Feature Articles Archives

Future Leaders: How Daniel Sharkey Turned Passenger Events Into Scotland’s Most Intentional Weekend

Feature Articles FeaturedJuly 1, 2026July 1, 2026

Our Future Leaders series is back. The series went quiet for a spell while we rebuilt the magazine around a sharper editorial brief, but the reason we started it in…

Are we burning out, or just longing for simpler times?

Feature Articles FeaturedJune 22, 2026June 22, 2026

That is the question worth asking as a generation raised on taping the mixes off Radio 1, whilst we quietly rebuild our record shelves. I’ve been getting an enourmous amount…

Synthwave: Neon Dreams in a Digital Age

Feature Articles FeaturedJune 16, 2026June 16, 2026

“Synthwave isn’t just music—it’s memory turned into motion.” —Gunship, in an interview with NewRetroWave Beneath the surface of today’s algorithm-driven musical chaos, there lives a world that glows with the…

Before Dubplates There Were Bones: The Soviet X-Ray Vinyl Story

Feature Articles FeaturedMay 26, 2026May 26, 2026

How Cold War Leningrad pressed its forbidden records into other people’s skeletons, and why every bedroom producer who has ever cut a dubplate owes the lot of them a drink….

Australia’s Festivals Are Not Dying. They Are Being Asked to Pay for Their Own Survival.

Australia Feature Articles FeaturedMay 18, 2026May 18, 2026

When the organisers of Return to Rio cancelled their 2024 event in New South Wales, they did so citing a 529% increase in police and medical costs. The figure has…

From Funktion-One To Gold Plated: A Working Class Ravers’ Tour Of Ultra High-End Audio

Feature Articles FeaturedMay 14, 2026May 14, 2026

A field guide to the very top end of hi-fi, where the cabinets weigh more than your car, the cones are cut from diamonds, and the price tags would buy…

The Quiet Epidemic: Why Mental Health In Electronic Music Still Isn’t Reaching The People Who Need It

Feature Articles FeaturedMay 6, 2026May 6, 2026

Last night I was sitting in my Mum’s lounge in Adelaide, out here visiting family, watching an interesting documentary on mental health in Australia. The credits rolled and I just…

When Did Dance Music Become So Fucking Boring?

Feature Articles FeaturedApril 30, 2026April 30, 2026

I have been chewing on this one for months and it is finally coming out, so pour yourself something stronger than coffee. When did dance music, our dance music, become…

Fake Artists, Real Money: The AI Machine Quietly Bankrupting Electronic Music’s Future

Feature Articles Featured Music IndustryApril 7, 2026April 7, 2026

Ghost production has never been a secret in electronic music (we even wrote about it back in 2016). It has always existed in the margins, understood rather than spoken about,…

The Great British Festival: Five Days of Music, Decades in Landfill

Feature Articles Featured FestivalsMarch 9, 2026March 9, 2026

UK festivals produce somewhere between 23,500 and 25,800 tonnes of waste every year. That is not a vague environmental concern you can file away with good intentions. It is a…

Thirty Years of Forum Culture: How Dance Music Found Its Voice on the Internet

Feature Articles FeaturedMarch 4, 2026March 5, 2026

That sound, we all know it…….anyone who grew up trying to find out about electronic music in the nineties will remember. It was not a bassline or a breakdown. It…

Five DJs to Watch at Barcelona’s MOSTRA Festival 2026

Feature Articles Featured MixesMarch 2, 2026March 2, 2026

Barcelona’s independent avant-garde festival returns for its fifth edition this March. These are the artists worth planning your schedule around. If you have not been to Mostra before, the short…

Record Store Day: A Celebration of Independent Culture or Major Label Marketing?

Feature Articles FeaturedFebruary 10, 2026February 10, 2026

As Record Store Day 2026 inches closer, scheduled for Saturday 18 April, there is a growing sense that the event has never been further from its original ideals. What began…

The One-Hour Set Has Killed the Art of DJing

Feature Articles FeaturedFebruary 3, 2026February 3, 2026

If we could pinpoint our experience of DJ culture over the years; it would start with the clock. Specifically, the relentless tyranny of the one-hour slot that has become the…

Should Governments Pay Artists a Living Wage?

Feature Articles FeaturedJanuary 27, 2026January 27, 2026

Ireland did something most governments only talk about. In October 2025, they announced their Basic Income for the Arts pilot would become permanent, making them the first country to commit…

The Politics of Partying: Why Electronic Music Has Always Been Political

Feature Articles FeaturedJanuary 19, 2026January 19, 2026

Thirty years into this thing we do, and I’m still hearing the same tired argument: electronic music isn’t political; it’s just escapism, just hedonism, just 4/4 music and ravers preaching…

From DJs to Data Points: How We Traded Musical Expertise for Engagement Metrics

Feature Articles FeaturedJanuary 9, 2026January 9, 2026

Recently over the holidays, I took advantage of a Spotify deal, 2 months free back on an account I stopped paying for a year earlier, I had no need for…

The Economics Are Broken: How Touring DJ Fees Are Killing Clubs (And Why Residents Are The Answer)

Feature Articles FeaturedJanuary 6, 2026January 6, 2026

The maths doesn’t work anymore, it’s that simple. Clubs are closing at a record rate across the world, from legendary institutions to promising newcomers, and while there are multiple factors…

Half of Clubbers Think Phones Are Ruining the Dancefloor. We Asked the People Running the Clubs

Feature Articles FeaturedJanuary 5, 2026January 5, 2026

Look, we know. Another piece about phones ruining club culture. The think pieces have been written, the surveys conducted, the hot takes delivered. But here’s the thing: most of that…

The Unsung Heroes Behind the Velvet Rope

Feature Articles FeaturedDecember 18, 2025December 18, 2025

There’s a particular taxonomy of human behaviour that only reveals itself at 1am on a Saturday night, and the people who catalogue it aren’t anthropologists or sociologists. They’re the ones…