Features
From DJ supergroup to live powerhouse
Face it. Often, the biggest acts in electronic music come at us like bass-dropping wolves. Above & Beyond is the group that bears a unique...
From Los Angeles club night to leading bass label, SMOG has engulfed the world
Flashback to 2006, dubstep in America. "In my opinion, Los Angeles was ripe for it,” Drew Best, co-originator of SMOG, tells DJ Mag. “We had...
Dutch electro team Showtek have created this month's killer new DJ Mag download card
Gordon Phillips is the big cheese, top dog, club impresario behind the success story of BCM, also known as Planet Dance, on the Balearic isle...
Danny Howells isn't your typical DJ.
"For fuck's sake, hang on a sec, I'm scanning stuff, some Visa crap. My old agent used to do it but my new agent won't...
As much emo as EDM, Chicago's Krewella was the sensation of 2013, releasing a debut album, 'Get Wet,' performing on Good Morning America, and embarking...
Rarely do you find artists who speak as highly and fondly of their fans as the fans do of the artists they love. What truly...
Swedish producer Axel Boman is like nobody else in dance music. With a wicked sense of humour, both feet on the dancefloor and an ear...
“I read this interview with Avicii the other day in the Guardian,” Axel Boman tells DJ Mag. “And the Guardian interviewer was like, 'Avicii's experiment...
There's a new techno sound echoing from the post-industrial streets of one of the UK's biggest conurbations. Influenced by Berlin and Detroit, Manchester's young producers...
Our personal geography is one of the formative things about us. Our immediate surroundings and the people that surround us are our most important influencers...
Shadow Child’s bass-heavy house music is all over the airwaves, dancefloors and beyond.
It’s a cold, wet Wednesday night in London but pumping across airwaves at 108.6FM are the ripping basslines, house beats, jazzy keys and liquid vocals...
Cosmic, psychedelic and extraordinary, Eric Volta's music is as far out as the man behind it. We asked the maker of 'Love Your Illusion' to...
In literature a 'volta' is the moment in a sonnet when everything changes — where the writer turns full circle, switching viewpoint. For Eric Volta...
Swiss DJ/producer Deetron has been a fixture of the world's coolest clubs and labels for years. But with a reputation for deadly, wide-ranging DJ sets...
Sam Geiser has had quite a year. After a decade-and-a-half slowly building from the ground up, now everyone wants a piece. Luckily, he's the kind...
The Belfast DJ/producer is fast becoming one of the hottest names in garage-laced house music.
“I’m not averse to a bit of shuffling but I wouldn’t say I’m a professional shuffler,” confesses Irish nu-house producer Garry McCartney. “But, when you’re...
A sound that's all his own
The post-punk guitars, stripped-bare machine grooves and proper songs of album 'Dancers'. DJ Mag linked with Tim to talk stepping back from the dancefloor, originality...
Leftfield beatsmith on his his funky new library compilation.
You know how it is. That epic, hip-hop crime drama series you’ve been directing is almost finished. But you just can’t find the right track...
The latest reworking of the dance music archive?
Two decades after they first inspired the establishment to try and legislate against dance music, the breakbeats that fuelled jungle and hardcore have found new life at the hands of producers who were in nappies when 'Terminator' was first released. But what’s behind this latest reworking of the dance music archive?
It’s taken three years, countless gigs, umpteen rewrites, a clutch of Beatport chart toppers, and one high profile plagiarism case, but finally — finally —...
“It’s not the same album it was three years ago!” Mat Zo laughs, Skyping from his current base in the LA suburbs. “I’ve done a...
The creepy synth sounds of horror movie soundtracks by Goblin, Fabio Frizzi and John Carpenter have proven hugely influential on modern electronic music. DJ Mag...
But whilst these cheap horror films with their copious sex and violence might not have brought about the nation’s moral decay, they have wormed their...
The Dutchman cuts through the crap and criticisms and discusses the EDM boom, the concept of selling out and gives us an insight into his...
Multi-platinum selling producer, DJ to tens of thousands every week and EDM figurehead: Afrojack is undeniably one of global dance music’s biggest names. In a refreshingly frank interview, the Dutchman cuts through the crap and criticisms and discusses the EDM boom, the concept of selling out and gives us an insight into his upcoming album...
With a host of monikers and diverse productions to his name, DJ Pierre has driven the development of dance and is still at the forefront...
Phuture, Pfantasia, Phantasy Club, Photon Inc, Audio Clash, Darkman, Doomsday, P-Ditty, The Don… all past aliases for Nathaniel Pierre Jones, better known as DJ Pierre, the man credited with kickstarting a movement in 1987 with ‘Acid Tracks'. Although a seismic claim to fame, this happened over a quarter century ago, most recently reactivated on Terry Farley's monumental 'Acid Rain' box-set. But, since then, Pierre has continued to chart one of the most idiosyncratic paths in house music, undyingly committed to developing new sonic mutants to send crowds bananas on his punishing schedule of globe-trotting DJ gigs.
MCs were often maligned in the early days of drum & bass, but nowadays it's pretty much universally accepted that a renegade mic-spitter is a...
“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.
DJ Mag spoke to two of the scene’s icons about their takes on the scene in 2013, their manifold future plans, and the enduring spirit...
When DJ Mag enters a disused pub in south-east London’s Rotherhithe, we find LTJ Bukem has arrived early and is waiting patiently for us on a sofa in the pub’s old bar area. A true originator of drum & bass, Bukem, aka Danny Williamson, then throws himself into his part of the photo-shoot in a small, sparsely-lit room, which, much to everyone’s amusement, was once the gents’ toilets in the now-converted boozer.