clair056

Panacea was a mid-1990s zine from Cardiff ('Panacea West') and Southsea ('Panacea South'). Panacea 'future sounds collective' aimed 'to provide information distributed from the techno underground, bring quality music to your ears, and find ways of getting to best future sound parties'. This issue (number 3) from 1995, includes articles on Jeff Mills and DJ Torah, and a round up of London techno nights, including Digital Nation at Bagleys, Kings Cross and of course Dead by Dawn : 'next Dead by Dawn will continue the party with cutting edge hardcore and hard experimental sounds to challenge the techno establishment. The next Dead by Dawn (121 Railton Road, Brixton) is on Nov 4, line up includes Torah'. I remember chatting to the Panacea crew at Dead by Dawn, nice people. The front page mentions 'Insurrection in Hyde Park' and the issue includes a review of the pamphlet I wrote at the time about the October 1994 anti-Criminal Justice Act rio...

SP23 (formerly Spiral Tribe) are putting on a rare event in London on 19 April, at Village Underground, London EC2. They say: 'In the early 90s, members of SP23 were all working with the Spiral Tribe Sound System. A creative collective that openly aligned itself with the free party and free festival movements. At the core of the free music scene were values of sharing, openness and inclusion. Values that should have a place in society, but in a country ruled by the ideologies of Thatcherite privatisation, they were not to be tolerated. After a year of organising events in remote locations, the Spiral Tribe Sound System learnt this the hard way. As opposition from the authorities grew to the free festival and free party movement, members of Spiral Tribe began thinking of leaving the country. Though key figures within the group had been arrested and bailed (for allegedly organising the famous Castlemorton Common free festival) the sound system (and a mobile recording studio) managed ...

Friday night's Praxis Records party on the MS Stubnitz in London docklands was great, may write a bit more about it, but for now here's something about the label's early history and more specifically the mid-1990s Dead by Dawn parties at the 121 squat centre in Brixon ( as discussed at this site before ). These extracts are from 'Bread and (Rock) Circuses: sites of sonic conflict in London' by Alexei Monroe, published in 'Imagined Londons' edited by Pamela K. Gilbert (SUNY Press, 2002). 'Gabber and associated variants (stormcore, nordcore, hartcore, speedcore) all represent not just aesthetic extremism but a frantic search for an un-colonised sonic space that will prove resistant to commodification and appropriation. All are based on the testing and surpassing of kinetic-sensory-pharmacological-sonic frontiers and a reaction against ideological, economic, and stylistic taboos. At the center of this stylistic mayhem lay the Dead by Dawn nights at the 121 ...