Dream Machines // Interviews

The recent passing of Keith McIvor, the pioneering DJ known as JD Twitch, came as such a shock to so many people in electronic dance music culture not only because it was so traumatic, but because Keith was such a lovely person: warm-hearted, deeply knowledgeable but ineffably modest, and always supportive of others’ efforts. Keith was probably best known for championing left-field dance music at Optimo (Espacio), his long-running club with Jonnie Wilkes in Glasgow, but he had been active as a DJ since the 1980s in Edinburgh. It was there that he co-founded Pure, a club that raised the standard for cutting-edge electronic music in Scotland in the 1990s. In April this year, I spoke to Keith on the phone about Pure, the early days of acid house in Edinburgh and what it all meant to him. I think his words go some way to conveying the emotional intelligence, sensitivity and sheer decency that made him so admired and beloved. This interview’s going to be all about the acid house perio...

  Netherlands-born Hillegonda C. Rietveld was a postpunk electronic dance music pioneer with Manchester-based art-pop group Quando Quango, an early theoretical investigator of house music culture with her book ‘This is Our House’ and is holder of probably the coolest title in UK academia, Professor of Sonic Culture. In this interview, she talks about the chance meeting - literally involving a message in a bottle - that led to her involvement in electronic music with DJ-animateur Mike Pickering. She explains how that led to getting involved in Manchester’s alternative culture around Factory Records, New Order and the pre-acid house Haçienda club, as well as the New York dance music scene of the mid-eighties. The journey comes full circle after the UK rave upsurge when she travelled to Chicago to interview house music pioneers for her PhD and found out that they loved Quando Quango’s record ‘Love Tempo.’ Quando Quango started off in Rotterdam. It all started with Mike Pickering...

  As a member of 808 State, Graham Massey has been responsible for creating some of the UK rave scene’s greatest anthems, for making some of the weirdest electronic dance records to ever reach the pop charts, and for producing a series of albums that have consistently reached beyond the boundaries of the genre. He is also a man with deep roots in Manchester’s musical culture; before 808 State, he was involved in the postpunk alternative scene with Factory Records-associated experimental band Biting Tongues, sonic disruptors Danny and the Dressmakers and his own offbeat DIY cassette-scene project,  Beach Surgeon . In this interview, he talks about the pre-acid house electronic scene in Manchester and the vital role played by New Order, as well as 808 State’s early work with A Guy Called Gerald and the making of records like ‘In Yer Face’ and ‘Cubik’, which were simultaneously weird and physically compelling on the dancefloor. 808 State’s members had been part of various dif...

The albums made by Coil in the second half of the eighties and the turn of the nineties remain a remarkably powerful body of work; their reputation as intoxicating, occasionally disturbing pieces of post-industrial electro-acoustic art has only increased over the years. Apart from Geff Rushton/John Balance and Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson, there was another mind involved in these recordings: Stephen Thrower, who was with Coil from ‘Scatology’ to ‘Love’s Secret Doman’, and later went on to form the brilliant experimental-ambient duo Cyclobe. Rushton (1962-2004) and Christopherson (1955-2010) are no longer with us, but in this interview, Thrower paints a fascinating picture of Coil’s musical processes: the pioneering use of technology, the wild sonic experiments, the creative use of drugs. He also speaks movingly about Coil’s role as one of the very few bands who were openly gay in the darkest years of the 1980s HIV-AIDS crisis, and how they expressed this through their music. The s...