Reynoldso versus Reynaldo

Shawn Reynaldo is a music writer who's just published his debut book First Floor: Reflections on Electronic Dance Culture through Velocity Press, which has a growing catalogue of interesting tomes on dance music.   

The title comes from Shawn's Substack / newsletter First Floor. Check out his columns like this recent one on the rise of spectacle within dance culture.  

Recently Shawn and I had a really enjoyable, wide-ranging chat about club culture, nostalgia, futurity, music journalism, genre-naming, and more. For a day or two, the conversation is accessible to non-subscribers here.

I put it to Shawn that we are phonetic near-namesakes.  Strangely, he said this had never occurred to him! Perhaps when I was starting my writing career, I should have put an 'o' on the end of my byline - it has a dashing, swashbuckling air. 

reading matters: friends + family edition part 2

Another dispatch from the frontlines of 2020s music - although in this case it sounds freakily like 1970s music - here's Kieran Press-Reynolds with a review of DOMi & JD BECK's hyper-fusion freakout Not Tight for Pitchfork 

A dispatch from the frontlines of 1970s music - my old Melody Maker comrade Frank Owen with a memory-lane guided tour to punk-era Manchester landmarks a.k.a. his old stomping ground. 

Dispatches drawn across decades in the form of Rolling Stone's 200 Greatest Dance Songs, largely selected and written up by Michaelangelo Matos. Nice to see Mescalinum United "We Have Arrived" in there - in between Fatboy Slim and somebody called Oliver Heldens. 

RIP Bohannon

Big tune the year it came out.

For a moment almost my Platonic ideal of what music should be.

"The whole house starts rockin'
As the drummer starts sockin'
That anti-wallflower sound at you"

Rap by Dr. Perri Johnson!

Never heard this Francois K rmx before




Nicely nodded here