I’ll be taking part in the Club Culture Panel at the Louder Than Words Festival in Manchester on Friday 15th November.
For the last decade or more, Louder Than Words has prided itself on its determination to cover all corners of popular music. And that includes electronic dance music culture, with the club scene handled by the annual club culture panel, a valued part of each and every festival.
And like a DJ’s perfectly cued mix, that leads us into the 2024 panel, chaired as always by Louder’s Dr Simon A. Morrison. Simon spent his (younger) life on dancefloors around the world, from running Ministry of Sound’s Ibiza magazine for two summers to penning columns for DJ magazine including ‘Around the World in 80 Clubs’. His next book, Transatlantic Drift: The Ebb and Flow of Global Dance Culture, will be published by Reaktion in 2025.
His experiences have taken Dr Disco to clubs everywhere from Moscow to Marrakech, Brazil to Beijing… but where are we at with club culture in 2024? There was a time, after the explosions of the rave scene in the late 80s, that music lovers seemed determined to swap their amps and guitars for decks and samplers. But now – and notably with the huge impact of the Oasis reunion, and the one-person economy that is Taylor Swift – that bands and singers seems to have returned to the forefront of popular culture.
So where are people going at the weekend? Joining Simon for this annual medical for the club scene is a range of scene insiders. These include Matthew Collin, acclaimed electronic music writer, with his latest book Dream Machines: Electronic Music in Britain From Doctor Who to Acid House published this year. We'll have plenty to say on the current role of electronic instruments in the construction of contemporary popular music and more!
More panellists will be announced in due course but this is already shaping up to be a lively conversation, seeing Louder ’24 through from its opening statements to the Innside’s bar and dancefloor… all the way through Friday night and into the weekend.
