Music Not Diving with Scuba

Hello from Tokyo... I am playing at Vent on 28 Dec and in Hakuba on 29 Dec. On New Year's Eve I will be playing all night in Toronto at Sub Division . Pretty sure that's gonna sell out so grab a final-release ticket quick . I recorded this on 24 Dec so didn't have a chance to mention the incredibly sad passing of Shaun Roberts, a really important figure in UK Underground music who gave opportuniti...

Episodes of this podcast tend to hover around the ninety minute mark, maybe an hour forty-five. That seems to be the natural length for this kind of format, but sometimes they just acquire a life of their own and end up a fair bit longer and quite often those are my favourites. My conversation with the noted American DJ and producer Fred P this week is one of those longer ones, and it was one that...

Running a club properly, like really, really well, requires an attention to detail that is rarely appreciated by the average attendee. During his time at Bob Beaman and BLITZ in Munich, David Muallem has shown an unusual flare in that department and delivered a couple of really special venues. He is also a highly accomplished DJ who has rocked many of the most notable dancefloors across the world....

Moving far outside of your musical comfort zone is a seductive move in theory but one which regrettably few producers feel able to execute in practice. Drew Lustman, aka FaltyDL, is fearless in his approach to breaking down his own stylistic parameters. His new album, A Nurse To My Patience , is the most striking example to date of that feature of his work. This is an artistic trait which I much a...

After an unexpected hiatus last week, the Not A Diving Podcast returns with former RA Top 100 DJs Poll winner, a unique character, and a man of sharp opinions and broad horizons. If that sounds like three guests then it's purely a failure of prose, because Seth Troxler is a titan of modern house music who brings much more to the table than the ability to accumulate poll votes. This was a highly en...

My last job as a civilian was working on educational research projects for an exam board, and the very last thing I did there was a trial of innovative maths teaching methods in schools. Which isn't something you'd expect to hear about on this podcast, but we get pretty close to it in my conversation with former Oye Records counterman Tallmen785 as his current area of work combines the teaching of...

Changing the direction of a music career is one of the most difficult tricks to pull, and changing your stage name is another thing entirely. Particularly if your stage name is DJ Barely Legal. Chloé Robinson has managed to do all of the above, and is now one of the most in-demand acts at the cross-section of UK bass music and European house and techno. We've been trying to align our calendars to...

It's Pledgedrive Week over on NDP Patreon . So if you love the show then this is the week to start supporting... Solidarity tier signups get a 50% off voucher for Bandcamp . and... Musicality tier signups get a FREE T-SHIRT! Join us in the Hotflush Discord Server Listen to all the music discussed on the show via the Not A Diving Podcast Spotify playlist For more links and other info visit the offi...

Every producer wants to be an auteur. The legend of the isolated guy (it's almost always a guy) turning out hits without any outside help is as potent a narrative in the culture as there has ever been. Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, aka TEED, aka Orlando Higginbottom is doing exactly that, and has made one of my favourite albums of recent memory with When The Lights Go . He's also a thoughtfu...

Having a conversation in front of an audience, it turns out , is a bit different to speaking on the phone. This is the first time we've done a 'LIVE' episode, and we can thank the good people of the Amsterdam Dance Event for helping us make it happen. As part of the conference we took over a room of about 80 people for an hour and talked to a real legend of Berlin techno - Ellen Allien . A residen...

Better late than never! We had all sorts of problems with getting the podcast out this week, not helped by a trip to ADE in Amsterdam to record an episode with Ellen Allien which (all things going well) will be on your feed next week. But right now on the show we have a very interesting and important person in the underground music scene of the UK - Elijah . You may remember his work in the grime...

What happens when you discover a new form of music being made thousands of miles away, but there’s nowhere to dance to it in your city? Or even your country? If you’re Dave Q , you go right ahead and put on a party, which is what he did when he held the first Dub War event in New York City during the summer of 2005.  That makes him an extremely important person in the development of bass musi...

The feedback to Episode 26 of the show with MJ Cole was overwhelming. But we came away from that episode without the real insider story of the UK Garage scene being told - what we got instead was the MJ Cole story, which was amazing in itself, but missing some of the key details as to how this unique genre of Dance Music unfolded. This week we welcome one of the absolute best people around to fill...

Can a DJ influence government policy? Sunil Sharpe has certainly tried, and through various campaigns going back to the mid 2000s his voice in the development of nightlife policy in Ireland has been a significant one. That makes him a great guest for the show and we dig into some of the machinations of policy-making, as well as the more directly music-related issues of DJing with vinyl, crowd beha...

Groupthink is everywhere, but rarely found in a more pronounced form these days than in the dance scene. Patrice Bäumel is not a fan of this phenomenon and, to his credit, he is willing to challenge received wisdom and orthodoxy. That approach to life makes him an ideal guest for this show and it was a pleasure to dig into some thorny topics with him over the course of a two hour conversation. In...

Releasing your own music can be liberating, but it also involves challenges. How keen are you on self-promotion? Well you better get used to it if you're self-releasing. Steffi is a long running resident of Berghain/Panorama Bar, and an alumnus of their label, Ostgut Ton . For her forthcoming album, The Red Hunter, she has taken over those responsibilities with a new imprint called Candy Mountain....

This week I'm taking the opportunity to evaluate what we've been doing on the show during the 19 weeks since I last did a solo pod. That also ties in neatly with a weekend I just spent in Berlin where we held a Hotflush party at Æden, and also collabed with HÖR on sets from me , Anna Kost , Roska , and Closet Yi . Support the show on Patreon! We'd be honoured and extremely grateful for your contri...

We have been angling for a booking agent to guest on the show since launching the podcast, and finally we have one! Ned Beckett is the founder of the Little Big agency, represents Aphex Twin, and is as well placed as anyone to make the case for the contribution made by agents to the careers of artists and live music as a whole. We discuss his formative period with Warp Records, the development of...

Electronic music and DJing are intrinsically linked, so what happens when your studio output shifts from being explicitly designed for mixing to something far less functional? Performing live is a challenge many DJs have taken up, but few as comprehensively as George FitzGerald who fully embraced the live experience after signing to Domino Records and releasing music which was a step away from the...

Miami is one of those places whose reputation precedes it. South Beach, basically. Which anyone with any smarts will reassure you is far from the whole story. Danny Daze is a second-generation Cuban who is Miami to the core. He's a former pro-level tennis player who spends his time running TR808s through an Eventide H9000, and is currently preparing to perform his forthcoming album in a planetariu...

We are now live on Patreon! Support the show and get tons of extra content right here . Pirate radio as part of underground music is commonly seen as a London phenomenon, but in the early 90s Kiss FM in Berlin was a key part of the emerging landscape. Anja Schneider played an important role in that extremely exciting period in the development of dance music, and has gone on to have a varied and su...

The touring lifestyle is not for everyone. It's the classic case of something which appears to be endlessly glamorous from the outside, but the reality of which is something else entirely. Everyone wants to be a part of it, few manage to sustain it for very long. At this point Ali Shirazinia, aka Dubfire, might (without too much of an emphasis on 80s imagery) be described as a road warrior. Tourin...

Prince taught us all the importance of controlling your own music, and that is a concept which this week's guest has taken to heart over the course of his career. A label-owner , publisher, and spinner of DJ sets featuring exclusively his own material, Levon Vincent is a producer's producer and a proper hero of the underground. In this conversation we get pretty deep into his roots in Newark and N...

Dubstep Wars is a series we're incorporating into the show which takes a serious look at the development of Dubstep in the US. How it got there, how it grew, and what happened then. This is the second in the series, but we've got so much more than that on this episode. Joe Nice is an actual hero of underground music in North America. Justifiably regarded as the first person on that side of the pon...

Hospital Records is one of the biggest labels in Drum n Bass, but its origins came out of the musical crossroads in the mid 90s which involved Acid Jazz, Broken Beat, elements of UK Garage, and of course Jungle. Chris Goss was a co-founder, a key part of London Elektricity whose music Hospital was in part set up to support, and now runs the label and all of its constituent parts as the MD. We talk...