Flying Lotus was born to be on Warp. Real name Steven Ellison, the great-nephew of jazz greats John and Alice Coltrane has been making surreal, wildly experimental beats since he bought his first Roland MC-505 Groovebox at the age of 15. He released one album (‘1983’, named for the year of his birth) on indie label Plug Research in 2006 before fulfilling his destiny to sign with Warp the following year. Since then he’s put out five albums with the label, starting with the textured soundscapes of 2008’s ‘Los Angeles’ (named for the place of his birth). Follow-ups ‘Cosmogramma’ (2010), ‘Until The Quiet Comes’ (2012), ‘You’re Dead’ (2014) and ‘Flamagra’ (2019) have established him as one of the world’s most inventive beatmakers, able to integrate elements of prog, jazz, hip hop, r’n’b and club music into one dizzying whole. In 2016 he made his feature film debut, directing the body horror comedy Kuso, while in his live performances he’s pioneered the use of 3D visuals, creating shows which are, like his music, truly psychedelic and constantly evolving.

Cover story for Mixmag, January 2020. Continue reading.

Sometimes you have to unlearn the rules. While growing up near Totnes in Devon, Rosie Lowe started learning piano and violin at the age of five. Later she picked up guitar as well, and did her musical apprenticeship in a jazz band. Yet it was only when she cast her instruments aside that she started writing from the heart.

“After I moved up to study at Goldsmiths I abandoned the piano and the guitar,” she remembers. “I got a computer with some Logic software and just started recording everything with my voice. I sang what was going on in my head: the drums, the bass and everything. It was the first time I was creating something that felt really ‘me’.”

Just like her music, her lyrics too come straight from her subconscious. Perhaps that’s why she can deal with topics as weighty as feminism and therapy with such a light touch. “I never know what I’m about to write about until I’ve written it,” she says. “I can’t really remember writing my songs. When it’s something I’m really feeling, I write it quickly – usually just over a couple of hours. When I’m on a vibe, I’m on it.”

Her debut record, ‘Control’, is full of these heartfelt moments, but she has no worries about letting people into her world. “This record is so personal to me, and I’ve lived with the music for so long,” she says. “I don’t want it to just be mine anymore, I want it to be other people’s too.”

Originally published in Mixmag, February 2016.

Tink, real name Trinity Home, was 19-years-old and watching TV in her parents’ basement in Chicago suburb Calumet City when she got the call from Timbaland. “I thought my manager was playing with me,” she remembers. “But then she put him through. He said: ‘I like your song, you’re talented. I want to meet you.’ How crazy is that?”

The song in question was ‘Don’t Tell Nobody’, which Timbaland was being played by its producers Da Internz. Two days later, Tink was on a plane to meet him. “I was nervous as fuck,” she says. “But he was humble to me! That blew my mind. He told me he started in his basement. I was like: ‘Damn! I record in my basement too right now!’”

In fact, Tink had already recorded and released five mixtapes from her parents’ basement, starting with ‘Winter’s Diary’ when she was 17. She had been singing in a church choir since she was a child, but got the confidence to perform when she posted a clip of herself freestyling over Clipse’s ‘Grindin’ to her brother’s Facebook page. Her mixtapes showcased the two sides of her: the soulful balladeer and the rapper with Minaj-like flow.

What she didn’t have yet was one coherent sound. That’s where Timbaland, who’s producing her debut LP in Miami, comes in. “For a long time I was searching,” she says. “The music I’m doing with Tim now is still my voice and message, but his production has a sound nobody can duplicate.”

Originally published in Mixmag, August 2015.

Serbia’s Exit Festival celebrated its fifteenth birthday this summer with its biggest ever year. When John Newman and Manu Chao headlined on Saturday night there were 52,000 people inside the Petrovaradin Fort in Novi Sad, breaking the event’s previous attendance record set back in 2007. This year’s festival was a particularly memorable one for its founder Dušan Kovačević, who proposed to his girlfriend onstage midway through Capital Cities’ covers-filled set on Sunday night. The main stage also witnessed an exemplary greatest hits performance from Faithless, Motörhead’s Lemmy growling his way through ‘Ace of Spades’ and a Hudson Mohawke set whose basslines threatened to shake the very foundations of the 18^th Century fortress.

The festival’s famed dance arena, which runs past 8am each day, drew crowds equal to the main stage. The weekend saw huge sets from the likes of Hardwell and Oliver Heldens on Friday night, Martin Garrix, MK and local hero Marko Nastić on Saturday night and Leftfield live and Dixon on Sunday night. The wildest party of the festival though was saved for Simian Mobile Disco and Roman Flügel’s back-to-back set at sunrise on Monday morning. They were joined by dancers dressed as roman centurions as they gave Exit 2015 a euphoric send-off. You won’t find many better dance arenas in world music – believe us, we’ve looked.

For Mixmag, September 2015.

Read: Exit and Sea Dance’s Founder is Harnessing the Power of Rave to Prevent Another Balkan War

It’s snowing so much in Bansko, Bulgaria that even ‘12 Inches Of Snow’ feels like an inadequate soundtrack. It’s more like ‘3 Feet High And Rising’. That’s good news for Horizon Festival, which has taken over the town for a week. Ask any adrenaline junkie and they’ll tell you there’s nothing quite like skiing on a mountain of pure, white powder.

The festival’s main stage, Mountain Creek, springs up beside the slope towards the bottom of Bansko’s sublime main ski run. This means on the opening Sunday afternoon you could ski right into Craig Charles’ two hour funk and soul set, get some ‘Sexual Healing’, then just coast back to town.

After a hard day on the piste and on the piss, the festival keeps the party going long into the wee small hours by taking over a host of Bansko nightclubs and filling them with a well-shuffled pack of DJs. First up there’s Jack’s House, where barmaids light cigarettes and shots with flamethrowers while the likes of Bulgarian native Nick Nikolov and Brits like Paleman and El-B chart a course from euphoric house to classic garage.

Just round the corner there’s Oxygen, a tiny, packed sweatbox where Om Unit lays down furious drum and bass while a guy with a t-shirt saying ‘Laughing Gaz’ is selling nitrous and giggling all the way to the bank. The festival even takes over a couple of Go Go clubs, like the Red Rose ‘Erotic Dance Club’. You haven’t really experienced Eastern European debauchery until you’ve seen strippers hassle startled dance music heads, but the real action is behind the decks where The Menendez Brothers and Benton bring an old school jungle vibe to proceedings. It ain’t what the Go Go girls usually dance to, that’s for sure.

The jewel in Horizon’s crown is Gardenia. Located beneath an unassuming hotel where many of the festival’s artists stay is a serious sound system with a dream dancefloor. The line-up is just as good, with LA hip-hop hero and 808 king Egyptian Lover going back to back with local live techno legend KiNK until 5am on the opening night. The slopes will be open again in just a few hours. No rest for the wicked.

For Mixmag.

“I might not bring out the feather boas just yet,” says James Greenwood, who’s plotting his live debut as Ghost Culture, “but there’s an element of theatrics. I want people to think about dance music in a different way. It doesn’t have to be overly macho. It can be a performance.”

Greenwood is used to following his own path. When he left school at 18 he skipped university and went straight to hustling for work at studios and record shops. “I would get the train in from Essex and go to Pure Groove,” he says. “I wasn’t officially working there, I was just pretending I could do sound for their live bands.”

After meeting Daniel Avery there, Greenwood wound up engineering ‘Drone Logic’ – but he wasn’t satisfied with that. “I had this little glint in my eye,” he says. “I wanted to be writing.”

He’d been working on Ghost Culture for three years and now had the chance to finish his own album – with a very specific sonic template. “For the two months I was finishing the record I made a conscious effort to only listen to three records,” he says. “‘Fear of Music’ by Talking Heads, ‘Construction Time Again’ by Depeche Mode and ‘Ziggy Stardust’ by David Bowie. I didn’t want to feel like I was in competition with whatever was on Pitchfork that week.”

That refusal to follow trends marks him apart. “I’m passionate about sticking to the sound that’s in my head,” he says. “There’s too many paint-by-numbers things going around.”

Originally published in Mixmag, February 2015.

Who knew an earworm could change your life? Three years ago, Nick Murphy stumbled home from DJing in a bar and sat down in front of Ableton to make a beat. “I’d obviously had too much to drink,” he grins. “When I was writing it I thought it was going to be an original, but I had ‘No Diggity’ in my head. I totally get the words wrong. Nobody’s pulled me up on that yet…”

The next day he stuck his reworked, and reworded, cover on YouTube for his friends to hear. Within two months it was the top track on Hype Machine. Emails and offers started to flood in, which meant he could focus on music – although his day job at a bookshop had been pretty good for a voracious reader. “I just read all day and spoke to weirdos,” he says. “You should have seen the place, it was like ‘Black Books’.”

He’s spent the last two years writing “about 80” tracks, culled to 12 for debut record ‘Built On Glass’. He adheres to Hemingway’s maxim that you have to write ninety-one pages of shit to get one page of masterpiece. “That’s it,” he laughs. “I got plenty of shit.”

‘Built On Glass’ is his own chance to write something that connects with people. “The big lesson is that no-one gives a shit,” he says. “but if you write a song that’s good enough people are happy to listen to your problems. It’s no longer whining, it’s art!”

Originally published in Mixmag, May 2014.

Barely out of his teens, Rowan Jones is already an old pro. Having first started making beats on a downloaded demo of FruityLoops at just 13, by 17 he was playing dubstep as Dream at places like Cable, Ministry of Sound and Fabric.

“I’ve been DJing in clubs since before I was old enough to be in clubs,” he admits. “I’ve never been out as a punter. I was either making tunes or I was locked in the green room, doing things I shouldn’t be doing.”

At the grand old age of 18 he realised he’d “kind of hit a wall”. Route 94 was born when he sent ‘Window’, a house track he’d been working on, to New York Transit Authority. “I didn’t think much of it,” he says. “But then he put it in a FACT mix. People started going mad for it and it dawned on me: ‘Shit, I’m actually quite good at this’.”

The deep house of ‘My Love’ shows the direction he’s heading under the tutelage of new manager Artwork. “Because I’m so young having people like him and Skream around is amazing,” he says. “I can take a leaf out of their books.”

This summer he’ll play “every festival”, but for now he’s home in Richmond with his mum, a music fanatic who plays everyone from Michael Jackson to Roy Davis Jr. “I love working in my bedroom,” he says. “I know people pay thousands of pounds for massive studios, but it’s pointless if you just make shit tunes.”

Originally published in Mixmag, April 2014.