While the history of New York dance music tends to focus on Manhattan’s legendary club scene, Brooklyn has played a pivotal role in the culture as far back as the early ‘70s, with the mobile sound system of DJ Grandmaster Flowers. It continued well into the golden age of ‘90s house, with DJ/producers like Todd Terry and Angel Moraes. Fast-forward to the 2020s, and clubs like Good Room in Greenpoin

Run an internet search for Agbetu—or Master Tee, one of his many production monikers—and you will be led to a trove of UK street soul classics. A former computer programmer, Agbetu got the producer bug after seeing the same two names pop up on the U.S. soul records he was buying. “[All of them] had the words ‘Produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis’ printed on them,” he recalls. While UK street soul

Tao, Conehead, and DJ Kool Klone, photo by Peco Geographically situated within the 1,900-mile stretch of water that separates China and Japan—and culturally positioned in the shadow of both nations’ more well-known music scenes—the island of Taiwan is somewhat of an anomaly in hip-hop’s international landscape. As the genre’s cultural impact expanded outward from the American bicoastal bases of Ne

Let’s be honest for a second: No one clicks on these lists for the introduction. I don’t blame them! This is usually just the place where some routine throat-clearing goes, before we get to the main event. It’s also the place where I confess to the amount of anxiety involved with putting together a list like this—last year, I said, “Right now, there’s probably someone in their bedroom in Buenos Ai

Koenji Hyakkei Back in the 1960s and ‘70s, Japan was home to a host of experimental psych bands. And while Les Rallizes Dénudés, Flower Travellin’ Band, Far East Family Band, and Taj Mahal Travellers didn’t sound the same, they all shared a love for lengthy improvisation and owed a debt to the avant-garde. They weren’t afraid to get weird, they were sometimes political, and they sometimes rode the

FEATURES Japanese Experimental Pioneer Phew Is Back with Her First Solo Record in 20 Years By Patrick St. Michel · April 05, 2017 The last two years have been rewarding for fans of Japanese experimental artist Phew. She’s released a pair of full-lengths—2015’s A New World and the off-kilter Light Sleep, released this past March via New York label Mesh-Key. This is an especially welcome development