Much belated link roundup

Catching up on stories and links that are a few weeks old ... (hat tip to Resident Advisor for these links)

1.  Orbital interview each other.  Why does Paul get all the hard questions and Paul all the softball questions?  Unless things come across differently in the unedited version ...

It's interesting that Paul chose the "Blue Album" as the least satisfying Orbital album because (and I'm paraphrasing a bit) it felt like the end of something, even though they knew the music was good.  I thought that was the whole point of the album.  Each song recalled a different time and style in their then fifteen year career, it was both a new album and a retrospective that reminded you of all the various reasons why Orbital were so incendiary.  In that sense, it felt like the perfect way to ride off into the sunset.


2.  Highlights from Kraftwerk's career-spanning shows at the MoMA in NYC last month.  I watch these videos and they hardly seem like human performances.  It's like looking at animated characters straight out of "Tron".  Yes, that's soooooooo Kraftwerk, but this time even more so.

"Ohm Sweet Ohm" gives me goose bumps ... being at the "Radioactivity" show would have been my first choice from this series, partly because most of those songs were never given a proper live airing.


3.  Michaelangelo Matos has written a history of the second wave of Chicago house music.  He interviewed many of the major players of the scene and includes links to a number of key tracks.  We need more articles like this one.  The first waves of Chicago house and Detroit techno (i.e. mid to late 80's) have been written about and fawned over to death, whereas the second wave of artists (beginning in the early 90's) have not only been comparatively neglected.  What's more, the second wave of artists were equally if not more influential, seeing as a greater number of them still play active roles in shaping their respective scenes.  


4.  Something of a fluff piece about Madchester 1989 (it was all about the music, lives were changed, etc.), written by Miranda Sawyer in the Guardian.  The article claims that Madchester was a Time magazine cover story in 1989.  I was skeptical about that, and a quick Google search turned up little besides links to this article.  She may have been mistaken and confused Time with Newsweek -- specifically, this article from 1990.  And the Newsweek article, contrary to what is implied by Sawyer, doesn't say much about the bands or the Madchester scene as a whole, but rather focuses on the rise of clubs and club culture.