Music Not Diving with Scuba

Is minimal the same as mnml? What about minimal techno? Microhouse? At least it's not HARD TECHNO anyway. That's the worst. Well maybe not the actual worst, but bad enough to spawn a popular musical movement in direct opposition to it. What that movement actually consisted of is more of a difficult question than you might imagine though. Just look at that first paragraph. Jeremy P Caulfield is a T...

It's all Business Techno now isn't it? Well, maybe. And who better to confirm or deny that statement than the man who coined the term itself, Guy Brewer aka Shifted . Prior to entering the Techno arena, Guy was part of the storied DnB combo Commix . They released some great music in the 2000s, before the call to Berlin became impossible to resist and the lure of late evenings in Kreuzberg discussi...

Daniela Caldellas is an electronic musician from Brazil. Having broken through as part of Digitaria on DJ Hell's International DeeJay Gigolo Records and latterly on Jamie Jones' Hot Creations , she launched Terr as a solo project in 2016 and has just released a debut album entitled Consciousness As A State Of Matter under that name via Phantasy Sound . We discuss her journey from Bela Horizonte to...

One of my most vivid memories as a DJ was the first Blkmarket Membership party I played in 2010. It was at a disused gym in lower Manhattan and managed to evade the notice of the authorities til the rapid approach of Sunday afternoon. Our guest this week, Taimur , ran those parties from 2006 until 2017, booking some of the world's biggest 'proper' DJs to play in incredible locations across NYC. He...

This is final part of our series of podcasts recorded at the International Music Summit in Ibiza , better known as IMS. Cocoon was a the first party to bring Techno to Ibiza. Sven Väth was a huge name in 1998 but bringing the real sound to what, up til that point, been a musical landscape that was probably best described as light-hearted was a big risk. But they made it work at twenty seasons late...

Last week we were lucky enough to be invited to record three podcasts at the International Music Summit in Ibiza , better known as IMS. In the second of these three conversations, we welcomed the Head Of Music at the Night League to the stage. Leslee Tatman is, amongst other things, responsible for the full season of programming at Ushuaia and Hi (formerly Space), and is as such a very important v...

Last week we were lucky enough to be invited to record three podcasts at the International Music Summit in Ibiza , better known as IMS. We'll be posting each of these conversations over the next week, starting with today's episode which features a genuine Ibiza legend, DJ Pippi . A man with a real claim to having been the first DJ to play House music on the White Island, he held residencies at Pac...

Why do musicians seem to be so depressed all the time? One of the many interesting takeaways from Tamsin Embleton 's recent book 'Touring And Mental Health' is that people who go into music have been shown to be disproportionately susceptible to certain mental health problems. I found this book really fascinating and was very excited by the opportunity to talk about it with Tamsin, who edited it a...

MJ Cole's seminal track 'Sincere' is a true classic. In this clip from Episode 26 of the Not A Diving Podcast, he breaks down how it was made, and how it developed as a dance scene phenomenon. Listen to the full episode here (all platforms). If you're into what we're doing here on the pod then you can support the show on Patreon! We'd be honoured and extremely grateful for your contribution to dev...

We've talked about distribution in underground music quite a lot on past episodes. Distributors have historically played a significant role in building labels and artists, but many of the prior guests on the show have a horror story about a distro going bust and taking their money with it. Kudos Records is an example of a modern distributor serving the underground the right way, and Ben Morris is...

Everyone is creative. They really are! As a society we fetishise creativity, as if it's a unique gift, but everyone is capable of using their imagination - and that's really what creativity is. I just came up with that last bit, but the general sentiment is a key topic of discussion in this week's episode. Sebastian Mulleart is a noted electronic musician and live performer who for the past few ye...

Collaboration is a blessing and a skill. In this cut from Episode 8 of the Not A Diving Podcast, Machinedrum shares some tips from his vast experience on how best to get the most out of working in the studio with other people. Listen to the full episode here (all platforms). If you're into what we're doing here on the pod then you can support the show on Patreon! We'd be honoured and extremely gra...

Very few techno records cross over. A ridiculously small number given the mountain of cookie cutter nonsense that gets spewed out in to the ether every week. But every now and then you get one that catches the imagination of a wider audience. 'We Do What We Want' by this week's guest was probably 2016's biggest festival tune, and Alan Fitzpatrick has been hiding from it ever since. Or at least tha...

Music and politics don't really mix do they? Stick to music! Obviously we don't think that. Music SHOULD be political. One of the reasons that music is less culturally important than it used to be MUST be the fact that it isn't political ENOUGH! Tijana T is from Belgrade, and everything in Belgrade is political. Everything in Serbia is. Everything in the Balkans is. So we talk a lot about politics...

DJs get better with age... don't they? Are DJs artists? And is DJing even an art form anyway? In this cut from Episode 37 of the Not A Diving Podcast, Patrice Bäumel breaks down these issues in his unique style. Listen to the full episode here (all platforms). If you're into what we're doing here on the pod then you can support the show on Patreon! We'd be honoured and extremely grateful for your...

This week's show is follows on from last week, where we left off in 2010 at a cliff hanger where the underground music scene was about to change significantly. We follow the narrative up to the present day, discussing the development of Hotflush Recordings , my own journey from imposter syndrome to bad attitude, and end up by identifying five important things to get right if you want to make a car...

As you know, we're in the midst of celebrating 20 years of Hotflush Recordings . I've done a few interviews to co-incide with that recently, but I am very rarely satisfied with how an interview turns out in print. Luckily I do a weekly podcast and am taking the opportunity to interview myself (kind of) over a two part podcast, the first half of which is this week's episode. I talk about the motiva...

The pandemic caused havoc across the music industry, but are we making a mistake in laying the blame for the epidemic of show cancellations in particular at the door of COVID-19? In this cut from Episode 41 of the Not A Diving Podcast, Elijah details his analysis of the problems in the live space and why digging deeper always makes sense. Listen to the full episode here (all platforms). If you're...

Untitled Group is Australia's largest independent music & events company, running a list of key festivals including Beyond The Valley and Pitch , and selling over 400k tickets per year in the process. Our guest this week, Fil Palermo, is a co-founder and director of Untitled , which he and his partners built from teenagers running DIY club nights into a world class promoter of large festivals...

Electro, IDM, techno, Warp, Rephlex, all that stuff. We talked about this stuff with Ned Beckett on episode 34 - it was a really interesting and fertile corner of the UK underground in the late 90s and early 2000s. It was also the entry point into music for this week's guest, Josh Doherty, as half of Posthuman and promoter of illegal raves in tube stations and other unusual locations. Since then,...

Political stands have become a key weapon in the arsenal of music marketers. The level of cynicism and virtue signalling is beyond belief. In this cut from Episode 22 of the Not A Diving Podcast, Dave Clarke and I discuss that phenomenon, and why it's so important that when musicians talk about politics that it comes from a position of sincerity. Listen to the full episode here (all platforms). If...

What did you do with your lockdown holiday? I was intending to learn a language and ended up just gaining a bunch of weight. Our guest this week - Detroit native Eric Cloutier - was a bit more productive than that - he embarked upon a project to reacquaint himself with a record collection that he'd been adding to for over 20 years, which ended up being broadcast to the world in a series of ten mix...

Hotflush Recordings turns 20 this year. There'll be an announcement later this week but we're pre-empting it here with an episode featuring the first 'external' artist ever to release on the label. Something I totally forgot to mention in the intro is that we've actually also made a new track, with more than half an eye on those early days of Dubstep, which is out on Friday - get it here . Always...

The music scene of the North-East of England is often overshadowed by, or sometimes even conflated with, the North-West. Everyone knows about the music of Liverpool and Manchester but there are no equivalents of The Beatles or Oasis on Tyneside. Despite that, and putting aside for one moment quite-famous names like Mark Knopfler and Neil Tennant, Newcastle has in recent years produced some of the...

Why should the DJs get all the money? And there is a lot of it. Over a billion dollars in fees paid to arguably the least popular members of the music industry every year, mostly for "adding value" to a live event by playing other peoples' music. This week's guest, DVS1 , has led a team which seeks to address that financial imbalance by providing an elegant mechanism for DJs to give some of their...