CONTROL VOLTAGE

June 25, 2012 – Signs of the EDMocalypse?

June 21, 2012 – "Anthem" is a funny word. In dance music, there's hardly any higher praise; it signifies the elevation of a song to something nearing universality — a social fact. But in the more traditional sense of the word, anthems are awkward, embarrassing things; at worst, they're propaganda; more often, simply pompous.

June 18, 2012 – In case you thought the whole EDM-as-pop-on-steroids thing was a uniquely North American phenomenon, think again: Dance music's mainstream U.S. breakout is also changing the shape of the scene in Europe — even in Spain, a country whose fans traditionally have shown a preference for harder, more uncompromising, and more underground sounds (and where, it must be said, dance music has been more or less mainstream, anyway).

June 15, 2012 – Of all the lumpy cardboard mailers that the postman brings (with increasing, and distressing, infrequency, I might add), few get me quite as excited as those from New York's Golf Channel Recordings. Helmed by Phil South, a Brit long since established in Brooklyn, Golf Channel just keeps keepin' on as though nothing in the music business had changed in the past 10 (or even 20) years.

June 13, 2012 – Musical systems are so intuitive (just ask Bobby McFerrin) that we tend to think of them as natural — innate, hard-wired, as elemental as the tides and the stars. And, indeed, the science of music, in which any sound can be broken down to its composite waveforms, each humming at a given number of cycles per second, would seem to reinforce that gut feeling: Sound, after all, abides by the laws of physics.

June 12, 2012 – If there's a sillier name in dance music right now than "Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs," that'd be news to me. And that, says Orlando Higginbottom, the man behind the Mesozoic moniker — a name that sounds better suited to Saturday morning cartoons than deeply emotive vocal house and club-tinged pop — was part of the plan all along.