No abstract

An absolute insider of the international underground electronic music scene for 20 years or so, Riccardo Balli is the best conceivable Charon for those who weren't there and want to get at least a flavour of what it was-and still is-all about. But beware, Balli is neither a music critic nor a music historian. Rather, a DJ, label owner, composer, novelist, live performer and, above all, a relentless experimenter in every domain of cultural production, Balli has now released a book whose main aim is to resist historification-a process which, as anyone acquainted with the Situationists knows, is inherently akin to museification and death (or, worse, sell out). Apocalypso Disco mixes fiction, autobiographic memories, interviews, recipe books, alchemical hints, sci-fi scenes and philosophical-anthropological asides to cheer up the reader during an intense, disorderly yet coherent promenade to the netherworld of unconventional electronics. One additional clarification: the subtitle of Apocalypso Disco, which reads "The rave-o-lution of post-techno", is best understood as not implying that there is something inherently revolutionary about rave music. Far from that. Indeed, the whole of Balli's book can be read as a call to bring the revolution into conventional rave and hardcore dance music, which are but the mirror of the zombie culture in which we currently live.

Paul Sullivan opens his Remixology: Tracing the Dub Diaspora by writing that "dub is a genre and a process", as he describes the intersection of Afrodiasporic and Rastafari soundsystem culture with bass-heavy music styles as "ethereal, mystical, conceptual, fluid, avant-garde, raw, unstable, provocative, postmodern, disruptive, heavyweight, political, enigmatic . . ." (2014: 7). Dub resonates as an echo through all of these signs, though Remixology tends to provide a lightweight treatment of the complex of metaphors Sullivan commences with. Less an intensive cultural study, even less so indulging in the kind of rich poetic license one would expect from a music journalist such as David Toop, Sullivan's make-do journalistic approach combines first-hand interviews with a repackaging of well-travelled tales to tell a rich narrative of dub's musical and cultural development, focusing on its producers, soundsystem operators, selectors and DJs. Avoiding the usual rounds of critique that gives cultural studies its edge-there is very little here on gender/sexuality, power/violence, colonialism/race or nationalism/politics-and leaving unremarked the sometimes provocative and interesting statements that arise in interviews, Sullivan nonetheless provides a gentle-enough grand narrative of dub's outward spread from Jamaica. In the process Sullivan lays the groundwork for naming the "dub diaspora" as a transnational network based upon postcolonial migrancy and the dissemination-through copying, remixing and versioning-of dub studio and performance practices.Remixology proves a readable and insightful treatment of dub for lay readers and studious scholars alike, beginning with a smart retelling of dub's origins in Jamaica, where Sullivan weaves the history of soundsystem culture into the invention of reggae and lover's Reviews

Cultural historian Tim Lawrence's first book Love Saves the Day adopted a chronological approach to East Coast disco's dramatic arc through the 1970s. Then his follow-up Hold On to Your Dreams widened the timeline, honing in on a valuable contributor to New York's downtown music scene-cellist and composer Arthur Russell. While LStD ranged widely across many spaces, DJs, artists, assorted characters and issues, the Russell biography was an intimate portrait of a key player, who died from AIDS-related complications in 1992.Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor 1980-1983 (henceforth Life and Death) is the third segment in Lawrence's New York project. Now he narrows the timeline and brings a forensic examination to just four years in the party scene. On the title, Lawrence explains, "the reference to life is intended to evoke the way that New York party culture didn't merely survive the hyped death of disco but positively flourished in its wake". And he clearly and convincingly argues that the short period was one characterised by a stirring artistic ferment, across music, art, dance and club space innovation. Lawrence explains: "instead of depicting the 1980-1983 period as a mere bridge that connected the big genre stories of 1970s disco and 1980s house and techno, I submitted to its kaleidoscope logic, took my foot off the historical metronome, and decided to take it-the book-to the bridge" (ix).His excavation uses all available sources to bulk out the progression through the years across a variety of intersections, downtown and uptown; legal locations such as clubs and galleries, to homes, disused industrial spaces, drilled DJs to first comers, established genres such as disco and R&B and the fresh fusions, collisions and cross pollinations garnered