If Daft Punk’s 2006 Coachella concert was the moment that the great American public was introduced to live electronic music, then Orbital’s 1994 Glastonbury festival gig was the spark that sent British dance music into orbit, 12 years earlier.

By this point, live dance music was already pretty well established in the UK. Inner City had played live extensively in Britain in 1989, while The Shamen’s Synergy tour, which stretched around the UK from 1989 to 1990, did the early groundwork of fusing live electronic music performances with DJs. Orbital, in fact, made their live debut in February 1990 at London’s Town and Country club during a Synergy gig.

Even so, Glastonbury 1994 - which is being released on a live album for the first time this month - was huge for Orbital and for British music fans as a whole, paving the way for dance music to take over the UK mainstream in the mid to late 1990s and helping to make the humble festival into a staple of British life.

The reason for this is national television. Glastonbury 1994 was the first time that the festival was televised live, beamed by Channel 4 into millions of houses from Thursday June 23 to Saturday June 25, when Orbital headlined the NME Stage.

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I say “millions of houses”; no one seems to really know how many people watched the Orbital gig. Maybe “millions” seems overblown for a set that went out at 11pm on a Saturday night. But the vast majority of households in the UK in 1994 only had four channels, so obscure programming could wrack up millions of views if the wind was blowing the right way and nothing else was happening.

Whatever the case, it certainly seemed like everybody - or everybody who counted, anyway - had seen the Orbital Glastonbury gig when I returned to school on Monday June 27 and started immediately planning to attend Glastonbury 1995. Over the coming months, my friends and I wore out our VHS players playing and re-playing the Orbital gig, itching with expectation that we too could one day attend something so epic.

Physics permitting, the best way to enjoy Orbital’s Glastonbury 1994 set would be to travel back in time and watch it live. Second to that - and eminently more practical - is watching this clip of the band playing Chime at the climax to the iconic gig, the crowd looking like they might levitate with excitement as the song’s synth riff explodes into life - like heavy metal rendered in pure celestial tear drops - and yellow lights burst over the Somerset field.

Faced with this stiff competition Glastonbury 1994, the band’s new / old live album, will inevitably struggle. This is the first time that the whole eight-song concert (nine with the intro) has been released, although three songs - Walk Now, Are We Here? and Attached were released on Orbital: Live at Glastonbury 1994–2004 in 2007 and you can find video of most of the gig online, in various shapes and sizes.

However clean the audio might be on the new record, losing the visuals is a tough blow, not so much for Orbital’s own light show - which is fun, if not boundary breaking - but for what we miss of the crowd. You can see from any of the video footage that the Glastonbury crowd is equally, if not more, important as the band during the gig, musicians and public caught in pure euphoric synthesis. Orbital’s Phil Hartnoll says as much in the new album’s notes. “All I remember is the energy from the crowd, this love…. oozing out, like it was vibrating from them,” he explains.

Glastonbury 1994 the album can’t compete with the live video footage of the gig, then. But it does a surprisingly good job of capturing the set’s communal ecstasy on record, with the roars, whistles, stomps and claps of the huge crowd poking through the mix at opportune times. To hear the scream of appreciation when the tickling, teasing synth lines of Remind give way to hard acidic burble and punishing kick drum is to feel the sweet adrenaline of a perfect concert moment burst through the veins.

By1994 Orbital were already veterans of live electronic music and they knew how to work a Saturday night crowd. Riffs are extended, synths are tweaked, beats are teased and their songs climb towards prog-techno-rave peaks that are largely faithful to their original versions - an Alive 2007-style song mash up this is not - although wilder, larger and most ambitious.

It’s not exactly a subtle sound that the Hartnolls blasted from the Glastonbury stage that Saturday night but it’s not particularly heavy either, at least by today’s standards, with Orbital relying on colourful synth riffs and huge builds to carry the day, their sound caught somewhere distinctly Orbital between rave, techno, what would soon be known as IDM and progressive house. It’s hearteningly live too: right at the end of Sad But True / the start of Impact you can hear a breakbeat looping just out of time, which gives an idea of the heart-in-the-mouth experience this gig must have been for the Hartnoll brothers.

The duo also have a knack of picking vocal samples that are perfectly primed for huge festival crowds - the voice on Are We Here that ponders human reality, for example, seems to get right inside the collective unconsciousness. Orbital sound enormous here, their music designed for the masses, a world away from the sweaty Detroit basements in which techno started. And it really doesn’t seem that far from here to EDM super festivals and vast DJ light shows.

It is perhaps unfair to nitpick a concert this euphoric. In retrospect, though, the four songs from the band’s third album, Snivilisation, released a couple of months after the Glastonbury gig - Forever, Sad But True, Are We Here and Attached - don’t quite clear the very high bar set by the earlier songs. Are We Here has a gorgeous recorded vocal from a pre-fame Alison Goldfrapp but its clattering breaks and metallic dread bass - an attempt to copy the nascent jungle sound - feel a little lumpy and on record the song’s 15 minutes overstay their welcome.

By contrast, the three tracks taken from Orbital’s second eponymous LP (known as The Brown Album) - Remind, Impact (The Earth is Burning) and Walk Now - are incendiary. The Brown Album was a record that sounded designed to play live, as Orbital got ever bigger on the gig circuit, its songs flowing into each other in a fiery melodic rush of synths and vocal samples.

And Chime is, well, Chime, a rave classic that has endured into dance legend and beyond, a track made in one take under the Hartnoll brothers’ stairs that screams with freshness and profundity and will do so forever more. I don’t know if the version on Glastonbury 94 is necessarily better than all those other takes on Chime that exist. But it is certainly the best placed of all, coming as the howling climax to this historic gig.

Besides, much as no one reviews the Bible for the elegance of its sentences, it doesn’t really make sense to assess Glastonbury 1994 as a simple live album. It’s way beyond that.

Orbital at Glastonbury 1994 was an event, a 10/10 festival gig and TV phenomenon that would be vitally important for dance music history and British cultural life as a whole. After Glastonbury 1994 no one questioned that electronic music could be performed live; and everyone wanted to go to festivals. Dance music became an integral part of the British festival experience and an integral part of British life, where it would stay until everyone got bored around the turn of the Millennium and The Strokes came along to save rock.

Orbital’s headline gig was a musical happening; but it was never just about the music. It was about the time, the people and the way the music lifted them up, together; it was about hope, possibility and optimism, about dance music coming 180 degrees from its rave infamy and slamming right into the mainstream.

No live album can come close to recreating that. But Glastonbury 1994, the record, runs it pretty close, a fire flash of energy, creativity and synchronicity that is one of the most important live electronic music albums ever made.

Some listening

Jazztronik - Samurai (Afro Latin remake)

Modern updates of classic tracks are the festering boil on the butt of dance music. Apart from, it seems, in the case of Jazztronik’s broken-not-broken beat 2000s classic Samurai, which slips into its new Afro Latin remake like a moisturised foot into a creamy new sock.

The original’s distinctive piano and string melodic lift, the sonic equivalent of a walk in the country with a breeze in the hair, is re-modeled into a slinky vibraphone lilt, while the sharp broken beats are ditched in favour of a warm, live-sounding groove, very much in the spirit of the original song without aping its much-loved actual sound. If this had slipped out on the NuYorican soul album back in 1997, it wouldn’t have sounded out of place; equally, it sounds perfectly simpatico to the sound of 2026. Bravo.

Skalah & Novelist - South of the Thames

It’s a grime generational crossover, as rising producer and DJ Skalah runs headlong into legendary MC Novelist, with the results being breaks-y, grime-y, hard and yet surprisingly airy at the same time, like one of those rave songs that lures the listener in with chillingly pretty synths before battering them over the head with the corruption of the come down.

Black Bananas - All The Way

Given that Jennifer Herrema formed Black Bananas after Royal Trux split and initially called the group RTX, it’s no surprise that the (ahem) banana hasn’t fallen that far from the tree. It’s not so much that Black Bananas sound like Royal Trux, pulling from P-Funk, synth pop and hip hop, where Royal Trux drank deep on the Rolling Stones and Captain Beefheart; it’s more that they resemble them in their densely-packed, borderline chaotic sound that is pulled relentlessly along by a groove.

Eddie’s Album, the band’s first record since 2014’s Electric Brick Wall, seems to work right at the edge of pleasure, daring you to find patterns and melody at the heart of their electric mulch. Sometimes the search feels in vain - Tiny Chewbacca is like Herbie Hancock’s Rockit being pulled into a black hole - but more often diamonds are found amidst the dark caves of chaos, with All The Way, for example, like a summer jam for the terminally dissolute, with electric synth riffs, squidgy funk bass and a vocal that flirts with breeziness. (No link as the album isn’t out until Friday.)

Things I’ve done

Saul Williams - Leap Life

Floating Points - Mere Mortals

A couple of reviews for DJ Mag. “‘Leap Life’, poet, actor and writer Saul Williams’ first new album in four years, is a real mulligatawny soup of a record: rich, wholesome and packed with dense flavour, the kind of album to be chewed upon, savoured and considered, rather than wolfed down whole.”

And: “From Daft Punk’s ‘Tron: Legacy’ to Classical Ibiza, the worlds of orchestral and electronic music have become increasingly common bedfellows. And yet there have been few - if any - genuinely essential records to come out of the crossover. Floating Points’ ‘Mere Mortals’, recorded with the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra, isn’t quite that - but it does have a number of dazzling moments where the classical / electronic hybrid makes total sense.”

Line Noise 277 - Erika de Casier (Essentials interview from 2019)

Back in May 2019, pre-musical stardom, K-Pop songwriting, Dua Lipa remixes and all, Erika de Casier was an independent artist whose debut album Essentials was getting everyone very excited. She came to the Radio Primavera Sound offices for an interview with Sprung, our English-language morning show, and was charm itself. So much so, in fact, that I thought I would recycle the interview as a Line Noise, even though I don’t feature. Instead, Johann Wald and Mark Dix spoke to Erika about lo-fi Sade, jeep music, Essentials, being independent, friendship with Smerz and much more.

The playlists

I have two playlists: the newest and the bestest 2026, which has all the best new music from this year; and the newest and the bestest, which dates right back to 2021. Both are available on Apple Music And Spotify.

Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026

Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify: The newest and the bestest

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Sébastien Tellier is preposterous. And I mean that as the highest praise. The singer, originally from Le Plessis-Bouchard on the outskirts of Paris, has been ploughing his own idiosyncratic field for a quarter of a century after debuting with L’Incroyable Vérité in 2001, always on the verge of a musical movement but never quite willing to go there, like the stone in the shoe of the French Touch.

Over eight albums - plus several soundtracks - he has made everything from orchestra Afrobeat (La Ritournelle) to juddering electro (Stunt with Mr. Oizo), recording the best album Daft Punk never made in the process. (That’s Sexuality, his third LP, a dream of electronic pop that bridged the gap between Discovery and Random Access Memories without anyone realising it.)

Who else but Tellier would create an album inspired by dirty dishes in the sink and soiled laundry on the floor and make it almost impossibly elegant? (That’s Domesticated, from 2020.) Who else could represent France in the Eurovision song context and also work extensively with noiseniks SebastiAn and Mr. Oizo? No one.

Tellier’s latest album, Kiss the Beast is incredible, too. In my round up of music from the first half of 2026 I called it “perfectly Tellier in its eccentricities and lush quality”. And I am sticking to that. So when he came to Barcelona, to play the Teatre Grec I jumped at the opportunity to talk to him.

We never met, more’s the shame, speaking by Google Meet on the Saturday morning of the gig. You can hear the interview now, on the Line Noise podcast. But here’s the text, for those who dream.

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We open with Sébastien telling me he has just got out of bed, at 11am.

Sébastien Tellier

I’m on tour. So, you know, usually I play around 10 until 11:30. So I go to bed - I go to bed maybe around two or three in the morning. So I wake up at 11.

Ben Cardew

And don’t forget, I’ve seen your tour bus. I enjoyed that video.

Sébastien Tellier

I enjoy a lot touring with the tour bus because, you know, tour bus, it’s a question of vibration. It’s like you are in the arms of your mother, you know? And it’s like a little movement. It’s perfect to sleep.

Ben Cardew

I want to talk about Kiss the Beast, the fabulous new album. I assumed when I heard the title that “The Beast” is you, is that right?

Sébastien Tellier

I’m not necessarily just the Beast. I guess I’m the Kiss and the Beast. Maybe when I am with my family, I’m the Kiss, you know: a tender guy, full of kindness, and just trying to be a good dad. But when I’m an artist, I’m the Beast. I’m a beast on stage. I’m a beast in the studio. So I could say I’m the Kiss in my regular life and I’m the Beast in my artistic life.

Ben Cardew

It seems like there’s a very big difference between the artist on Domesticated [his 2020 album] and the artist on Kiss the Beast. Was that a conscious thing?

Sébastien Tellier

Yeah, I did this album named Domesticated because I was domesticated by life, you know? With two young kids and almost my entire life was about my regular life. And it was hard for me to be more a dad than an artist. So step by step, I said to myself, ‘Enough. Stop being domesticated by your life. You have to be a real artist,’ because to be an artist is the goal of my personal life, you know? All my life, my dream is to be a great artist. So I said no, I broke the cage around me. And now my kids are bigger than before and so they can prepare the breakfast by themselves. So now I have time to be a full artist again.

Ben Cardew

What do your kids think of your music? Have they seen you live, for example?

Sébastien Tellier

Yes, it’s really funny. I say to my kids, ‘Papa is just a baby star. I’m not famous; I just love music’. I have a lot of luck I can play in front of people but I try to say to them, it’s just my choice. But you can choose what you want later in your life. If you don’t like music, no problemo. If you don’t like to write a song, it’s not a problem. Do what you want but you can see it’s really, really fun to do music. So I’m like a snake: I say something, but I’m showing something else. I say, ‘Ah, don’t worry about music,’ but at the same time, I take them to the gig, and they can see why it’s cool to play in front of big, big venues and blah blah blah.

Ben Cardew

You said of Kiss the Beast that you wanted to make, and I quote, “a record that’s free, instinctive, guided simply by the pleasure of making music.” Did you succeed in that goal?

Sébastien Tellier

Yes, I guess. Of course I think a lot about music and why I’m a musician and why I’m an artist, what can I do, blah blah blah. But I think there is something very strong, very - the basis of my music is my love for gear and I discovered that maybe six months ago. The pleasure of playing piano sounds very important for me. And this album was this kind of pleasure.

For example, I bought a Gibson Les Paul but metallic pink. It’s a very beautiful guitar, a very sexy guitar. And this guitar for me is almost the basis of the album, because the guitar is so beautiful. When I wake up, I want to touch it, I want to play with it, and now the real inspiration, in a way, it’s all my guitars, all my synthesisers, my piano, my speakers, my computer, and I love them, and I want to use them. So I use them maybe 10 hours a day and step by step I have songs.

Ben Cardew

I wondered, reading what you said about wanting to make music that was free and guided by the pleasure of music, if there had been a moment when that wasn’t the case with you?

Sébastien Tellier

Maybe. I did a few albums and I did an album named Sexuality with Guy-Manuel from Daft Punk and this album had a lot of success in France but also in the UK, US, Japan, blah blah blah. And so with this album, I did a big, big tour. After, you know, a lot of promotion, so many gigs and blah. And so after this album, I was tired. I was really tired. The success of this album really broke me. Maybe it was too much for me. Too much energy, too much travel.

Because what I really like to do is to be on my sofa, in Paris, eating some cookies. I really like that. And for me, it was really the opposite of my natural state of mind. And so after that album, maybe I took 10 years to recover. It was a long time. I have this vision of artists, like a very contemplative vision of art. I take time to think about the world, I take time to watch the sky, to read a book, to listen to records, watch movies, blah blah blah. And so for me, it was important to - not to stop, because I did L’Aventura, I did My God Is Blue, I did a few albums, but I was not burning for them. I did it with all my heart but without the burning. You need to burn inside to do a good album. And for My God Is Blue and L’Aventura and Domesticated, I gave you my heart but not my fire. And with Kiss the Beast, I’m coming with the fire, the real fire inside.

Ben Cardew

One of the things I love about Kiss the Beast - and there’s many things - is the song Mouton, which has sheep noises and includes the brilliant line, “J’ai un mouton dans la tête” [“I have a sheep in my head”]. What do you mean by that?

Sébastien Tellier

It’s a song about all my mistakes, all my inner questions. And sometimes I think a lot but for nothing, you know? It’s a loop. My brain is looping like a sheep in a field. There is no destination. I try to go somewhere but it’s a loop. And I think it’s not just me. Human spirits are like that. There is no definition because the truth is too high for us. So we try to find the truth but it’s impossible for us to find it, because we have just the brain of a human. And so, in a way, we are not so far from a sheep. Maybe our brains are just a little bigger than a sheep but we are almost sheep. And so it’s a song about that. It’s a song to say, ‘My brain is looping and at the same time, in a way, I’m just a sheep.’

Ben Cardew

I can’t think of many artists who would write a song about being like a sheep and use sheep noises and make it work. It’s a brilliant thing.

Sébastien Tellier

Thank you. For me, it’s really important to be deep and fun. Because just fun, it’s too light; just deep, it’s too heavy. And so the goal of my music is to create also a balance, a kind of perfect balance between everything, like fun, deep, but also happy and sad. And for me, it’s really important to create this balance and to show to the audience I have an open mind. I’m not just doing rock music or reggae or hip hop. I try to create something else. In a way, it’s a salad. It’s a salad of everything I love. So if I have to give the type of my music, the style of my music, I do salad music.

Ben Cardew

I remember when you first came out, people called you French Touch, linking you to bands like Phoenix, but I don’t know. I didn’t really feel like you fit in with that. Do you ever feel like you fit in with anything?

Sébastien Tellier

In a way, yes; in another way, no. Yes, why? Because we have the same passion for synthesisers. We love vintage synthesisers from the ‘70s, from the ‘80s. That’s for sure. And the common point we have is, we watched the same TV shows when we were young. The same TV shows, like Miami Vice and we heard the same songs on the radio in France because maybe we had a few radio stations in France when we were kids, like six or seven. So I think we heard the same music at the same time and we have, I don’t know why, the same passion for all synths. So that creates a kind of huge connection.

But besides that, I guess the French Touch is about going to the dance floor, having fun, this kind of a spirit. But me, I’m doing a kind of intellectual music. It’s more complicated. You have to take time to understand… It’s more like a book or like a movie, something like that. But this bunch of guys - Daft Punk, Phoenix - are really cool. They’re still my brothers forever. I love them but it’s true, it’s an anomaly. It’s a kind of mistake to put me in the French Touch movement because I’m not really a French Touch guy. I’m just friends with the guys at the front of French Touch, but I’m not a real French Touch guy. It’s true.

Ben Cardew

Do you feel very French in a way?

Sébastien Tellier

Ah, yes! I’m very, very French, because I love cheese. I really love cheese. And I love - but it’s true! And when I’m somewhere else, like US or I don’t know, the UK, I really miss the French cheese, really, really.

And also I’m French because I prefer to do nothing than to do something. For me, it’s more important to go to the terrace and drink a glass of wine than to work, work, work. I don’t care about work. I do music because I really love music but for me, music is not a job; it’s a passion, it’s a pleasure. And I smoke a lot and sometimes I read a book... and I’m French, you know? I’m very French. And for me, from my vision, and a lot of French [people], I don’t have the duty of to be efficient. I don’t care about being efficient. That’s not the goal.

In UK or US you have to be efficient. It’s really important for them. But me, I don’t care. And besides that, also I’m very romantic. I have a very romantic vision of life. I see my life like a story more than just a life. And I’m romantic, and I guess French people are really romantic, also.

Ben Cardew

You talked about doing things for fun earlier. Was that the spirit behind the Eurovision Song Contest when you represented France in 2008? Was it basically for fun?

Sébastien Tellier

It was for fun and not fun. I did it in a fun way but for me the goal was to sing my song in front of millions and millions of people, because this TV show has a big, big, big success and a big, big, big, big, big audience. And this audience was the light for me to follow.

But of course, the Eurovision Song Contest, I don’t want to be disrespectful but for me it’s not an artistic contest. It’s not. It’s closer for me, Eurovision, to the circus or patinage artistique - ice skating, artistic. For me it’s not an artistic contest. It’s just a big circus with a lot of audience and I did it. But if they asked me to do it again or to do it again, but for the first time, I will say no, because it’s too cheap. It’s not artistic enough. So I did it. I don’t really regret it but I don’t miss it and in a way I don’t care about it at all.

Ben Cardew

Did you think you were going to win? [He came 19th]

Sébastien Tellier

No, no, no, no, no. I was sure not to win. I don’t know why, but… otherwise, why not? We never know. The audience is so strange. But no, no, no. For me, the goal was not to win. It was just to do it and to sing my song in front of millions of people. Then for me, it was enough just to sing my song well enough.

Ben Cardew

I wanted to ask something else about Domesticated. As we mentioned, it came out of domesticity. It came out of doing the dishes, the laundry, children, that kind of thing. Are you surprised that there isn’t more music that comes from domesticity? Because I couldn’t think of anything similar. Kate Bush has a song about doing the laundry, I think. I couldn’t think of anything else.

Sébastien Tellier

It’s really strange because to make good music, in a way, you have to suffer, to feel the pain. If you have a perfect life with, you know, you don’t have to prepare the breakfast or life with no problem is not good to create. So for me to feel this pain, to be in the cage of regular life.. I love my kids and I love to buy a croissant for my kids and blah blah blah, but you know, it’s painful, you know? You don’t sleep enough, you have a bad haircut, you don’t have time to choose your clothes.

And this pain, in a way, woke up my artistic side, because at one point it was really painful, but really, really, really... like, maybe to have kids and a family life is the hardest thing which came in my life. It was great to be a dad but it’s not, ‘Oh, I smoke a joint. Oh, I wake up at noon.’ No, no, you have to wake up at seven to go to school and in the winter you have to walk in the night to go to school. It’s cold, it’s terrible. And so, to feel this pain woke up something in me to say, ‘No, no, no, no, no, I don’t want just that in my life. I have to come back with a massive album like Kiss the Beast to become again important in the music industry and to shine again.’

Ben Cardew

I wanted to ask about three of your most incredible collaborators and what was it like to work with them. Firstly, Nile Rodgers.

Sébastien Tellier

I knew Nile Rodgers before working with him because I was the ambassador for Chanel, the president of Chanel with him. So I knew him before because we did many events with him for Chanel - dinners, blah blah blah, interviews, blah blah. So I knew him, and when I had this song named Thrill of the Night, I missed something on the song. It was good producers like SebastiAn, Oscar Holter but I missed something. And my wife knew that we had to ask Nile Rodgers to play the guitar on it and I think it’s a wonderful idea.

My wife sent a text to him: ‘Sébastien wants to play music with you; we need the guitar on one song. Could you do it?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I’m down.’ And a few days after, he sent to me six different tracks of guitars and he said to me, ‘You can choose what you prefer in the parts.’

And so it was super easy with Nile Rodgers. This dude is the best: super nice person, super clever, with a real vision of music and from my point of view he has the perfect vision. He works a lot, he’s a scientist of music, but the goal of his science is to give pleasure to the audience. And for me, that’s perfect. You work, you work, you work and the result is it’s easy, it’s fun, it’s sweet. So for me, Nile Rodgers is a kind of perfection in my vision of music.

Ben Cardew

And what was Guy-Man like to work with?

Sébastien Tellier

Guy-Man is great! Also a genius of music. Guy-Man is really serious when you work. Like kids, we come at nine in the morning and we finish at 6 p.m. in the evening. And he knows exactly what to do. And so he tells me, ‘First today, you do the piano of this song.’ Okay, I do the piano. ‘After, you do the guitar of the other song.’ Okay. And sometimes it’s like… for sure he heard the record in his head and he just does it. It’s not experimental at all. Daft Punk and Guy-Man, it’s not experimental music. They know and they do. And so it’s just, ‘Now we have to turn on this synthesiser. You choose this tone.’ Yes. Okay. ‘So first, you play your right hand.’ Okay. Cool. And very serious with the direction. This guy is amazing. He’s an amazing musician.

Ben Cardew

And finally, Tony Allen.

Sébastien Tellier

He was so cool, a super relaxed guy. Of course, a genius of music, because he’s the guy who created Afrobeat. It’s like he plays a kind of lyrical drum, you know? For him, the drum was not a question of beat; it was a question of poetry.

Because when he played the drum, it was like a caress. It was not boom, tsch. I love that. Because I heard a long time ago The Beatles in an interview said, ‘You have to use the instrument as the opposite of the goal of the instrument, like you have to play the guitar like it’s a piano, or you have to play the bass like it’s a drum.’ And I was saying to myself, ‘But I don’t understand why they say that.’ And with Tony Allen, I understood that you have to take your instruments with the opposite vision of the basic instrument proposed. And so Tony Allen was great to work with.

Ben Cardew

And finally, can you recommend me a book? I reckon you’ve got very good taste in - in books.

Sébastien Tellier

The name in French is Je voulais juste rentrer chez moi [by Patrick Dils], in English, ‘I just wanted to go home’. And it’s about a young guy, a 17-year-old guy, who was accused of two murders, two terrible murders, killing two children with stones, a terrible thing. But it was not him and so he tells all this long process, with the police, after with the justice and his life in the jail with everybody around him thinking he did these terrible murders.

Some listening

Doubtlessly lots of great music was released this week. Some of it will be in my playlists, below. But, as for write ups, you can go whistle: I’ve been on holiday. Next week will be different.

The playlists

I have two playlists: the newest and the bestest 2026, which has all the best new music from this year; and the newest and the bestest, which dates right back to 2021. Both are available on Apple Music And Spotify.

Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026

Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify: The newest and the bestest

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23 years after the release of her first studio album, Colleen continues to delight and surprise. Libres antes del Final, her tenth studio album, was inspired by learning to swim in the sea after 30 years of water phobia, Buddhism and the question as to whether we can ever be freed “from the endlessly spinning twin wheels of our own brain and heart”?

I spoke to her at the SLS hotel in Barcelona, close to where she learned to swim in the sea, and you can watch that here. But for lovers of text - and I know you’re out there - I decided to run some selected highlights from the interview here. Look out for dog pools, dolphins, Moogs and more.

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Ben Cardew

Colleen, it’s a real pleasure to have you here for many reasons but one of which is that we are currently near where you learned to swim, by the Playa del Llevant in Barcelona, and you said the end near the dog pool.

Colleen

Oh yeah, which probably didn’t sound so good, but that’s the area where I learned to swim, really close to here and really close to the new Primavera Sound offices.

Ben Cardew

There’s a pool for dogs.

Colleen

There is a pool for dogs. I never knew, thankfully. They deserve water too.

Ben Cardew

In a rather neat circle, learning to swim relates back to your most recent album, Libres Antes del Final. Could you tell us the story?

Colleen

Initially, the album was actually going to be called Aguas Abiertas, which is the Spanish for open waters or open water. midway through making the album, I decided to change the title to Libres Antes del Final but I think the fact that I was thinking of calling the album Aguas Abiertas says a lot about the impact that learning to swim in the sea had on me, to try and summarise it.

I had this water phobia for nearly 30 years, even though as a kid I really loved swimming. But I only did it in a swimming pool and then basically I came across several adults through the course of my childhood and early teenage years that, instead of helping me stay comfortable in the water, did just the opposite. I ended up feeling so uncomfortable that this turned into an actual fear and I thought, “Okay, I’m just not going to get into water anymore.”

When I moved to the Basque Country in 2010, I kind of reconnected with the sea, but obviously the Atlantic is a very unforgiving sea. It’s not the kind of sea where you would want to learn to swim again. So when I moved to Barcelona in 2019, each time I saw the Mediterranean, I was thinking, “I can’t believe I can’t get into it because of my fear, I have to do something about it.” But each time there was something stopping me. It was maybe, “Okay, my health isn’t so great,” or “I’m just too busy making this album,” or “I’m about to go on tour.”

Then, in the end, exactly two years ago, I decided to not make excuses anymore. I had celebrated my 250th show in the Azores, which is this incredible archipelago, and I went on a boat trip to try and see dolphins and whales. The crew said, “When the water temperatures are warm and dolphins are showing signs of being willing to interact, we allow people to get off the boat and swim with the dolphins.” I think that moment, because I’m really into nature and observing animals, I thought, “Imagine being in this situation of being able to swim with dolphins - which I’m guessing must be one of the best things you can do in your life ever - and not being able to do that because you just kept making excuses for not learning to swim again.”

So I came back, and a couple of weeks later I made the decision to learn to swim. I found a teacher who specialises in open water swimming and who also specialises in the psychology of fear and fear of water. That was the start of this incredible journey of confronting the fear and learning to be in contact with water again. It just was like a chain reaction after that of feeling really empowered. I think the way it translates to the music is that the music is a lot more impactful, a lot more rhythmical, a lot more physical. Some people have said at the shows that it’s very visceral, and I think I really connected with the adventure of facing that fear.

Ben Cardew

Libres Antes del Final means free before the end.

Colleen

Yeah, or the ending.

Ben Cardew

Is that how you feel when you swim - free?

Colleen

I think with that title I wasn’t necessarily still thinking about water, even though for sure, in general, learning to confront whatever fear you have is liberating. I think it was more a reference to my own tendency to have thoughts - I guess my own, but also a human trait - like these tendencies that we have that lead to self-sabotage, or maybe just going in loops. I think it’s a theme that’s been present in my music over many of my albums: this predominance of the mind over the body and how basically that sometimes ruins our experience of life.

About three years ago I started reading about Buddhism quite a bit. I didn’t become a Buddhist but I do think Buddhism has very interesting things to say about the human psyche and they have this concept of unskillful thoughts - basically thoughts that don’t serve us. So when I thought of the title Libres Antes del Final, I was trying to imagine a life where thoughts and feelings wouldn’t get in the way of feeling free, whatever you want that to mean. Definitely there is a connection with learning to get rid of your fears or confronting them, for sure.

Ben Cardew

Do you listen to music when you swim?

Colleen

Oh, no, no, no. I think, really, for me, actually, it’s really about connecting with the water and trying to disconnect as much as possible from the rest of my life. I don’t listen to music but it’s still a very interesting experience in terms of sound, just having your head under the water. I really like it, actually.

Ben Cardew

Do ideas for music come to you when you’re out there?

Colleen

Actually, they do, yeah. I would say, in general, my music is very connected to the things I do outside of being in the studio, whether it’s human experiences or traveling, or especially with this album, being connected with physical activities in general.

Ben Cardew

I was thinking there’s something about the way in which synths sometimes overlap almost a bit like waves or something.

Colleen

Yeah, definitely. Also, when I chose the photo for the album cover, when I saw that photo - it’s me Cadaqués, just laying like this - I was looking at the shape of the water and I was thinking this is insane. Because with analogue synthesis, obviously all music is waveforms, but with synthesis your job is to work with waveforms, literally. You choose your square, triangle, ramp, sawtooth, whatever you work with, and the fact that it’s called a waveform in and of itself... without getting too literal about it, I saw that there’s really a connection for me, at least.

Ben Cardew

The album is all made on the Moog Matriarch?

Colleen

Yes, the whole album.

Ben Cardew

Why did you want to deliberately limit yourself to one instrument?

Colleen

This process of limiting myself has been going on for quite a few years. When you last interviewed me for my previous album, The Tunnel and the Clearing, that was super restricted as well because it was one synthesiser, which was monophonic, and just two delays, which is a very, very minimal setup. In this case, you could say it’s more minimal because it’s one synth, but it does have a delay that’s integrated, and it’s paraphonic.

Not going to go into too many technical details, but paraphonic is not exactly the same as polyphonic. To shorten it, it does mean you can play chords and a melody. So for me, that was a big shift from the previous synthesiser, the Grandmother. It’s just such a beautiful synthesiser. I worked on this album for about a year and a half, and even after a year and a half of really digging into it, I’m still just at the tip of the iceberg. It’s just a really amazing synthesiser.

Ben Cardew

It’s a kind of freedom through limitation?

Colleen

Yeah, for me, yes. I also think it ties in with a personality trait of mine, which is that I easily get overwhelmed by quantity. Some people thrive on having 1,000 records in their vinyl collection, lots of books, lots of shoes, lots of clothes, lots of whatever, but for me, that actually gives me anxiety. It’s the same in the studio. I do have quite a lot of instruments that have accumulated over the years, but I really love just focusing. With synthesis, it’s really about how much care and how deep you are willing to go. If you go really deep into one single instrument, you will definitely get a lot out of it. If you have more instruments, you’re probably going to skim the surface, I think.

Ben Cardew

The album has some wonderful song names too. Mis Armas Se Habian Caido al Suelo - “My weapons had fallen to the floor.” What do you mean by that?

Colleen

Oh, wow, that’s kind of very personal but I think it’s maybe something that anyone - well, hopefully everyone - can relate to. It’s a reference to moments when maybe after building up an armour, or maybe things have happened to you that mean you have been carrying these weapons just in case someone tries to mess with you again, you have this moment of maybe meeting somebody or being in a situation where you feel like, “Okay, now’s the time to relax, just put your weapons to the floor.” It could mean a lot of different things to many people, but it was just one day where I was leaving something and it made me realise I had just put my weapons to the floor.

Ben Cardew

When you’re making music, obviously nowadays it’s mostly instrumental music, but where does the title come from? Are you thinking of it as you’re making it, or is it after?

Colleen

It’s like a conjunction of factors. As I said, I really think my music is tightly linked to the different areas of my life, and I will regularly have ideas for words or titles that resonate with me. The next song is Puertas de Mi Cuerpo, like “Doors of My Body” or you could also translate it as “Gates of My Body,” which I think is a bit more interesting. That’s also a reference to trying to live a more embodied life.

“Embodied” is a fashionable word right now, but when I started to swim, after that, I also started playing ping pong - table tennis - just for fun. I mean, how much fun is playing table tennis? It’s just the best thing in the world. So I connected with that.

I also started dancing. I went clubbing a little bit - not too much, because I’m too old to be up in the middle of the night. I can’t really do it, but I also had this self-imposed limitation on dancing and when I started dancing, actually, that also had a big influence on the album’s sound.

What else did I do? Oh yeah, and I went to self-defence classes - women-only self-defence classes - where it was a mix of karate and boxing, which is super powerful when you start to learn how to punch.

So this title also came about from this feeling of opening the gates, opening the doors of your body, in all the different ways you can think of. Antidoto was also maybe in connection with the first title - about finding an antidote when something is ailing you and finding the energy to fight back against that. It’s general thoughts on life that connect with specific experiences and then I try to find which music is going to be best fitted to that title and make a coherent kind of narrative or journey. I think this album can really be felt as a journey.

Ben Cardew

So you started to go out dancing. Where did you go?

Colleen

Well, not that many places, really. I went to Laut [in Barcelona] a few times. I also just danced to people making their modular sets at the Barcelona Modular Society events, because quite a few people play modular techno. Wherever I felt like moving my body, and also just at home.

I have this community terrace where I live, so especially last summer, I would go up with my headphones. I had a really big period of listening to Drexciya, which I think is just such amazing music. I really tried to revise my techno classics.. I would just go up to my terrace in the evening, look around to check if no one could see me and I would just start dancing alone, just going with the flow.

Ben Cardew

That is an excellent thing to do. I wanted to ask about the club, because I wonder if sometimes musicians who make electronic music find it slightly harder to let go in a club, because you understand the music so much and you’re thinking, “Oh...”

Colleen

Since I’ve started to let myself go, if I really like it... I do have to really like the music. If I think the music is not to my taste, I won’t dance.

The one thing I have trouble with is people talking; that really drives me nuts. That’s maybe one of the reasons I haven’t gone out this much. I find it so disappointing that people go to a nightclub and then they just talk super loud in front of the DJ who’s doing an amazing set. That pisses me off a lot. So sometimes that’s why I think it’s not that it’s better to dance on my own but at least I don’t have any interference from people who are a bit rude.

Ben Cardew

The two or three times I’ve seen you live, I remember it was a very respectful audience. People weren’t walking around; people were sitting and listening, and they were great gigs. Is that normally how it is at your gigs?

Colleen

It is normally how it is. I can count on the fingers of my hands the times that I’ve had to deal with a disrespectful audience. It just seems that from the start - I started in 2003 to put a bit of context, so a really long time ago - I immediately found my audience.

Right now is a really beautiful moment for me because I’ve almost finished this tour. I just have two shows left, I performed 13 times and the audiences have been just really, really amazing. They’ve also been amazing in a standing context, because I’ve started to ask venues to have the audience standing. Sometimes what we’ve done also is we’ve had circular setups, so I’m in the middle and people are around standing, so there’s this really nice circular energy. People are respectful and enjoying the music.

Some Listening

Axel Boman and Superpitcher - True Crime

It feels slightly cheap to simply parrot the press release tale that Axel Boman and Superpitcher’s new collaborative album Tell it to the Mountain was inspired by a hike to Sweden’s Helags Glacier. At the same time, True Crime, the first fruits of that album, definitely sounds like house music inspired by dizzy heights and mountainous fog, a lazy acid line poking its nose out from behind layers of pleasantly swirling noise, like Acid Trax cooling its feet at an Alpine pass, as eagles soar overhead.

Coki and Durrty Goodz - We Nah Business

Sometimes the highest compliment you can pay a song is that it sounds simple. And We Nah Business, from bass legends Coki and Durrty Goodz, is one of these: Coki lines up a mucky half-step beat and cobra-strike bass line and Durrty Goodz lays his deceptively nonchalant flow over the top. Simple, right? I mean, obviously not but the dynamic duo make it sound so on a banger that is primed for the real dubstep revival.

Starcleaner Reunion - Lay on Plastic Moment

… in which Starcleaner Reunion take a break from sounding like Stereolab in order to evoke the spirit of the Cocteau Twins, all purple guitar swirl and cotton-y vocals whose meaning is forever lost to linguistics and yet perfectly understandable to the human heart.

Dummy - Full Spectrum Dominance

Holy Hell Dummy have gone full on Paris Angels on their new single. I doubt that’s what they were aiming for exactly - they claim to be more about AR Kane, Goldie and Maxinquaye on the press release, which is a fine set of influences - but the combination of subtle Amen beat, funked up bass line, scorching wah wah and casually disinterested vocal screams Madchester to me and I couldn’t be happier. Bring on the Inspiral Carpets revival. (Only kidding: every day is an Inspiral Carpets revival in my house.)

Things I’ve done

Line Noise podcast - with Ezra Collective

I spoke to Femi and Ife from Ezra Collective about Tony Allen, The Shrine, live versus recorded, the band’s new album Here Because of Hope, drummers and drumming, at the Cruilla festival in Barcelona.

The playlists

I have two playlists: the newest and the bestest 2026, which has all the best new music from this year; and the newest and the bestest, which dates right back to 2021. Both are available on Apple Music And Spotify.

Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026

Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify: The newest and the bestest

Subscribe now

What’s the greatest British disco album? With all respect to Heatwave and Hot Chocolate, the troubling answer might be Metal Box, Public Image Ltd.’s second album, a record of apocalyptic grooves that is twisted, darkened, metallic and despairing, like 1970s Britain reflected through a rotted disco ball.

Everything that was so remarkable in Public Image Ltd., all the promise that they showed on their debut single Public Image, crystallised on 1979’s Metal Box. This was an album that was unbelievably free, born out of improvisation, where Jah Wobble could play his deep dub bass lines, Keith Levene could tease his stannic guitar sounds and John Lydon could sing about his mother slowly succumbing to cancer and somehow the mix worked.

Metal Box was an album that proved influential on everyone from U2 to The Slits, Radiohead to Massive Attack, LCD Soundsystem to pretty much anyone in New York in the early 2000s. And yet no band could ever really sound like Metal Box, because no other band could even dream of being this free.

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“Many people don’t understand that it was improvisation,” Lydon told Classic Rock of the recording of Metal Box. “It had to be, because we’d spent most of the money on the container [the record’s distinctive metal box packaging, which gave the album its name] and so what we had to do was quite literally sneak into studios when bands had gone home for the night. And these were pretty rough monitor mixes - no actual production.”

Albatross, the album’s 10-minute opening song, was recorded live, with the band making up their parts and Lydon free-forming over the top. It felt like Lydon, in particular, was breaking free, smashing out of the musical and cultural walls that Sex Pistols had built around themselves.

There’s something jazzy in the song’s almost total lack of structure, with verse - chorus - verse abandoned in favour of crawl and expansion, the song’s slowly evolving grooves almost like a modal form of disco. Albatross doesn’t really go anywhere - and yet it goes everywhere, a song of infinite ambition and scope.

That the band could do this is tribute to the perfect connection between the musicians, in particular Wobble and Levene, who seem to be telepathically linked, while David Humphrey, who played drums on Albatross and Swan Lake, locks into a perfectly elastic groove. (Five people played drums on Metal Box: Humphrey, Levene, Wobble, Richard Dudanski and Martin Atkins.)

Poptones, meanwhile, seemed to lurch in ever-more malevolent circles. Keith Levene’s drum pattern has the unconventional momentum of a non drummer, to which Wobble adds one of his best bass lines - he once called it “as symmetrical as a snowflake” - and Levene picks out a cascading shower of metallic guitar notes.

The absolute peak of Metal Box’s musical freedom, however, is Death Disco - the single that preceded the album, that was reprised in slightly different form on Metal Box as Swan Lake. It is a genuinely remarkable song with little precedent in pop history.

Lydon wrote the song for his mother, who had died of cancer not long before the album was released. “I watched her die,” he told Select magazine in 1990. “She was tough, my mum. She asked me to write a disco song for her funeral. This was hardly happy stuff.” Lydon’s lyrics and delivery are among the most intensely traumatised expressions of pain ever put into record, a cry of agony that seems unfiltered by artistic expression.

To that, though, the group add a sprightly disco drum pattern - just as Lydon’s mum requested - a bass line that borrows from dub and disco, rising over the mix like a funeral director at a procession, and a guitar section that plunges the melody from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake into a metallic bath. It sounds, on paper, like a horrible, unworkable mixture of influences. But somehow the band make it not just work but prosper, creating one of the most desolate songs ever to fill a dance floor.

Swan Lake / Death Disco is Metal Box’s most obviously nod to the disco sound. But you can also find its influence in the album’s use of synths and drum machines, as well as its open-minded production techniques. On Careering Levene uses a Prophet synth to add drone and effect - allegedly an attempt to replicate the sounds heard from a downstairs toilet - and the song is dotted with drum machine effects, in a way that is reminiscent of Joy Division’s contemporaneous work.

Levene was at play again on the album’s closing track, Radio 4, using a Yamaha String Ensemble and wandering bass line to create a kind of ambient punk funk, the guitar player taking the canny decision late in the recording process to yank out the drums that Ken Lockie had laid down, the reduction allowing the song to breath.

You could argue that punk, jazz and dub had a bigger influence on Metal Box than disco. But the fact is, I want Metal Box to be a disco record - and to be a British disco record at that, not in the jingoistic sense of the word, but rather in the way it reflects the grim political austerity of late 1970s UK through a disco prism.

For many people - particularly in the USA - disco was a way of escaping the grind of every-day life and if the music sounded slick and contented that was aspirational rather than actual. Disco was music to escape into, music that - for a few crucial hours on a Saturday night - gave you the illusion of a better life, more Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever than Andy Warhol at Studio 54.

And that’s great. I love slick disco. But that was never really a British thing. Britain at the end of the 1970s was broke and dirty and fractured; punk wallowed in it, The Sex Pistols reflected it; and Public Image Ltd. re-cast it as the most desolate disco sound you could ever imagine, an emotional break down on the dance floor. Metal Box sounds grim - but at least it was free, Lydon inching himself away from the constraints of both British public life and the increasingly tired punk sene, one grubby fingernail at a a time.

After Never Mind The Bollocks - and Lydon’s departure - the Sex Pistols became an instant self parody, covering My Way in a “punk” style that already sounded dated and working with Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs.

The same could easily have happened to John Lydon, who left the Pistols in 1978 after a disastrous US tour. Rather than being boxed in by the success of the Sex Pistols, though, Lydon used his punk legitimacy to throw musical convention out the window, creating a band - and one near perfect record - that was unlike anything that anyone expected of him, a one-off fusion of punk, funk, dub, jazz, disco and more that many would try to copy, but no one would get close to.

And, yes, Lydon then became the archetypal angry old man, who voted for Trump, wore a MAGA shirt and opposed the BDS sanctions. But he also cared for his wife, Nora, as her Alzheimer’s slowly got worse and, in 2023, composed Hawaii for her, a stunning work of pure emotion that ranks among his very best work.

I’m not saying this excuses his other behaviour. But, like him or not, Lydon is one of the most fascinating figures in modern music, a man who could have said it all with the Sex Pistols - a genuinely era-defining band - and cashed in on his notoriety, but who instead poured his soul into re-inventing music again, going farther out and freer.

And better, too. Ultimately The Sex Pistols were like a slap in the face - sharp, nasty and quickly overcome; but Public Image Ltd. were a kick to the groin, deep, dark, lingering and rarely forgotten.

The playlists

I have two playlists: the newest and the bestest 2026, which has all the best new music from this year; and the newest and the bestest, which dates right back to 2021. Both are available on Apple Music And Spotify.

Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026

Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify: The newest and the bestest

Subscribe now

It seems oddly, ineffably French that one of the best albums of the French Touch era isn’t really an album at all. Or not in the way that we commonly think of them, anyway.

Super Discount, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, was the record that cemented Étienne de Crécy in the public consciousness after the underground acclaim that greeted Motorbass, his duo with Philippe Zdar. And yet, in some ways, it isn’t really his album.

Technically, Super Discount is a compilation of songs, most of which are by de Crécy himself (sometimes operating under different nom de plumes) alongside Air, Alex Gopher and the enigmatic DJ Tall / Mr Learn (both pseudonyms of one Laurent Collobert). Many of these songs - or perhaps all, history seems a little fogged on the matter - were released on a series of EPs by de Crécy’s Disques Solid before being put together as an album in 1996. (I’ve also seen 1997.)

To add to its unlikely appeal, Super Discount is also a concept album of sorts, based around the idea of shopping. Each of the four sides of the vinyl is marked with a different currency, while the song titles translate to phrases like “everything must go” (Tout Doit Disparaître) and “the boss has gone mad!” (Le Patron Est Devenu Fou!). It’s kind of silly, when you think about it. But who would want to think about it?

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“Super Discount is a really chaotic story,” de Crécy told Vibe in 2013. “It began in 1994, the Paris techno scene was pretty small and took itself very seriously, which is why I chose to release EPs under a non-credible name like Super Discount.”

De Crécy wanted to produce “thoroughbred house that is both abstract and elegant”. But the release schedule he had agreed for the four EPs forced him “to produce music under constant pressure” and he says he “completely failed” in his ambition to make thoroughbred, abstract music.

“I was so late I asked my friends Alex Gopher and Air to give me some demos I can finish for the release, that’s why I choose to use many alias to make people believe we are an army,” de Crécy recently explained on Instagram. “The EPs’ success gives us the idea of putting them together on an album, which, to our surprise, soon goes on sale in supermarkets! We’ve come full circle!”

I mention this chaotic background not to take an ounce of acclaim from de Crécy, who has a hand in six of the album’s 11 tracks - really nine, plus two brief interludes from Collobert - and who is one of my favourite producers.

Quite the opposite, in fact: Super Discount’s fluid positioning is evidence of a warm and relaxed creative spirit that is not too bothered about traditional music industry norms. Super Discount is a record that bathes in the confidence of the new, a record that doesn’t really care what you think about it. So maybe it’s an album; maybe it’s a compilation - who cares? Just sit back, relax and enjoy the grooves.

This spirit extends to the 11 songs on Super Discount. When I recently interviewed de Crécy for Line Noise, he lamented the fact that he could no longer make music as simple as this.

“I love it [Super Discount], it’s really fresh… it’s innocent music. I wish I could be that innocent when I start a track now. That was just fun like, ‘OK this sample is good, OK with a kick, OK the track is done, you know?’ I’m still seeking this kind of freshness and innocence when I am doing music. Which is pretty hard when you have 30 years of experience.”

De Crécy’s idea of “just a sample and you’re done” both totally underplays the genius of Super Discount and really hits the nail on the head. The album is built around samples, filters and drum machines, which de Crécy puts together in a way that suggests you could do it, as long as you found the right sample sources.

But this, of course, is total nonsense. Because not only does de Crécy have a brilliant ear for a sample, he also folds them together in wonderfully unlikely ways, the clips often vaguely out of frame in a way that just works.

Take, for example, Super Discount’s opening track, Le Patron est Devenu Fou. It is built around a haunting sample from Isaac Hayes’ Runnin’ Out Of Fools, which wails like a ship siren announcing the end of humanity. In de Crécy’s hands it sounds like the perfect hook for a rousing, if slightly melancholic, house song and an easy win - that is until you realise that the Isaac Hayes original is in 6/8 time and de Crécy has somehow inserted it into a 4/4 house slink in a way that really shouldn’t work but does - and in a particularly elegant fashion too.

Added to this is a vocal from an interview with Prince Tebah, taken from a documentary called Roots Rock Reggae - Inside the Jamaican Music Scene; plus a wonky sounding piano riff from Stevie Wonder’s Send Me Some Lovin’ - again, employed slightly out of time - and a perfectly distressed bass groove from Earth Wind & Fire’s Brazilian Rhyme (Beijo Interlude) and you have a beautifully curated selection of samples that only a seriously inspired music producer could put together.

Le Patron est Devenu Fou is a strangely obtuse piece of house music wrapped up in a late-night anthem: silly, funny, sad and entirely unhurried, content to let a sample just play for two glorious minutes if that’s what the song demands. I think of it like a swan, gliding along majestically on the surface as its feet frantically paddle below.

The same is true of the album’s next song, Prix Choc, which is the record’s other huge house highlight. Not only does the interview with Prince Tebah turn up again - in this case, de Crécy samples just two words, “sinsemilla” and “marijuana”, giving Prix Choc its iconic hook - but de Crécy once more teases a fistful of samples into precisely wonky and hauntingly melancholy shapes, notably employing a piano and drum riff from Hurt So Bad by US jazz guitarist Grant Green and a bewitching vibraphone sample from Johnny Lytle’s Street Scene.

Lifting a couple of vocal clips from Prince Tebah, a drummer and Rastafari elder, might perhaps seem like a slightly cheap way to borrow from Jamaican music. But elsewhere on Super Discount de Crécy shows a willingness to engage with reggae and dub production. Tout Doit Disparaître is skeletal deep house dub that makes an excellent use of reverb, echo and space, with a filtered funk sample buried right at the bottom of the mix, while Liquidation Totale has a bass line so deep it sounds like it has escaped from a rogue Lee “Scratch” Perry record.

Le Patron est Devenu Fou and Prix Choc might make you think of Super Discount as a French house album. But it’s not really, veering instead towards the more open-ended sounds of the French Touch, à la DJ Cam, Le Tone, Dimitri From Paris et al.

The most obvious sign of this is the presence of Air - who definitely aren’t French House but couldn’t be more French Touch - who contribute Soldissimo (Étienne de Crécy remix) to the album. Soldissimo is a lightly remixed version of Les Professionnels, from Air’s Casanova 70 12 inch, which de Crécy produced, mixed and released on his Solid label. Proving that you can’t keep a good idea down, Les Professionnels later became All I Need on Air’s Moon Safari.

Soldissimo (EDC remix) isn’t as brilliant as that song - because, frankly, what is? - but it does add a beguiling Nina Simone vocal hook, while lifting Super Discount into a thoughtfully downbeat moment. And there it remains for Affaires à Faire by La Chatte Rouge (aka de Crécy and Motorbass partner Philippe Zdar), a downbeat hip hop number that is both mournful and surprisingly snappy, like Air meeting A Tribe Called Quest.

Air’s presence on Super Discount is evidence of de Crécy’s strength as a curator, dot joiner and scene builder. It’s also a neat link to his recent past: de Crécy attended the same school in Versailles as Air’s Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel, as well as Alex Gopher.

Gopher - real name Alexis Latrobe - is an unsung hero of the French Touch. He co-founded Disques Solid with de Crécy and Pierre-Michel Levallois in 1994 and it was his Gopher EP that christened the label. On Super Discount Gopher contributes two songs: the castanet-clacking deep house of Super Disco and the jazzy swing of Destockage Massif, as well as mastering the record.

Today Gopher largely concentrates on mastering rather than making his own music. But in the 90s, he was a minor star of the French Touch, his excellent 1999 album You, My Baby & I home to hits like Party People and The Child; and his presence on Super Discount is evidence of a scene that nurtured like-minded artists for the common good.

Even Laurent Collobert’s two contributions to the album, DJ Tall’s Tout à 10 Balles and Mr Learn’s Fermeture Définitive, are important in this context, even if neither weighs in at more than 15 seconds or contains a great deal of music. Collobert has a small but important history in the French Touch: he remixed a track on Alex Gopher’s classic Gordini Mix EP in 1997 and later worked with Cassius, alongside a (perhaps unlikely) career as a classical vocalist, painter and electronic composer.

Super Discount, then, is de Crécy’s record; but it is also a community record, the product of friendship, tight deadlines and collective inspiration. Because that’s the thing about the French Touch: to an outsider it looked as cool and stylish as all hell, a peak of chic disco-house sensation. But, as Super Discount shows, the French Touch was also warm, friendly, sometimes silly and a lot more musically diverse than many people would have you believe. And surely we can all drink to that, as the record hits its 30th birthday.

Some listening

Dave Angel - Réflexion ft. Steve Waterman

British techno icon Dave Angel heads back to R&S for a piece of summer house so smooth you could lay tiles on it. Réflexion, with trumpeter Steve Waterman, is like the ocean lapping at your toes as a breeze flutters your bellybutton hair with just the right amount of summer melancholy to see you by, a solitary tear salting up your martini. The trumpet solo, in particular, is sublime, floating over the shuffling, shaking beat like the saddest little cloud in the sky.

Arca - Syncope

Arca’s new album arrives like a bolt from the blue and a slap in the face: 16 tracks of twisted and twitching rave energy that scorch past in an hour of weird industrial fun. XXXXX started life as a mixtape, after the epic Kick pentalogy, and you can hear it in the album’s carefree and stripped down spirit. There are no guest turns here, no obvious concepts and all but two songs weigh in under four minutes. Instead songs tend to turn around one brilliant idea - see the stuttering riff in Syncope - which Arca then runs with, taking it as far as her warped imagination can turn. XXXXX is simple but not simplistic, abounding with ideas, bleeding-edge production and mischief.

Marina Herlop - Vas Volant (feat. Adri Goor)

Did you expect jazz funk from Marina Herlop? More fool you. You shouldn’t expect anything from Marina Herlop. Or, rather, you should expect each and everything from an artist as boundlessly talented as Marina Herlop. Vas Volant, the latest single from her new album Dja Dja, is among my favourite things she has ever done, combining woodwind that chirps like summer birds, a bass line that verges on slap without ever quite getting there and a beat that resembles an octopus playing Afrobeat, all wrapped up in a gorgeous pastoral melody.

Things I’ve done

Line Noise podcast - Zora Jones returns

I spoke to Zora Jones about the sting from 400 bees, going off grid, singing in Spanish, playing live live and more, as she looks ahead to the release of her wonderful new album 50 Bullets To The Heart.

Dreams in Neon: Remembering Kavinsky

I wrote a tribute to Kavinsky for Crack magazine, examining his impact on music and culture. “French producer Kavinsky, who has died at the age of 50, was an artist who seemed to manifest his dreams into reality.”

Line Noise - With Saul Williams

I spoke to the hugely talented musician, poet, director and actor Saul Williams ahead of the release of his new album, Leap Life, in August. We spoke about that new album, but also the role that music plays in Williams’ life, trusting the moment, shamanism and ceremony, headphone listening, technology, Sun Ra, optimism, Paris and more. Naturally, I also asked him about his magnificent DJ Krust collab. Coded Language and - for film fans - we discussed his role as a preacher in Sinners. On video for the moment - coming to the podcast soon

The playlists

Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026

Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify: The newest and the bestest

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It sometimes feels as if Daft Punk have swallowed the French Touch whole, as if the entire generation of electronic music made in France between 1995 and 2000, has been reduced to its role in the rise, further rise and even more rise of the Parisian duo.

Having written a book about Daft Punk I am as guilty as anyone in this. Perhaps more so. So it’s time to redress the balance a little. This is nothing against Daft Punk, of course - I adore them - but it’s worth remembering that the French Touch was wider in scope and deeper in sound than many Daft Punk fans would have you believe.

(And just a reminder: French Touch ≠ French House. I’ve written about this before. French Touch includes a lot of French House. But it also includes DJ Cam’s jazzy trip hop, Air’s lush ambience, Dimitri from Paris’s sampledelic collages, Phoenix’s disco rock and more.)

So today I present to you my 10 best songs from the French Touch underground, from 1995 to 2000. My rules are: nothing Daft Punk, nothing too obvious and nothing I have covered at length on this Substack before. Hence no Dimitri from Paris, Le Tone or The Micronauts.

I hope you enjoy it. I hope it opens your mind. And do let me know your favourites.

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Alëem - Why Hawaii? (Original Formula mix)

Alëem’s Why Hawaii? is clinging to the edges of the French Touch for its very life. The song sounds, bizarrely, like early Big Beat and was, in fact, later reissued by über-Big Beat label Concrete, home to Death in Vegas.

And yet there feels something very French in its combination of smoothly twanging Patsy Cline sample (from Walking After Midnight), improbable hoover synth line and snatches of reggae vocal. It’s kind of stupid but also pretty sophisticated - and a lot of fun; French Touch on swimming pool cleaner and lots of cheap wine. Plus, the song was released on Pro-Zak Trax, a label founded in Paris by Barcelona DJ / producer Cesar de Melero, that would later carve out a corner of the French Touch market for incredibly obvious but very enjoyable filter house records from the likes of Kojak and De Pompidou. So Why Hawaii? (high) passes. (Yes, that’s my attempt at a filter joke. Not great, was it?)

DJ Cam - Dieu Reconnaitra Les Siens

The filter house sound was the most prominent strand of the French Touch. But second to it was a cinematic instrumental hip hop embodied by DJ Cam and Kid Loco.

Dieu Reconnaîtra Les Siens, from Cam’s 1995 debut album Underground Vibes, is an especially gorgeous take on the genre, a collection of samples - some relatively obvious, some less so - stitched together in a very chic way to create music that sounds sophisticated and natural, as if all these various sample sources were just waiting for someone to join them together. It’s very 90s, very trip hop and also very Parisian jazz club (of your dreams).

Cam - AKA Laurent Daumail - would later dabble in jungle but he remains wedded to the ambient hip hop sound. His most recent single, Wake Up, released in July 2026, is pure Underground Vibes.

Shazz + St. Germain feat. Derek Bays - Muse Q The Music

The French Touch wasn’t all French House. But sometimes it was - and in the most glorious fashion.

Admittedly, Muse Q The Music, by Parisian house producer St. German, his mate Shazz (an excellent producer in his own right - see La Seine for evidence) and vocalist Derek Bays, isn’t what most people think of when they imagine French House.

Rather than disco loops and filters, the song comprises a minimal organ melody, a shuffling, but not overly busy, beat and four-note bass line, which provide the bed for Derek Bays to sing his broken heart out. And it’s all basically perfect, one of those alchemical house tunes where every little part is perfectly calibrated and it all fits together like a Swiss watch.

Dirty Jesus - Don’t F*ck With My Shit (Late Night Cruising Mix)

… and talking of perfect house tunes.

Dirty Jesus was Erik Rug, a prominent Paris DJ, and Marc Collin, who would later release the wonderfully whistling classic Les Kidnappeurs (Main Theme) and co-found Nouvelle Vague. Together they released two 12 inches on Manchester house label extraordinaire Paper, Cut A Rug in 1996 and Don’t F*ck With My Shit in 1997.

The Late Night Cruising Mix of the latter is like a night-time ride around Paris in an expensive sports car, the top down and the smell of luxury perfume in your nostrils, 10 minutes of melodic, moody, cinematic house that I once heard Rug play at Paris’s Rex club and never forgot.

The song also was track one, side one, of French Fried Funk, a compilation I bought in 1997 that has pride of place in my collection today, run through with sweet quality like a stick of Brighton Rock.

Trankilou - Atom Funk

Also on the same compilation were Trankilou, a duo that featured Guillaume Berroyer aka Ark and Julien Auger, later to become far better known as Pepe Bradock.

The moody, down-tempo and deceptively complex hip hop of Chicago Babe, taken from the duo’s debut EP St Glin-Glin, is what appears on French Fried Funk. But Trankilou’s greatest song was Atom Funk, an irresistibly guitar-twitching, cow-bell funking, loop filtering slice of house music that is just strange enough to suggest the weird alleys that Auger would later stumble down in his Bradock days, without ever losing its laser focus.

Atom Funk, incidentally, was later compiled on Pepe Bradock’s 1998 album Synthèse.

Gilb’r - Pressure

Drum & bass didn’t play much of a role in the French Touch. But the music had its fans among French producers of the 90s and did occasionally surface around Paris.

Besides, anything Gilb’r - AKA Gilbert Cohen, boss of none-more-French Touch label Versatile, half of Château Flight with I:Cube, DJ and man about town - did is French Touch lore and what he says, goes.

What’s more Pressure, which Gilb’r released in 1997, suggests a French-Touched strand of drum & bass, with its airy synth sweeps and a playfully funky bass line that is more P-Funk than Photek.

Kid Loco - A Grand Love Theme

For a certain type of artist - and indie artist, say, with an interest in French pop and film soundtracks - the only place to go for a remix in the mid to late 1990s was the house of Jean-Yves Prieur, aka Kid Loco, who turned songs by Pulp, Saint Etienne, The Pastels, Mogwai and more into cinematic dreams so sophisticated you entirely forget they came from eg a shambling Glasgow guitar band. The best of these are collected on his Jesus Life For Children Under 12 Inches compilation, which I advise you buy on site.

His own music perhaps lacks a little something in comparison, as if Prieur needs something to rub against to create a spark. Although A Grand Love Theme, which opens his 1997 debut album A Grand Love Story, is unbelievable lush and buoyant, like hot air ballooning over a Parisian sun set with the love of your life.

Femi Kuti - Truth Don Die (Jackson’s Rhum Gingembre)

Femi Kuti isn’t French. But Jackson - later Jackson & His Computer Band - is. And it is his Rhum Gingembre remix from 1999 that gives Truth Don Die a place in this list.

This is to take nothing away from Femi and band, who cook up a defiant Afrobeat storm on the song. But Jackson takes these elements and crafts a remix that not only sits finely balanced between the original Afrobeat vibe and his French filter house, but also shows where filter house could perhaps have gone with a bit more forward thinking.

Jackson started his music career making fairly straightforward house music - see, for example My Kind Of... (Chicago) on his The Edits EP. Later on, when he signed to Warp, he started to make hyper-fractured future-glancing IDM.

His storming remix of Truth Don Die is closer to the former. But it has shades of the oddness he is soon to embrace, with a jaggedness to the beats, like Todd Edwards picking his tentative way through broken glass. This is fascinating - and all the more so because it is employed without ever breaking the song’s infectious groove.

Filter house didn’t really evolve - as Modjo et al would attest. But this is to take nothing away from this overlooked French Touch classic.

Le Peuple de l’Herbe - PH Theme (feat. Sir Jean)

I don’t think Le Peuple de l’Herbe ever get mentioned in French Touch round ups, probably because they are from unfashionable Lyon and dabbled in the very un-French Touch world of ragga.

PH Theme, however, was all over influential Parisian radio station Nova in 2000 and fits with the downbeat world of Kid Loco and DJ Cam, thanks to its avian scratches, sample collages, rolling Gil Scott Heron bass line and vaguely melancholic air. The addition of rapping in Wolof is inspired, blasting off PH Theme into its own wonderful world of adventure.

Lake Soul Feat. Mathilde - Autour De Toi

Lake Soul’s Autour De Toi follows a similar history. Lake Soul are from the alpine town of Annecy - far from a musical strong hold - and got massive airplay on Radio Nova in the year 2000.

Their music, however, is very different to PH Theme, a tough, minimal house beat and psychedelic synth traces à la Isolée wrapped around a stupidly catchy vocal from Mathilde, where strangeness pulls at gridded rhythm and the scratchy synth sound battles the hypnotic vocal line, with the result being we all win.

Bonus track (because I forgot I had written about it before)

Julien Jabre & DJ Gregory Present Soha - Amour

Julien Jabre and DJ Gregory were French House royalty, having composed the anthemic Faithfull by Fantom in 1997. Later - after Gregory had returned to Paris from New York - they combined again as Soha, a relatively short-lived collaboration that nevertheless threw up several classic songs, including their debut Amour.

Amour provides a neat through line from Muse Q The Music four years earlier; they don’t really sound alike but both songs show off a graceful minimalism where a handful of the right elements are set to play, creating music so ridden with space you could drive a cheval through it.

I also love the way the (nameless) vocalist on Amour appears to be basically feeling her way around the song as it was recorded, as if she had simply wandered in off the Parisian street

With apologies to:

Le Tone - Joli Dragon

Dimitri from Paris - Sacré Français

Demon - You Are My High

La Funk Mob - Ravers Suck Our Sound

Michel Houellebecq - Célibataires

Cosmo Vitelli - We Don’t Need No Smurf Here

Alex Gopher - Gordini Mix

The Micronauts - The Jag

Beth Hirsch - Miner’s Son

Some listening

Zora Jones - Ultrafreak

Zora Jones’ Ultrafreak contains a drum part so sharply sculpted it will take the top off your head. It’s pure percussive filth and the rest of Ultrafreak - an avant R&B / club / rap number with elaborate swagger - only drags your further into the gutter. And I mean that in a good way. So many hooks you could use it as a cloakroom.

Danny L Harle & Doss & MNEK feat. oklou - Dumb Luck

It’s been a shame to see wimpy and wonderful Danny L Harle - see: Broken Flowers - be edged out of the public eye by donk Danny over the past few years.

Dumb Luck, from the Crystallise Divergence EP, in which Doss plays merry hell with Danny’s Crystallise My Tears, feels like a return to those gentler days, however, with a synth line that flutters like a butterfly and a silky vocal hook from oklou. Underpinning it all is a huge (Danny) bass line that is finely poised between gnarled and warming. More of this please.

Cassius - Feelings For You (FCUKERS & Junior Sanchez remix)

How do you remix a song as perfectly simply as Cassius’ Feelings For You? FCUKERS and Junior Sanchez take the intelligent decision to keep the essentials of the track complete, while upping the tempo and throwing a few sparkling jewels at it. The result is Feelings For You as rendered by a hyperactive child with a deep respect for French House history. The new organ line, in particular, is lovely.

Diagonals - Bozeman’s Simplex

In summer 2026 the expanded Stereolab universe brings you Diagonals, a collaborations between Oakland’s Nick Daly, Stereolab drummer Andy Ramsay and Stereolab EVERYTHING (apart from actual member) Sean O’Hagan.

And guess who they sound like? Bozeman’s Simplex - which could be taken from one of those fake Stereolab song name websites I love so - is drift jazz with a light funk frosting and spy theme shards, all sad, mysterious and far more Rive Gauche than you could ever aspire be. To this, sometime Laetitia Sadier Source Ensemble vocalist Nina Savary adds a wonderfully casually vocal, like she’s blowing bubbles in the park.

Some watching (an infrequent TV column)

The Dark Wizard (HBO Max)

What makes a person want to free solo climb? To ascend mountains hundreds of metres tall, with no climbing equipment other than your own hands, feet and mind and nothing to catch you if you fall? And what happens then, when you reach the pinnacle of free solo climbing and someone comes along who is better than you at it?

These are the two questions asked - and to an extent answered - by The Dark Wizard, a four-part documentary series on HBO Max that premiered in April 2026. It looks at the life of Dean Potter, one of the greatest free solo climbers of all time, a pioneer of BASE jumping, the inventor of the unfortunately named FreeBASE, which combines the two practices, and a world-class highliner.

He’s also a pretty complex character, driven by a dream of flying, a love of ravens, severe depression and the kind of world-beating ego you need to walk a tightrope line strung between two mountains, as those who love you watch on.

It’s the kind of story that really lends itself to a documentary, all staggering highs, churning stomachs, passion and betrayal. The climbing footage is immaculate, too, a reminder that climbing is, for Potter, a way to connect with nature. The documentary makers don’t whitewash Potter’s character, either. He may be inspirational in many ways and his athletic feats incredible - but Potter frequently comes across as unpleasant, totally selfish and quick to cast aside friends for perceived slights.

What most intrigued me, though, is his tangled relationship with Alex Honnold, a free solo climber who seemed to delight in breaking Potter’s various records and getting in his way. The two are chalk and cheese: Potter driven by an almost spiritual need to climb that leads to him dynamiting various commercial partnerships, while Honnold - who is interviewed at length - sees everything in far more mundane terms, at one point embarking on a record-breaking climb because he needed to film a Squarespace advert. (This, any way, is how the documentary explains it.) The problem, though, is, for all Potter’s vision and drive, Honnold is simply better at climbing. And Potter knows it…

This is just one of the threads in this fascinating documentary, which takes in everything from park ranger politics to Potter’s relationship with his dog, the tension ratcheting up almost unbearably over the four episodes as Potter looks - literally and figuratively - deep into the void. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll watch through your fingers and you’ll go to incredible lengths to avoid Wikipedia spoiling the ending, which, when it comes, is magical.

Things I’ve done

Line Noise podcast - With u.r.trax

Inès Boullant - better known as French dance destroyer u.r.trax - came to the RPS studio at Primavera Sound ahead of her first live festival gig to talk sneaking into clubs at 14, annoying her Parisian neighbours, blowing up during Covid and “anti club music”.

The playlists

Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026

Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify: The newest and the bestest

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The descent from “holy hell! Northern Exposure is getting reissued!” to “actually I don’t think I’ve ever heard Northern Exposure” was swift and vicious.

I mean, I must have heard it, right? Sasha and John Digweed’s second mix album was a classic of the mid 90s, a follow up to their similarly ubiquitous Renaissance: The Mix Collection (which I definitely have heard) that paved the way from progressive house to trance. Northern Exposure went Silver in the UK, selling 60,000 copies and I certainly saw it everywhere. So I must have heard it, right?

Wrong. Then again, maybe that’s not that surprising. Northern Exposure was released in September 1996. By this point I had been clubbing for about a year. My tastes leaned firmly towards Chicago House and Detroit Techno - influenced by Manchester’s Bugged Out! - and I didn’t have a lot of time for the superstar DJ combo of Sasha and Digweed, who tended to play the kind of clubs you would need good shoes to enter.

True: I had a friends who were getting into trance. But they tended more towards Goa, acid and hard trance, rather than the fluffy, progressive house-inspired style that Sasha and Digweed were ambling towards. And so Northern Exposure went unheard.

The news that the album, a double-CD mix, no less, was getting reissued as Northern Exposure Redux, including a new bonus disc of dub reworks, sent me scuttling to Wikipedia to look for more info. I was expecting to find a tracklisting heavy on proto trance and fluffy house. Instead, I was surprised to find a wide-angled selection that brought together unlikely bed fellows in a way that defied easy logic and suggested a pair of DJs with a very distinct vision.

Disc One, 0° North, is home to dub house disco specialists Spooky; Keiichi Suzuki’s ambient classic Satellite Serenade; rave weirdos turned IDM heroes The Future Sound of London and Banco de Gaia, a Megadog-friendly global dance specialist who I associate more with Eat Static and fluoro paint than Silver-selling mix CDs.

On Disc Two, 0° South, there are two more Megadog favourites in the shape of Drum Club and Underworld - very 1996 acts; plus New York tribal house chief Junior Vasquez and Florida breakbeat trance act Rabbit in the Moon. What the hell is this album?

And so I dived in.

What I found was a fascinating relic of a strain of dance music that seems to have almost disappeared from history. True, Sasha and Digweed remain huge in 2026, while some of the names on the mixes - like Underworld and Vasquez - are among the biggest in dance music lore. And, yes, you can definitely hear the sound of commercial trance forming, particularly on disc two.

But I can’t imagine any DJ playing a set like this in 2026: it’s too slow for trance; too clean for techno; and too varied for tech house. The music isn’t particularly weird or obtuse - it simply doesn’t fit with dance music trends, like a 2026 Schaffel revival or a clownstep DJ set.

And this, in a way, is Northern Exposure’s strength. The mix captures a very particular time in British dance music history, when progressive house was edging its way gently towards trance, before Paul van Dyk and co. emerged to bosh commercial trance into hard-paced ubiquity.

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Every time a new Matmos album is released, I think what unbelievable fun it must be to actually be in Matmos.

Consider it: the loving couple of M. C. (Martin) Schmidt and Drew Daniel have explored concepts in electronic music from making an album out of washing machine sounds to composing song with distinct metallic clangs, including cemetery gates and aluminium cans. (This was their most recent record: 2025’s Metallic Life Review.)

Every album is different; every album is brilliant and every album pushes the envelope in its own particular way. Music is literally all around for Matmos and the possibilities are endless. But they are never po-faced or overtly chin-stroking, conscious of how fantastically ridiculous it is to make an album with their Whirlpool Ultimate Care II and then have to lug the self same machine around Europe on tour.

Johann Wald and I interviewed Schmidt and Daniel at Primavera Sound 2026, the day after they had played the festival, and the duo proved as joyous and funny in real life as they are on record, resulting in one of the most out-and-out fun interviews I think I have ever done.

You can watch the interview here. But, for fans of writing, I present to you here the edited highlights, full of Björk, fire, the Pavarotti of plastic pillboxes, Hit Em, gay energy and disgruntled Italian audiences. I hope you enjoy it.

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Johann Wald

It is the Saturday of Primavera Sound 2026 and last night people were very fortunate to catch Matmos performing at the Levi’s Warehouse. Welcome Drew and Martin. Did you specifically ask the festival if you could stay an extra day to check out stuff?

Drew Daniel

Yeah, I knew I wanted to see some more things. Lechuga Zafiro - Lechuga Zafiro is a friend. We’ve exchanged a lot of emails and he did a remix of Matmos and so I’m stoked that he’s playing with Verraco. I’ve never seen My Bloody Valentine. I’ve loved them since Isn’t Anything, way back in the day, so I’m really chuffed for that. I brought some earplugs too, because I hear it gets pretty loud.

Johann Wald

You’ve been to Barcelona plenty of times. I remember taking a picture of you with a friend at Sónar.

Drew Daniel

We have played Sónar many times, many times.

Martin Schmidt

I was claiming that we played the first one….

Drew Daniel

…but then he got busted and it wasn’t true. We also went to it as punters one year. We weren’t playing; we just wanted to go the year that it was Stockhausen and Coil and Autechre. But we also have played as Matmos and then in Björk’s band as well and then I played as The Soft Pink Truth a few times.

Johann Wald

Oh yeah with Björk!

Drew Daniel

I played Primavera also as The Soft Pink Truth two years ago.

Martin Schmidt

Yes, that was Björk, and everything was on fire. And the Fire Commissioner of Barcelona was here, like, “No fire.” And Björk was like, “Yes fire.”

Drew Daniel

People were being kind of harsh because the Björk show was delayed and it was because the dress was in a taxi that was stuck behind a lot of traffic. So there was a lot of drama backstage that year; I definitely remember that.

Ben Cardew

Every time I hear about a new Matmos album, I think what fun it must be to be in Matmos.

Drew Daniel

Well, you don’t see the tears and couple fights that are behind it.

Martin Schmidt

The brutal, vicious, gay energy.

Drew Daniel

Yeah, the gay energy gets a little scorchy sometimes. I think the issue with being a couple band is that you know each other really well and you can’t conceal anything. So if someone’s playing you a pattern and they’re super excited about it and you’re just like, “No, this is not it.”

But it is fun, I’m not gonna lie. Our life is crazy. It’s really weird and feels like some odd bonanza or some unearned windfall. And I am super grateful; I don’t mean to sound all mushy about it, but it’s fun as hell. Except when it’s like, will the washing machine clear German customs, or -

Martin Schmidt

Or will the washing machine blow the fifth power converter in a row?

Drew Daniel

Yeah, we had that thing set up at Berghain. Our audience is there and we still have no way of knowing if the show itself is even going to happen because we’d blown up so many power converters, because the washing machine sucked so much power. We finally got this magic converter that helped everything to work. So yeah, it is fun and it’s a mess sometimes too.

Johann Wald

Because you had a question about that - of, you know, which is one utensil or one piece of apparatus that you just tried and it’s like, “Let’s not do this again.” I imagine the washing machine might be something that you’re not even…

Martin Schmidt

I loved every minute of the washing machine schtick.

Drew Daniel

I think just the most labour-intensive thing we did where we were like, “Ah, this is a bust,” is we dragged a piano through the desert with video cameras and microphones inside it, and we were like -

Martin Schmidt

Screwed wheels to the bottom of the piano and dragged it behind a truck. And I had this imagining that it was going to make this beautiful, sort of thrumming, humming sound and it was basically an amplified wooden cart... and then it fell over.

Drew Daniel

There was a TV commercial for dog food that had something called a Chuck Wagon and basically our recording of this piano being dragged through the desert sounded like the dog food commercial. So that was a dead end. So sometimes you experiment and you just roll a snake eyes, you know? That’s life.

Ben Cardew

I’ve often wondered about this. Do you have the idea first, or are you just pottering around and you think, “Well, that might make a kind of idea.”

Drew Daniel

Sometimes objects flow into our lives from other people. So we have a sculptor friend that said, “Hey, I think you would like this,” and he gave us this weird blue thing and it sat on our shelf for 20 years.

Martin Schmidt

It looks like... you know, they don’t really make pills like this anymore, like a capsule. Remember capsule-style pills with the little balls in them? Yeah, imagine that, but like, much... I’m holding my... because for those of you who don’t have eyes on the radio, I’m holding my hands out about a foot and a half apart and they’re spread to about that deep.

Drew Daniel

This keeps getting dirtier! Yeah, okay, so how to describe? We had this object, and then -

Martin Schmidt

It was plastic and blue.

Drew Daniel

Two decades later, we’re like, “Let’s make a plastic album,” and we suddenly realise, oh, this thing makes an incredibly great noise, and it became the star of the album. It was like the Pavarotti of plastic pillboxes.

Martin Schmidt

It had been dormant, taking up stupid space in our house for 15 years.

Drew Daniel

And the problem with this is that it legitimates being a hoarder, because you have this feeling of like, everything is potentially valuable. You just don’t know if the right project will come and then it activates it.

Ben Cardew

I reckon, in a way, the idea that you can make music from anything is brilliant and at the same time, it’s slightly intimidating. Because you must have days where you’re like, “I just want a cup of tea,” and then you think, “Yeah, but that milk bottle - we could stick out a 12-inch.”

Martin Schmidt

It’s never not funny. It just never stops being yeah… because it’s stupid. That’s what makes it endless. It’s like, yeah, that’s so dumb.

Drew Daniel

We were in Lisbon and the metal railing going down the staircase into the club was absolutely gorgeous. We just encounter things about everyday life and it’s all there. But yeah, sometimes I get obsessed and Martin has to pull me back from the ledge. I got really into agate coasters, you know, like a drink coaster. This was a cross-cut of this…

Martin Schmidt

This was so dumb…

Drew Daniel

And I was like, “Oh, these agate coasters are so poetic, they’re so beautiful.” He’s just like, “These are not interesting, Drew. These are just agate coasters.”

Martin Schmidt

They made a nice sort of crystalline ‘ding ding ding’…

Drew Daniel

We did a whole concert in Paris based on these agate coasters and Martin was like, “You’re getting lost in the sauce. Come back to Earth.”

Ben Cardew

Martin, you were just outside the studio and you said five people came and said how much they like you did.

Martin Schmidt

It was very nice. Literally, the people in front of me in line in the coffee thing turned around and went, “Oh my god! Oh my god!” And I turned red. It was very sweet.

Ben Cardew

Because people know Matmos, right? Especially at a festival like this.

Drew Daniel

Weirdos know Matmos.

Ben Cardew

So that’s what I want to ask. When was the last time you played to an audience that had no clue who you were and were just like…?

Martin Schmidt

Last summer. We played in Italy, in Milan, as the band at the afterparty from a green energy convention. This is just another line item on our schedule. We thought it was a Matmos show and I get there and I just realise no one knows who the f*ck we are or gives a shit. But I am such a ham that I look forward to those situations. I’m like, “At the end of this thing, you will love us.” And goddamn it if they didn’t.

Drew Daniel

It doesn’t always work. We once got booked for a beach party in Italy, in this town, Bari, and there’s all these grandmas in folding chairs out on the beach because it’s free music. We’re doing this piece where we shave someone’s head and just amplify the buzzer because it sounds really good when you shave your head. It’s a great sound. And they start yelling this phrase at us and we’re asking our Italian promoter later, “What were they saying?” And they were going, “Dov’è la musica? Where’s the music?”

So it doesn’t always work out but you can’t start by condescending. That’s what’s great about being in a context like Primavera is that there’s people here that are here for pop music but you don’t know who’s going to wander in and maybe see something that for them is the first time they’ve seen something like that, you know? And you shouldn’t assume in advance that you’re too smart or too arty or too deep for them. You have to just bring it.

Johann Wald

Aren’t you amazed or impressed by how soundscaping and industrial textures have become part of pop music and young Gen Z are making pop-oriented music that has edge? That they’re drawing on Aphex Twin, they’re drawing on Matmos, they’re drawing on Warp Records, and they’re doing it in a kind of inhabited internet space where they’re going for pop.

Drew Daniel

It reminds me of when you’re having a salad and there’s some bacon bits in there. It’s kind of like that when you listen to Lana Del Rey or certain Kanye productions or whatever, where there’s a lot of different layers of music that are being drawn upon. But now the crunchy parts are crunchy in a new way and it’s like the bacon bits of the salad have penetrated into a world that you didn’t expect them to ever show up. I think it’s awesome.

Martin Schmidt

That’s an amazing metaphor.

Johann Wald

Last night you got to perform in the Warehouse, which is reserved for more edgier stuff that requires intimacy, whereas Blixa and Einstürzende Neubauten were playing in the auditorium; it was a great evening for industrial music. Einstürzende, were they ever a reference for you?

Drew Daniel

Huge for me. I remember having the Strategies Against Architecture album and the thing that really blew me away - in addition, of course, to Blixa’s voice and the sound world - was the liner notes that said this song was made entirely from the rubber suction cup supports on the bottom of mic stands. When I read that liner note of Neubauten, I was like, “Oh my god!” It just blew my mind. So yeah, I have a lot of respect for their way of working.

Ben Cardew

Who’s got a bigger sample library? You or Matthew Herbert?

Martin Schmidt

Matthew Herbert.

Drew Daniel

Matthew Herbert. He was there first

Martin Schmidt

And his is organised.

Ben Cardew

And yours is just…?

Martin Schmidt

Yes. The answer to that question is yes. Just a bunch of crap. You know, when you look at some people’s desktops and it’s just like ‘blablablala’, every single one of our computers is like that.

Drew Daniel

It’s a rat’s nest, it’s true. All my computers are named after different Shakespeare characters, so that’s how I keep track of what era of the band are we worrying about. Is it Dogberry or Juliet or Timon?

Johann Wald

All this wonderful recorded output that you have - do you have plans to make your own Matmos museum?

Drew Daniel

Yeah, we live in it and it may collapse on us at any moment.

Johann Wald

A Matmos museum is something, if you made all the installations and everything…

Drew Daniel

I think we try to now let the albums themselves become an act of reflection on the history and survival in the past. The last one being called Metallic Life Review, making a record called Plastic Anniversary. There’s now a retrospective thing and I think it’s part of survival.

You know, as a gay dude who’s about to turn 55, a lot of my peers didn’t make it; they died of AIDS. So a sense of survival not being promised or not being something you can necessarily assume will happen. I don’t mean to get all mawkish or whatever but there is something about memory and the falsehood of memory but also the pleasure of memory. And I think that’s becoming more important to the music I make because of being an old creep.

Ben Cardew

I’d forgotten about this until I was researching the interview: Hit Em.

Drew Daniel

Hit Em was a really weird thing and it made me connect with a bunch of music communities that I wasn’t that aware of, like the Discord server scene where people share a sample pack and then have beat-making challenges.

Martin Schmidt

This is a huge thing for younger generations. I started teaching at a music school recently. I had no idea. That’s the world that computer musicians live in.

Drew Daniel

Hit Em was really rejuvenating in that sense and very estranged.

Martin Schmidt

Can we explain what the...?

Drew Daniel

I had a dream that I met a girl at a rave who told me that there was this new style of music called Hit Em and that it was 212 beats per minute of very crunchy sounds in a 5/4 time signature. And I just woke up and tweeted it because I thought, “That’s a ridiculous dream,” and I went back to sleep. And then I woke up a few more hours later and people had started making this music. And then hundreds of people were sharing it and we put out some... there were some compilations of Hit Em music.

It [the tweet] got 3 million views and there’s real-deal producers like EPROM were starting to play Hit Em tracks at Lost Lands, giant dubstep raves in the United States. So it got this traction in all these worlds that I never really thought I would see and I thought that was really fun. And I feel like it’s very impersonal in the sense that it’s from my unconscious but it wasn’t me. It was like a girl I met in a dream told me about a genre and then the internet decided, “Well, let’s make it real. Why not?”

Ben Cardew

Why did people go so mad for it?

Drew Daniel

It’s so specific. It’s just absurd. It’s an annoying thing to do. I tried to make Hit Em and it’s a hard needle to thread. 212 BPM - okay, you’re talking Gabber. But 5/4... you know, that’s the Mission Impossible theme.

Johann Wald

There is that club element to your music. Do you guys still go out to clubs to see how it’s evolving, how people are celebrating dance music?

Martin Schmidt

Here’s how clubs were described to us in Baltimore. “You guys can’t go. You’ll get cut.”

Drew Daniel

If I’m honest, it’s mostly a dance club of the mind at this point. I feel like I can get down in gay bars and I can get down... like, I go to a Shakespeare convention every year that has a Shakespeare Malone Society dance. And it’s a bunch of academics in tweed jackets in their 50s and 60s dancing to Shakira and the Black Eyed Peas. And it’s like wedding DJ mode and I love that.

Johann Wald

I was also interested in the physical spaces where your music and your sound can exist, right? Obviously, there’s the art circles or festivals like Primavera but I’m wondering if you’re ever interested in where where else can we take this?

Drew Daniel

I mean, we have DJed a prom for homeless teenagers once, so that was a tough audience. I’m not sure that we wowed them or won them over but I’m glad that we got tested by like, “Can you do the job?” I mean, who wants Matmos? I’m not really sure. I don’t want to assume in advance.

Martin Schmidt

It’s not like we choose where we play. They choose. There are weird places where they don’t want us. Like, apparently, the country of France.

Drew Daniel

They used to love us but I don’t know. We lost France.

Some listening

Actress - Overchord

Moody piano ballad Actress is not the Actress I expected in 2026 - but by god is it the Actress I needed. Overchord starts with languid piano chords, a vocal comes in, delicate and longing, and drapes itself all over the melodic bed, there is a slightly dissonant string rush and a leisurely four four bass drum line arrives to shepherd matters home in a suitably circumspect manner. Overchord is an unusually beautiful track, so much so, in fact, that it doesn’t feel the need to over-agitate or draw the listener in, confident in its own glory.

Drew Ashby - After Hours

After Hours, from New York’s Drew Ashby, is soulful, jazz-y house at its finest, a nebulous late-night drift of unexpected chord changes, echo, double bass, ultra-deep kick drum thump and hi hat shuffle that reminds me of peak Motorbass. And I REALLY like to be reminded of peak Motorbass.

TDF - Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

The Stone Roses meets Mura Masa? Yes please! That is how Tokyo artist TDF bills Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, the first single to be taken from his debut album Truth I Found Last Nite. And, remarkably, that is what Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? actually delivers, in a song that marries the melancholy / messianic melodic smarts of Manchester’s finest to sharp - but never intrusive - electronic production, as if The Stone Roses had actually bothered to evolve post The Second Coming, rather than crashing and burning in an elaborately messy fashion. The swagger of this song is absolutely delightful.

GB - The Next Day

Gustav Berntsen, AKA GB, has almost certainly listened to a few Durutti Column records. But that’s OK because so have we all and injecting their liquid guitar style with tricky time signatures, Copenhagen songwriting class, the smell of freshly cut summer grass and faint lines of cello is resolutely a smart move. The Next Day feels simple and gently stimulating, kind of like the perfect summer holiday.

Vanishing Twin - Bring Me The Axe

It has only recently occurred to me that Vanishing Twin are home not just to Susumu Mukai - AKA Zongamin, a producer whose records fascinated me in the early 2000s - but also to Valentina Magaletti, who is one of London’s best drummers.

Of course, now I can only marvel at the group’s drums and Bring Me The Axe, from the brilliant new album Archives, is a masterful example of this, an overdriven and really quite nasty drum machine pattern joining consciously off-hand percussion to create an unusual rolling groove, over which Cathy Lucas supplies her best, chillingly pagan vocal.

Things I’ve done

Tricky - Different When It’s Silent

I reviewed the (largely great) new Tricky album - his 15th! - for Pitchfork. “…after the darkly desperate Fall to Pieces, Tricky’s punchy, punky album is further evidence of a career renaissance rooted in emotional power and musical exorcism.”

The playlists

Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026

Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify: The newest and the bestest

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Who was the best DJ at Primavera Sound 2026? Most people I asked said Call Super. Which didn’t really surprise me because Call Super, aka Joseph Richmond Seaton, is perhaps the perfect example of a DJ who knows how to walk the line between the professorial and the party-starting, capable of playing both Circoloco in Ibiza and the brainier corners of Dekmantel. And killing it at both.

Seaton is also an excellent producer - I listen to Chiseler’s Rush with Parris just before doing the interview and it gave me chills - with both sides of their personality combining on last year’s A Rhythm Protects One mixtape. So it was a pleasure to speak to them at Primavera Sound this year, where conversation ranged from Basement Jaxx to Ivy Compton-Burnett - not something you can say of every producer.

You can watch the video of the interview here; but I thought it worth bringing it to you in text form too, lightly edited, starting off with my new initiative of tipping the DJ.

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Ben Cardew: Welcome once again to Line Noise, coming to you from the second full day of Primavera Sound. It gives me great pleasure to be here with Call Super. How are you doing?

Call Super: I’m absolutely wonderful, thanks.

Ben Cardew: Now, I believe in a job well done being well rewarded and I believe I’m going to do something new. I’m going to tip you one euro because the last time I saw you DJ, you played the Stanton Warriors remix of Jump N’ Shout by Basement Jaxx, which is an amazing tune. It’s also a tune I’ve not heard a DJ play in about 20 years, so when I was thinking of you coming, I thought, right -

Call Super: Was this at Gala a couple of weeks ago?

Ben Cardew: No, this was in a festival just on the outskirts of Barcelona a year ago.

Call Super: Wow, that’s funny, because it’s about a year since I played that, and I played it again at Gala two weeks ago and I don’t think I’ve played it since the one here. Amazing.

Ben Cardew: Well I wanted to ask about how you order your DJing, because I was reading that when you’re categorising music in rekordbox, you don’t use genre names, but you use emotional words that have connotations, like “Environmental pause”?

Call Super: Yes, that is a folder. “Environmental pause” is tracks that have little or no drums; they might be quite percussive in terms of the melodies, but there are times in a set when I want to give myself some space and that’s what those tracks do.

Ben Cardew: What folder would Jump N’ Shout be in?

Call Super: That is probably in a folder called “Ladbroke Grove”, which initially started off as a folder that held a lot of tech house that was made in West London in the late 90s and the early noughties. Then the few new-schooly break things I have ended up in that folder too.

Ben Cardew: Doesn’t that system make it impossible to find things?

Call Super: No. Why would it make it impossible to find things?

Ben Cardew: Well, just because whenever I DJ - and obviously that’s very irregularly and no one’s paying me to do it - I need to be like, “Okay, a house song.”

Call Super: I see what you’re doing. You’re looking for something that’s like, “I just need something in a particular style,” not a particular track. If I need a particular track, I just type it in on search. If I’m looking for a particular style, it’s more important for me to not have a premeditated thought about what I want. The idea for this came as I was trying to shift from playing on vinyl only to more on CD - and then eventually just on CD - and I wanted to try and recreate what goes through my mind and what kind of sparks fly when I flick through a pile of records.

Obviously, online, if I’m just going through a folder of tracks which are quite similar genre-wise, there are less sparks flying. Whereas if the genre is taken out of the equation and we’re just looking at tracks in terms of emotion and vibe and feel, I get many more of those strange interconnections, which is what I’m looking for myself to stay very present in the moment when I’m DJing.

Ben Cardew: Let’s talk about A Rhythm Protects One, your mix CD which came out last year - all your own tracks - why did you want to do something physical?

Call Super: It started off that I had made a load of tracks to play out just as a DJ. I don’t release that many 12-inches and I feel like when I do, I need a very good reason to and I didn’t want to just put out a series of twelves with these tracks. I also don’t really, as a listener, listen to dance music albums that much and I feel like the DJ mix as a medium has gotten to quite a strange, disposable place with the abundance of the internet. So I wanted to kill all of these things with one shot and doing it as a mix on CD seemed to do that.

Ben Cardew: Do you still buy mix CDs?

Call Super: I do occasionally buy mix CDs, not that often, because again, as a medium, it’s kind of disappeared. There are very, very few series left and I wanted to say that I think this is a valuable thing that should still be engaged with, disseminated, and hopefully... I mean, the nice thing about it is that the label that I did it with [Dekmantel Records] felt really, really good about how it went and off the back of it were like, “Yeah, we would definitely do more of these with more artists.” I have spoken to other labels who feel the same way and that was a large part of the intent behind it.

Ben Cardew: I wonder sometimes when you get someone who does a mix CD like DJ-Kicks these days, the question is how you make it different from all the others... If you’re a successful DJ, how many mixes are floating around on SoundCloud? And one of the things you did was obviously that it was all your own tunes, all unreleased until then, and also you made beautiful packaging.

Call Super: I think packaging was so important to me buying mix CDs growing up - and again what you can’t do online is the physical dimension. It was so important to me to tell a story about the mix through the packaging as well because this isn’t an anti-online mix series or podcast statement. That’s great - it’s great that we have such a wealth of music and it’s so easy for people to get their mixes out there but I just wanted to say this still has a place. I see the DJ mix as a valid expression alongside albums and singles and all the rest of it and online sets don’t really capture that.

Ben Cardew: And you worked with Daniel Mason, who also worked on one of my favourite ever CD releases, the Spiritualized pill container box. I presume you bought that back in the day?

Call Super: I did, yeah. I was a huge fan of his work. He was my number one person to do the packaging on the album and he was really up for it. He did so many other things as well. I knew him through that - I was a huge Spiritualized fan - but he did the packaging for the Prince Batman tin and the Pet Shop Boys’ orange plastic anthology. That was a really crazy bit of packaging. The people he’s worked with is just insane and the ideas that he’s come up with are all very inspiring.

Ben Cardew: And for you, he did a rotating wheel.

Call Super: It’s a volvelle - it is the earliest maps of the sky. In the Middle Ages, some of the very first things that were printed, before we’d mapped the Earth, we mapped the skies and these sky maps were printed on hand-drawn circles. People navigated their way around the Earth using the sky and these volvelles are incredibly beautiful. Some museums around the world have volvelles.

Ben Cardew: What is your favourite ever mix CD? Or one of them.

Call Super: There’s so many… There are so many clichéd ones, the Coldcut one, of course, and I’ve talked about the DJ Rupture one a lot, so I want to talk about one that I haven’t mentioned. There’s one by Layo & Bushwacka! [All Night Long] - it’s a double CD and I don’t know if one of them mixed one and the other mixed the other, but the packaging is like flight cases and lots of the stickers you get on your baggage when you fly.

Ben Cardew: Oh, that rings a bell. Yeah.

Call Super: And I listened to that mix solidly for about two years and I think it taught me a lot about how much you can actually fit in. The other one that I would mention is Laurent Garnier’s Excess Luggage, which ended up being a five-disc mix because they had a bonus of two sets: one from the Rex Club at a birthday party and the other one from Detroit. Anyway, those mixes I listened to for years and years and years.

Ben Cardew: Good choice. Was this before you were DJing?

Call Super: Yeah, I mean, I started DJing when I was quite young, probably about 14, and this was... no, I was probably DJing.

The first mixes that really knocked me for six were Carl Cox Fact mixes, which my friend’s older brother had. We just nicked them out of his room and were like, “What in the Lord’s name is this?”

Ben Cardew: I think some of the mix CDs or mixes I like most were from when I had no idea what DJing was. I didn’t understand how they were doing it. Now I kind of understand how it’s done. Whereas before, it was like sorcery.

Call Super: This is the other thing: when there were loads of CD series, there were also like a bajillion tapes of every rave - every big rave ever, it felt like. You could access these things through markets and sometimes secondhand music shops, so you still had this kind of hierarchy that maybe you have today between the internet and a physical mix but then it was between the cassette and the physical mix.

Ben Cardew: Are you quite a nostalgic person?

Call Super: No, not in the slightest.

Ben Cardew: So it doesn’t make you feel nostalgic when you think back on those…

Call Super: No. I think there are lots of things that are really vital now and I love that present. I think the music we make and everything we do should exist in this moment. I’m also not someone who believes that we need new genres to validate dance music - like the shock of the new is always through a new genre. I think the shock of the new is often through refinement and the kind of refinements that are happening in the present are numerous and incredible. I feel like sometimes things die because licensing is a faff, it’s expensive and putting stuff out in physical format... if people aren’t buying CDs, it’s hard to justify.

But actually, I feel like this is a moment where there’s a lot of people who are sick of DSPs and would like to have more physical music and we definitely felt that in the sales last year of that CD. I think other people are seeing this - and I’m going to make more CDs, like a kind of a fan club. Off the back of that, they will get a CD mix this year because people seem to be responding to it really well. There’s Arpozine, which is a Substack as well -

Ben Cardew: It’s the newsletter -

Call Super: It’s the newsletter and I kind of didn’t really know how to... The main idea was to have a fan club. Again, this isn’t a nostalgic thing but when you had fan clubs 20 or 30 years ago and people paid that money each year and got stuff in the post, that is a very, very pure expression of fandom, which I feel again has been really changed through social media. But I feel it has a place. People still feel the same way about the things they love and I have noticed through certain things I’ve done offline that energy from people, and I wanted to have a clear expression of it. And so Arpozine is one of the places where that hangs from.

Ben Cardew: Were you in any fan clubs like that?

Call Super: Actually, I wasn’t, sadly. It was slightly before my time but I have read a lot about them and I’m very aware of how they existed.

Ben Cardew: And how have you found the experience of having the Substack?

Call Super: I really enjoy writing and I have kind of missed it in my life for many years. I didn’t want to do something which felt... basically, I only write when I have something I want to say. I’m not trying to get something out every two weeks or whatever, so it’s utterly sporadic. I think initially I thought I would do more kind of linking of things that I’m into but as it’s gone on, I’ve been less inclined to that and more inclined to just try and say something when I have something to say.

Ben Cardew: You used to work for Granta, right?

Call Super: I did. Wow, you’ve done some research. Yes.

Ben Cardew: Oh, so you were a journalist?

Call Super: No, I wasn’t. I was just like an office tea boy who was cataloguing at the time. They were building the back end of their first website and they needed basically everything they’d ever published somehow archiving for that and I did a lot of work on that. I did the very entry-level reading submissions and filtering out things I thought maybe an editor would be interested in.

Ben Cardew: It’s very high level, Granta.

Call Super: I mean, it’s a quite small office [laughs] but yes, I loved that job.

Ben Cardew: And what are you reading at the moment?

Call Super: At the moment, I’m reading a woman called Ivy Compton-Burnett, who wrote in the end of the 1800s about... Okay, we’re in Spain. I don’t know if you’ve read any Lorca but the way that Lorca writes about the interior life of a family, that’s very much her. She’s like a kind of late Victorian English version of that - everyone hates each other.

Ben Cardew: Good to know.

Call Super: Yeah, it’s very sassy. Late Victorian sass is a genre I love.

Ben Cardew: I can’t think of any other examples of late Victorian sass!

Call Super: This isn’t late Victorian but someone like Beryl Bainbridge, who writes later, a kind of female eye for the domestic and more working classes and the interpersonal relationships.

Ben Cardew: You moved back to London from Berlin last year, right? Has that changed your music?

Call Super: I don’t know yet. I’ve just been finishing my first ideas since moving back and I don’t have a studio, so I’m working in strange, odd spaces here and there. I don’t know. I feel like my music is slightly resistant to my geography - I’ve written things in different places before and I don’t feel like the sound of the place is really so present. I did a lot of my first album in New York. I did a lot of my third album in Mexico. I hope that I’m influenced by my life generally but I don’t know how much that’s got to do with geography.

Ben Cardew: Was there a moment when you were moving home where you started to think, “Actually, all these records are…”

Call Super: They’re all still in Berlin. I basically just left my studio; I walked out, I still have the keys. I just didn’t have the bandwidth. I will slowly get to it.

I’d also used a lot of that gear for quite a while and I was quite looking forward to starting again and starting in the box and then slowly growing it out. If there’s a particular bit of kit I want, I do bring it back.

Ben Cardew: You’re playing Circoloco in Ibiza later this summer. I’ve never been, neither to Circoloco nor to Ibiza. The image I have of your music doesn’t fit with the image I have of Circoloco. Maybe I’m... well, I must be completely wrong because you’re playing there, but how does your music fit in with that? Do you do the same set you might do here?

Call Super: I kind of play into where I am but in the way that I play, if that makes sense. So it’s a bit of give and take. I’ve been playing at Circoloco for quite a while now and through the winter, when I’m not playing there, I might come across a track and I’m like, “That’ll work well on the terrace,” and it just gets tucked away for later. It’s a nice other dimension to what I do and I love playing that.

Ben Cardew: You released your first record 15 years ago. How does that feel? Does it feel a bit weird?

Call Super: I don’t really understand time. I feel like there are things I’ve figured out as I’ve gotten older and there are things that are ever more mysterious and time is one of those ever more mysterious things, for sure.

Ben Cardew: I believe one of the current theories is that time doesn’t actually exist and we just perceive it, or something like that.

Call Super: Yeah. I mean, I feel very... When I was a kid, I was friends with people that were much older than me and as I’ve gotten older, I feel like my friends just go in both directions. I’ve got lots of much older friends and lots of much younger friends and I’ve never really... I don’t know, it’s not something I dwell on too much, to be honest. I think it’s also why I’m not really interested in nostalgia and the past so much. It’s a thing to sometimes be inspired by but only because it says something about the present.

Ben Cardew: Do you ever go back to those first records and listen?

Call Super: Of course. I’ve always done a thing before I start writing a new record: I’ll listen to either an old record or the previous record and it usually makes me feel quite depressed because I’m always like, “How did I do all that?” Quite daunting, like, “Oh my god, I don’t even know where to start.” But then it just happens again.

Ben Cardew: I suppose the other way of looking at that is being impressed by yourself, like, “I can do this. I’ve done this once. I did this thing that was good.”

Call Super: Yeah, I think somewhere inside of me I know I can do it. I don’t feel impressed but I feel like I can. I’ll get there; just keep turning up each day and I’ll get there.

Ben Cardew: This is a slightly cliché thing to ask, but do you feel you’ve grown as a musician?

Call Super: I don’t know. In some ways, I’ve got worse because I used to play instruments much more and practice much longer each day and I don’t do so much of that. I do lots more knob-twiddling and I sometimes feel like I’ve gotten worse as a musician, but I never really know. My ear has sometimes gotten better or worse. It depends on the day of the week.

Some listening

Karizma - Around

Karizma’s Around is a rude and clanking take on house music, full of sass, bass, swing and a vocal hook that wraps its claws ever closer around the unsuspecting listener until escape is impossible. The song, taken from Soul in the Horn Act 4: Remixes & Bonuses, a new compilation from the titular New York label, is like basement house music, if the basement was full of nasty sharp objects, tetanus nails and the greatest DJ you ever heard.

Aquarian - A Rush of Fat To The Head

TraTraTrax aren’t f*cking around: A Rush of Fat To The Head (FABULOUS title BTW) by Canadian-born producer Aquarian is, they say, “our candidate for anthem of the summer” and goddamnit if they might not be right.

A Rush of Fat To The Head is totally ridiculous, in the best possible summer anthem / TraTraTrax tradition, a growling, clanging, surging 303 beast that is simultaneously terrifying and welcoming, in the line of Josh Wink’s own anthem, Higher State of Consciousness (which I was just writing about the other week) or Aphex Twin’s Didgeridoo, both of which A Rush of Fat To The Head vaguely resembles. If I hear A Rush of Fat To The Head in a club, then summer 2026 will be epic indeed.

Radie Peat - Still I Love Him

It’s not that Radie Peat could sing the telephone book and I’d still listen; it’s that the Lankum singer could sing the telephone book and I’d be on the floor bawling my eyes out and thinking about life choices. Still I Love Him, Peat’s debut solo single, does more with sparse guitar chords, a simple song structure and her bone-chilling voice than most bands could do with several stadiums worth of pyrotechnics and amplification. A master class in minimalism.

Carmen Villain - Entre Nosotros

Entre Nostotros - “between us” - is well named: there is something intimate and unsettling to Carmen Villain’s new single. A beat rises out of the dub dust, too slow to be enjoyable; there’s the smallest suggestion of melody, like a band tuning up next door, and everything fades back into dust. Entre Nosotros feels like watching time lapse footage of your childhood home disappearing under the rising sands: intriguing, contemplative even, but not really something you’d celebrate.

Kyla Kilzer and Max Noir - Break Through (brekkyt remix)

Break Through, in its newly-remixed form, is one of those dance music songs that sits just on the edge of unpleasantness, its Broken Beat drum lines sharpened, its bass notably corpulent and the original song’s soulful warmth hanging on by its finger nails over what sounds like chilled electro pan pipes. Out of this near nastiness, though, arrives a fantastically honed piece of dance music, buffed and re-tooled for maximum impact.

Nikki Nair - Odd Sympathy

Listening to Odd Sympathy you can almost picture a veteran bassline producer shaking their head in poorly concealed frustration. “Nikki,” they’re saying. “You almost had it. A heavyweight bassline banger perfect for the club. And then you just had to go and add a load of stupid whooshing noises. Who’s going to DJ that?” And Nikki Nair slopes off in silence, an inscrutable smile lighting up his face.

Starcleaner - Never Odd or Even

You know why more bands don’t sound like Stereolab circa Sound Dust? It’s because they can’t.

Springfield’s Starcleaner can, though, and more pertinently they do on Never Odd Or Even, a song that splits the difference between early, drone-y Stereolab and the trombone-jazz-Brazilian influences of Sound Dust. (To be clear: I don’t think there are any trombones on the song. But you know what I mean.) And, my God! Do Starcleaner do it well. They have the drive, the swing, the intricate dual vocals, the chiming guitar, the adventurous spirit and the incredibly songwriting of vintage Stereolab and you will love them for it.

Inland Years - Morning Train

Parents will perhaps remember the moment that an entrepreneurial switch flipped in their kids’ minds and they realised that they could charge you €1 for a garish friendship bracelet or pair of paper earrings; and you would buy them, not just because you wanted to support your kids but because these simple creations have an intimate charm and spirit of life that brings you almost to tears.

In a strange way, the work of Brooklyn’s Inland Years reminds me of this; not because their music is childish in any way, but because it is small and intimate and unassuming and full of joyous life, a pocket-dose of Teenage Fanclub, whereby 13 songs whip by in 15 minutes and each is sparkling and brilliantly written and each feels no need to elongate their time on earth just to try to impress you.

Morning Train, from the new album Nowadays, is 62 seconds of chiming guitar, slide, folk harmony, psychedelic touches and fantastic songwriting that turns on an emotional dime and it WILL make your life that little bit better.

Things I’ve done

Kelela - new avatar, the One Minute Review

Cocteau Twins with trace elements of Crazy Town’s Butterfly? Yes please! It’s my One Minute Review of Kelela’s third studio album, new avatar.

Pixies - Complete B Sides: 1988-97

I reviewed Pixies Complete B Sides: 1988-97 for Pitchfork. It’s one of the Pixies albums I listen to most and I totally adore it. “Pixies are arguably more Pixies in their flip-side freedom, four eternally loveable weirdos with one foot in the punk gutter and one eye way out in the oddball universe of the avant-garde, looking for clues.”

The playlists

Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026

Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026

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Spotify: The newest and the bestest

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The Portuguese have saudade - a deep state of yearning for absent people, places or things. I have the 90s.

Not quite the same thing, I realise. But I do spend more than a few moments of my waking hours thinking of the decade that formed me, the decade that taught me all there is to know about music and clubbing.

And so, while walking to work this morning, I started to think about what might be the most 90s dance music songs in existence. Not the best dance songs of the 90s. Oh no. But the songs that could only happen in the 90s: songs so 90s they thought Union Jack guitars were a good idea and had a free university education; songs so 90s they spent 75 grand on an Armand van Helden remix then got into speed garage; songs so 90s they own three different Dope On Wax compilations on CD.

Well, you get the idea.

And here I present them to you: the 10 most 90s dance music songs in existence. (With, as you might imagine, a heavy UK bias.)

What do you think? What did I miss? Let me know below.

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Primal Scream - Jailbird (the Dust Brothers remix).

It was listening to The Chemical Brothers that got me into this mess. Because they - with all due respect to Underworld, The Prodigy etc. - are the most 90s dance act and I will hear no argument on the matter. And their most 90s song? It’s probably Setting Sun, a song that nails the mystical 90s mix of The Beatles (via the Tomorrow Never Knows beat), Oasis (with the Noel Gallagher vocal) and huge chart success.

Instead, though, I am going for the Brothers’ (the Dust Brothers, as they were then known) remix of Primal Scream’s 1994 single Jailbird) on the grounds that a) it’s a total banger and b) it reminds me of driving around in my friend’s Honda Jazz car at the age of 17, when he had just passed his test, and feeling an unbelievable freedom in our hair. Damn right!

Bentley Rhythm Ace - Bentleys Gonna Sort You Out

What’s the most 90s dance genre? One that The Chemical Brothers flirted with in their time? It’s definitely Big Beat, that Frankenstein’s Monster of breakbeats, silliness, rock influences and acid house. Birmingham duo Bentley Rhythm Ace were the epitome of Big Beat. And their debut single Bentleys Gonna Sort You Out is their Mount Rushmore.

The song is defined by a series of very silly “boing” sounds, which ensure - probably consciously - that Bentleys Gonna Sort You Out is never going to be taken seriously by any respectable dance music fan, overriding what is actually a pretty alluring collage of 303 tweaks, shadowy breaks and easy-listening samples. It’s like your wacky uncle making dance music - if your wacky uncle had studied at the knee of DJ Shadow. Just think about that.

Grace - Not Over Yet (Perfecto mix)

Coming in just after Big Beat in the battle for the most 90s dance genre: progressive house, that bright, clean, melodic, uplifting and very British take on house music that emerged at the start of the 90s and kind of turned into trance. Paul Oakenfold was its king and his Perfecto label progressive house’s Windsor Palace.

And it’s best song? How about Oakenfold’s Perfecto mix of Grace’s classic Not Over Yet, a whooshing, jostling, fluoro sunrise of a hit that, despite a snare drum that sounds like it was recorded in a bucket, is basically a perfect dance pop song, all tears on the dance floor and wonderful daytime Radio 1. Listening to Not Over Yet today, it sounds simultaneously as old as the hills and utterly up to date.

Bomfunk MC’s - Freestyler

But what about jungle, I hear you ask? Doesn’t jungle represent all that is fantastic and ground-breaking and exciting about 90s dance music?

Indeed it does. But you know what really screams 90s dance? An MTV- friendly, watered-down jungle hit from Finland. And that is what we have with Bomfunk MC’s [sic - and very much sic] - Freestyler, a song that I detested at the time but nowadays passes muster as a kind of bubblegum jungle hit, so far from the dark innovation of the actual jungle hits of the decade, but catchy as herpes and incredibly silly. Freestyler would never, ever, get played in an actual jungle club. But it has just about enough of the genre - the break, the sub bass, the BPM - to suggest that Jaakko Salovaara and Raymond Ebanks have actually heard some proper jungle in their time. And they possibly even enjoyed it.

Josh Wink - Higher State Of Consciousness (Tweekin Acid Funk)

One of the defining features of 90s dance music, certainly in the UK, is that it threw up some unlikely chart hits. And what better to illustrate this than Josh Wink’s Higher State of Consciousness, whose Tweekin’ Acid Funk remix hit the British top ten in 1995. The song was totally inescapable that year: I remember walking around my university halls of residence and hearing it blasting from what seemed like every single window on a sunny day.

And why not? It’s a brilliant song that combines an ithchingly exciting 303 line with endless drops, a metallic breakbeat and a wobbling vocal hook that ensured you knew what song to ask for at the record shop on a Monday afternoon. Higher State of Consciousness was sort of Big Beat, in the end, if, you know, Big Beat was good.

Tori Amos - Professional Widow (Armand’s Star Trunk Funkin’ mix)

90s dance music was a business. A big one. And few people were bigger than Armand van Helden, a Boston producer who could allegedly charge $75,000 for a remix at the peak of his fame and still find takers.

And you know what? Armand earned it, his remixes transforming indie dance whimsy, pop reggae, the Rolling Stones and tender piano ballads into strutting club hits. And none more so than his 1996 remix of Tori Amos’s Professional Widow, in which he looped an errant bass line, grabbed the odd catchy vocal phrase, strapped on some massive drums and sent the song to the top of the UK charts. It might - just might - be the best remix ever.

The Grid - Swamp Thing

Sometimes those big 90s dance hits were sublime; sometimes they were incredibly catchy; and sometimes they were weird and awful. This was very much the case with Swamp Thing, a huge 1994 hit for The Grid.

Don’t get me wrong: The Grid have made some brilliant songs; Crystal Clear is a chill out classic; and David Ball and Richard Norris have serious dance credentials. But Swamp Thing… Swamp Thing is horrible, a teeth-rattling combination of banjo, electric clapping and progressive house beats that is once heard and never forgotten.

And not in a good way. I have listened to Swamp Thing this morning, so now you don’t have to. If your friends ever get too jacked up on 90s nostalgia just play them this and watch those hazy memories turn to dust.

ATB - 9PM (Till I Come)

Ibiza was very 90s, the holiday of any self-respecting raver who wanted to spend a week in the Balearic sun drinking Orange Fanta and vodka and listening to the club anthems that would become British chart hits after their return to the drizzly UK.

Chart trance was also very 90s. And the two collided on ATB’s megahit 9PM (Till I Come), a song that ate Ibiza alive, then snacked on the British charts for afters. Do I like it? I do not. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t heard the song’s distinctive guitar hook in my head every single day since 9PM (Till I Come) was first released in October 1998. Which, I suppose, is a kind of success.

Double 99 - RIP Groove

Remember speed garage? Of course you do: it’s the galloping British dance sound that nailed atomic sub bass lines to shuffling house beats and briefly threatened to take over the world in 1997, before everyone decided they preferred UK Garage anyway.

New genres were very important to British dance music in the 90s, thanks to the country’s profusion of dance music magazine, radio shows, TV coverage etcetera. Speed garage was one of those genres that never quite took off but left a lasting influence on the likes of Sammy Virji, who is very speed garage indeed.

The absolute number one speed garage tune - the one that made you think that world domination really was possible - was RIP Groove, the 1997 debut single from Double 99, which brilliantly combined a vocal snatch from the Kelly G Bump-N-Go Vocal Mix of Tina Moore’s Never Gonna Let You Go with a bass line hewn out of granite and lots of spin back sounds, aka British catnip. You know RIP Groove. It still gets played today. A lot. And you can’t say that about Swamp Thing.

Robert Miles - Children

Look, if you don’t know why Robert Miles’ 1995 Eurodance classic Children is one of the most 90s dance songs ever there’s not really much point in us talking. I heard it everywhere, from Megadog to MTV, and - if you were alive in the 90s - you did too.

Children is perfect, in a way, that flickering, melancholic piano riff, plaintive acoustic guitar, enormous snare rush build and pumping drums intended to make ravers calm down at the end of the night (and therefore reduce car accidents) but which had precisely the opposite effect. If I could look at Children objectively, I might hate it. But if I could look at Children objectively then I wouldn’t have lived the 90s and you wouldn’t be reading this piece. So drink it in.

Some listening

IZCO - Strike a Pose feat. Camille Munn (Karen Nyame KG remix)

IZCO’s recent album Powerscroft is seriously twisted fun. As I put it in my DJ Magazine review, “The album is fast and furious, running through 12 songs in 45 fat-free minutes of playful invention, the colourful skip and jazz-y chords of broken beat making hay with influences from UK Garage to jungle, melody always to the fore.”

Now Karen Nyame KG, a producer entirely au fait with accessible but twisted dance-floor numbers, has put her inimitable stamp on Strike a Pose, one of the album’s highlights. Where the original song is as tight as a drum and ever so slightly nervous, KG’s remix is laidback and hopeful, both cooling things down and heating life up, a sultry house slink for late nights with nothing to worry about in the morning.

Marina Herlop - Jaque

I spoke to someone recently who said that the new Marina Herlop album Dja Dja is mind-blowingly good, the defining work to date of an artist who has never shied away from an experimental challenge or devastating vocal melody.

Jaque, the first song to be released from Dja Dja, is certainly very special, a kind of woozy but infinitely tough martial jazz march, that reminds me a little of the opening days of London’s Millennium Bridge, when this huge metallic structure started mysteriously swaying under people’s feet and no one could work out why. But, er, musical. Jaque contains so many ideas over its five-minute run time it feels like we might be still coming to terms with it in 2036. And that is obviously a compliment.

PS Important update: the album is fabulous.

Eden Samara - Punish Me (Hodge remix)

When I reviewed Eden Samara’s Punish Me for this newsletter, I made much of the un-punishing nature of the music it contained. Perhaps Hodge heard me (Hodge definitely didn’t hear me) because his remix of the song ups the levels of punishment to quite shattering levels, his pounding, rattling, New York house rhythm like being trapped in a metallic dungeon with a load of Basque Aizkolaritza experts. Samara’s vocal is still a pop celebration and, in itself, quite sweet. But little can escape Hodge’s dungeon of doom. And while that doesn’t sound like a good thing, it really is. This song doesn’t just bang; it clatters.

Djrum - I Wander (IV and V)

Djrum has forced his way into the brilliantly free space that few musicians ever occupy, in which the doors are entirely open for any kind of Djrum sound. Rather than going full on minimal techno or summer-time lovers rock, though, I Wander might be seen as (relatively) typical Djrum, a mixture of graceful classical piano, frantic, glitched rhythm and finely stitched production trickery that hangs in the balance between acoustic finery and electronic nerve. At the same time, to suggest there is anything typical about a piece of music this thrillingly out there on the edges, this beautifully rendered and this stuffed with dazzling ideas seems like treachery.

Topdown Dialectic - False LP A 03

I could wax and wane about dust storms, trips to the North Pole, fractured sonic reality and the devastated shadow of electronic music. Or I could say that False LP A 03, from once anonymous producer Topdown Dialectic, sounds a HELL of a lot like Pole - one of the greatest to ever do dub techno. And, look, it’s hot outside, so I’m going for the latter.

Things I’ve Done

Line Noise podcast - Étienne de Crécy returns

This week, we welcome Étienne de Crécy, a house hero for any sensible musical brain, back to the Line Noise podcast. Last time out, in 2023, we spoke about the origins of Étienne - Motorbass, Super Discount and all - so in this interview I wanted to catch up with what he had been doing since then. That included the Flashback tour, playing vinyl, songs that do and don’t work with modern audiences, his excellent Warm Up album, working with Damon Albarn, football and playing live versus DJing. We also look ahead to the 30th anniversary of his classic Super Discount.

The playlists

Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026

Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026

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Spotify: The newest and the bestest

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And so time strikes the great ending bell on the first six months of 2026 and we move on to the end of the year. Which means, for writers like me, a chance to look back on the best records of the first half of the year.

You could argue that the exercise is meaningless: why not look back on the first three days, seven months or 2,645 seconds instead? But I personally love a list and, besides, it’s another excuse to mention some of the great heaps of records I have loved.

I’m not writing about the best records of 2026, per se. That would include Boards of Canada, Dry Cleaning and Aldous Harding. Instead, I am going for nine fantastic records that I wanted to write more about and didn’t get the opportunity to do so. I was tempted to “overlooked” but it’s not really that.

So, without further ado, nine records for you to grasp to the breast like a portable fan in a sweat farm, including Nondi_, TVAM and Anastasia Kristensen, PLUS some special bonus words from dgoHn.

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I have history with Dimitri From Paris. It’s just that he didn’t know it. When I arrived in Paris, in August 1997, I bought myself a cheap CD player and Dimitri’s peerless debut album Sacrebleu, which I knew was the perfect disc to ease myself into the city.

I’ve written about Sacrebleu before: I called it “the ultimate French Touch not French House album” and I will stick with that description with a vengeance. The album is incredibly, sophisticatedly French. In an interview with Muzik magazine in 1996 Dimitri said that Sacrebleu was supposed to be “a play on everybody’s stereotyped ideas about Parisians… like a musical version of Inspector Clouseau or Pepé Le Pew” and he filled it with easy-listening, exotica, reggae, house and more, dusting down with some of the most kitsch Gallic samples possible, including - right at the start of the damn album - someone playing the Marseillaise on a xylophone.

It’s not a serious record. In fact, as Dimitri says below, Sacrebleu was a kind of a joke to trip up Americans. But it’s certainly not a stupid one either. More than anything, Sacrebleu is a wonderful record, beaming with light, funk, style, melody and élan. Sacrebleu is - as I mentioned before - light hearted but never throw away, its brilliantly varied production labyrinthine in a way that makes me think of The Avalanches’ sample patchwork.

And it was perhaps un-repeatable. Dimitri didn’t make another album until Cruising Attitude in 2003 and he hasn’t really made another album since, concentrating instead on remixes - something he is insanely good at - DJing and producing 12 inches.

I caught up with Dimitri in Barcelona in May 2026, just before he DJed at La Paloma in Barcelona, an old music hall / dance house that was absolutely perfect for his stylish sound. And, of course, I had to start with Sacrebleu….

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Ben Cardew

When I arrived in Paris in 1997, the very first album I bought was Sacrebleu. Because for me, it felt so French, you know?

Dimitri From Paris

Good - you know, it was a joke? It was meant to be like a Monty Python kind of joke - like, that is how French people are or how people think the French are. It was just all cliches. And then a lot of people - good young people, like you were in 1997 - took it on the very first degree, I was really shocked because, for me, it was so obvious it was a joke that no one would deem that I was serious about this.

And then everybody thought it was so French, which was like, okay. I mean, it did help my career, but it was meant to be like, you know, I am joking about all the cliches - people like Pepe Le Pew or Monty Python, like having that French accent on the show, or whatever. So it is funny you said that to me, because I thought old people and Americans would deem it French, but then if a Scottish young person thinks it is so French, then alright.

Ben Cardew

But I think the thing was - and obviously it was your record - there were some very overtly French elements. There was a humour. But at the same time, the music itself was brilliant.

Dimitri From Paris

I didn’t try to make the music particularly French-sounding but it was more all the packaging and putting the Eiffel Tower on it was like the big signature. Okay, we are trying to make this full French, you know?

The whole thing was like, it is a fake French thing made by someone who is not - that was the idea behind it. And it sort of became a very, “Oh, it is so French” everywhere, but that is fine. I mean, I like the music and I am 100% proud of it. But I was really not expecting that kind of reaction, so it still makes me like, wow, okay.

Ben Cardew

This is one of the things I find so interesting about you, because you were born in Istanbul, right?

Dimitri From Paris

Yeah.

Ben Cardew

I wonder what your relationship is with France. Do you feel very French?

Dimitri From Paris

Yeah, probably. I mean, I was raised in France. I arrived there when I was three years old, so being born in Istanbul is more of a technicality than anything else. Both my parents are Greek and they were in their early 20s when they moved to France with me as a newborn, not a newborn, but a toddler, let us say. So I got all my education in the French system and all my friends were, you know, wherever they were - some were more French, some were from other countries - but we were all in the same French system of schooling. And I guess, more than French, we could say I am more Parisian, which the rest of France hates.

Ben Cardew

I grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and for a long time French music wasn’t really appreciated, and I was quite a Francophile.

Dimitri From Paris

I so agree with you, in its own right, because there was nothing much to be appreciated, to be honest. It was like a French-language, watered-down version of pop music from the rest of the world. In the ‘60s they were taking US songs and putting French words to them, which retrospectively has its own charm, but back then it was just like third-grade, low-shelf music made for the French people and really just remade more simplistically. So growing up in that environment, I was absolutely not interested in French music and the rest of the world wasn’t either, so I felt I was not so wrong.

We weren’t even trying to be considered by other people. Personally and with a lot of my friends back then - I am talking early ‘90s - we had already started making music in one way or the other, DJing some of us, and we were like, yeah, we are doomed, French is never going to interest anyone, especially not the Brits. And we would look up to the UK because so many good genres of music came out of there and they were always ahead of us in terms of catching on to new music. They caught up on house music in the late ‘80s and before that, there were so many other things, like reggae, I mean ska, so many things that came from other places, but where the UK was catalytic in making them what they are now. So we were looking up to the UK.

I have said that many times we would go to a record store and our biggest fear was to be spotted as being French, because we knew we would get the worst service ever if people knew - just go back to the back of the line for you guys. We had this complex of being really not as good as the rest of the world, basically.

Ben Cardew

This is one of the reasons why I loved your music so much. I know it wasn’t entirely serious but at the same time, it was Dimitri from Paris with an album called Sacrebleu, with all this kind of…

Dimitri From Paris

I will give you that.

Ben Cardew

You started DJing really young, right?

Dimitri From Paris

I wouldn’t say that young compared to most people. I did have a stint at DJing in a club. When was that? When I was 18 or 19, so that must have been like early ‘80s, ‘82 or ‘83 and I didn’t like it at all. I had this idea of DJing like the scratch DJs. I went to this show where they had Grand Mixer DXT and Fab Five Freddy and breakers and graffiti artists. It was slightly before Malcolm McLaren, so there was this time where hip hop was coming through into Europe and there was this notion of DJing as being a creative thing - you could do creative things with records.

And it was just an epiphany to me because I thought you could only play a record, you couldn’t do much with it. And everyone had records because it was the only medium to listen to music - that, and cassettes back then. So having this sudden idea that you could actually manipulate the record and become creative with it was really like an epiphany to me. And I started looking up to all the American DJs and trying to learn things but, you know, no internet, no nothing, so it was very difficult to find information.

I was following up on the hip-hop thing and wanted to play the music that I liked and started doing editing stuff. And I put an ad in a trade magazine, the Magazine de la Discothèque, and I got two calls, and I got hired to replace a guy that was calling in sick. And I realised what DJing was about: to play records that made the crowd happy, not the records that you thought were good. And suddenly I realised that this wasn’t the creativity I was looking for and I went more towards radio, which was more exciting at the time because, like you had in the UK, there was the pirate radio movement and it was kind of the same thing. There was an early pirate movement, and then very quickly it got legalised, so everybody wanted to do radio and there was a huge demand for DJs - any kind of DJ you could get, like you could get a job.

So I got like a few stints in small radio stations and my goal was to make a mix show, because I was getting also those mixtapes from New York, from DJs like Tony Humphries or Shep Pettibone, who were mixing tracks together, which was something hardly anyone was doing in France, to my knowledge. And I think England was the same. The English DJs were very much like the French; they would talk on the mic, create a vibe, play one record after the other, but they wouldn’t beat match and it was very niche. So I was into that very technical thing and I said, if I have a mix show where I can play the music maybe I could get gigs or whatever.

And my main ambition at the time was more to be a remixer than being a DJ. I didn’t know that a lot of the remixers that I was looking up to, like Larry Levan or François K or Shep Pettibone - the names that I was seeing on the records, those guys were actual DJs, because I didn’t have the information, I just saw a name, so I wanted to be a remixer. I was already some kind of DJ manipulator, doing edits of cassettes and stuff. The main thing was to make something with the music that was my own version of it.

Ben Cardew

If you had to choose between hip hop, house and disco - you are on a desert island - what would it be?

Dimitri From Paris

Oh, it would be disco, because disco is the mother of both. Even hip hop, I mean, there is slow disco that a lot of the hip hop people sampled and in the early days it wasn’t as segregated as it is today, so it was just dance music. So, definitely disco.

Ben Cardew

You started off making music for fashion houses, right?

Dimitri From Paris

Not exactly. I started dabbling in production but most of all I did a lot of remixes, because that was my initial goal. And thanks to the house music show - I mean, it wasn’t strictly house, but thanks to my mix show - I got noticed because I was playing a lot of my own edits, so a producer called me like, “Wouldn’t you come to the studio and do a remix for us?” and blah blah.

So I started doing that and it worked, really picked up really quickly because no one else was doing it and I was getting calls literally every week - and several calls a week - to do remixes of a lot of French pop stuff, which wasn’t great, but I was so happy to be sitting in the studio and learning the trade.

So I started doing that and that led me to meet a guy that was working at the most exclusive record store in Paris, which was open seven days a week until 2:00 AM in the morning. You could buy records - I mean, I think it is unique in the world, it was unique in the world. It was on the Champs-Élysées and because of all these features, it was attracting a lot of jet-set people and one of them was Karl Lagerfeld. And Karl Lagerfeld was a big client of this shop and the buyer of this shop was the special buyer for Karl and eventually they hooked up and he ended up making... this guy, Michel Gaubert, ended up making music for Karl. He wasn’t very technical and he needed someone to work with him and he knew I was more of a technical guy, so he hired me to work with him.

And that is how I started with Michel, to work in the fashion industry but I was totally a behind-the-scenes guy. And eventually that collaboration with Lagerfeld, who was also designing for Chanel, led Michel to be asked to write music, which he didn’t know how to do. He didn’t have the, you know, none of the equipment or anything, so he was giving me indications, sometimes bits of dialogue that he would take off films and stuff and I would just sample bits and bobs and had total freedom to do whatever I wanted.

The only brief was: “Whatever you do, just make it stylish.” So that is the only thing that I had as a brief and I was making a lot of small modules, like very short almost like jingles, one- to two-minute length songs that were used once every year and after a few seasons I had about 20 of them and that became the base for Sacrebleu.

Ben Cardew

You mentioned remixing a few times. I found that very interesting, that it was remixing that interested you more than making your own music.

Dimitri From Paris

True, probably because I never considered myself as a musician. I never learned any instruments; today, I still cannot play anything, but I can play everything with one finger or two. So, yeah, it is a very paradoxical thing.

A remixer is like being behind the scenes and I started also DJing because I felt it was a behind-the-scenes job, because back then the DJ was in the dark corner of the room watching everyone. And I always felt like the cat who likes to sit up very high on the... on the library or whatever, and then watch everything - that is kind of my character. And I can see what is happening but I don’t want people to see me.

Remixing is like you are not the artist and I had no idea what a producer was. So producing and remixing for me is a bit of the same thing. You just act behind the scenes and you act as a conductor. I would have loved to be an orchestral conductor… You put pieces together and they make something nice. You are trying to make something nice with all those pieces.

Ben Cardew

Your remix of Stetsasonic’s Talking All That Jazz is one of my favourite remixes.

Dimitri From Paris

One of mine too.

Ben Cardew

How did it come about?

Dimitri From Paris

People don’t know that most times you don’t choose what you remix. People hire you to remix something, because to remix something you need to have access to a lot of the original master tapes, which are not publicly available. So in the case of Stetsasonic, it was the owner of Tommy Boy, Tom Silverman, who reached out to me. He is a very interesting person because he came up with so many groundbreaking records, namely Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa.

And Tom Silverman, the Tommy Boy founder, is also the one who organised the New Music Seminar, where I learned about how doing a mix show could boost my career, so he has always been sort of a guardian angel somewhere. He came to me because I started to become a little bit notorious after Sacrebleu and I don’t know how and why he asked me to remix this, but I said, “Yeah, I mean, I love the song. I would love to do it.”

And because it was a song about sampling, I said, you know, “Why don’t I do a reverse thing where I make original music from the samples?” And I knew it mostly sampled a song from Lonnie Liston Smith called Expansions and I said, “Why don’t I get musicians to replay that and why don’t I make those disco records I rave about and go into the studio and make an actual disco record 20 years after disco has disappeared from the mainstream?”

I am very proud of it because I put together a band - it was the first time ever I worked with a band. We went to the studio, we recorded everything, everything was live and it was a real and a true labour of love. And I wasn’t really expecting anything much out of it, because the song wasn’t really a hit - it was just one of those very appreciated hip-hop songs but I didn’t see that as a hit - and it became quite famous and thanks to the remix as well.

So I am very proud of that and it did teach me that it is possible, if you put the means, to make live music. And at the time everyone was sampling - it was the beginning of French Touch and French House and it was a lot of loops - and I said, “No, I don’t want anything looped, I want everything to unfold naturally.” So that was really my reaction to the loop thing as well.

Ben Cardew

I read that you actually lost money on the remix because you were offered this fee and you got a band in.

Dimitri From Paris

Probably, yeah. I don’t even remember. It was definitely not a money issue; I just wanted to make it happen.

Ben Cardew

You mentioned French Touch. How did you feel about all that?

Dimitri From Paris

It has been reduced to filtered house music, which is what came up most importantly out of the whole movement but people like Air tend to be forgotten. It was a wide variety of things when it started. And because Daft Punk were at the head of the biggest successes, this sort of imprinted that sound to the rest of the... of the name, which is... it is what it is, you know?

I was part of the whole scene of young French producers, getting interest from the UK press and then the rest of the world after that. Everyone moved through his own path and did whatever they wanted. Now there is just quite recently, like the last year or so, a comeback or revival of the French Touch sound and it is only a revival of the disco house sound, which is… it is good for what it is but it was never really what I was about. I am an anti-loop person. I hate looping stuff around because I find it very sterile.

It sounds good for 20 seconds and then it sounds really boring. So, yeah, it is not my thing but people like it. A lot of people got into dance music and house music through that, so I totally respect that. It is part of my history as well and I don’t have anything bad to say about it.

Ben Cardew

You didn’t release another album until Cruising Attitude in 2003. Why was that?

Dimitri From Paris

I never thought of making an album in the first place, so that sort of happened and then there was pressure to do another one - maybe self-inflicted pressure - and I got a few scares with samples, which totally put me off sampling again. The liberty of doing stuff without caring was gone, because I didn’t even think anybody would listen to the first time, so I was like, I can do that, I can do whatever, you know, who cares, no one cares. Now that people actually cared and were watching it, it kind of froze me creatively, so that took a much longer time.

We talked about starting Stetsasonic. I did that soon after Sacrebleu and I was really happy with the experience and said if I would ever do music again, I would want to do it like this. So I started writing the stuff with an idea that musicians will replay it and they ended up replaying it. So it took a lot of time, a lot of money and I think when it came out, the world was not expecting that - they were more into whatever French House was doing.

I don’t regret that I did it and I am happy that I did it but it didn’t really put me in a mood of doing albums again because it was too much effort and with not much return. Not even people noticing, really. It is not so much the money, it is just, you know, people enjoying it.

Ben Cardew

To take things to the present day: early this year, you released the Nassau Excursions with François K, which is a great EP. You are referring to Compass Point Studios, I assume. Why? What do you love about Compass Point?

Dimitri From Paris

Well, there was definitely a sound coming out of that, which was mostly due to the musicians that were making it. There are a lot of musical genres that actually originate from one place, one studio, and that studio has the same group of people working in there. Motown is like this, Philadelphia is like this, and there isn’t a genre, a Nassau genre, but there is definitely a sound that you can hear on Robert Palmer, you can hear on Grace Jones - you can hear it, if you know.

With Philly, I was thinking that people were copying each other because they sounded the same. No, it is just the same guys playing different artists - same guys, different labels, same guys. And it is the same thing with Compass Point. It is Sly and Robbie, it is Wally Badarou, it is all those guys playing, the same guys arranging and you have a lot of different artists from different fields that have this thing in common, which is binding the sound together. And for a lack of a better word, we call it a Compass Point sound. It has always been a sound that I love without knowing all those details that I am telling now.

So I think once you understand the links between all those things that you have been loving for ages, without being able to join the dots, the moment you join the dots, you want to share this with the rest of the world. And that was our idea. François, obviously, was even part of it, because he did work there [Compass Point], he did record there and met with pretty much everyone that was involved, including Chris Blackwell, the owner of Island.

It is just tribute, homage - I don’t know how you call it - and it is something that is still going on. We have a lot of music, probably six or seven other tracks that hopefully we will be able to release, so it is... yeah, it is a nice project.

I wasn’t expecting the reaction that it got, which is a very positive one. I mean, I wasn’t expecting it to be negative but I thought it would be much more niche than what it ended up being, so it is great when things happen like that, when you manage to touch people and share something that you really like and they get it. I mean, what... what more can you wish for?

Ben Cardew

You strike me as being someone for whom the details count, if you see what I mean.

Dimitri From Paris

I always said, if you show me a square, I always start to see the four angles before looking at the middle. So, yeah, it is... it is annoying for a lot of people.

Some listening

Julia Holter - Fantasy

A lot of songs involve the word “fantasy”. But few of them sound as genuinely fantastical as Julia Holter’s new one; this is fantasy in the sense of a slightly unreal but very pleasant daydream, one where you imagine yourself with huge birds’ wings rather than an expensive car.

The song glides in on a gilded cloud of synths, to which Holter adds one of her most perfectly diaphanous vocals, throwing in a brilliantly melancholic melodic twist when you least expect it. She then briefly rocks out, if by “rock” you understand My Bloody Valentine at their most warmly fuzzy.

Black Bananas - Turkey Burgers

…. and right on cue, Turkey Burgers, the first new music from Jennifer Herrema’s other band in 15 years, is like the rotted alter ego of Holter’s Fantasy, a sprawling dream that wanders in stinking, somewhere between Funkadelic, a summer synth jam, Exile on Main Street and Bitches Brew, topped with Herrema’s idiosyncratic vocal, like a vulture crawling out of a sewer. Needless to say it is wonderful - so much so, in fact, that you won’t even miss Royal Trux. And that is saying something.

Kneecap - Cold at the Top (Shanti Celeste remix)

Who had Kneecap down as producing the song of the summer? Certainly not me - unless your summer is more one of rioting in the streets than relaxing by the pool.

Shanti Celeste, though, had different thoughts, transforming the (OK actually quite relaxed) electro disco of Cold at the Top into a laid-back but totally thrilling Mediterranean banger, bringing a tiny guitar (?) lick from the original to the front of the song, submerging it in congas and basically getting rid of the vocals. (Not that’s there’s anything wrong with the vocals, just that they tend to dominate any Kneecap song.) If there’s any justice in the world you will hear this everywhere this summer, you will enquire who the song is by and you will not believe the DJ when he tells you.

PJ Harvey - Voyager

It turns out that cosmic PJ Harvey is the PJ Harvey we all need in 2026. Voyager, her first new song in three years, is written in the voice of the NASA probe Voyager 2 and Christ is it beautiful, like an orchestra floating off into space with Polly Jean at the helm, looking for another world in which to get over the heartbreak. it’s probably my favourite thing she has done since Let England Shake - and yet totally, utterly different to that record.

Roy Montgomery and Martha Skye Murphy - Cloudburst

Somehow the most unexpected thing about this song, the first fruits of a new album by New Zealand composer / guitarist Roy Montgomery and vocalist Martha Skye Murphy, is the vaguely conventional vocal melody that drops into focus four minutes into the song.

By this point that listener has been tumbled and floated into orbit by beaming thickets of acoustic guitar and Skye Murphy’s gorgeous operatic tone, in a way that I’ve been trying to avoid comparing to the Cocteau Twins but really can’t any more. The effect is like finally seeing a dolphin in one of those Magic Eye posters from the 90s: shocking and yet kind of inevitable when you finally get there. Needless to say, Cloudburst is far more beautiful than that, though.

The playlists

Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026.

Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026.

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify: The newest and the bestest.

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The Sinatra name will forever be associated with the musical mainstream, snugly tied to big-band jazz, Vegas casino shows and comfy classics. But if Frank was cosy and straight, a glass of good whisky by the fire, his daughter Nancy is one of pop’s great subversive forces, her work filled with rebellion, unease and obtuseness, a bottle of cheap bourbon spiked with basement psychedelics.

Born into musical royalty, it would have been easy for Nancy Sinatra to follow in her father’s footsteps. Instead she sang songs about drugs, taking revenge on her boyfriend, robbing cowboys and more, a turn that must have delighted her very anti-counter culture dad.

Some of Nancy’s music was inflammatory - see Sugar Town, the 1966 ode to LSD that shot to the top of the easy-listening chart; some of it was heart-breaking - Down From Dover has to be one of the saddest songs ever recorded; and a lot of it was brilliantly strange, like Some Velvet Morning, with long-time collaborator Lee Hazlewood, which was inspired by Greek mythology but still doesn’t appear to make any easy sense. Or how about Somethin’ Stupid a classic song about an unpredictable love affair that Nancy creeped up by singing with her father?

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Nancy - who is very much still alive but hasn’t made a record in years - has personality in glorious excess. But it didn’t always come easy. Her first records, the likes of Cuff Links and a Tie Clip and Like I Do, released on her father’s Reprise label, were awful, an ultra-lite bubblegum that couldn’t even stick. And it wasn’t until meeting Hazlewood that Nancy started to really fly.

“It was Reprise head of A&R, Jimmy Bowen, who, in a last ditch effort to keep me from being dropped from the label, teamed me up with Lee Hazlewood 60 years ago,” Sinatra said in a Facebook post from 2025.

Hazlewood, who was then best known for his work with Duane Eddy, apparently wanted Nancy to sing “like a 16-year-old girl who screwed truck drivers” rather than in the anonymous higher register she had used previously. And Sinatra obliged, with the pair hitting musical - if not chart - gold on their first single, So Long Babe in October 1965.

Technically, I’m writing about Nancy Sinatra here not Lee Hazlewood. But it would be pointless to deny the incredible influence he had on Sinatra’s career over the following decade.

Not all of Sinatra’s great songs were recorded with Hazlewood - 1976’s admirably breezy Kinky Love, for example, was without him - but the vast majority of Nancy’s best work came between So Long Babe and 1972’s Nancy & Lee Again album, with Hazlewood writing, producing and singing on classics like Some Velvet Morning, These Boots Are Made For Walkin’, Summer Wine and more. Consider the gulf in quality between 1968’s collaborative Nancy & Lee album and 1969’s Nancy, a rather limp collection produced by Billy Strange, and you can see how vital Lee Hazlewood was to Nancy Sinatra’s music.

This is not to reduce Nancy’s contribution. Because if Sinatra’s best work was with Lee Hazlewood, then Hazlewood’s best work was definitely with Sinatra. (Great though Cowboy in Sweden undeniably is.) When I think about Nancy Sinatra’s music - and often when I talk about it here - I am thinking about the alchemical combination of Nancy and Lee, whatever the name on the record sleeve.

“We had sort of a love / hate relationship,” Sinatra told Best Classic Bands. “Maybe it was a sexual tension because we never had any kind of affair. I don’t know exactly what it was but it worked.”

Nancy didn’t write songs, produce them or play an instrument. But she sang the living hell out of her songs, with an incredible emotional range in her vocals. Down From Dover, a tale of unmarried pregnancy that ends on tragedy, is almost unbearably moving, with Nancy’s final verse so rawly emotional you can barely believe she’s singing someone else’s song (in this case Dolly Parton’s.)

These Boots Are Made For Walkin’, by contrast, is full of sass and energy; Jackson is hilarious, as Nancy side eyes Lee’s brassy philanderer; The Last of the Secret Agents? is a preposterous novelty tune; Kinky Love is ethereal and erotic; You Only Live Twice infinitely classy and bold. And so on.

Frequently, Sinatra and Lee would duet, his gravelly baritone the beast to Sinatra’s sultry beauty, although this tended to mean each singer taking turns on the microphone, rather than their voices blending in any conventional way. “He [Lee] didn’t like singing with somebody,” Sinatra told grammy.com. “He would prefer - even though they were duets, a contradiction in terms - to have us sing separately.”

Perhaps the greatest example of this is the unsettlingly beautiful Some Velvet Morning, from Nancy & Lee, in which Lee’s vocals are delivered in a menacing four / four time signature and Nancy’s come in an eerie three / four, as if unseen forces are struggling to keep the duo’s dangerous chemistry down. Nobody has ever sounded like Nancy and Lee, their relationship one of the greatest vocal partnerships in history.

“It was a very comfortable process,” Sinatra told grammy.com of recording with Lee. “The studio was familiar; we were all friends. The challenge was trying to create vocals that had power and magic to them. It wasn’t easy to do but Lee’s songs were really fairy tales - and telling stories was what we did.”

Sinatra’s music with Hazlewood was extremely unusual in its rejection of 1960s pop norms and simple emotions. This is reflected in the musical beds that Hazlewood cooked up for Sinatra, employing some of the best studio musicians that money could buy.

There’s the exquisite and instantly recognisable double bass plunge on These Boots Are Made For Walkin’ or the eerily high-pitched strings on Some Velvet Morning, which operate right at the top end of tolerable; or the autoharp and backwards guitar lines of Sand; or the orchestral / fuzz guitar combination that puts the nervous electricity into Lightning’s Girl. Classics all.

You could look at Nancy Sinatra’s background, her nepo baby privilege, and say she was born into stardom. But the reality is far more complex. True, Nancy began her career on her father’s TV series The Frank Sinatra Show and, true, she was signed to his label. But, for many years, that delivered nothing tangible and Nancy Sinatra could have easily fallen into oblivion.

That she didn’t is thanks to sheer musical chemistry and the courage to take risks. What Nancy had with Lee Hazlewood was magic, a perfect creative pairing that produced some of the most unusual but moving pop music of the 1960s and beyond. “It was something different about the two of us that captured the fancy and the imagination of the public,” Sinatra explained to grammy.com. “It’s weird how those things happen, those unexplained magical pairings.”

Some listening

Zora Jones - 50 Bullets

On 50 Bullets - and, in fact, on a lot of her forthcoming album 50 Bullets to the Heart - Zora Jones has nailed the crossover between pop and club music, by being 100% pop and 100% club at the same time. The result is that 50 Bullets has both a tune the milkman would feel empowered to whistle, and a whole bucket load of glittering, wobbling, stuttering electronic effects, like a particularly melancholy Destiny’s Child staring into the deep-space abyss.

Nikki Nair - Default Mode

Bless Nikki Nair, patron saint of the wobbly banger. In the intro to his new EP, The Sick Dimension, Nair says that, “In my mind, I’m making normal house music but when I get feedback, I guess it does not sound like normal house music to most people.” Which is just the kind of thing you like to hear from your producers.

And, to be fair, Default Mode, the first song released from the EP, doesn’t exactly sound like your standard house floor filler, particularly in the first half, where a stretched out vocal turn meets a syncopated beat that sounds like Junior Vasquez at his most abstract and a host of splattering electronic noises. Underpinning it all, though, is a bright melodic edge, robot harmonies rising like a rainbow staircase, that could just about pass for pop music reflected back in an oily puddle.

Pye Corner Audio - Cycle

If I didn’t know better, I would swear Pye Corner Audio was trying to flirt with me. The influences on the new album are “Stereolab, Spacemen 3, Harmonia, Cluster, Suicide” and opening single Cycle is described as an “indie-dance banger seemingly beamed in from an episode of Snub TV in 1991”, featuring Ride / Oasis’s Andy Bell. Oh la la.

I could hardly resist, could I? Although, funnily enough, I only read all this after realising that Cycle was a towering work of electronic shoegaze that has the psychedelic brightness to burn off clouds at 100km, a giant pyramid eye broadcasting huge electronic vibes at illegal frequencies. The only problem is that there’s no Glastonbury this year, robbing Cycle of 1,000 BBC syncs and 1 million special moments.

Jah Wobble and Tian Qiyi - Tomorrow Never Knows

Is there any point in covering Tomorrow Never Knows? Perhaps not. But I love Jah Wobble - a man prone to finding the dub in the unlikeliest of situations - and his forthcoming album of Beatles reinterpretations in the company of his sons John T and Charlie Wardle is a riot of unlikley fun, splashing the Fab Four in deep dub bass and Chinese classical music.

Their version of Tomorrow Never Knows manages to pull off just the right amount of reverence, which is very little, as the trio take the song out for a Krautrock ramble, substituting a kind of bucolic warmth for the sharp focus of The Beatles original.

Things I’ve done

Line Noise podcast - With Victor Calderone

I spoke to New York DJ hero Victor Calderone about 18-hour sets, phone-free zones, Bleep, working with Joey Beltram, signing to Sire and - of course - remixing Madonna. We also chatted about his new New York residency, ma++er, at Brooklyn club Refuge, where he is to be found spinning 12-hour sets that will take you into tomorrow evening.

RPS Music - Interview with Yves

I sat down with K-pop sensation Yves backstage at Sala Apolo in Barcelona during her European tour. She discussed breaking out of the traditional K-pop box to experiment with genres like house and rock, the creative chemistry with her producer IOAH and how PinkPantheress inspired her sound.

The playlists

These playlists are made for walkin’!

(Other exercise is also allowed, if not legally recommended.)

Apple Music: The newest and bestest 2026.

Spotify: the newest and bestest 2026.

Apple Music: The newest and the bestest

Spotify: The newest and the bestest.

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There’s a playlist on Apple Music called “Inspired by Chic”. It might as well be called “breathes oxygen”, I thought to myself, as I wandered down to Barcelona’s port to see Chic at the Blaumari festival last night, such is the influence of the US disco group and its co-founder and guitar player extraordinaire Nile Rodgers.

Chic not only produced some of the most indelible, undeniable hits of the disco era - think Everybody Dance, Le Freak, I Want Your Love etc. - but their music also provided the basis for many foundational hip hop songs (notable Good Times, which was plundered for Rapper’s Delight), while Rodgers and fellow Chic co-founder, bass player Bernard Edwards, would go on to produce hits for everyone from David Bowie to Madonna. Edwards sadly died in 1996 but the last two decades have seen Rodgers only increase in influence, co-writing songs like Daft Punk’s Get Lucky and Le Sserafim’s Unforgiven.

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Welcome to part two of my guide to those Far-Out Son of Lungs, the Future Sound of London.

In part one, published last week, I took you through Stakker Humanoid, Papua New Guinea, Tales of Ephidrina, Cascade and their Radio One internet broadcast. In part two, though, things are about to get really weird. So strap in.

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6 Future Sound of London - Lifeforms (Path 4)

Lifeforms the album was released in May 1994 and charted at number six in the UK. Two and a half months later FSOL released Lifeforms, the single, with the Cascade model very much on their mind. The single release comprised seven “paths” of Lifeforms, totalling almost 39 minutes of music and also featured the vocals of Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins, whose penultimate album Four-Calendar Café had been released at the end of the following year.

What should have been a landmark collaboration, however, proved unsatisfying for Fraser, who complained that “I sang my heart out for eleven f*cking hours on that record and all that is on it is something that sounds like a sample.” Dougans disagreed, claiming that the duo were under strict instructions to use the vocals that Fraser’s people had delivered on DAT unedited.

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On Thursday evening at Primavera Sound 2026 I wandered into the Auditori and fell straight into wonderland. Lucrecia Dalt and her band were on stage, their music a spell-binding mix of melody, jazz, drama, pop, style, colour and adventure that built a bridge from her native Colombia to New Mexico, via Berlin, Barcelona and more. There was, at that point in time, nowhere I would rather have been.

Rewind 24 hours and I was in the Radio Primavera Sound studio on the Primavera grounds, speaking to Lucrecia about depressurised mambo, the voice at its most revealing, horror films, why she still dances and much, much more.

You can watch the results on the RPS Music YouTube. But I know you love words so here, for paid subscribers, you have the lightly edited transcript.

Ben Cardew: I wanted to talk about your most recent album, A Danger to Ourselves, which came out September 2025. Am I right that the genesis of the album came from a period where you had to slow down and take things kind of easier?

Lucrecia Dalt: Definitely. Yeah, that was part of it. I guess it was the first time that I made an album in such conditions, not doing everything at once because I had to stop for health reasons. I gave myself the opportunity to just focus on music-making.

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If you’re going to choose a name as showy as The Future Sound of London, then you’re going to have to work for it.

Luckily FSOL, the British electronic duo of Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans, really put their back into it, putting their names to Acid House classics, dance anthems, sprawling psychedelic adventures, ambient excursions and proto-internet broadcasts in a career that had spanned five remarkable decades.

FSOL were genuine chart stars in the 90s, major label contract and all, brushing the top 10 on a number of occasions, and later worked with Noel Gallagher on what should have been his second solo album, after remixing Oasis’ Falling Down into woozy oblivion. But they are also strangely underrated today, perhaps a victim of their own tentacular ambition, blowing up heads into monstrous psychedelic bubbles for the past two decades when they could have been rinsing Papua New Guinea for all its financial worth.

Never mind. Those who know, know. And for all of them - as well as the unconverted - I bring you 10 moments from the Future Sound of London to gloriously expand your mind. (Part two out next week.)

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Read anything about My Bloody Valentine and inevitably it will go on about guitars: glide guitars, drone guitars, sludge guitars, tremolo guitars, detuned guitars, distorted guitars, womb guitars, loud guitars, guitar textures, guitar experiments guitars guitars guitars.

Which is fair enough, really, when you consider that My Bloody Valentine are one of the most innovative guitar bands of all time, a group that managed to reinvent the guitar sound time and again during the late 80s and early 90s, to create some of the most thrillingly visceral music of this - or any - era.

But, among this avalanche of guitars, something can get missed. Because My Bloody Valentine were also one of the first rock bands to seriously experiment with samplers and electronic music techniques, their catholic musical tastes driving them towards Public Enemy, Andrew Weatherall, London pirate radio and more.

In fact, I like to think that even if you stripped away all the incredible guitars from My Bloody Valentine, you’d still have one of the most brilliantly innovative groups of their generation. And, with MBV playing Primavera Sound this weekend, this piece is my attempt to show it, via five songs that prove MBV’s electronic chops.

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Primavera Sound in Barcelona starts today, with the first of the Ciutat concerts. I am going and I hope you are too.

I asked Pau Cristòful, from the festival’s booking team, for his unmissable recommendations for Primavera Sound 20206. And he even threw in some insight into how the various acts got booked.

Pau Cristòful

This is a personal list of tips from within the most special and lesser-known programming of this next edition. Also, no clashes.

Please mind the set times might slightly differ depending on last-minute changes, changeovers etc so always keep an eye on our app to make sure you have the right ones.

The essence of Primavera mainly relies on us not only securing top headliners but heavily working on all tiers, trying to program unique shows year after year. Also make sure to visit all the most special stages of the festival such as the Auditorium, Pulse (adventurous dance open air) and Warehouse (more deep electronic music).

This is just a tiny part of our line-up, I encourage you to explore the rest as well.

Ciutat program

Monday June 1

Current 93 - P62

We have been working on this for years so couldn’t open the week in a more special way.

Current 93 are a cult British band that come from the early industrial scene (Throbbing Gristle, Nurse With Wound, etc) and developed into mystical neofolk.

It’s one of the favourite bands of Fra (head of booking). Lately, they are performing less and less so this is definitely quite unique.

As totally unexpected recent news from them, Drain Gang idol Bladee included them as the only collab on his recent album.

Tuesday June 2

Cardiacs + Faten Kanaan - La 2

No less cult and legendary are Cardiacs, an ever changing schizophrenic art / progressive rock band that will perform at Primavera what is supposed to be one of their last ever shows (following the death of their frontman Tim Smith and the release of their critically acclaimed album LSD).

Way more minimalistic but also interesting, Faten Kanaan will open with her intriguing Baroque-inspired keyboard compositions.

Wednesday June 3

Melt-Banana - Apolo - 12.10AM

Another band we have been trying to invite for ages: for more than 35 years, Japanese band Melt-Banana have been one of the most exciting, fresh noise punk acts in the world. They are also performing on Thursday at the main site but you should really try to see them in a venue as well.

Their first album in 11 years, 3+5 (2024), shows that they are still in an unbeatable shape.

In my mind, their music really matches the kawaii influence on hyperpop acts such as Hannah Diamond, who is performing on the same night (Model/Actriz and Serpent are also playing so it’s definitely a great opening party, both “punk” and incredibly fun).

Sunday June 7

Titanic - P62 - 8.30PM

Everything that cellist Mabe Fratti does would be on this list. She is definitely one of the best artists around imo (her solo albums, Titanic and her collabs are all worth checking, including the recent album with Bill Orcutt).

Titanic is her project with Hector Tosta (aka I. La Católica). Together with a band they play really epic but spacious music, incredibly beautiful but also with doom energy.

Konono N°1 - P62 - 9.30PM

Playing just after Titanic.

The line-up was almost done when I heard Konono no1 were touring again - what a crazy way to finalise it!!!

Active since the late 60s but only recognised internationally since 2005, this band from Democratic Republic of the Congo plays with electric likembes and recycled percussion instruments, all amplified in a rudimentary way which gives them a unique distorted sound.

You can think of many later so-called “global sound” music that was influenced by them, but they were first.

Black Country, New Road will play after Konono and also shouldn’t be missed (but I am sure you know them already).

Main festival

Thursday June 4

Cameron Winter - Auditorium - 5PM

I mean, duh! The auditorium has only 3,000 seats so make sure to get your festival wristband in advance and be there a few hours in advance to secure your seat.

Agriculture - Port - 8.55PM

Abel from our booking team is my go-to person when it comes to metal. Through the years, Primavera has hosted an extensive list of the genre’s greats: from Slayer, Mötorhead, Carcass and Napalm Death to Liturgy and Wiegedood.

This year’s best example is the mind-blowing black metal band Agriculture.

Reappeared sludge metal band Kylesa (playing on Friday) is another great tip.

Epic and expansive new-gen GY!BE vibes band caroline playing the auditorium at the same time are also highly recommended.

Brìghde Chaimbeul - Warehouse - 23.05PM

The warehouse stage is known for hosting the most deep, exquisite and “underground” electronic music of the festival. We like to contrast it with musicians that are really fitting while not electronic at all (like Mohammad Reza Mortazavi too, who is playing on Friday).

Brìghde Chaimbeul plays Scottish smallpipes and performs a modern / experimental take on Celtic folklore.

Rustie - Pulse - 2AM

OK this is a crazy one for us. For many years, we have been dreaming with Calum (Numbers) about inviting him to the Off Week party we used to do.

It’s finally happening: Rustie’s first show outside of Glasgow since 2017 (and only show he is doing so far) will be at Primavera Sound.

He became a hugely influential on the early 2010s, reinventing bass and dubstep with colourful euphoria (considered a blueprint for SOPHIE and PC Music). He is now back with insane maximalist noisy tracks.

The Pulse stage has a reduced capacity of about 1,000 people and there are normally lines to access so make sure to go on time if you want to witness it.

Oli XL - Warehouse - 2.20AM

OK I lied, this one is a clash with Rustie but is definitely worth the attention. Oli XL’s fragmented and processed hyperpop beats are instantly recognisable.

Primavera will be the first festival where he plays live. He will perform together with Valeria Litvakov.

Friday June 5

Mark William Lewis - 6PM - Auditorium

When I heard the show that Mark played in Barcelona a few months ago lasted for two hours I raised an eyebrow: ADHD and overexposure to music means that I can’t really stay for more than 30 minutes in front of something if I don’t really, really love it (not even speaking about the fact that a “new” artist with a short catalogue plays for that long). When it finished, I was wishing they would have played for double the time.

Coming from the Dean Blunt-adjacent scene and being the first artist released on A24, his songs are slow burners that remind me both of Slint and The Durutti Column.

He is just starting and already feels like an all time classic.

Einstürzende Neubauten - 7.30PM - Auditorium

They don’t really need an introduction. Industrial music reference and one of the best live bands in the planet. Every time they play the festival, it ends up being of the best shows of the edition. This is the first time they play the auditorium so it will be even more special.

Show up early in order to secure your seat.

Merzbow - 9PM - Auditorium

THE Merzbow - someone that has almost become an adjective by itself because of how noisy and intense his music is.

We have been trying to get him for years. Bring earplugs (and keep them for My Bloody Valentine the day after).

Joan La Barbara - 10PM - Warehouse

Being almost 80 years old, Joan La Barbara is a pioneer and reference in vocal experimentation. She has collaborated with all-time greats such as John Cage, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass and Merce Cunningham.

Definitely contemporary experimental music royalty.

I recently learned that she performed the sounds of one of the “Newborn” creature in Alien: Resurrection and I felt that was worth mentioning.

Mohammad Reza Mortazavi - 00.35AM - Warehouse

I booked Mohammad in 2018 (for a not-Primavera related event) and I have been wanting to invite him to the festival ever since.

This Iranian musician is known for being one of the best percussionists in the world, performing with Persian instruments such as tombak and daf and amassing fans both on the folkloric and the virtuoso worlds and on the electronic one - Ricardo Villalobos released a remix of one of his tracks on the prestigious label Latency last year.

Completely based on improvisation, his shows will take you into a deep journey that for sure you won’t forget.

This is really one of my biggest tips for the festival so don’t miss it!!

Hekt - 2AM - Pulse

EDM has stopped being a guilty pleasure a long time ago, but even if it was still the case, Hekt’s last album would get validated by the purists since it’s on the great label Numbers (that released SOPHIE and Rustie among many others).

Jokes aside, this record is really great and it has both a huge mainstream potential and a fresh, fun and exciting twist to it. Summer vibes.

Remember the Pulse stage has a limited reduced capacity so be there in advance to secure your place.

Debasement live - 2.45AM - Pulse

Right after will be the time for this duo formed by Margo XS (who is producing for Zara Larsson and Kim Petras) and Ali from the punk band Special Interest.

Together they are releasing electroclash and bass music hits.

This one will have a crazy energy for sure.

Underground Resistance - 4.05AM - Schwarzkopf

The Detroit techno institution, reference for MANY things to come after. Not an easy one to see or book, Elena was considering flying to Detroit to get answers from them a few weeks ago but now everything seems on track.

Truly legendary.

Saturday June 6

These New Puritans - 6PM - Auditorium

Their trajectory keeps getting better and better, developing from their early post-punk hype origins into a more sophisticated, Coil-influenced sound.

A goth way to start the journey.

Beverly Glenn-Copeland and Elizabeth Copeland - 7.30PM - Auditorium

NOT TO BE MISSED!!

Beverly Glenn-Copeland released Keyboard Fantasies in 1986, which for many years remained an obscure New Age gem for diggers.

It got reissued many years later, including a cover album with tracks from Arca, Bon Iver, Blood Orange, Julia Holter etc.

As a result, Beverly has connected with new generations of fans that recognise him as an icon for both ambient / folk music and transgender rights.

He made his last album Laughter in the Summer (2026) together with his wife and it is both a letter of love to each other and to life. They will perform together at Primavera, adding more musicians and a choir onstage.

Being over 80 years old, this is expected to be one of Beverly’s last shows.

I am literally dropping a tear while writing this down. This one will be really emotional.

res_ - 10PM - Warehouse (Hivern Discs showcase)

With practically no presence or information online, res_ is the project from Oma Totem (one of the best, most underrated Catalan electronic music producers) and the poet Juns Castella.

With an artsy approach, this is a quite unique proposal and one that I always recommend to check (it’s my tip when it comes to local acts to discover at the festival).

Lechuga Zafiro & Verraco: Hyperverbena - 10.30PM - Plenitude

Another clash, but worth the exception: the Latin label TraTraTrax has been one of the most exciting and refreshing editions to the dance music catalogue, merging their local references with the spirit of revolutionary bass record labels such as Hessle Audio.

“Hyperverbena” feels like a celebration of their universe, amplified by the great visuals from the Latin-born / Barcelona-based duo Proxima.

Expect it to be wild and fun.

Joey Valence & Brae - 12.25AM - Schwarzkopf

Party-ready hip-hop, like a modern version of the Beastie Boys.

Beatrice M. - 01.30AM - Warehouse (Hivern Discs showcase)

Great “new” French DJ that blends tech house with deep dubstep and contained trance vibes. Tasteful.

Nick León live AV - 02.50AM - Schwarzkopf

Another adjacent to the TraTraTrax scene, the Miami producer merges Latin-influenced electronic music with a pop sentiment that has led him to produce for artists such as Rosalía, Oklou and Erika de Casier.

He will present his acclaimed album A Tropical Entropy (2025) with an AV show.

When it was announced that Michael Rother was coming to Catalonia to play the Barcelona Psych Fest, someone in the office joked that I had to go and speak to him because I had already interviewed everyone else in Kraftwerk.

That’s not quite true - Ralf Hütter resists - but it is also unfair on Michael Rother who was in Kraftwerk, briefly, but also formed part of two of the greatest Krautrock acts in history: Neu!, which he formed with Klaus Dinger, and Harmonia with Cluster’s Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius. (The name, as you will see below, was slightly tongue in cheek, give the inter-band disagreements.)

Rother’s solo career is also brilliant - see his 1977 debut, Flammende Herzen, for evidence - and he is still doing it at a sprightly 75: 2020’s Dreaming is a gorgeous album that I highly recommend. And so I did interview Michael Rother, not because he was briefly in Kraftwerk - although we did go into that - but because he is the epitome of freedom in music, of not being a “copycat”, as he calls it, and instead following his muse wherever it might take him.

The interview came out on the Line Noise podcast this Monday. But for you, highly appreciated paid subscribers, I put together some written highlights from the interview. Enjoy.

Ben Cardew:

You’re playing Parallel 62 in Barcelona tonight. The concert is billed as “Michael Rother plays Neu!, Harmonia, and solo works.” How do you choose what to play? That’s 60 years of music.

Michael Rother:

Some promoters in some countries like to present Neu! in a special way, because in some countries Neu! is the most famous - maybe in most, actually - but I’d like to be fair. Maybe some people know the history of my bands, Neu! and Harmonia, and Harmonia in the ‘70s was sort of rejected by the audience and that always bugged me. So when Harmonia got the recognition, 25 years later when everything had already moved on, that gave me great pleasure.

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