I
AUDIO GUIDE
RAVE REVIEWS
The London Design Museum’s tech-fuelled electronic music
exhibition: if your name’s not down, you’re not coming in
UNDERWORLD
SECOND
TOUGHEST IN
THE INFANTS
Blending assorted
flavours of downbeat
electronica with Karl
Hyde’s meditative
poetry, the result
is a brilliantly paced
masterpiece that
has aged nicely.BURIAL
UNTRUE
Barely recognisable
as dubstep, this is a
record about lonely
3am bus rides home.
Listen to it for its
heavily textured yet
spacious tunes, and
samples that sound
like bullet casings
falling to the ground.DAFT PUNK
RANDOM
ACCESS
MEMORIES
A love letter to disco,
this will never be the
most beloved of
Daft Punk records,
but the use of
original instruments
gives it an exquisitely
unique feel.NOW
HEAR THIS
IN THE
CLUB STYLE
£14.50 / designmuseum.orgt’s as close to real
clubbing as Covid
rules will allow, and
its opening has been a huge
success. ‘Electronic: From
Kraftwerk to the Chemical
Brothers’ has been so popular,
the exhibition at London’s
Design Museum has regularly
sold out. Even DJs themselves
are finding it hard to get a
ticket – at least we assume
that’s why the legend that is
Normski was forced to cover
it for Mixmag.
The museum has been
careful to cater for social
distancing. Signs urge visitors
to ‘keep the dist-dance’,
only 60 people per hour
are allowed in after booking
their timed slot, there’s
a one-way system andenhanced cleaning takes place
throughout. If this is a vision
of clubbing’s future, perhaps
it’s not so bad after all.
Make it past the bouncers
and you can expect a journey
through time and bass, from
electronic music pioneer
Daphne Oram’s ground-
breaking BBC Radiophonic
Workshop in the 1950s to
mad scientists fiddling with
Moogs and Korgs in the ’60sand ’70s, then ’80s electro
funk and computers like the
Atari ST debuting software
such as Cubase.
See how DJ Jeff Mills (with
an unprecedented second
mention in this month’s
magazine) utilises three
decks and how Richie Hawtin
taps into tech, then plug in
headphones to hear hip-hop
scratch DJs go at it.
But for that ultimate
hands-in-the-air moment,
legendary British speaker
company PMC’s 7.1 active
studio monitor install
combined with a Chemical
Brothers AV experience will
probably do it.
O ‘Electronic: From Kraftwerk
to the Chemical Brothers’
runs to 14 February 2021.