March 17, 2021

Donna Leake: Soul Trips, Vinyl and Vintage Hi-fi

London-based selector and creative influencer Donna Leake’s vinyl-only NTS Radio show is a window onto how a virtuoso assembles enigmatic jazz hooks. Whether of the spiritual, straight, rock, fusion, or psychedelic varieties, Leake’s uncanny ability to mix jazz with rock, Afro-disco, dub and boogie takes listeners on a genre-bending deep dive through an astral plane of the recherché every episode.
May 4, 2021

DJ Shadow: Endtroducing – 25th Anniversary Sample Mix

Cited as one of the best records of the nineties by most major music publications and included in Time Magazine’s list of greatest albums of all time, one of the keys to the resounding impact of DJ Shadow’s Entroducing can be found in the title of one of its less substantial cuts, a 43-second interlude entitled “Why Hip Hop Sucks in ‘96”. It kind of did.
August 17, 2021

Beauty And The Beat – The London Dance Party Built on 50 Years of History

The beat has shaped our history in myriad, complex patterns for thousands of years. Not the least of which is a private party started in New York City in 1970 which became known as The Loft and spawned countless imitators and spin-offs, but only a handful of anointed successors. One of these being London, England’s Beauty and The Beat.
August 22, 2021

Beauty And The Beat: Part Two – Building an Audiophile Sound System to move People

The calculus of throwing a dance party today is no more complex than it was five decades ago when David Mancuso kicked off The Loft in New York City and birthed a disco mecca still worshipped today by tens of thousands: The latest iteration of which – Beauty and The Beat – continues to be the subject of this second article and interview.