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It's impossible to overstate The Hague's impact on dance music. In the early '90s, this small city in northern Holland crafted a bastardised version of the sounds bubbling out of Detroit, a ravey mash of jacking house and techno that, at the time, sounded almost impossibly futuristic.

“There is no other music in the world where an MC stands on the stage for an hour and continuously sprays lyrics with such clarity and power over so many frequencies,” Eksman, one of the d&b scene's foremost MCs, tells DJ Mag. “The life and evolution of the drum & bass MC has grown from strength to strength over the years, and I have no doubt that down the line many more great things are in store for the future generation of MCs in our music.” 
Undoubtedly so. The role of the drum and bass MC has steadily progressed simultaneously with the scene it resides in, although in the early days MCs experienced negativity from some DJs. But the MC has fought for its corner, and now overwhelmingly basks in the same golden glory as the DJ.

Always that most steadfastly independent genre, today drum & bass is splintered into a panoply of micro camps. In one corner, the giant, fizzy-pop electro chords and high fructose rushes of labels like Hospital; in another, the clipped, dark minimalism and sub bass caverns of its most underground soldiers, the Critical crew.

Picture this... It’s 2030, and the DJ Mag Top 100 has just been topped, for the first time ever, by an artist created with artificial...

Patience is a virtue, possess it if you can. It’s a quality that’s seldom, if ever, found in a modern-day drum & bass fan. For...

“I can’t go to my other studio ’cause I’ll get shanked,” says Mike, who proves to us that he can sing Afro-swing melodies as well as he raps...

Mak & Pasteman capped a busy 2016 by dropping their final release of the year with the ‘Function/Reflect’ EP on their own Materials label last...

ADE. All the techno, EDM, leather jackets, live streams, networking and café pit stops you can handle. Don’t expect to sleep. We certainly didn’t. DJ...

There's a heap of DiY information online these days. One of the clear benefits of our brave new digital world is the glut of YouTube...

The advent of laptop DJing brought a massive smile to the faces of travel-weary DJs who have spent a large portion of their lives lugging...

Andy Cato (the taller, fair-haired one) and Tom Findlay, who together comprise Groove Armada, have been one of the most successful dance music duos of...

The V-MODA Crossfade M-100 headphones sound every bit as good as they look...

House legend Felix Da Housecat has found his way again, not that we ever thought he’d veered from the path of genius. After experiencing something close to a divine intervention, convinced that he had the devil on one shoulder and his family on the other, Felix has given up tequila. And his creative juices are in full flow again, with his latest release, the ‘Sinner Winner’ EP, sparking mayhem on the dancefloors, an exciting collaboration with dub hero Lee Scratch Perry in the bag and a new album due for release this year. Now living in London, Felix cites the UK as the place that he got his start. 
“I’ve lived here back and forth, sometimes I would stay for a year. But when I first came, England accepted me. And the vibe here back then, it’s still that vibe here now, it's not cheesy here at all.”

Once upon a time DJs roamed the planet with boxes filled with enough vinyl to cripple a sherpa and synthesisers that were so big and heavy they required two roadies to wrestle them onto the stage. Fortunately, these days, all it takes is a laptop with a couple of controllers plugged into the USB ports to do the job. Korg have been around since the beginning of the electronic music revolution, and while once they were manufacturers of hardware behemoths, they have kept abreast of the times by releasing a wide range of products in both hardware and software formats, from bulky workstation synthesisers designed to live in a studio to their micro range of keyboards, which are the perfect size and weight to be taken on the road.

When it comes to the world of studio effects plug-ins, few companies have been around as long as Waves, whose first product, their Q10 paragraphic EQ, was released in 1992. Even fewer have built such an outstanding reputation among the studio community for producing consistently awesome sounding plug-ins.