E-Vapor-8 / Rave Day, Sheffiled, Sunday August 3

In conjunction with the E-Vapor-8 exhibition at the Site Gallery in Sheffield I posted about recently, there is a Rave Day seminar this coming Sunday:

Talking Art and Rave
Sunday 3 August, 2 - 6pm

Join us for a Sunday afternoon exploring the legacy of 90s rave culture and its influence on artists today. The event will be led by E-Vapor-8 curator, Francesca Gavin, and you’ll hear from five artists in the exhibition along with guest speakers including a DJ, music critic and researcher of underground rave communities. We’ll also be screening their selection of music videos and playing vinyl records from the time.
The event is open to everyone and will be particularly interesting for artists, art and music lovers, researchers, former-ravers as well as bloggers and journalists.

Who is involved?
Francesca Gavin, exhibition Curator and Chair of the event. will give insight into how she curated the exhibition and discovered a fascination with rave culture and happy hardcore young British and American artists.
E-Vapor-8 artists, Jeremy Deller, Adham Faramawy, Harry Burden, Lucy Stokton and Rhys Coren. Whether they actively participated or were indirectly influenced by rave, these artists explore ideas such as technology, collectivity, rebellion and psychedelia in their work.
Guest speakers include:
Winston Hazel, DJ and producer. As a true originator, Winston Hazel helped gift house music to the city of Sheffield in the mid-80s, organising parties combining new American dance sounds with funk, jazz and soul. Sharing some records and speaking from his individual perspective on the rave and dance scene, he will explore ideas of experimentation, shared positive mindset and rhythms which transformed peoples lives.
Alice O’Grady, Professor in Applied Performance at University of Leeds. Alice will talk about her 
own experience of rave, that began in the early 90s and included warehouses, beaches, festivals and more. She will examine the impacts that rave and DIY culture had on public policy and how it inspired other social movements.
When: Sunday 3 August, 2pm – 6pm, followed by drinks at Site Gallery
Where: Showroom Cinema, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield S1 2BX
Tickets: £5.00 / £4.00 concessions
Booking highly recommended

bringing 88 back

I was never a patriot for house, like I was with certain other genres. But I'm totally  susceptible to "the feeling".

Immense.

So is this...

And this next one was everywhere in 1993, played in all kinds of clubs. Did Jaydee ever do anything else on this sort of scale?

Surprising, puzzling, is the cultural staying power of house music. Never would have dreamed back in the early Nineties that house would even be around still in 2014, let alone be so big, such a widespread, inescapable template  - in the U.K., dominating the charts (and even pushing its way in there in the US now - how odd to hear Disclosure and Clean Bandit on  pop radio here in LA).

 But also runnin tings on the underground. 







"Like you bringing '88 back" !

A Moment Worth Waiting For

Kevin Pearce of  Something Beginning With 'O' legend has a new book out - A Moment Worth Waiting For. Available as an e-book through Amazon for £4.50 or $7.63, it's "a mesmerising dub history of late 20th Century pop culture". Starting with "a two-year period at the start of the 1980s", it criss-crosses pop time "tracking where clues led and how things fit together", in the style of Your Heart Out, Kevin's celebrated e-zine of the past five years (and 50 issues!).

Many names here are familiar from the Pearce counter-canon--Vic Godard, Weekend, Pale Fountains, Watt & Thorn, Postcard, ZE, The Scars, Dave McCullough, Y, Linx, Eddy Grant, Compact, Carmel, The Wild Swans--but he wanders far and wide taking in such esoterica as Nigerian boogie, Greek neo kyma and Cuban nueva trova.  There is also a thrilling section tracing the cat's cradle of unlikely connections between Motorhead, New Model Army, Screaming Blue Messiahs, and the Amphetamine Reptile roster.

Only kidding!

1986 was a bit of a dreary year to be starting out as a musical journalist. The pickings were particularly slim on the UK indie scene. Stump were one of the saving graces, or disgraces perhaps, given that the indignity of embodiment was one of their main topics. Pegged to the anthologized reissue of their work, Colm McAuliffe has written a fascinating piece on the band for The Quietus,  featuring quotes from MM's resident  Stump-supporters (Stubbsy and myself). Had no idea they got deep into sampling and worked with Holger Hiller, but that makes total sense if you see them as a "late postpunk" group rather than a shambling band -  as much C81 as C86,  The Art of Walking rather than "Panties Please".  And here's what I wrote about them at the time.