The 2023 Annual Not A Diving Podcast Pledge Drive is here... for ONE FINAL WEEK! For the next week, support the show and receive special benefits... Option 1 - Patreon Musicality Tier (£8.50 per month) Pledge Drive Bonus = the 2024 Musicality t-shirt! Free of charge, postage and packing covered Option 2 - Patreon Solidarity Tier (£3.50 per month) Pledge Drive Bonus = a 50% off voucher to use on a basket containing any items at the Hotflush Bandcamp Store Option 3 - a one-off donation of...

The 2023 Annual Not A Diving Podcast Pledge Drive is here... for one extra week. For the next week, support the show and receive special benefits... Option 1 - Patreon Musicality Tier (£8.50 per month) Pledge Drive Bonus = the 2024 Musicality t-shirt! Free of charge, postage and packing covered Option 2 - Patreon Solidarity Tier (£3.50 per month) Pledge Drive Bonus = a 50% off voucher to use on a basket containing any items at the Hotflush Bandcamp Store Option 3 - a one-off donation of...

The 2023 Annual Not A Diving Podcast Pledge Drive is here! For the next week, support the show and receive special benefits... Option 1 - Patreon Musicality Tier (£8.50 per month) Pledge Drive Bonus = the 2024 Musicality t-shirt! Free of charge, postage and packing covered Option 2 - Patreon Solidarity Tier (£3.50 per month) Pledge Drive Bonus = a 50% off voucher to use on a basket containing any items at the Hotflush Bandcamp Store Option 3 - a one-off donation of £8.50 or USD$10.00 Pledge...

Here's a bonus pod to give you a taste of what being a subscriber is like, because... The 2023 Annual Not A Diving Podcast Pledge Drive is here! For the next two weeks support the show and receive special benefits... Option 1 - Patreon Musicality Tier (£8.50 per month) Pledge Drive Bonus = the 2024 Musicality t-shirt! Free of charge, postage and packing covered Option 2 - Patreon Solidarity Tier (£3.50 per month) Pledge Drive Bonus = a 50% off voucher to use on a basket containing any items...

The 2023 Annual Not A Diving Podcast Pledge Drive is here! For the next two weeks support the show and receive special benefits... Option 1 - Patreon Musicality Tier (£8.50 per month) Pledge Drive Bonus = the 2024 Musicality t-shirt! Free of charge, postage and packing covered Option 2 - Patreon Solidarity Tier (£3.50 per month) Pledge Drive Bonus = a 50% off voucher to use on a basket containing any items at the Hotflush Bandcamp Store Option 3 - a one-off donation of £8.50 or...

It's Bandcamp Friday this week! And we have a 50% sale on everything on the Hotflush Store. Head over there and cop some amazing limited edition vinyl. Use the code nov50 to cop that discount. We are late and in a confused state on the podcast this week... where are the guests?! That's the question I've been asking too over the last 10 days or so. But luckily there have been developments in the Bandcamp story and there's lots to talk about there, so I have taken the opportunity to do so....

Solo pod today... thoughts on the developing situation over at Bandcamp, both on the platform itself and its position in the ecosystem. I read a whole load of stuff so you don't have...

We now have a facility for one-off donations to the podcast... to make such a donation using either a credit or debit card, or with Paypal, head over to scubaofficial.io/support. Presave my forthcoming Digital Underground mixtape: push.fm/ps/digitalunderground Ever considered making an album using only the skeleton of a horse you managed to buy off ebay? Or perhaps a statement about the UK's departure from the European Union via the contributions of over a thousand musicians? I didn't think...

We now have a facility for one-off donations to the podcast... to make such a donation using either a credit or debit card, or with Paypal, head over to scubaofficial.io/support. We've been talking development and mentorship on the podcast in recent weeks, and the theme continues with a man whose experience covers albums on labels as diverse as Brainfeeder and Ostgut Ton, running a label for well over a decade, and chronicling the legend of Goldie's Timeless record. This is not a narrow...

We now have a facility for one-off donations to the podcast... to make such a donation using either a credit or debit card, or with Paypal, head over to scubaofficial.io/support. Record labels, music journalism, artist careers, and the historical developments of the dance scene have maybe been the most enduring themes of this podcast to date. And they all get discussed on this episode. Tom Lea has been running the excellent Local Action label since 2010, and is also, since 2021, label...

Berlin is the centre of the European dance scene. It's changed almost beyond recognition in the past two decades but its influence has steadily grown in that time, and while those two things mean that some people will inevitably be sniffy about it, the reality is that it's still the place to be. Paul Hanford literally wrote the book on coming to Berlin as an outsider, and even though the path is extremely well-trodden at this point, the experiences continue to develop. The stories in his...

A quick thank you to everyone listening in the UK... we made it into the top 10 music podcasts for the first time last week! Non-UK listeners: tell your friends so we can get up those international charts too! What is creativity? Why do we value it so much as a society? And how do you unlock it? These were not questions I was anticipating a deep dive on when I started researching this episode. As a long-time Krust fan, I was looking forward to talking about early Jungle and the Bristol DnB...

Catch myself b2b with Chloé Robinson at the Skreamizm weekend takeover at fabric in London on 21 October! --- A lot of artists complain about the way success and the weight of expectation affects their output. But what about people who've been scrutinised in public since they were a teenager? This week's guest has spent every weekend since he was 15 in clubs, and been the headline DJ for most of that time. There's not many other people who can say that. It's almost impossible to describe...

What connects the overnight success of Oliver Anthony with alien landings in Brazil? This week's podcast will give you the answer. Matthew Dear is a musician, producer, and DJ, who also teaches at the University Of Michigan. He's also very much a part of the Ghostly Int. label, which he has in common with recent guest Sam Valenti. As the above might suggest, this was a wide ranging discussion also covering many of the AI-related issues I talked about with Mat Dryhurst last week, as well as...

When I make a specific effort to talk to people about AI, the responses range from the occasional Chat GPT enthusiast to a much-more-common feigning of indifference, hinting at a deep insecurity and probably-quite-pronounced fear. This week's guest is perfectly placed to offer a degree of reassurance, or at least a bit more of a balanced view on the coming storm. And make no mistake, it is coming. Mat Dryhurst, along with Holly Herndon, has long been engaged in important work at the...

Regular listeners will have noticed my frequent references to the comedy podcast circuit, which is a great ecosystem and rewards repeat appearances by guests and conversations which deviate from the sort of profile-type interview which music shows (including this one) often resolve into. So this week we welcome our first return guest, Recondite, who appeared all the way back on episode 002. We discuss his involvement in the phenomenon of Afterlife, the Ibiza incarnation of which he played...

We do like a history discussion on this show. And who better to discuss the history of DJing with than the co-author of the most authoritative book on the subject? 'Last Night A DJ Saved My Life' was originally published in 1999, but there's a 2022 edition and I highly recommend getting hold of a copy. It's a genuinely important work and something every fan of the culture should be familiar with. Actually my conversation with Bill Brewster is probably more about him than DJing at a wider...

Despite the appearance given by my conversation with Sam Valenti, I was on holiday last week. I've latterly decided to extend my break by another seven days, just because I realised that I really need it. So to fill the podcast gap we present my appearance on the Will Clarke podcast from a few weeks ago. We discuss many familiar issues, including the music press, social media, and the running of record labels. It was a fun conversation to have and an illuminating look into the running of one...

Any person who has run a label for knocking on a quarter of a century is someone I want to talk to. Ghostly International was launched in 1999 by Sam Valenti with a single by fledgling producer Matthew Dear which would go on to be sampled on a global hit by Fedde Le Grand. You know the one. This episode is actually almost a sequel to episode 077 with Shawn Reynaldo. Of course we discuss Ghostly, and particularly the early period of the label, but I really want to pick Sam's brain on a few of...

Paris is rarely cited (somewhat unfairly) as one of the key cities of electronic music, but the influence of French musicians is absolutely huge. You know the names, and you definitely know the tracks. But there's a lot more to it than Daft Punk and Justice. Chloé Thévenin has been a key figure in Paris for the last two decades, as resident at the hugely important night Le Pulp, and at Rex Club, while also developing a reputation as a highly technical producer operating in different styles...

Is music journalism in as bad a place as people say it is? I've certainly said it... really quite a lot. Maybe to the extent that I've been a bit unfair on the overall quality of music writing today, and having a total ban on music writers on the show was also possibly taking things a bit too far. Today though, the ban is lifted. Shawn Reynaldo is a former editor of XLR8R, and contributor to many of the august music publications we all love to hate, but now operates mostly out of his First...

We haven't done a solo pod since the 'Thoughts On Releasing Music' two-parter which covered episodes 58 and 59. Those two were really popular, surprisingly so... to me at least. I enjoy doing these because it forces me to get my thoughts together in a way that I sometimes struggle to usually. And the topics we're covering today definitely require some clear thought. Obviously the episode title is a bit provocative. It could totally be happening though. Generative AI and LLMs are things we're...

Welcome to Episode 75 of the Not A Diving Podcast. That's quite a lot of episodes, and probably more than I thought we'd get to at the outset but it's been a highly enjoyable ride and we're not slowing down any time soon. This week on the show we welcome a former resident of one of my favourite clubs, Smartbar in Chicago. Alinka is an Ukraine-born, American expat in Berlin, a great DJ and a producer making some really interesting music. We discuss her journey in music from the early 2000s,...

In the storied days of vinyl, snooty record shop staff, and white label promos, the diligent producer would cultivate many aliases, seemingly at least one for every nuance of his studio output. With DSP tagging and the endless collaborations that are a featured of today's recorded music, does that approach make sense anymore? That is a paraphrasing of my first question to Kevin McHugh, aka Ambivalent, aka LA-4A, on today's podcast. You'll have to tune in to get his answer in full, but let's...

The majority of DJs spent the pandemic mostly of stood in front of a camera, attempting to perform the impossible task of transplanting a rave into the bedrooms of the few people lucky enough to be watching at the other end of a fibre optic cable. We are only beginning to come to terms with the implications of what the failure of that approach have had for our culture, but DJ Bone did something completely different. 'Further' was a hugely successful series of events which combined music,...