Kevin Press
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As someone whose love of music took root in the early 1980s, I’ve always had a weakness for analogue synthesizers. Musically, they’re unlike anything that came before or after. And my goodness they’ve been put to good use. Gary Numan, Kraftwerk, Afrika Bambaataa, Cabaret Voltaire, Yazoo – a big part of what made them and…
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It’s easy to forget that musique concrète dates back to France in the 1930s. Unlike other forms, its mix of repurposed musical recordings, vocals, ambient sound and electronics still feels progressive and groundbreaking decades later. Imagine what listeners of those early pioneers must have thought. Radio was only just entering the mainstream, and already thought…
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If you’d told my teenage friends and me that we’d one day watch a 56-year-old Bernard Sumner prance around Toronto’s posh Sony Centre stage singing: “How does it feel, to treat me like you do,” not one of us would have believed it. Of course, Rick, Dan and I saw that exact thing in October…
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The North Atlantic Drift is a warm-air current that pushes the Gulf Stream north east. It packs a pretty decent punch too. We can thank this freak of nature for carrying more tropical water our way than any other coastline current. The Toronto duo that’s chosen to record under the same name is similarly moving.…
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A lot of what you find filed under dub these days bears little resemblance to the Jamaican pioneers of the 1960s. Those early geniuses – King Tubby, Lee Scratch Perry and the rest – were tasked with producing reggae single B-sides as cheaply as possible. In the process they invented a new genre to which today’s purveyors…
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First record: “Wipe Out” by The Surfaris. Lifted it from Dad’s collection of 45s and really didn’t appreciate what a gem I’d adopted. Funny that this first track was an instrumental. Forty years later I remain as impatient as ever with poorly penned lyrics. First record shopping experience: Ended in frustration. Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke” landed and…
