Category Archives: music

Vale Frankie Knuckles: “On a scale of 1 to 10, it’s 12.”

“How hot is house music now?” an interviewer asks Knuckles in the video.

“On a scale of 1 to 10, it’s 12.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/02/godfather-of-house-music-video_n_5078764.html?utm_hp_ref=chicago&ir=Chicago

Rare Video Footage Proves The ‘Godfather’ Of House Music Will Live On Forever

The Huffington Post  | by  Joseph Erbentraut

Consider yourself warned: This clip will probably bum you out that time travel still isn’t a thing.

On the heels of the passing of Grammy-winning house music pioneer Frankie Knucklesthe Media Burn video archive shared a previously unseen mini-documentary of the Oct. 25, 1986 opening of the Power House club in Chicago on Wednesday. The documentary was produced by filmmaker Phil Ranstrom.

The clip features a brief interview with Knuckles, plus footage of patrons dancing to what Knuckles coined as “disco’s revenge” and a performance from the Steve “Silk” Hurley-led J.M. Silk. These were the glory days of Chicago house.

“House music to me represents yet another form of black music that has broken from the street into peoples’ homes,” Simon Low, then an executive with RCA Records, says in the clip. “House music is intrinsically a Chicago phenomenon. You can hear it. I mean, all this music they’re playing tonight has come out of Chicago.”

Knuckles had his own Chicago club, the Power Plant, from 1982 to 1987. He then began the residency at Power House, but according to Tim Lawrence, author of “Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-79,” Knuckles left Chicago for New York after Power House closed and was renamed the Music Box in 1988.

“How hot is house music now?” an interviewer asks Knuckles in the video.

“On a scale of 1 to 10, it’s 12.”

(h/t Gapers Block)

HBO set to do dance-music comedy….

  • knob-twisters
  • self-oblivious man-children

http://www.theguardian.com/music/shortcuts/2014/jan/26/calvin-harris-irvine-welsh-dance-music-comedy

Calvin Harris and Irvine Welsh’s HBO dance-music comedy could be hilarious

Egomaniacal knob-twisters? Self-oblivious man-children? According to the anonymous duo behind the @DJsComplaining Twitter feed, the EDM scene provides a rich comic seam
Calvin Harris
Funny man? Calvin Harris, who will be collaborating in the making of HBO’s new comedy. Photograph: John Lamparski/WireImage

Remember when you first heard Calvin Harris‘s 2007 hit Acceptable in the 80s and thought to yourself how amazing it would be if Harris wrote a sitcom with Irvine Welsh about electronic dance music? And then remember thinking that the only way that could happen would be if Jay Zand Will Smith agreed to produce it? Well, it’s happening.

HBO – the visionary network behind modern parables The Wire and Boardwalk Empire – has announced it is in the process of developing Higher, a new half-hour comedy series “set in the world of electronic music,” clearly concluding that the next logical step on from crack dealers in Baltimore and bootleggers in prohibition-era Atlantic City is a kid sitting alone in his mum’s house in Romford listening to the same kick drum for hours on end and occasionally going out to buy clothes pegs just to “get out of the house”.

While, on the face of it, this may not seem like the most fecund comedy ground, as DJs ourselves, we are well aware that the world of dance music is a rich tapestry of egomaniacs and self-oblivious man-children that is ripe for mockery. We have tried to mine this particular seam of comedy for a couple of years now, first undermining our peers by retweeting their bitter, mundane gripes on our Twitter account,@DJsComplaining, then drawing on our own hard-won experience to write cutting think pieces about the EDM scene. And we have remained completely, spinelessly anonymous – because sharing a backstage area with a socially impaired knob-twister is often awkward enough even without the added frisson of them knowing you’ve spent 500 words and several days of your life lampooning them in the national press.

Saying that, Harris clearly operates in a different sphere to the likes of us, and while details about which aspects of EDM Higher will focus on are scarce, we can only assume that The Most Highly Paid DJ in the World™’s input to the project will be somewhat influenced by his own lifestyle. Harris probably slaps together his latest chart-topper on his iPad in between sips of ambrosia and bouts of clay-pigeon shooting, occasionally sloping off to wistfully roam his grounds on his gold-plated penny farthing. Let’s hope, then, that the presence of Welsh – a man whose heart remains closer to the gutter – will bring things back down to Earth. Welsh was reared in a different world of dance music altogether: a world of pills and pubs, of minicabs and chilli sauce; a world where ketamine was what you gave a horse and Traktor was what you used to get away from the horse once you’d given it some ketamine.

We don’t know yet quite how these two very different world views will meet on the page, but with Welsh’s keen eye for hallucinatory nightmare and Harris’s renowned comedic prowess, Higher just might be the laugh-a-minute romp that the EDM world has been so desperately waiting for. Perhaps.

Giorgio Moroder: how Star Wars inspired I Feel Love – video interview

My favourite film of all time inspiring my favourite track of all time… what are the odds?

http://www.theguardian.com/music/video/2013/nov/14/giorgio-moroder-i-feel-love-video-interview

Italian record producer Giorgio Moroder speaks to Ben Beaumont-Thomas about his long and varied career, from producing Donna Summer’s hugely influential I Feel Love to Daft Punk’s tribute to him, Giorgio by Moroder, and his recent reinvention as a DJ. He explains why the critics were split over his re-scoring of the Fritz Lang film Metropolis (which he recently presented at the LEAF festival), and his plans for a disco-themed Las Vegas musical extravaganza

• Listen to a long version of this interview in our Music Weekly podcast, published on Thursday 14 November

The Evolution of Western Dance Music Visualised

A super-excellent animated timeline portraying the evolution of western dance music. Even if it’s not perfectly correct, it’s a damn fine attempt, strangely hosted on a travel company website… why not!

Impressive to see what happens from the start of the 70’s and good to see “Deep House” properly represented in the same general vicinity as “Christian Hymns”.

History of Western Dance Music

http://www.thomson.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/infographic/interactive-music-map/index.html

Accompanying blog post:
http://www.thomson.co.uk/blog/2011/10/how-music-travels-infographic/