5 Magazine

10 stories

5 MagazineScenesMr. Good Times: Norman Jay MBE & the Invention of Modern Club Culture In his 2019 memoir, Norman Jay MBE tells the story of a groundbreaking DJ, and also creates a vital record of the formative years of modern club culture.

10.16

5 MagazineScenesSLOPWAVE: AI is Eating the World. It’s Finally Come for Us. There’s no way to shut off the sewage pipe of AI-generated trash. And it's started to overwhelm us.

10.16

5 MagazineScenesScissor & Thread reissues the gorgeous “You Can Always Leave” & “Companion” with DJ Sprinkles Scissor & Thread drops two highly coveted vinyl-only reissues on one 12 inch, highlighting two DJ Sprinkles-related tracks from the mid-2010s.

10.16

5 MagazineScenesVery Superstitious: Rhodes Designs a Digital Clavinet The iconic sound of funk and the electronic clavichord captured as a plugin.

10.16

5 MagazineScenesLumberjacks In Hell celebrate 15 years of hell-bound sounds on “Random Acts of Kindness” If L.I.H. have a label sound then you'd place it somewhere in a musical triangulation with Chicago house in one corner, soulful house in another, and disco in another.

10.15

5 MagazineScenesRon Allen — Foundational Element James Duncan on legendary seminal Toronto dance music producer and DJ Ron Allen on Strobe Records, scene building, A&R and his major contributions to the global dance music scene.

10.14

5 MagazineScenesDancefloor adventures on Ackermann’s “I Know What To Do” If you know how an Ackermann track starts you can never feel 100% sure how it'll finish.

10.14

5 MagazineScenesMichelle debuts on Kalahari Oyster Cult with the otherworldly grooves of “Unfailing Love” Unfailing Love is the sound of the future colliding with the past, metal and plastic and unknown materials twisting and bending until you can't fathom the original shape.

10.14

5 MagazineScenesMira Ló orchestrates a danceable nervous breakdown on “The Way We Glowed” On The Way We Glowed, French DJ/producer Mira Lo stirs up the embers of a past relationship, an impressive new work by a new, major house artist.

10.14

5 MagazineScenesMultitrack editing in the browser, free with AudioMass Free, open source and works offline: the latest upgrade to AudioMass, a lightweight but surprisingly robust audio editor.

10.14

Three pins, and nearly every signal in this business passes through them.

The magazine is named after the cable: the microphone in the booth, the line to the desk, the DMX run that fires the lights. Studio, stage and rig share the same cable. Most magazines pick one of the three. This one covers all of it, because the people we read do too — the engineer mixing a record on Tuesday is on front of house by Saturday.

Around a hundred and sixty sources, in English, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Chinese and Italian: makers and their release notes, reviewers who put a hand on the thing, studios and touring crews, the producers and collectives surfacing this month and the scenes they came out of. Synths and modular, plugins and DAWs, guitars and drums, microphones, monitors, PA and lighting. What the trade is talking about is counted and plotted. The editor's letter has just started; it will find its rhythm.

For each story: a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the link out. We never reprint the article, and the picture belongs to the maker or the photographer. A German review appears in German and a Japanese one in Japanese, as the writer published it; the link goes to the original.

Nothing is sold on this site. When a link leads to a shop, it is the maker's shop, not ours.