The pandemic is a topic of conversation we studiously avoided for the first year or so of the podcast, it just seemed a bit boring and predictable. It was shit, basically, and there's only so much you can say about being locked inside for 18 months. But what if you suddenly became a successful DJ in 2019? That was some of the worst timing possible, and must've posed a series of challenges to keep it going, both professional and psychological. This week's guest had to deal with exactly that...

Afro House is not something we've covered in depth on the show to date, but this week we welcome one of the UK's foremost exponents of the form. Kitty Amor was born in London, but cut her musical teeth running nights as a student Nottingham where she and her associates were instrumental in bringing the second wave of Grime, Funky, and other key London genres out of the capital. Her sound as a DJ was also developed during that stint in the midlands, and upon returning to London she made a...

Join us at the D:U:2 listening party -> https://scubaofficial.bandcamp.com/merch/d-u-2-listening-party Listen to the awesome Laurus Ascending EP by Bodhi -> https://ingrv.es/laurus-ascending-ya4-9 It's been a while since we had a promoter on the show, and this week's guest is one of the most influential in Europe since the turn of the century. Having spent his 20s servicing in the military and fire brigade, Danny Whittle joined the Renaissance team direct from the job centre and since...

Are we partying like it's 1999? I mean what it was actually like in 99, not how Prince imagined it might be back in 1982. Millennium eve was supposed to be the best thing ever. I was beside myself with excitement for months beforehand, possibly years. But when push came to shove, my group of friends didn't even bother going to a rave and spent an underwhelming evening drinking warm champagne on Brighton Beach before attending a number of deeply boring house parties. The subsequent inquest...

At what point does criticism of changes in culture become overly reactive? This is a question I've wrestled with continuously over the past couple of years, but I can't get past the conclusion that if something isn't good then pointing that fact out is never really a bad thing... right? My conversation with Radio Slave this week doesn't pull any punches on what is wrong with dance music currently. It's no longer cool. Social media is rewarding the wrong stuff. The history of the thing is...

It's the week after the week before.... no guest this week, but a deep dive into my experiences with live electronic music in the audience as well as being on stage myself. And on stage I was, last week in London, Bristol, and Manchester. Huge thanks to all of you who attended the shows, had so much great feedback it's been a bit overwhelming actually. If you missed it then there will be more later in the year! If you're into what we're doing here on the pod then you can support the show on...

D:U:LIVE is coming this week!! My first live shows since 2013.... London / Bristol / Manchester - all tickets: scubaoficial.io/live How many proper recording studios are there left in big cities in 2024? And how many of those are used regularly for making proper dance music? Probably not that many but one of them is run by this week's guest, a recoding engineer with a ton of house and techno credits and one half of the Lost Souls Of Saturn alongside previous NDP guest Seth Troxler. Phil Moffa...

D:U:LIVE is coming in June! My first live shows since 2013.... London / Bristol / Manchester - all tickets: scubaoficial.io/live We've been covering techno quite a lot on the show recently, but mostly from a legacy perspective. This week we are joined with one of the last few years' breakdown names on the production side. Based in Krakow, Poland, Karol Mozgawa aka Deas emerged largely via the Audio River festival, a truly world class event which is now its seventeenth year. Releases on CLR,...

D:U:LIVE is coming in June! My first live shows since 2013.... London / Bristol / Manchester - all tickets: scubaoficial.io/live Tom Vek is a solo artist from the UK who has been signed to majors, indies, and been self released. He was in the news recently in the debate surrounding James Blake's Vault platform, penning an opinion piece on the subject in the Guardian. So obviously we discuss all that stuff in this conversation, as well as his own contribution to the music distribution...

D:U:LIVE is coming in June! My first live shows since 2013.... London / Bristol / Manchester - all tickets: scubaoficial.io/live Is it possible for the music to do the talking in 2024? Maybe, but probably not the extent that Paranoid London managed it for the first few "vinyl-only, no interviews" years of their career. Quinn joins us on this episode for a chat that includes a lot more laughter than usual for an episode of this podcast. But that's a good thing! And we talk about some...

D:U:LIVE is coming in June! My first live shows since 2013.... London / Bristol / Manchester - all tickets: scubaoficial.io/live Ceri is a DJ, producer, Find Your Own Records label owner, and Find Your Own Sound music production masterclass host. A former resident of the legendary after hours party Jaded in London, she has really taken off on the circuit since the pandemic with recent debuts at Panorama Bar and Blitz Munich. She's also an Ibiza resident and a long-time participant in the...

D:U:LIVE is coming in June! My first live set since 2013.... London / Bristol / Manchester - all tickets: scubaoficial.io/live Radio is not something we've covered massively on the podcast to date but this week's guest is often (and somewhat lazily) referred to as the Irish John Peel, so this is a step towards rectifying that. Cian Ó Cíobháin has been curating his 5-nights-a-week show An Taobh Tuathail on the Irish state broadcaster RTE RnaG for 25 years. That longevity is an achievement in...

D:U:LIVE is coming in June! My first live set since 2013.... London / Bristol / Manchester - all tickets: scubaoficial.io/live How could we possibly follow last week's episode with the techno legend Luke Slater? Well, with another legend of techno of course! Laurent Garnier is, in fact, and all-time great of dance music PERIOD. He was playing the Hacienda before acid house really got going. He can plausibly claim a large amount of the credit for the sound gaining popularity in France. And he...

D:U:LIVE is coming in June! My first live set since 2013.... London / Bristol / Manchester - all tickets: scubaoficial.io/live If you were discussing, as people sometimes do, the possible identity of ' the best techno producer of all time' then Luke Slater would surely be mentioned in that conversation. At least if I was involved in the debate it certainly would be. Is anything else necessary to say here? Well, he has a new album coming under his LB Dub Corp alias, which is usually closer to...

D:U:LIVE is coming in June! My first live set since 2013.... London / Bristol / Manchester - all tickets: scubaoficial.io/live We haven't covered Drum n Bass anywhere near as much as I'd like. dBridge was an early guest, and we've also had Fracture, Chris from Hospital, and Krust. So that's not even 5% of the episodes so far, and DnB really is a fascinating topic. Doc Scott was there from the very start. A teenage attendee of acid house raves like Sunrise, he was on the dancefloor at Rage,...

Sign up for London / Bristol / Manchester Scuba live shows! scubaoficial.io/live What's it like to mediate a disagreement between members of one of the biggest bands in history? And to do that while you're trying to produce their new record? This is a question which is answered in this week's episode, in which our guest is one of the most prolific producers of Big UK Acts of the last two decades. As well as being a member of Simian Mobile Disco, James Ford (occasionally with his middle name...

How many elite sportsmen know their way round a modular synthesiser? Steve Davis was the first modern star of snooker. He dominated the game in the 1980s, winning six world titles, appearing in 8 of the 9 finals between 1981 and 1989. He was ranked number one in the world for seven consecutive years, posted the first ever 147 maximum break in official competition, and was easily (Alex Higgins hipsters aside) established as the best player ever to play the game by the end of that decade. As...

Coming to you from Dehli, India.... via dodgy mic in a hotel room so don't watch the sound quality! I play Vent in Tokyo this Friday, and will be making my debut in Shanghai this Saturday. On the show this week... What makes an Ibiza DJ? And does anyone want to be one anymore? Chloé Caillet is always talked up that way in the press, but there's a lot more to her than a residency at Circo Loco. One of house music's breakthrough DJs of the post-pandemic era, Chloé has really become a big name...

For the dance producer, a move into scoring film and TV is often a secret (or not-so-secret) career aspiration. Hardly anyone manages to pull it off though. How do you do it? And what is the work and life actually like if you make it? Nathan Micay has released singles and albums on labels including Aus Music and Lucky Me, but now spends most of his time writing music for projects for Netflix and the like. His CV in that area now includes Industry, the new Sexy Beast series, and HBO's Reality....

What connects hair metal on the sunset strip with Burning Man, the Dotcom Bubble, and Planet E Communications? On this this week's episode we find out, with the man who was formerly label manager for Carl Craig's imprint, grew up in the Bay Area and was in the first group of employees and AskJeeves.com...! Monty Luke is a great DJ and producer who has been around the block a few times. We therefore had much to discuss, including the aforementioned journey from dive bars in LA in the late...

The Orb are the biggest ambient act of all time - that's probably true but they were certainly THE ambient band of the 90s, selling enormous amounts of records, touring a live show which drew breathless comparisons to Pink Floyd, arguably inventing the concept of Chill Out, and generally occupying a unique space as a truly experimental group in the mainstream of music.  Alex Paterson is the only constant member of The Orb, who last released an album in 2023, and has the scars of litigation to...

I think this might be a classic episode in the making... it's a really fun and interesting comversation about scenes, new music, new tech, and being a musician.  T.Williams is a UK house don, a close friend and long-time recommendation of previous NDP guest Roska, who has done all sorts of stuff over a long career covering multiple genres, touring with Disclosure, releasing a great new album, but starting all the way back in the early Grime scene as a member of the Black Ops crew in West...

Welcoming Danny Daze back for a second appearance on the podcast. Danny graced us with his presence on episode 32, but a lot has happened since then both in the scene generally and in Danny's life too.  We get deep into his recent album and visual project, Blue, which is a great piece of music but also a really interesting example of how to build a truly engaging visual element into the album format. We talk about constructing spatial audio mixes, Dolby Atmos, the audience perception of...

And we're back! Thanks so much for you patience - the last couple of weeks have been a total nightmare for me actually but I'm happy to say that normal service can now be resumed.  Head over to the Hotflush Bandcamp where we have unveiled a new policy of 'Pay What You Feel' for all catalogue items! Vinyl, CD, tapes, tees, mugs... Name your price on everything. This does NOT cover new releases, as we don't want to be undermining the record shop ecosystem, and digital downloads still have a...