, and goes on to say that what impresses him more is when a DJ shifts a track’s key so that it matches harmonically with the one that’s being mixed out of.

“If I hear a DJ do that, I'm like, ‘OK, this guy is good,’” he says.

Dance duo Bicep have been talking about their new soundtrack project, which involved travelling to Greenland and recording with Inuit musicians.

The soundtrack accompanies an immersive installation called Takkuuk, which premieres at Outernet in London tomorrow (July 3). The film explores the lives, communities and challenges that artists face in the Arctic region.

As one half of the duo Andy Ferguson explains in a feature in today’s Guardian, the project also involved him sampling the noises from the gradually melting huge ice sheet at the centre of the country. Inevitably, the idea is to draw attention to the current climate emergency. “Everyone comes back changed,” he said. “Seeing first-hand climate change happening like this.”

Ferguson initially returned from Greenland with samples and field recordings which the duo sent to the indigenous artists that they met. Those artists sent back full songs to Bicep, at which point the duo realised: “We needed to step back and not be the focal point... it became clear this needed to be us shining a light on them.”

There is a rather cringy tradition of pop stars travelling to the frozen north to ‘draw attention’ to climate change. Think of the somewhat ludicrous Cape Farewell project of 2008 that saw 45 artists, including Jarvis Cocker, Marcus Brigstocke and Leslie Feist take a voyage into the Arctic Ocean in the hope that it would elicit a ‘cultural response’ via their art. But Bicep’s motives seem more honest than most, in genuinely wanting to shine a light on the artists of this small community on the world’s largest island.

One of Bicep’s collaborators, Charlotte Qamaniq from the duo Silla, summed up the purpose of Takkuuk neatly: “The Arctic climate is changing rapidly so in the context of the project it’s: ‘look, the adverse effects of climate change are obvious.’ But it’s also: ‘hey, look how cool Inuit culture is!’”

Meanwhile, Ferguson said: “If it starts people on a journey to learn more about Greenland then it’s achieved something.”

“It’s easy to switch off with climate change, I switch off myself sometimes,” he continued. “But if you start telling the story in different ways, different narratives, ways people can visualise it, at least it’s a start. Because for the next generation it’s going to be the focal part of their life.”

PLUGIN WEEK 2025: First forming a kinship through a love of local raves, Joseph Chung and Joseph Abella’s fusion of dubstep, trance and techno has found favour with millions of listeners globally.

Last year the pair, in their guise as ARMNHMR, released their debut album. Around the time of its making, we sat down for a natter with Abella to find out more…

Firstly, how did ARMNHMR first get off the ground – how did you guys first meet?

“To put it simply, partying. We began as concertgoers. We both met through mutual groups of friends in the SoCal raving scene. We spent many years going to festivals together that we eventually thought it would be a great idea to start something of our own. I started learning first and the rest is history.”

Can you talk us through your (coined term) ‘Hammer’ sound – what are the hallmarks of it and why did you call it that?

“The ‘Hammer’ sound is something of an emotional rollercoaster. We want our music to take you on a journey. By the end of the song we want you to be left feeling pensive and in awe. Hopeful or at the very least a sense of closure.”

Let’s talk about Together as One, which is out now via Monstercat. It’s a really fantastic listen. How long has this album been in development and what tracks are your personal faves?

“The album has been in development for the past couple of years. On and off we’ve been working on each of the tracks since the COVID pandemic. It’s hard to pinpoint a favourite track, because each one shared a special moment during the time we wrote it.”

There are some incredible textures on the album, and some rock-solid hooks. Do you have a tried-and-tested production process, or does your arrangement/mixing approach vary track to track?

“Each track naturally takes a life of its own. We don’t have a plan of attack for most of our music. Some tracks came together quicker than others, but overall it just took time and patience.”

Someone To Forget is a real monster of a song and has perhaps a more poppy vibe. How did that track originate and how long did it take to get the mix right?

“Thank you for the kind words! The song actually originated early on in the pandemic in a little cabin in Big Bear, California. Most of the initial songs on the album began there, after we decided to isolate ourselves for a team writing boot camp. It took a little over two years, off and on, writing and rewriting. Lights [the pair’s collaborator on the track] absolutely crushed it in the writing process. It really didn’t take too long to wrap up the song after that.”

There are some exceptional featured artists on the record. How do you decide who to work with and do you typically build the tracks together with the collaborators?

“We are fans of each one of the vocalists we work with. Much of it began with just cold emails. We start building tracks from the ground up. Much of the tracks begin as stripped demos that eventually turn into full-scale productions by the end of it. We respect working with other creatives and never want to skip corners.”

Who would be a dream collaboration for you?

“Personally for me (Joe Abella) most of my dream collaborations are artists who have come and gone. Michael Jackson, Freddy Mercury, and John Lennon just to name a few.”

There are some interesting blends of instrumental textures on the record, things like acoustic guitar and shimmering piano sit alongside those more classic electronic elements, tracks like September Nights really balance these worlds well. What motivated you to bring in those additional flavours?

“Nothing can replace the warmth of real instruments. This time around we wanted to get as hands-on with the album as we could. Most of the instruments were recorded and written by ourselves. [We wanted] Together As One to be the embodiment of both electronic and traditional music. We aimed to combine and blend the best of both worlds to create something of our own.”

We’re guessing you work in your own studio. What’s the cornerstone of your setup gear-wise and what’s the balance between hardware and software?

“Everything we’ve done has always been grassroots. Every song was written in our small bedroom studios with just our pianos, guitars, bass, and in-the-box plugins. As much as possible we don’t want to rely on one over the other. Our whole goal is to write a good song.”

What software is vital for the ARMNHMR sound? Can you talk us through a few of your favourite DAWs or plugins?

“We’ve had backgrounds in most DAWs, but Ableton Live by far is the most essential. As far as plugins, there are too many to name. Minimal Audio Rift and Xfer Serum are by far the most used in our toolbox. In the end it’s just colours on a canvas and the most important part is us as the writers.”

What software could you not produce without? And what’s on your studio wish-list?

“Ableton Live would be the one piece of software we could not produce without. It has amazing instruments, samplers, MIDI effects, etc. Most importantly, the warp function is by far the best.”

Do you prefer being in-studio or performing live overall?

“Live performances are just as important as the time we put into music. We love being in the studio working on music, but nothing beats being able to see first hand reactions. Also, live performances give us the platform to create new and fun edits that give a brand new life to the tracks.

“We write most of our tracks to be played live because we feel there is an energy in a live setting that you just can’t reach through your headphones. Everyone singing and being together on the same page is so rewarding.”

What are your thoughts on the continuing rise of AI? Do you think it threatens new musicians and the wider industry?

“Overall, I think in our space it isn’t much of a concern. Just like the introduction of the internet and the improvement of creation tools, I feel like it’s the artist’s role to adapt. It’s just another tool in the act of creating. I think most fans support art created by humans because they share a common experience. It’s hard to find connection and relatability in a machine if it hasn’t come from someone who truly understands the nuance of being human.”

What advice would you give to anyone looking to have a career like yours?

“Don’t! Just kidding! If creating music and expression is something you feel destined to do then I would say just start. Create when you’re uninspired just the same way you create when you’re inspired. It takes so much time to get good at something. The more music you make, the more chances you have to gain supporters.”

What’s next on the agenda for you guys?

“We love what we do and want to take it as far as we can. There’s a big world out there. For now, we’re just focusing on touring for the rest of the album and seeing where we go from there…”

ARMNHMR's Together As One is out now on Monstercat.