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L'enfant terrible
Also known as the spicy hot latina editor in chieff of the Northern Ireland Magnetic Magazine, Cinthia Castillo, she is beautiful yes, but she is even more smart. An Oxford educated mexican who nobody can't help noticing.
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Flirting in the Club Was Much Easier in the 1920s
Before the digital day of Tinder, Grindr, and texting, Berlin nightclubbers from nearly a century ago resorted to different methods of making love (or lust) connections on the dancefloor.
As Atlas Obscura writes, shy club-goers used a system of pneumatic tubes (through which cylindrical containers transport items) and private telephones set up at each of the venue's tables to send messages to other clubbers. Once a person zeroed in on a potential companion, he or she would take note of which table that person was at, and then either call or send a handwritten note to that table.
Atlas Obscura noted that the trend started with two local nightclubs, the Resi and the Femina; the former's communication system was said by the Chicago Tribune to be its "big lure." The Resi also seemed to be early adopters of comment moderation, as handwritten messages sent through pneumatic tubes were first inspected by female switchboard operators before reaching their intended targets. According to the book Voluptuous Panic, which explores the "erotic" world of Weimar, patrons at the Resi could also use the tubes to send people gifts such as perfume and cigar cutters.
According to Cabaret Berlin, the Resi closed in 1978 and the building demolished that same year, but the phone system still lives on in other clubs such as Ballhaus Berlin.
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The Tracks that Have Made Beat Hotel a Glastonbury Staple
Right now, somewhere in Somerset, there's about 15 million people stood in a massive field, drinking warm cider, scouring their muddy gussets with baby wipes, all eagerly awaiting the Magic Numbers acoustic set. This is Glastonbury baby, and it is heaven on earth!
I mean, that's what everyone tells me. I've never been. Sad! Anyway, this isn't about me and how I'd prefer my festival experiences to involve proper beds and shuttle busses and continental breakfasts. This is about the slapheaded farmer Michael Eavis' bigger-than-Jesus bash.
More specifically, it's about the Beat Hotel, which I'm told is one of the festival's most notorious nightspots and the perfect place to get away from the hordes of Status Quo fans who roam the gargantuan site shouting "DOWN DOWN DEEPER AND DOWN" until they are louder than whoever's headlining the Pyramid Stage.
This is the sixth year that the Beat Hotel's doors open for the entire duration of the event, and the team behind it have lined up a cracking set of selectors, ready to bathe you with the best that contemporary dance music has to offer. Do you like Hunee, Lovefingers, and Young Marco? Into Lena Willikens, Jennifer Cardini, and Call Super? Massive fan of Jamie XX, Sampha, and Job Jobse? Good, just head down there and you're in for the best weekend of your life.
If you're sat on a Megabus right this second, itching to get to Glastonbury, trembling fingers running through a grab bag of Wotsits, two cans of Pimms attached to one of those novelty hats with the straws, then we've got just the thing for you. Here's a smattering of Beat Hotel favourites picked fans, staff, and DJs.
The Chemical Brothers - Star Guitar
"I remember Erol dropped this as his closer in 2011—our first year—after an extended chant for one more whilst we worked out if we could get away with it. We did and it was the right time for the right record." (Nick, Hotel manager)
PM Dawn - Set Adrift on Memory Bliss
"Rug Dug played this in the afternoon and it captured the mood at the Beat Hotel perfectly. Attrel Stephen Cordes Jr aka Prince had died a week earlier so it had extra poignancy." (Tom, new business director, Beat Hotel)
Salif Keita - Madan (Martin Solveig Remix)
"One of the most played and most loved in 2016. The perfect soundtrack to a downpour." (Milly, director of hospitality, Beat Hotel)
Shy FX & UK Apachi - Original Nuttah
"When Joe (Goddard) played "Original Nuttah", we watched the girls from Haim trying to dance to jungle on the bed." (Alex and Dom Greco-Roman Sound System DJs)
Frankey & Sandrino - Acamar
"When I was working in 2015 there were quite a few defining tracks, but Saturday night's moment of clarity came during Bicep b2b Simian Mobile Disco's set. It was one of "Acamar's" many notable appearances across that summer, and certainly my favourite." (Louis, artist management team, Beat Hotel).
Fatima Yamaha - What's a Girl To Do
"The first time I came into the hotel to work, "What's a Girl To Do" came on and everyone started line-dancing. Perfect Glasto vibes." (Mark, photographer, Beat Hotel)
John Farnham - You're the Voice
"A Johnno from Bugged Out brunch time staple." (Richie, social director, Beat Hotel)
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Steve Aoki Made a Rap Album
Vin Diesel-collaborator Steve Aoki recently announced that he was putting out a rap LP featuring guest spots from some of the genre's biggest stars.
2 Chainz, Lil Uzi Vert, Gucci Mane, and more make appearances on Steve Aoki Presents Kolony, which will be released next month.
Last Friday, June 16, the Dim Mak founder released the album's trap-styled lead single, "Night Call," featuring Atlanta icons Migos and Lil Yachty. Kolony will be Aoki's first studio LP since 2015's Neon Future II. He's been keeping busy since then, though: in February he released a skater-inspired clothing line, while Netflix made a documentary about him in 2016.
"When I was in the studio working on this project or a song with someone that made it to the album, they brought their own crew, and I'd turn around and be like, 'this squad is like a colony,'" Aoki said in a press release. "It was a lot of energy from people flowing from the studio, and I loved that think tank, that group collaboration, and spirit."
The album will be released on July 21, and is available for pre-order.
Kolony tracklist:
1. Steve Aoki - "Kolony Anthem (feat. ILOVEMAKONNEN & Bok Nero)"
2. Steve Aoki and Yellow Claw - "Lit (feat. Gucci Mane and T-Pain)"
3. Steve Aoki and DVBBS - "Without U (feat. 2 Chainz)"
4. Steve Aoki - "How Else (feat. ILOVEMAKONNEN and Rich The Kid)"
5. Steve Aoki - "Been Ballin (feat. Lil Uzi Vert)"
6. Steve Aoki - "Night Call (feat. Migos and Lil Yachty)"
7. Steve Aoki and Bad Royale - "4,000,000 (feat. Ma$e & Big Gigantic)"
8. Steve Aoki - "If I Told You That I Love You (feat. Wale)"
9. Steve Aoki and Bad Royale - "No Time (feat. Jimmy October)"
10. Steve Aoki and Ricky Remedy - "Thank You Very Much (feat. Sonny Digital)"
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The xx's Romy Madley Croft: my favourite places in Reykjavik
We spent three weeks in Reykjavik in the summer of 2014, and threw ourselves into creating music at Greenhouse Studios for the I See You album.
The sun never really set and we were so inspired by the incredible landscape we’d seen on our journey to the studio, the deep cultural history in the air and the intimate and communal atmosphere that is so unique to Reykjavik. These are a few of the places we loved.
Harpa
This venue is actually the root of how we ended up choosing Iceland as a place to record. I first went to Iceland on a holiday with my at the time very new girlfriend, now fiancee, who suggested we go to Reykjavik to see Björk play at Harpa – and I jumped at the chance. I not only fell in love with my girlfriend but with Iceland as a place. This venue is incredible, a beautiful musical landmark designed by the ever-inspiring Olafur Eliasson. It both stands out from and complements the landscape.
• harpa.is
Reykjavik Roasters
The locals we met told us this place does the best coffee in town. It feels like a cosy living room, there is a record player and a lot of classics records to play … I am pretty sure they were playing a Patti Smith album when we went there, and she is my hero!
• reykjavikroasters.is
Gló
A vegetarian cafe with a daily-changing menu. We came here every single lunchtime before heading into the studio. [My bandmates] Oliver and Jamie aren’t vegetarians but they loved it, too.
• glo.is
Paloma
We loved the nightlife in Reykjavik. There is the sense that if you are craving it, a wild night is out there waiting to be found. We started one night at another cool bar next door, Hurra, before heading to Paloma for a dance where we had a fun time. It’s surreal to spend a night dancing to incredible music in a bar (which, in retrospect, can only be described as resembling a boat) to emerge outside at 4am to bright, crisp daylight. All those extra hours of daylight definitely play with your mind!
• palomaclub.is
Marshal House
It’s only just opened so we haven’t been yet to this tall white building with huge glass windows in the harbour that is the new home to the Museum of Living Arts … but we hear it is amazing. We’ll visit when we are back in Iceland for the Night + Day festival.
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Public Service Broadcasting: 'we wanted to do something on a more human level'
It’s general election night in the Ebbw Vale mining institute and four Englishmen are telling the Welsh about Wales’s past. They wear ties, rather bravely, in front of pint-sinking choristers and local rockers in 1970s tour T-shirts. Above the stage, footage plays of mid-20th century miners, their eyes shining like anthracite, cigarettes dangling from their lips. “The arrogant strut of the lords of the coalface,” purrs Richard Burton through the speakers, “looking at the posh people with hostile eyes.” These miners look like rock stars, much more so than Public Service Broadcasting, who are operating the machinery tonight.
Between 2013 and 2015, Public Service Broadcasting ploughed a fertile furrow in the pop landscape with two albums sampling old public information films over guitar-slathered electronica: Boys’ Own adventures about space, Spitfires and the second world war. They return with a very different record: Every Valley. Chronicling the rise and fall of the Welsh coal industry, it was recorded in the Ebbw Vale institute, which stands in one the most deprived areas of a country predicted to swing closer to Tory tonight. Last year, people here voted heavily to leave the EU.
This record remembers when the idea of being working-class didn’t mean that you couldn’t appreciate art or poetry.
Tonight’s gig was booked long before the election was called and frontman J. Willgoose Esq (bandmates JF Abraham and Wrigglesworth have similar, Molesworthian monikers) sits in an upstairs counselling room, without a bow tie for now, looking nervous. “We’re going to take an absolute pounding, I think.”
He’s talking about Labour. Every Valley is a project born of his renewed interest in politics and a society he feels is smothering opportunity and potential in ordinary people. “That horrible phrase ‘stay in your lane’… this record rails against that and remembers the desire for bettering yourself that came from communities that coalesced around a single industry, when there was more political engagement and the idea of being working-class didn’t mean that you couldn’t appreciate art or poetry.”
Willgoose first had the idea for Every Valley before 2015’s Race For Space, wanting to get away from “big, epic subjects… and do something on a more human level”. The album’s themes aren’t just about Wales, either, he adds – its title is deliberately universal.
Despite “vague connections” to the country thanks to a half-Welsh grandmother, Willgoose has been wary with this project about being a Londoner looking in. He recorded interviews with old miners through the NUM in Pontypridd and pored over mountains of audio and film at the South Wales Miners’ Library at Swansea University. “I expected to be viewed with suspicious half-glances, constantly,” he says. “But that hasn’t happened once. Everyone’s been supportive, welcoming and open… and making the same jokes about Brexit as we do in London.” There’s a story still here, you sense, that bears retelling.
Every Valley tells this story very inclusively. Women are the subject of the moving They Gave Me a Lamp (“If you could get the women into one meeting or get involved in one thing, you could see them as this other life,” says the voice of a local woman, Margaret Donovan). You + Me is a bilingual duet with Lisa Jên Brown from 9Bach, to address “the history of English people being absolutely awful in terms of the Welsh language,” Willgoose says. James Dean Bradfield turns poet Idris Davies’s Gwalia Deserta XXXVI into the rocking Turn No More, while the Beaufort male voice choir sing Take Me Home.
The risk of romanticising the past hangs heavy on this record, but tracks such as The Pit bring things back to earth, detailing the “three feet and six inches” of working space and the 80 degree heat. So does the chorus of Progress (“I believe in progress”), the melancholic double meaning captured perfectly by Camera Obscura’s Tracyanne Campbell. Willgoose didn’t want to impose a stronger political message on the music, because “it’s much more powerful if you leave ambiguity in –if you’re too earnest it doesn’t matter how correct your message is”.
He’d prefer that the echoes of the past in this record help us think about the present, like how the destruction of the unions in the 80s has a legacy in working conditions today. After the Tory majority in 2015, and last year’s Brexit vote, this project felt even more vital. “Watching it become more relevant, as more dominoes fell… it felt important to get on with it”, he says.
Half an hour before showtime, the institute is buzzing. The NUM’s Wayne Thomas and Ron Stoate are here, who Willgoose interviewed for the album; solid men in polo shirts who survived the miners’ strike, they’re still youthful now, which propels the past to the present. Stoate thinks the record’s “really good – mining songs before this were solemn and about dust and dying in your hospital bed”. Thomas agrees. “For a young man to come in from outside and really get to know the people and piece the story together – there’s real sincerity there.”
Both men believe the people of the valleys have been hoodwinked by politicians in recent years. “The Leave vote was that bloody bus. £350m to the NHS – so many people voted for that,” Stoate rails. “And as for immigration! People going, ‘Bloody Poles coming here, taking our jobs.’ Down the mines, we worked with Poles all the time. Lithuanians, Latvians, all of them!” Wayne nods. “Locally, nationally, internationally, there’s been a smashing of that knowledge base, those memories.” Then he shrugs. “You can only hope things will get better.”
'We must take a stand': the vital election issues – picked by young British artists
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Public Service Broadcasting take the stage at 8.30pm. The show is rousing and moving, grown men welling up at the National Coal Board’s 1960s recruitment campaign adverts, as well as songs about the conquering of Everest and the first orbiting of the moon – all night, you see men transported back to their childhoods, in full voice.
Seven hours later, Blaenau Gwent returns its Labour MP, Nick Smith, with 58% of the vote, and the Ukip candidate drops from second place to fourth. Willgoose spends the night at a nearby Premier Inn, in shock, with the words of a fan who grew up near Ebbw Vale still ringing in his ears. “He said the gig was a strange sensation, like having a band speak directly for him… and if we have helped people have their voices heard, in a tiny way, then that’s great.” And how does he feel about the election result? “It’s a total mess, but maybe it’s the start of a new generation finding their voice, realising they have the chance to make a difference.”
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Goldie: The Journey Man review – over-ambitious jungle epic drifts off course 2 / 5 stars
Goldie has always been larger than life, and his giant ambition took jungle from an underground concern to music that could sketch out cityscapes in epic widescreen. That ambition is undimmed on this 100-minute-plus solo album, his first in nine years.
As well as sleek and well-heeled junglism, there’s trip-hop, piano-led lounge jazz, restless, Pharrell-ish funk on Castaway, and even, on Tu Viens Avec Moi?, pleasantly noodly Balearic soft rock.
But as the running time indicates, Goldie’s weakness is not always being able to corral that ambition, and, not helped by rote production, there is some interminable material here. It bottoms out with Redemption, which is like being stuck on a Pro Evo loading screen for 18 long minutes. The vocalists are in fine voice, with the Sampha-ish Tyler Lee Daly a great find, but they are allowed to drift into vague melodies. Even the jungle tracks such as Prism, while propulsive and admirably contemporary, lack the jeopardy and psychic disharmony of the genre’s best.
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Field Day review – Aphex Twin's live comeback raises the temperature
A fixture in east London’s Victoria Park for a decade, Field Day has in many ways reached that optimal festival state of commanding a large and loyal audience on strength of reputation as much as the individual artists it books each year. Intuitively curated with playlist-shuffle eclecticism over a single Saturday, typically the 2017 lineup feels like one that fans of a whole span of ages and tastes could navigate to their satisfaction.
Youthful bookings abound, from guitar acts like Methyl Ethel and Julia Jacklin to trap producer Mura Masa, and yet it’s also a clutch of names who enjoyed their breakouts in the 90s and before – in particular Aphex Twin making a long-awaited UK live return in epic surrounds – that help push the mercury higher on a blazing hot June day.
A man whom you can be sure would be sporting sunglasses even if performing on a dark winter night, sexagenarian Mancunian punk performance poet Dr John Cooper Clarke is old enough to be a grandad to much of the Field Day crowd, and yet his slanted and funny wordplay (“I eat a third of a Mars Bar every day – to help me rest”) feels somehow still apt to the occasion. Leafing his way through a sheaf of pieces about love, ageing and boredom, the deliciously sweary Evidently Chickentown included, he’s on fine form, even if trying to discern his rapid torrent of thickly accented words can sometimes feel a bit like listening to a cattle auctioneer.
Livestock the size of aeroplanes could inhabit Field Day’s large and impressive new indoor main area, the Barn stage, a stunning achievement of architectural and acoustic engineering. As the throbbing Open Eye Signal rattles the steel-girdered ceiling, Jon Hopkins’s elegantly constructed, industrial-strength ambient electronica feels like just the thing such a venue was built for.
Arab Strap’s Aidan Moffat is in prickly mood – “Fuck Brexit,” he barks pointedly, the Falkirk purveyors of post-rock guitars and nakedly bleak spoken-word lyrics having just flown in from the continent and the Primavera festival in Barcelona. Their songs of tragic sex and triumphant inebriation – a majestic New Birds and a stomping The First Big Weekend included – become no less grimly gripping with age, nor any more respectable. Silhouetted sinisterly behind warped visuals on a translucent video screen, Flying Lotus variously melts minds and moves feet by veering between twitching, twisted IDM and squelchy LA party funk.
Back in that hulking great Barn, it’s a bit like being on the set of a science fiction movie as Aphex Twin’s headline set – his first UK show in five years – begins with clouds of dry ice and searching rays of laser lighting. Richard D James’s acid beats and almost tactually textured soundscapes surge spine-tinglingly across an enormous sea of humanity beneath one roof. As a stormy wind suddenly whips up, and there’s a short but intense downfall of rain just after sundown, the scene is aptly set for squalls of distortion and feedback from reformed shoegaze cult heroes Slowdive to round off the day for more guitar-inclined Field Dayers – a darkly dreamy reverie at the end of festival successfully finding a sweet spot between substance and sheer scale.
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Goldfrapp review – electrifying performance marks a return to 80s futurism
Alison Goldfrapp is all windswept hair and shiny silver pyjama suit. Appearing on stage, backlit and washed in smoky red and blue, in the cold industrial hollow of Sydney’s warehouse-turned-music venue Carriageworks, she seems less like a rockstar and more like a mysterious angel from the space age.
Carriageworks is the perfect kind of space for the kind of alternative, danceable synth pop that electronic duo Goldfrapp are most well-known for. The last time I saw them live was at Melbourne’s Palais Theatre – a beautiful old venue in its own right, but not exactly dance-friendly, with its ornate internal architecture and antique fittings, and a bizarre choice of space for a band with a back catalogue dominated by strutting synths that compel you to get out of your chair and pull shapes.
That was the tour for Seventh Tree, an album that now, in the shadow of the duo’s latest release, Silver Eye, seems like something of a whimsical folksy detour. Indeed, not a single song from Seventh Tree was played during this show, which seemed, like Silver Eye, to cement a return to the kind of 80s futurism epitomised by albums Black Cherry and Supernature.
Alison Goldfrapp: ‘Artists are private people, observers’ Read more
They mostly stick to this side of their repertoire for this show – a one-off exclusive for Sydney’s Vivid festival. The performance is, in many ways, a tightly structured compilation of high notes: breaking the ice with the eerie and glorious Utopia, followed by the haunting Lovely Head. The wash then turns to strobing and the band launch into Silver Eye’s highly danceable Anymore and Black Cherry’s guaranteed crowd-pleaser Train, followed by standout tracks from the new album, Ocean and Moon in Your Mouth.
Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory may both be firmly on the other side of 50, but the only place this is evident is in experience: the show is gloriously slick; the sound is clear and they have perfected the art of delivering a set with natural peaks and ebbs while maintaining the energy of the crowd.
Ride a White Horse closes out the main set but an encore follows quickly. If there are any missteps, it’s beginning the show’s coda with the reflective Black Cherry, possibly the sharpest drop in energy over the night. It’s picked back up again quickly, however, with an urgent, almost frantic, rendition of Head First’s Shiny and Warm and the euphoric Ooh La La, before the opening bars of Strict Machine crescendo and splinter into a floor-shaking blasts of noise. It’s a cathartic end to an electrifying show.
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Leftfield review – bone-quaking revival of a dance music revolution
Leftfield performing their epochal and monumentally banging debut album, Leftism, in full at a sold-out show might once have meant a bonanza night’s trade for drug dealers, but it is probably childminders reaping the benefits at Glasgow’s Barrowland tonight.
It is 22 years since this Mercury prize-nominated house and techno album was released, refracting the energy and idealism of the rave era through a wantonly eclectic prism of dub, jungle, reggae and world music sounds. Arguably the first classic British record of electronic dance music, it eased the way for the titans of big beat.
How we made Leftfield's Leftism Read more
A lot of audience members at this sold-out show of the album’s anniversary tour probably haven’t seen the inside of a nightclub in many years. But while everyone has got older since 1995 – including the band’s sole original member, Neil Barnes, who has a secondary-school physics teacher vibe about him these days, cooking up sounds centre stage in his kitchen of synths – Leftism still sounds fresh.
As classic-album-in-full shows go, this one is about as pure as they come: just the 11 original tracks performed in order. But there is a sense of each song having been stripped down, tuned up and put back together with love and purpose, their edges and focus sharpened. A considerable retinue of guest vocalists spearhead the party, even if only for one song apiece. There are several original contributors among them, including rasta MC Earl Sixteen, whose cosmic request for “peace and unity” during the introductory opening swirl of Release the Pressure is greeted like an old friend – especially after a bone-quaking donk lands.
Leftfield deploy a more measured sound system these days than the one that once caused plaster to crumble from a venue ceiling, but you still feel its pulsing low-end in your very bones. It is impressively supplemented by a light and visual display, which at one point sees Barnes slapping conga drums silhouetted against a full moon with cartoon cheetahs running through it while vocalist Djum Djum chants during Afro-Left, one of the most madly infectious pieces of progressive house music. Hips-twisting vocalist Tarantina deputises for Toni Halliday on the trip-hoppy Original, before the screaming beat drops of Space Shanty take things big-room techno.
John Lydon isn’t here in the flesh to reprise his menacing guest vocal on probably Leftism’s most important track Open Up, but the Sex Pistols and PiL frontman’s disembodied voice howling from the speakers along to chopped-up and looped footage from the 1993 video only adds to the track’s sense of scowling disquiet. Beatific comedown-closer 21st Century Poem prompts one group of men to throw their arms around each others shoulders in nostalgic reverie. Surprisingly, Leftism isn’t scheduled to be performed at more festivals this summer – it would surely grace any dance tent. But it is great to see this ageless masterpiece get the anniversary celebration it deserves.
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DJ Shadow: 'Music has never been worth less, and yet sampling has never been more risky'
“Sampling isn’t just about dusty 45s anymore,” says Josh Davis, and he ought to know. As DJ Shadow, Davis has been responsible for some of the seminal, pioneering works in the genre, beginning with the critically acclaimed Endtroducing in 1996. His debut full-length album, it was composed entirely of samples, the first of its kind.
“My agenda back then was like, planting a flag in the soil and saying, ‘This is my art form, sampling is my art form, the sampler is my instrument,’” Davis tells Guardian Australia. “It’s real, it’s authentic, there’s art to it, there is a discipline, it’s a craft. And that’s what I wanted to represent. Now, obviously, 25 years later, we all know that ... The art of sampling in itself is no longer novel.”
Davis is about to embark on the Australian leg of his current world tour, kicking off his trip through the Antipodes with two nights at Sydney’s Vivid festival. His last appearance in this neck of the woods was in 2015, on the Renegades of Rhythm tour with Cut Chemist – a vinyl-only tribute to hip-hop in which the two DJs spun Afrika Bambaataa’s record collection, with the blessing from the “Godfather” of hip-hop himself.
DJ Shadow review – a hyper-evolved beat frenzy
Trip-hop pioneer embarks on a bumpy, fun-filled safari that manages to sound both sci-fi and vintage Read more
This time around, Davis’s Vivid appearance sees him sharing a stage with Australian band the Avalanches – touring off the back of their long-awaited second album Wildflower (2016) – alongside Briggs, Sampa the Great, DJ JNETT and Jonti.
Once, Davis explains, all you needed to do to create a new sound was dig out some old vinyl. These days the scene has moved on, and an original aesthetic requires much more imagination. “Once you add something to the vocabulary, you don’t want to continue to go back to that same way of doing things, because that’s what everybody else is doing now,” he says.
While Davis insists that he tries to do something different with every record – sometimes to the chagrin of fans of his early work – the DJ Shadow sound still has a distinctive flavour: jazz and funk influences punctuating melodies that are often defiant, often deeply eerie, boosted by hip-hop beats and a heavy dose of the unexpected.
Narrative, too, plays a big role in that sound – consider the dramatic arcs of a track like Stem/Long Stem, or the melancholy shifts in Blood on the Motorway. It’s a conscious element of his live shows as well.
“I definitely have always tried to avoid anything smacking of some kind of retro party. That’s definitely not where my head is at in terms of how I like to represent my music,” he says.
Last year’s The Mountain Will Fall marked a creative shift for Davis. There was more of his own composition and a focus on direct collaboration with artists (hip-hop “supergroup” Run the Jewels and German composer Nils Frahm among them), rather than a reliance on repurposing the work of others. But how much of this shift into composition and collaboration is a natural artistic development, and how much is a result of the pressures of a highly litigious industry?
Davis is emphatic: “I’ve always believed in clearing samples, however I believe it needs to be done on a musicologist basis.” This would involve, he explains, breaking down a song in a forensic way, and working out compensation accordingly: “This bass line sample constitutes – based on the space that it occupies and the number of seconds that it plays over the course of the track, in relation to other elements that come and go ... this sample is worth 16.7% of the composition.”
“Now, if that could be done,” he says, “then I would clear everything. But the problem is, you go to the first person – they want 75% whether they deserve it or not. You go to the next person they want 70% – whoops – you can’t cut a pie that many times, there isn’t enough pie to go around.”
In some ways, Davis argues, this is just a product of the times, but it certainly makes sampling a lot less fun.
“In a strange sense I feel like music has never been worth less as a commodity, and yet sampling has never been more risky,” he says. “We work in a hyper-capitalist time, where you grab what you can, get everything you can, doesn’t matter whether it’s right or wrong, it doesn’t matter whether it’s valid, it doesn’t matter whether it’s deserved.”
These days, Davis is more concerned with finding new sources of inspiration. He hosts a radio show, Find, Share, Rewind, on California’s KCRW, which gives him an opportunity to boost the work he enjoys – everything from Frank Ocean to Cyhi the Prynce to the new Kendrick Lamar.
Me and the muse: DJ Shadow on his sources of inspiration
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“For me, what I’m always reaching for is just a pure form of expression,” he says. “That’s what I look for in music. I want to be taken on a ride, I want to be taken somewhere, and I want to be invested in the artist. And most of the music I identify strongest with is by artists that really live – they’re artists that make music for their entire life and music is their life.”
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Making sounds with Suzanne Ciani, America's first female synth hero
It might not seem so much of a stretch any more, but imagine spending your entire life in a tempestuous relationship with a machine. Not a sleek smartphone or tablet – we’ve seen how that can escalate in Spike Jonze’s Her.
Instead picture a tapestry of tangled multicoloured wires, knobs and buttons, a bulky modular synthesizer otherwise known as the Buchla. Suzanne Ciani has spent much of her career testing the limits of one of these cumbersome instruments. So dedicated to its oscillating drones, burbles and bleeps did she become that has jokingly referred to the Buchla as “her boyfriend”. At times that affair was “traumatic”, she says now, down the phone from her studio in the Californian coastal enclave of Bolinas, sounding like both Marilyn Monroe and a Woodstock hippie. “Technology’s always very risky – you never know when it might break.”
Alright everyone, chill: why ambient is one of the sounds of the summer
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Ciani is one of electronic music’s earliest but lesser known pioneers, dubbed variously as the “diva of the diode” and “‘America’s first female synth hero”. This weekend she’ll be one of the recipients of the Moog Innovation Award at Moogfest, the synth brand’s celebration of electronic music and technology, alongside Devo and Brian Eno. Ciani, however, has been quietly innovating in various fields of music and sound design for nearly half a century. She was one of the few women on the frontline of electronic innovation in the 1970s, a five-time Grammy-nominated recording artist, a pioneer of the new age genre and the first solo female composer to soundtrack a Hollywood film. Brilliantly, she also invented Coca-Cola’s infamous “pop and pour” sound effect.
Today, however, she has returned to the Buchla, an instrument that it seems will always have her heart. Ciani was introduced to it by the inventor himself, Don, while she was studying music composition at the University of California in 1970. As the sleevenotes for one of her compilations put it, the Buchla was “San Francisco’s neck-and-neck contender to New York’s Moog … run by a community of festival freaks and academic acid eaters.” Ciani soon established herself as a Buchla buff and moved to New York, when the Soho avant-garde circles were swirling at full tilt and she was living among musicians such as Philip Glass, Vladimir Ussachevsky and Ornette Coleman.
But choosing the Buchla as her other half came with its own unique set of complications. To watch her live performances is to see a graceful “choreography of movements” and yet the synth itself was bulky, would continually break and took years to get fixed, if it could be fixed at all. Travelling anywhere was particularly hazardous. “Something can break on the airline, the luggage handle smashes your machine. You never know if you’re going to have what you need to do the performance,” says Ciani.
Not only was there all this unpredictability, but Ciani also had a hard time getting people to understand what she was doing in the first place. Electronic music was so alien that it posed “a whole new world and language”. Her live television performance, to an incredulous-looking David Letterman, in 1980, underlines how, even then, after Kraftwerk, her talents were seen as bizarre. “Nobody even understood that the sound was coming out of the machine, it just didn’t compute,” she says. “It was so unknown that the connection couldn’t be made. It’s like when they say when Columbus came across the ocean, that the Indians didn’t even see the ship because they had no concept for ships.”
Even the forward-thinking minimal classical milieu of the day didn’t get it at first. Ciani sees a link between the emotionally affecting simplicity of her music and theirs but at the time it doesn’t sound as if that understanding worked vice versa. In 1974 she met Philip Glass and put her Buchla in his studio for a period. “We did electronic lessons for about a month or so, and in the end it just wasn’t for him.” Other composers were not as receptive. “Steve Reich said, ‘You should send all these machines to the moon and make them stay there!’” she laughs. “It’s so funny because Steve, in those days, openly hated electronic music instruments. And a couple of years ago I was at a big industry convention and a young fellow comes up to me. He’s an electronic musician, and he says, ‘I think you know my dad?’” And I just laughed out loud. I said, ‘It’s poetic justice, that Steve’s son is an electronic musician’.”
New age of new age music: 'It used to just be for hippies and unassuming types'
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As a recording artist, the Buchla also had its limitations. “I went to all the record companies and I said, you know, give me a deal,” Ciani remembers, “and they said, ‘What do you do?’, and I said, ‘I play the Buchla’, and they say, ‘What’s that?’, and I said, ‘I’ll show you’.” But even a studio setup back then couldn’t accommodate her Buchla – or at least music execs couldn’t get their head around the fact that she didn’t need a band. They said, “Why don’t you sing?’, ‘Where’s the guitar?’, ‘You’re a girl’, you know, ‘You must sing’,” she continues. “There was no opening for it, and that’s how I got into commercials.”
The advertising world, she says, was “looking for something new; you want to be on the edge, you want to be different. The fact that they didn’t understand it already intrigued them”. So she started her own company, Ciani/Musica, which was almost completely unheard of for a female musician in those days. Essentially they did sound design, and much of it has been archived on the compilation Lixiviation on the British independent label Finders Keepers, who’ve been largely responsible for rereleasing Ciani’s work and bringing it to a wider audience in recent years. Notably, she added the electronic “swoosh” sound to Starland Vocal Band’s Afternoon Delight and FX for a 1977 disco version of the Star Wars soundtrack, among the odd B-movie horror and kung-fu films.
The noises she created for perhaps her most infamous sound effect, she says, were invented in a matter of minutes. “My brain was working at lightning speed in those days,” she laughs, of how she came up with Coca Cola’s signature pop, bubble and fizz. “I had been trying to get an appointment with the music director Billy Davis for over a year. He stood me up for the umpteenth time, so I marched over to his studio from his office and they said, ‘You can’t disturb him’, and I said, ‘He had an appointment with me’. I opened the door and I went in. It was brazen. But I was desperate, I was starving. I was in New York living on Canal Street for $75 a month, and I was propelled by hunger, really.”
“It just so happened that they were working on a Coca-Cola commercial. He said, ‘What do you do?’, and I said, ‘I play the Buchla. I make sounds’, and he said, ‘Well, can you do something in here?’. I don’t know what they had in mind, but I said, ‘Yes, I can’. He said, ‘What do you need?’. I said, ‘I need my Buchla’, and he said, ‘Well, go get it’. I went and got my Buchla and I came back’. I did it right there and then.”
Eventually her original, irreplaceable Buchla 200 model broke for good and, unhappy with its subsequent models, Ciani started making piano and acoustic music that would later come to be known as “new age”. She wasn’t bothered by the emerging strains of dance music rattling clubs at the time (“I loved to go to Studio 54 in the day, but to make that music, I thought, was a little boring”) and instead wanted to explore sounds that had “beauty and sensuality”. Her debut album, 1982’s Seven Waves, was inspired by the femininity of the waveform. “To be blunt about this, the male paradigm for sexuality is more that pumping rhythm,” she says, referring to electronic styles, “and the female paradigm for sensuality was a much slower span. And it was that slow, wave-like form.”
But it is the Buchla that has brought her back. Last year Finders Keepers Records rereleased Buchla Concerts 1975, a collection of Ciani’s original live recordings and she made the collaborative EP, Sunergy, with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, her latter-day incarnation and fellow Buchla disciple. Ciani is also the subject of an upcoming documentary, A Live In Waves. Don was the one who encouraged Ciani to try her beloved instrument once more. The two had had a fractured relationship – she says he used to be a “tough cookie” and says sweetly, “we even had a little lawsuit at one point”, of when Don replaced her faulty Buchla with a synth she was less pleased with, and then wouldn’t let her return it. But when her recovery from breast cancer in her early 40s brought her back to California, the two reconnected – over a shared love of tennis. “He said, ‘If you want to get a new system, get it now because something’s going to happen’,” says Ciani wistfully. She settled on the 200e, a “21st-century rebirth of the 70s classic”. “I didn’t know he was going to sell his company.”
When we first speak, Ciani is in good spirits, preparing to go to Burning Man and packing her light-up clothing and “butterfly wings”. But Don Buchla died soon after, on 14 September 2016, and just a month after a long and ugly lawsuit against the company who bought his Buchla brand in 2012 was dismissed. When we talk again, Ciani is still grieving, but his death has given her shows greater purpose. “I’m still in that moment,” she says of her life without Don. “It’s become about performing on the Buchla 200-E, I want to communicate the potential for live performance that Don envisioned. My dedication now is to show that you can make music with these live: no samples, no pre-recorded [music], you just go out there and play this non-keyboard instrument.”
Besides, she adds, “I had a deal with him up in the sky and I said, look, as long as this machine works, I’m going to keep playing it, and when it breaks, I’ll stop.”
Don Buchla, modular synthesizer pioneer, dies aged 79
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If others had as much of a storied career as Ciani, they probably wouldn’t bother looking forward to the future, but the resurgent interest in her music and the technology it uses is also what gives her hope. “It’s interesting to me to see the cycle of things recurring, that the young people are very much in a technological wonderment that we had in the 60s,” she says. “In the 60s, that new world was aborted to some degree. The idea of a synthesiser was taken over by cultural forces that didn’t understand the potential: ‘Oh, you can synthesise the sound of a flute’, ‘Can make the sound of a violin?’, [there was] this preoccupation with copying existing timbres. I thought it was a dead idea, that we missed the first time around and that who knew when or if it would be revisited?”
Today, though, she sees the potential for machine music in line with the futuristic frontiers that herself and Don Buchla once envisioned. “In my day I thought we would be where we are now, 30 years ago,” she says. “I thought electronic music would be everyplace, built into furniture! I designed a sofa where eight people could sit in a circle and everybody could adjust their pitch.”
It sounds like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey but for Ciani, every day was living inside that hi-tech headspace. “I thought it would be built into homes, because for me it was built in,” she says of electronic music. “My Buchla was on all the time, and I would walk in [my house] and the sound would greet me, and it would make me feel a certain way, and I thought everybody’s going to have this. It didn’t happen, and maybe now it is happening.” She considers how she is playing Moogfest when she is Team Buchla, the rivalry between east and west coast long dissolved and overtaken by a desire to find a new musical realm together. If it sounds hippyish, perhaps that’s because it always has been.
“It’s a conceptual field now,” says Ciani. “Rhythm to a higher level of consciousness.”
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Second Manchester bomb victim named as eight-year-old Saffie Rose Roussos
A “beautiful little girl” has been named as a victim of the suspected suicide attack at the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester which has left at least 22 people dead and 59 injured.
Eight-year-old Saffie Rose Roussos was at the concert with her mother, Lisa, and sister Ashlee Bromwich. It is understood they are being treated in hospital.
Chris Upton, the headteacher at Tarleton Community primary school, where the eight-year-old was a pupil, said: “Saffie was simply a beautiful little girl in every aspect of the word. She was loved by everyone and her warmth and kindness will be remembered fondly. Saffie was quiet and unassuming with a creative flair.”
The news of her death had come as a tremendous shock, he added. “The thought that anyone could go out to a concert and not come home is heartbreaking.” The tight-knit school would be helping staff and pupils to cope with the shocking news, he said.
The first victim to be named in the aftermath of the attack was 18-year-old Georgina Callander.
Runshaw College, where Callander was a student, released a statement, saying: “It is with enormous sadness that it appears that one of the people who lost their lives in Monday’s Manchester attack was one of our students here at Runshaw College ... Our deepest sympathies, thoughts and prayers go out to all of Georgina’s friends, family, and all of those affected by this loss.”
The former Bishop Rawstorne pupil was in the second year of a health and social care course at the college, which said it was offering counselling with a dedicated student support team to people close to the teenager.
A crowdfunding page set up by two people Georgina knew from YouTube to help with her funeral costs had raised more than £1,500 within two hours of being launched.
Live Manchester Arena bombing: Police name attacker as Salman Ramadan Abedi, 22 – latest
Police say attacker died after detonating ‘improvised explosive device’ in foyer of concert hall Read more
A man from Bury has also been named among the victims of Monday night’s attack. Friends of John Atkinson, 26, from Radcliffe paid tribute to him, reported the Manchester Evening News.
On Facebook, one friend, Taliè Andrèa, called him “a beautiful soul”. Tracey Crolla wrote: “Thinking of all the Atkinsons at this very sad time. John Atkinson you turned into an amazing young man so kind and thoughtful you will be missed by everyone x x.”
Nana Julie Mills said: “Just heard one of my good friends whom I’ve known since he was a little boy passed away last night. Condolences to his family and friends. RIP John Atkinson.”
Parents of other missing concert-goers continued to search for their children the day after the Manchester Arena attack, visiting hospitals and posting photos of their loved ones on social media.
About 21,000 people, many of them children and teenagers, were in the arena when a bomb exploded in the foyer at about 10.30pm.
Twelve children under the age of 16 were among the 59 casualties taken to hospital after the terror attack, confirmed by David Ratcliffe, the medical director of North West ambulance service.
Greater Manchester police have told people who need help or assistance to go to gate 11 at the Etihad Stadium, Manchester City football club’s ground. An emergency phone number set up to help people is 0800 096 0095.
Some family members have been on @Radio5live appealing for information about missing loved ones.
Deborah Hutchinson, from Gateshead, went to Manchester on Tuesday morning in the hope of finding her teenage daughter, Courtney, who has been missing since the attack. In an appeal on Facebook, she wrote that Courtney was with her partner, Philip Tron, and by 8am on Tuesday neither had been located.
She wrote: “My daughter Courtney Boyle and partner Philip Tron have gone missing tonight in a attack at Manchester tonight please share and help find them I need them home safe xX.”
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The bombing in Manchester has brought national trauma. We must not lash out
The Manchester bomber was not just trying to kill those at the pop concert, but he was also targeting you and me. He wanted to make us nervous about going to a shopping centre today or attending events such the FA Cup at Wembley this Saturday. His weapon of choice was the emotional responses that we carry within us and which he was trying to trigger.
Emotions such as horror: at the lives snuffed out, the injuries sustained, the families devastated. Or fear: that on another occasion it might be us who is involved and who is carried away in bodybags. Or anger: that a person could do such a thing and be “inspired” by a political or religious ideology.
Live Manchester Arena bombing: Police name attacker as Salman Ramadan Abedi, 22 – latest
Police say attacker died after detonating ‘improvised explosive device’ in foyer of concert hall Read more
There is also the resentment that the attack forces us to reassess daily acts that we have taken for granted up to now: is it safe to travel on buses? Might it be best not take the children to a funfair?
Worst of all is the sense of vengeance it evokes in us, wanting to lash out and hurt those whom we – however lacking in evidence – associate with the bomber; at the same time, we instinctively raise drawbridges and seek to isolate ourselves from groups other than “our own”.
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What all these responses have in common is that they are negative reactions, and although totally understandable, they lessen us rather than enhance us. We are being offered sugar-coated poison and should refuse it.
What is needed is reassurance on two levels. First, the reassurance that our way of life will continue. More security checks may now be necessary, but concert halls will still function, public transport will still run. We want there to be a tomorrow and we want it to resemble today.
Second, the reassurance that our values are still intact. Society will still be based on law and justice. Cross-communal events and inter-faith dialogue will carry on, social and cultural events will still flourish. Doing what is noble, speaking the truth, loving our neighbours as ourselves – they will all remain.
With time and help, we can cope with personal shock and we can overcome individual trauma, but what we fear most is our social structures being derailed and losing everything that hundreds of years of gradual progress have achieved.
We know we are not alone: New York faced 9/11, Paris experienced Charlie Hebdo, and many others have suffered and survived. Amid the mayhem, there are beacons of light. As the prime minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg, said after the shooting of schoolchildren in 2011: “You will not destroy us. No one will stop Norway from being itself” and he vowed that the response would be “more democracy, more openness, more humanity”. It was echoed by the populace at large, which said: we shall not change our way of life, we shall recognise the disturbed man responsible for the killings as an exception and not let him alter the rule.
Manchester is suffering now – but its spirit will overcome this atrocity
Owen Jones
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It could have been so different: looking instead for scapegoats, pointing fingers, turning inwards, blaming migrants or each other. It was a national example of staying calm, working together and believing in the common good.
It is also worth remembering that the forces of good are often underestimated. In the recent terrorist attack on Westminster Bridge, there was one terrorist, but thousands of people who rescued, comforted, gave medical care, and donated money in memory of the policeman who was killed, PC Keith Palmer.
The Manchester Arena will not be the last incident, and, sad to predict, more lives will be lost and more bereaved families will be created in other parts of the country. Individually, there will still be suffering, but, collectively, providing we can preserve our values and stop our emotions from diverting us, the attacks will be ineffective in their larger aim of altering who we are and how we behave.
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I was 10 when I witnessed an IRA bomb. The Manchester victims will need years of help
t is almost impossible to put into words how horrible the attack on the Manchester Arena on Monday night was.
The news will terrify any parent. For anyone who’s ever been near to a terrorist attack, it will provide a reminder of the pain that such events inflicts. This morning, Tessa Jowell reminded us on the Today programme of the long-lasting effects of these atrocities on relatives and friends of the casualties. She said that support for families affected should last “10 years” at least, drawing on her experiences of coordinating the response to the 7/7 attacks. That did not surprise me at all.
Manchester is suffering now – but its spirit will overcome this atrocity
Owen Jones
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On 27 March 1976, when I was 10 years old, my mother took me, my sister and two of our friends to the Ideal Home Exhibition at London’s Olympia. It was exciting to be among the 20,000 or so visitors and to see the lavish decorations and demonstrations of innovative gadgets. At some point in the afternoon, my friend Tanya and I waited by a waste bin while my mother and the others went to the toilets.
When they returned, we alighted a nearby escalator to the floor above. As we stepped off at the top there was a monumental, ear-splitting boom. People were flung in all directions, there was smoke, screaming, crying, broken glass all over the floor and what seemed like torrents of blood. The bin that we had been standing beside only seconds earlier, it transpired, had contained a bomb planted by the Provisional IRA.
An amplified voice instructed everyone to evacuate the building immediately and mass panic ensued. My mother told us to stand still – she was concerned we would be trampled – so we did, unable to avoid witnessing the grisly scene below. A man lay on the floor and we watched as what was left of one of his legs was propped up on a barrel to slow the escaping blood while people ripped fabric from stalls to mop up the other 84 casualties, many of whom had shards of glass protruding from their flesh.
As terrorist attacks go, this one was relatively minor: there was no structural damage to the building or immediate deaths, but without doubt there was damage to some of those who witnessed it. In the months ahead I had trouble blocking out the images of what I had seen and struggled to come to terms with the realisation that grownups could panic like children. When my mother planned trips to London, I was often unable to go, being struck down with mysterious nausea and vomiting. Curiously, no one ever put two and two together and it was years before I realised the cause of this “illness”.
My friend Tanya suffered more: sudden movement or sounds would incite severe anxiety; she later developed claustrophobia, agoraphobia and panic attacks. She became obsessed with unattended packages, the potential threat of which was on everyone’s mental radar at the time due to the continued IRA bombing campaign. To this day she will only sit in an aisle seat at the cinema or in a theatre. Tanya was clearly suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Live Manchester Arena bombing: Saffie Rose Roussos, eight, named as second victim of suicide attack – latest
Police say attacker died after detonating ‘improvised explosive device’ in foyer of concert hall Read more
Terrorism, be it executed by a solo operator or an organised political outfit, can never be wiped out. The response should be to mourn, to make sure everyone has the help they need, but not to let society change in the way terrorists wish it to. As the Manchester mayor Andy Burnham stated: “We are grieving today, but we are strong. Today it will be business as usual as far as possible in our great city.”
Thankfully counselling for those immediately affected – as well as the less obvious victims, the onlookers – is now more readily available. Like others today, I am hoping that all those still missing are found safe and well. And that, for those who witnessed the tragic event, or have lost loved ones, we can give them whatever support they need to come to terms with what has happened.
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Interview + Playlist: Chuck Daniels Is Celebrating 15 Years of His Label at Movement
We're getting mentally prepared for the massive festival known as Movement- a quintessential event for those interested in techno and its vivacious history throughout Detroit. There's a whole list of different artists and talents we're excited to see there, and it would be basically impossible to cover it in the detail we want to at this moment, but we're excited for this. We sat down with Chuck Daniels, who's preparing for a massive after-party during the festival that's also a part of his label's Sampled's 15 year anniversary.
We sat down to learn about what Detroit, Movement, and music, means to him as we get ready for the festivities ahead.
More information on the after-party here.
Hi Chuck, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with us today. You're gearing up for both Movement and your official after party. With Detroit being such a fundamental part of dance culture, what does today's dance culture mean to you, and do you think that the message of electronic and dance music has changed since its original message?
Thank's for having me! Music is very personal so everyones message may be different. That message can also depend on the mood someone’s in. If someone has a break-up and writes a song it could have a unique subliminal message. I have written tunes Happy, Angry & Sad so my music will reflect that feeling. Detroit Techno can be dramatic and often tells a story, that story can change. Music has power and means so many different thing’s to me.You've undoubtedly traveled throughout the world for music, and seen a lot of musical scenes. Is there any place that excites you today? My last trip to Berlin was quite exciting; I played 4 gigs while I was there. The room’s I played were about 200-400 people in capacity on average and they were all really good. I would have to say Sysyphos was my favorite.
If we were to visit Detroit tell us some historical places we could visit that pay tribute to the roots of Detroit music.
The Motown Museum would for sure. Many classic records were recorded there dating back to the Motown era. Submerge is also a must, John Collin's runs a music distribution company, private record store and our Electronic Music Museum is where you can find things like the lathe of the late great Ron Murphy who is responsible for cutting hundreds of Techno records.
What advice would you give to young aspiring Artist’s trying to make it in the Dance music industry right now.
Work hard, do what you are passionate about and don’t be afraid to be yourself.
You have had some really exciting things happen the past couple years with your own music and your label Sampled Detroit. What can we expect from you and the team in 2017?
More music! We’ve got upcoming stuff from all our most popular artists and we have also been working hard to discover some new fresh talent that we can’t wait to showcase. At the end of this month we will be celebrating our 15 year Anniversary during ‘Movement’, our electronic music festival here in Detroit. We have worked hard to manage and create a crazy line-up including Gene Farris, Mark Farina, Jesse Rose, Junior Sanchez, Andrés, Rick Wilhite, Tall Black Guy and a bunch of others. I also just curated a project for Seth Troxler’s label ‘Play It Say It’ that I am super excited about. It’s an amazing tune from some Detroit based friends Andy Toth & Billy Love and includes a remix I did that is already receiving some love getting some play’s on BBC Radio 1.
Lastly, You mentioned ‘Movement’, what would be a couple good record stores & club’s to visit while we’re there?
Melodies and Memories has always been a favorite. They have a huge selection of Motown, Jazz and classic Dance and Disco. It was the preferred digging location for the late great J Dilla and many others. Also Detroit Threads is the spot for any of the newest Detroit Techno and House releases. Most of our local Artists sell direct to them so they are always likely to have anything new from peeps like Mike Huckaby or anyone still pressing records. Concerning our night life, I would have to mention Marble Bar a new venue that has been killing it with some really good show’s. They have an amazing outside stage and a brand new sound system. TV Lounge is our go to venue and has been for years it’s kind of a family affair there and it’s the heart of our underground dance music community. These are the 2 spot's I play the most and have hosted our Sampled parties.
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The Secret To Elevating The Entourage Effect
If you’re a cannabis nerd like we are, you might already be familiar with the Entourage Effect. An understanding of this essential cannabis concept helps us understand how different types of cannabis products create different experiences and effects.
Researchers have identified hundreds of compounds in cannabis. While we understand the primary effects of the most common compounds like THC and CBD, we have not yet been able to explain precisely how these components work together to produce different reactions. One common theory, the Entourage Effect, explains that some cannabis compounds that have minimal or no effect in isolation may generate significant effects when combined with additional cannabinoids and terpenes. Put simply, the beneficial impact of the whole plant is greater than the sum of its individual parts.
This may explain why whole plant cannabis is reported be so effective in treating certain medical conditions, while synthetically derived formulations of isolated THC or CBD often achieve less consistently positive patient outcomes. Researchers have explored the concept of synergy in herbal medicine for millennia. The idea that combining two or more compounds to create a magnified effect is nothing new. Synergy also explains why nutritional supplements tend to be less beneficial than eating fresh fruits and vegetables that contain a broad variety of vitamins and minerals.
So we can all agree that the Entourage Effect is a great thing. How do we take advantage of it?
Any properly grown cannabis will feature a full spectrum of cannabinoids and terpenes. However, when that cannabis is refined into concentrate or products, most, if not all of the beneficial terpenes and other compounds will be lost to the extraction process. Whether using solvents like ethanol, butane or hexane, traditional methods like cold water extraction, or even common CO2 technologies, preserving quality terpenes through the extraction process has generally been considered impossible.
At Evolab, we see impossible as a challenge. So when we realized that traditional extraction processes were neglecting the full spectrum of the plant that would benefit our customers, we sought out a new way of processing that would maintain those beneficial compounds.
Through collaborative partnerships and significant investment in research and development, we created the cannabis industry’s first clean CO2 extraction solution that not only preserves terpenes, but also allows us to extract the entire profile of any plant, enabling us to deliver the power of the Entourage Effect in convenient vape pens and extracts. Furthermore, this approach provides the unique ability to extract only the terpenes when we choose to, which led to the first and only product line featuring pure cannabis terpene profiles —FreshTerps™.
Creating the best extracts starts long before we bring raw material into our laboratory. Just like anything, what you put in dictates what you get out. This is especially true with cannabis processing. That's why we only source the best material from the most respected cultivators that have been carefully and consistently optimizing their operations for years. We visit farms to understand the people and practices behind the material we use. We meticulously inspect every facility that we source from — analyzing consistency, genetics, pesticide use, cultivation methodologies, testing standards and much more. Then we sample, test and test some more — looking for good things like cannabinoid and terpene levels, and things that we avoid — like microbial contamination and pesticides.
Since each batch is subject to rigorous quality inspection and availability, all strains are essentially limited stock. Despite making every effort to maintain the availability of popular strains, just like any crop, availability sometimes varies based on many factors.
Once we source the very best material that we can find, the real fun begins. Back at Evolab headquarters, a team of expert chemists uses our proprietary pharmaceutical-grade CO2 technology to begin the complex process of breaking down the material into its essential elements: cannabinoids, terpenes, waxes and other byproducts like chlorophyll.
The cannabinoids and terpenes are further distilled and purified before being formulated into products including Chroma™, Alchemy™ and FreshTerps™. The advanced extraction process used to create the award-winning FreshTerps™ line pulls just 2-3% of the plant weight in pure terpenes, so users experience nothing but the purest flavors and effects of their favorite strains. With the new FreshPen™, FreshTerps™ are now available in a convenient and discreet disposable vape pen for on-the-go use.
Another Evolab innovation is Alchemy™, which blends FreshTerps™ with ultra-purified Chroma™ oil to deliver a true full spectrum Entourage Effect including the entire terpene and cannabinoid profile of many of our favorite strains. For the ultimate personalized dab experience, users can build their own Alchemy by combining purified Chroma™ cannabinoids with strain specific FreshTerps™.
Of course, to deliver the best full spectrum extracts, we had to find the highest quality hardware to complete the perfect user experience. We tirelessly sought out the best vape hardware from around the world to match our uncompromising, uncut cannabis extracts. With pure oil paired with durable, premium materials like stainless steel and pyrex glass, and a customizable variable draw technology that replicates a dab, a slow vape draw, or anything in between, Evolab cartridges are designed to provide a seriously smooth, consistently potent experience. A variety of convenient disposable vape pens and environmentally-friendly oil refills are also available at dispensaries across Colorado.
Ask about Evolab products at your favorite dispensary or visit evolab.com/store-locator/ to find a convenient location near you.
Want to learn more about Evolab, our products or the Entourage Effect? Follow @evolabCO2 on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter or visit evolab.com.
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