Amsterdam is one of Europe’s most beautiful and vibrant cities famous for it’s tolerance and picturesque canals. It is also overflowing with achingly trendy and stylish hangouts, subcultures and creative types and… 2 Unlimited, but the less said about them the better. CONTINUE READING THIS POST >

Chocolate Puma, are one of Holland’s biggest House music producers. The duo are currently celebrating their 20 year anniversary so who better to ask for the lowdown on all things Dutch? CONTINUE READING THIS POST >

This weekend (July 22-24) London’s Olympia Two plays host to Hyper Japan 2011- an exhibition of all things Japanese, kooky and undoubtedly kawaii!

This is set to be a great show and has a huge list of exhibitors and performers. It’s certainly a must for any fan of Japanese culture or Cosplay. CONTINUE READING THIS POST >

Wilderness is a pioneering new festival of music, food, theatre, literary debate and outdoor pursuits, which is set to redefine the festival experience for 2011. CONTINUE READING THIS POST >

I suppose it must have liberated my ideas about what a ‘song’ could consist of: it didn’t have to involve singing. There were other examples of music with speech rather than song – the long spoken sections in The Shangri-La’s ‘Leader of the Pack’, Mike Berry’s ‘Tribute to Buddy Holly’, and then a whole slew of spoken country songs such as Wink Martindale’s ‘Deck of Cards’. Around the same time I had become fascinated by the sheer strangeness of Schoenberg’s ‘Pierrot Lunaire’, in which he pioneered the idea of ‘sprechstimme’ – speech-song. More recently, of course, there’s the whole vast treasury of hip hop-poetry and music in a more visceral form. CONTINUE READING THIS POST >