Interview with DJ Vidis
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The Dance music aficionado, DJ Vidis created a unique partnership in the sphere of the burgeoning Lithuanian dance music scene.  He teamed up with seasoned producer, Mario Basanov in 2007 to form what is cited as a highly influential production duo whose delivery is a fresh approach to electronic music and the art of video making, with a distantly Baltic vibe.  After dropping their debut album, Changed, to critical acclaim across the blogosphere, EM takes some time out to chat with Vidis about their current and upcoming projects. →

Image courtesy of Factmag.com, Licensed under Creative Commons.

Multiple Venues – Barcelona, SPAIN
Live Review: 6/16 thru 6/18/11
Recap of Sonar 2011 by EM’s International Correspondent, Rick Heffernan.

Touching down from an Australian Winter to the Barcelona summer of my long-time surrogate home was well worth the 23 hours of horrible air and bad food. The town’s much beloved Sonar Festival was going through its annual madness; for it was only few days from kicking off (giving me just enough time to ditch the jet-lag and piece together a schedule of catch-ups, check-outs, and meetings.)

The sprawling 18-year old festival officially takes place over the course of three days and two nights. →

An interview with John O’Connor
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John Blek and the Rats are brought up on a healthy dose of country ballads and American folk roots mixed with the deep Irish countryside.  The Irish four piece is showing Europe that not all new bands have to be skinny jeans, ray-bans and haircuts. With tracks that sound way past their years and arrangements far more interesting than a lot of what’s currently on offer in Europe, it will be exciting to see how the future unfolds for them.  →

Sala Bikini – Barcelona, Spain
Live Review: 5/7/09
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An unusually wet night in Barcelona Spain, didn’t damper the anticipation and energy that was building up within the city’s music loving public. As Gil Scott Heron, often touted: “The Black Bob Dylan” and the venerable “Godfather of Hip hop,” was moments away from tickling out his 40-year career span on a vintage fender Rhodes. →

Not everyone’s grandmother rolls out the words “It’s good to be bad and it’s bad to be good” to their young nephew, but in the life of Malcolm McLaren this couldn’t have been a better slice of advice.

Born in suburbs of a post world war two London and falling in and out of a series of Art School’s, the self-declared protégé of the 70’s avant-garde scene discovered a love for designing clothes. →

Interview with Leroy Burgess
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As one of disco boogie’s founding fathers, Leroy Burgess boasts a formidable body of work in the music industry. Every DJ, musician, disco head, boogie fanatic and soul brother is inevitably a fan of his legendary voice and the production skills that shaped scenes from the underground sound of the 70s’ smooth soul right on through to modern day house, collaborating with such artists as Ron Carroll and Joey Negro. His studio creations, reaching tour audiences across the globe, have given the world over vinyl slices of New York to add to their record collections. Burgess has also gained a huge following that ranges from London to Tokyo; he’s been specially invited to Rome to lecture young music students at the Red Bull Music Academy’s yearly get-together, which saw participants from ever corner of the planet wide-eyed at Burgess’s generation-crossing influence. →

As prolific purveyor of 80′s dancefloor jazz and Wire Magazine’s first DJ of the year (circa 1985), Paul Murphy is one of the original London legends. Cited by everybody from Carl Cox to Gilles Peterson as their major influence, Paul was the first DJ to introduce jazz to the dance floor and thus, influenced a generation of young Londoners. →

Bob Jones career in the music business started in May 1967, he secured a DJing job at his local youth centre and gained his first ‘club’ appearance in 1971. His music policy was, as it is now, the highest quality black music, featuring soul, dance and jazz, and he has been recognised worldwide as one of the first DJs ever to play jazz to a dance floor as early as 1971

He has played in numerous clubs and venues across England, Europe and the world. In 1981 he played on the pirate radio stations in Essex and London, and quickly gained a reputation for playing quality black music and was asked to join Blues & Soul magazine as their jazz correspondent in 1983. →

Fiesta de la Merce – Catalan, Barcelona
Date: 9/22/08
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It’s always nice to witness an artist onstage whose prolific musical output pushed him safely past that point in his career path that some like to call “making it”. Only this time around, Jose James is cruising down that path at two miles per hour, so everybody can take note as his stereo pumps out the smoothest shit produced in the industry. He arrived at the annual Fiesta de la Merce, for the weeklong party →

With half the members of Stones Roses present in their own right, as well as aging punk blueprint drafters and modern British soul groups topped off with a shoeless and carefree Debbie Harry; the Summercase festival turned up the heat on a Spanish summer night. Barcelona, Spain was home to yet another weekender of amps, bleeps, screams and thumps. And now in its third year, this festival, had already hosted events showcasing the likes of Jarvis Cocker, Air, DJ Shadow, Daft Punk and the Chemical brothers to name a few. This year was no exception to the line-up →