History is made at night

One of my favourite quotes is from Walter Benjamin: “A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones act...

This weekend there has been a 'festival of New Orleans' in London, with Dr John playing for free at the O2 arena in Greenwich. Unfor...

... or at least the 'sounds' of pulsating stars detected by the Corot space telescope in France . Have a listen, some interesting no...

Anita Berber (1899-1928) was a dancer in pre-Nazi Germany, famous/notorious for a life of bisexuality, drugs and semi-naked performance. Wit...

A research study at the University of Illinois suggests that people were more effective at Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) if they wer...

My previous post on the notion of community mediated by the senses got me thinking about what senses come into play in music/dance spaces. ...

The relationship between music, dance and community is a recurring theme on this site, but the word 'community' has come to be appro...

Advance warning – I will be doing a talk in Berlin on Friday October 31st, part of an event to mark the tenth issue of Datacide zine. Not s...

Excellent post at Uncarved on UK reggae and the National Front , complete with a mix of the tracks he talks about. The racist NF, which pea...

It's been a while since I posted anything about space music (see here for the original Disconaut text ), but I came across this fine pi...

Some interesting reflections on tight trousers, masculinity and sexuality cropping up. The always excellent Pop Feminist has the remarkable...

With record shop Sister Ray in London's Berwick Street going into administration (and inevitably a facebook group set up to save it),...

Peter Stallybrass and Allon White on the carnivalesque , extracted from The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986): …in the long-ter...

I enjoyed Street and Studio: an Urban History of Photography at Tate Modern in London over the summer (the exhibition opens in Essen next w...

Around 1950 a new music and dance craze swept across the Americas - Mambo. It had emerged in Cuba during the 1930s as a series of variations...

Human, the new single by The Killers, confirms their place as the new U2 of epic pop complete with grandiose themes of faith and mortality. ...

From Salt Lake Tribune, 12 September 2008: Dirty dancing high school students, consider yourselves warned. Get that "freak on"...

I've posted here before on jazz subcultures under the Nazis , including the Zazous in France and Hamburg anti-fascists . There’s an ...

Everybody dance it says on the tin, and on the many occasions when I have heard this song in clubs, parties, weddings that's generally w...

My thoughts go out to the victims of the nightclub fire in Shenzhen, China this weekend: Thirteen people have been detained in connection wi...