Night Bus to Nowhere: Manchester's After-Hours Revival
Four buses, one night, and a set of rules nobody wrote down. Manchester's after-hours scene has quietly rebuilt itself around the bus timetable and the end of the late shift.
Wire
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Liner Notes: Nostalgia Is a Compression Artifact
The 128 kbps rip sounds right and the lossless copy sounds like an impostor. What we miss about old formats is precisely what they could not carry.
Five Questions for Barometric, the Duo Turning Weather Data Into Techno
Pressure to filter cutoff, humidity to delay feedback, wind speed to tempo. Ines Aalto and Marta Reis explain the rules of their machine, the treaty that stops them cheating, and the night the weather refused to do anything at all.
Club Flyers Were the Internet Before the Internet
Before a link could travel, a rectangle of paper had to. The club flyer was a routing protocol with a typeface, and it encoded who was invited far more precisely than anything that replaced it.
The Return of Tape: Ferric's 'Oxide Dreams' Reviewed
A tape company made an album on its own stock, on a four-track, to prove a point. It proves two: that tape does something real, and that it lets you get away with things you should not get away with.
Mixing Desk Confessions: Sam Okereke on the Loudness Wars
For fifteen years Sam Okereke made records louder because that is what he was paid for. Now there is a clause in his contract that says he will not. We went to Deptford to hear the confession.
The Case for Buying the Cheap Synth First
The expensive synth will still be there in three years. The one that teaches you anything is the one with four knobs, one oscillator and no menu to hide inside.
Seoul's Modular Scene Meets in a Former Bathhouse
Once a month, in a tiled room that has not held water since 2011, thirty people plug their machines into one another and find out what the building will allow.
A Brief History of the Bassline That Won't Die
Four notes, played wrong on a borrowed bass synth in 1983, have since carried electro-funk, house, jungle, garage, grime and one very good synth-pop record. A biography of a figure that refuses to be retired.
Game Audio Is Eating the Avant-Garde (and That's Fine)
Indeterminacy, generative form, scores that never play the same way twice. Concert programmers largely stopped paying for that. A twelve-person studio making a diving game is paying for it now.
Nadia Volt's 'Overcurrent' Is Synth-Pop With Teeth
Ten pop songs written on a 1981 polysynth that goes out of tune as it warms up. Nadia Volt sequenced the album by temperature and kept the takes where the machine wins.
