Dream Machines // Interviews

  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 goi

  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 different sc

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

Sonic surrealist, magus of the absurd, self-proclaimed ‘purveyor of sinister whimsy’: with his musical alter-ego Nurse With Wound, Steven Stapleton has been delivering esoteric electro-acoustic soundscapes to enthralled admirers since 1978. I spoke to him about the origins of Nurse With Wound in his passions for krautrock and free improvisation;  his love of unexpected creative incidents,  his disdain for computer technology, and his ambivalent relationship with the industrial genre. Before Nurse With Wound, you were a record collector. What made you think, “I can do this myself”? I was a sign writer, and I was asked to write a sign on the window at a studio in Wardour Street [in Soho, central London]. And I started painting the window, and the [studio] engineers were sitting behind me at a tea break. And they were just making jokes about putting the paint on backwards because I had to write the sign backwards so it could be read from the front forwards. And then on the other s