commendation for outstanding service to human race: resident advisor

and yes, i am conscious that selection is almost definitely lacking in a diversity of voices, so recommendations outside of that pov would be welcome

Yup Test Pressing is great. Forgot about that one. Will check the others thanks.

also Attack magazine, but that's mostly music tech:

https://www.attackmagazine.com/

ok. i withdraw my comment about the government money.

i guess all the sites i was going to mention get mentioned above. there aren't a ton i'll concede but deffo a fair few. i guess it is dependent on what way one's taste skews.

To be fair, FACT was always pretty shitty.

in its defence, it was shitty in quite an interesting way. also chal ravens was/is awesome

FACT was great in its original incarnation.

Who could resist stuff like this? - https://www.factmag.com/2010/11/02/20-best-goth/

also chal ravens was/is awesome

I second this.

https://banbantonton.com/ was a recent discovery for me that I'll recommend for mostly balearic coverage. I will stan for FACT under Kiran Sande's editorial reign when they threw enough curveballs into the listicle/clickbait content to keep things interesting.

banbantonton is nice, it's one of the old testpressing guys I think

yeah BBTT is Dr Rob formerly of Test Pressing.

Stamp The Wax is good, their Monday mixtapes are excellent. In general I tend to follow writers than sites though - for every decent Ravens piece on RA there's one of those terrible no-insight Rewind reviews that seems generated by AI.

I still remember when FACT ran that "top ten gayest Ritchie Hawtin moments" article, hard to take them seriously since.

Have only ever read Chal in places other than RA.

Chal is great. Sometimes I look at Insert for tracks. Electronicbeats.net had some good editorial for a little while. Bandcamp editorial has some good round-up columns, not a lot of writing though (just short capsules). Mostly I just follow people on Twitter and Bandcamp (good for actually finding music, but yeah music writing is in a scattered and sorry state rn). Seems like some good writers are moving to the newsletter format though.

Ray Philp is another name who'll I will always read

"Who'll I will" I don't even know what grammatic rule I was trying to follow there

Thanks so much for all these recommendations. I also was lost on good sites for electronic music since music blogs died. ResidentAdvisor used to be the one I frequented the most but I don’t think I got too much out of it in 2020.

to be fair I don't think anyone was getting much of dance music culture in 2020 and everywhere seems to have a pivot towards music designed for home-listening (as if you can't and wouldn't listen to Proper Dancing Music around the house etc)

i'll second Ray Philp too.

Oh and how could I forget TRUANTS
http://truantsblog.com/

And the Bandcloud newsletter is great, although I certainly don't always have time to go through it.

i realize this has been discussed but wowww the new RA redesign... holy shit is it dull to look at. it's reminiscent of default wordpress themes circa 2016. thank u to all who posted links to alternatives, i will be visiting them.

other than the mix series RA is useless to me now that they abandoned the tracks feature. do any of these other sites have something similar? just soundcloud links to like 10-20 new tracks a day posted with minimal description. tracks was a good midpoint between beatport which is too much of a hose to the face for me and their reviews section which is too curated

best i can recommend is to follow a bunch of labels and artists you like on soundcloud, and use this greasemonkey script to hide reposts so you only see what they're originally posting: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/13566-soundcloud-hide-reposts

it's dumb that you can't just hide reposts on SC without this hack. the stream/timeline is useless to me without it. (n.b., it's a bit janky and you might have to reload the stream page for it to kick in.)

hm that’s a nice hack thx

i haven’t used it in a while but SoundCloud app was pretty bad last time i checked

they're looking for a new Editor In Chief.

they need front-end dev who could implement a dark mode for the site

finally: https://ra.co/podcast/769

Great little vid about Tech House: https://ra.co/features/3851
It wasn't always shit.

https://ra.co/news/76839

According to a tweet by Lee's colleague and friend Kenneth Takanami, who DJs and makes music under his given name, Lee joined Splice around the time of the Atlanta spa shootings in March 2021, which left six Asian women dead. Lee was passionate about supporting the Asian community in music and about combating racism and appropriation. She also loved vinyl.

jesus christ that’s terrible framing and writing

I'm into this

https://ra.co/podcast/849

I'm into this

https://ra.co/podcast/849🕸🕸

Looking forward to that but I'm still working my way through the Nikki Nair mix (which is fantastic)

It’s disappointing to see how much this site has become the editorial side-project of what’s now primarily a ticket vendor. Seems like every other feature is some paean to a a supposedly utopian club/festival culture, that’s meant to get people to buy tickets to club nights and festivals, which also happen to be sold on the same site. This is old news at this point, but as I age out of going out (I’m right in the middle of my club-going retirement life-crisis) it hits a raw nerve.

but really, this is what it has always been all along. it's just more glaringly apparent now.

that clicked into place for me when i saw an RA photographer snapping pics at a shitty festival in miami like ten years ago. it was humid, raining, and the bodies packed together under the part of the dancefloor covered by a tarp smelled like a gym locker, no one needed photos of this

outdoor events in the sun are their own thing, but the club experience is typically dark rooms with people in movement and it's not something that lends well to visual representation. festivals in interesting spaces lend well to crowd shots, but again, not a club

the instagram-ready shots of a dj dancing around behind the decks or the boiler room-style cramped videos feel like an attempt to make the experience more social media-aware but they're still not the pov of the audience! I've attended many such events but something always feels off when everyone's in lockstep facing a dj on a stage. the music creates the space, the dj shouldn't be the focal point

but really, this is what it has always been all along. it's just more glaringly apparent now.

― stirmonster, Thursday, May 4, 2023 9:21 AM (twenty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes, but I am still living in 2007 :(

where is the thread where the late great talks about how dance music should be people in a dark room banging their body to the beat of the box instead of being smiley happy sunshine festival attendees?

my platonic ideal of a place to listen to dance music involves me in my car driving along an overcast coastline, cityscape in the distance, fog clinging to the nearby green hills, not a club in sight. i've been doing it wrong my whole life tbh.

The Bay Area is waiting for you omar

xp that’s pretty much the origin story of second and third wave detroit techno, at least according to carl craig and others. they weren’t glam enough to get into house parties and not hard enough to go to hip hop shows, so they drove around detroit freeways at night listening to juan atkins and derrick may and electrifying mojo, and eventually made music to fit that vibe.

one of my all time most transcendent experiences was driving through tilden on a clear moonlit night in 96 after a storm, super clear views of everything from santa clara to tamalpais, the city glittering across the bay like computer graphics, while an anonymous radio dj spun through io “claire” and stasis and ken ishii and mark broom and so on

i believe the track titles on model 500’s deep space are an homage to that possibly apocryphal car craig tale

my platonic ideal of a place to listen to dance music involves me in my car driving along an overcast coastline, cityscape in the distance, fog clinging to the nearby green hills, not a club in sight. i've been doing it wrong my whole life tbh.

― omar little

just makes me want to play "outrun"

"outrun" one of the better thomas bangalter tracks, though i prefer "ventura" (another classic driving locale) from the same EP

One of my similarly transcendent experiences was coming home from college driving past the steel mills of Gary, Indiana heading towards Chicago on a foggy winter night listening to my then brand new copy of second toughest in the infants by underworld. Think I may have bought accelerator by FSOL on the same trip back.

I've got a little personal ritual of always listening to a dj mix on the way home from work on Fridays...something about the combination of my brain being too fried from the week to process a podcast + the rush of weekend freedom. And of course late night freeway drives.

Anyway RA have succeeded deemphasizing their editorial content. I wonder how many people even look at reviews or go there to find new music anymore.

Most of the music I love sounds better at night. Or on a cloudy day.

techno does sound great in the car. one of the best was carl craig's landcruising on a langorous drive after the beach as the light shifted from a warm gold sunset to the synthetic light of the city

Highly recommend listening to cfcf's the colours of life while cruising PCH late in the day.

idk which Moodymann thread to post that this week’s RA mix is all Moodymann so I’ll just post it here