It’s been a bad week for music journalists. Anna Wintour kept her sunglasses on to inform Pitchfork staff of their absorption into men’s magazine GQ, while FACT Magazine – alma mater of both yours truly – quietly announced the end of an era, with the mix series closing down and editorial scaling back.
Nothing lasts forever – and certainly not your favourite music mag’s old Instagram account – but we were still jolted by FACT’s announcement. Especially when it got completely buried by the Pitchfork story, lol.
So we looked inside our hearts and did the only thing we know how to do: record an emergency podcast about it. We brought in Henry Bruce-Jones, who has capably helped steer the ship at FACT since 2018, including curating the website’s beloved mix series, to help us perform a biopsy of the last 15 years of online music journalism before making our predictions and prescriptions for the next phase. No transcript this time!
We’ve also dug out our favourite bits of FACT #content from years gone by, from essential listicles to highlights from the aforementioned mix series. Scroll down for that.
This week we’re paying our respects to Luis Vasquez of darkwave project The Soft Moon, Juan Mendez, AKA throb-techno titan Silent Servant, and visual artist Simone Ling, who all tragically died last week in LA. Luis and Juan were both what we used to call “core FACT” – artists whose sound, style and attitude cut through the industry hogwash and carved out that extra bit of space on the interesting margins. They’ll be missed. For those who are unfamiliar, we’d recommend getting stuck into The Soft Moon’s FACT mix from 2011 and a Silent Servant mix and interview from 2012.
We also just learned of the death of British music writer Neil Kulkarni from a suspected heart attack, aged only 51. As Chal put it on Twitter, Neil was “one of the absolute all-time punk-as-fuck music writer greats, monolith of righteous vitriol, Nineties hagiographer, true crisp connoisseur”. His writing for Melody Maker in the ‘90s was a righteous rebuttal to the Britpop clones, venerating the likes of Pram, Prince Paul and the Ragga Twins over the Stone Roses and Nirvana. The Coventry son famously got the job after writing into the MM letters page to criticise their failure to cover Black artists, and he blazed a trail as a South Asian critic, as Geeta Dyal and Manu Ekanayake noted on Twitter. He was really one of the best.
Hope you’re enjoying No Tags so far. Feel free to get in touch with any thoughts, questions, feedback – or of course complaints, Kulkarni style.
The best of FACT, according to three people who worked there
(We haven’t linked to every single mix, but you’re on top of it.)
Tom
Mixes: Pangaea, Jam City, Blawan, Grouper, King Midas Sound, Randomer, Ryan Hemsworth, Untold, Tama Sumo, Eclair Fifi, Peanut Butter Wolf
Articles: The Best Albums of the 90s, 80s and 70s, of course (special shout to El-P’s guest blurb for Illmatic, a thing of beauty). Alex Macpherson’s definitive four-part interview with Terre Thaemlitz. All the “how did we even get this?” moments: Burial, DOOM, Jeff Mills and John Peel in conversation. Paul Wall on Texas’s weight and lean issues. Joe Muggs’ nine-point defence of brostep. Kutmah on the birth of the LA beat scene. The lost Aphex track, ‘Avril 1’.
Henry
I unashamedly love the FACT lists. While I am very much not down with the Buzzfeed-ification of any kind of journalism, the FACT lists and the people who wrote them served as a wellspring of the very best stuff at a formative time in my life, well before I’d even considered working at FACT.
I remember poring over Mumdance on the 20 best happy hardcore records of all time when I was 19, but equally Tom on the 20 best grime records, Simon Reynolds on the 20 best bleep records, Joe Muggs’ 34 reasons why trance is the greatest dance music, the 100 greatest IDM tracks and the 100 greatest video game soundtracks, as well The Essential… series really shaped my listening habits as a younger person.
The following three reflect the different stages of my time working at FACT – before, during and after the ‘pivot to video’.
My very first proper assignment was interviewing Happa about his project عشق, with which he’d transformed Lewis’s cult classic synth-folk record L’Amour into an ambient rap tape. Not only is the tape brilliant (especially this!) but Samir has since become a very good friend. This was also during the period I was working with John Twells and Clare Lobenfeld, who are both fantastic editors and writers and who encouraged me to write well and write weird.
Freeka Tet is a mad genius and his early contribution to the online audiovisual programme really captured the laptop screen-lit fever dream of peak lockdown cabin fever.
The Fact Online Residency series is one of things I’m most proud of, as it was an opportunity to capture the breadth and depth of a single artist or collective’s work. They’re all worth checking out, but Blackhaine, Tianzhuo Chen, Holly Blakey (especially her stunning film Phantom we commissioned as part of it), Sam Rolfes, Actual Objects, Theo Triantafyllidis and Gabriel Massan all presented really beautiful work. I’m forever grateful to each of them.
Mixes
In all honesty, I love every single mix I put out during my time running the series. So, in the spirit of the FACT list, here are 25 mixes selected from over the last three years that have stuck with me: Jabes, Shannen SP, Yen Tech, Tom Boogizm, Malibu, Palmistry, Crystalmess, Time Is Away, emma DJ, Klein, Manuka Honey, DJ Travella, KAVARI, Himera, Juba, k means, Torus, Happy New Years, Liyo, Slim Soledad, Lauren Duffus, DJ K, DJ Danifox, Chuquimamani-Condori, Tati au Miel.
Chal
Tom and Henry have done a very comprehensive sweep. However, at one point I remember we were publishing about 10 features a week, on top of reams of news stories, videos like Against The Clock, and all the regular stuff like FACT Singles Club, Best of Bandcamp, the Week’s Best Mixes and the Rap Round-up (which, at the time, was one of the only places on the entire internet covering the DatPiff-focused street rap scene – props to John and Chris Kelly).
So I’m going to draw attention to Miles Bowe’s efforts with the Best of Bandcamp column, taking over from Laurent Fintoni who’d begun to map out this new territory earlier in the decade. Miles’ Best Bandcamp Releases of 2015 is a glorious snapshot of a specific moment on the platform – before the bigger indies turned up, when it was still a weird frontier space where genres were collapsing into each other from all directions. Someone called Eartheater topped the list. Wonder what she’s doing now.
Second, after smashing through the best of the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s we made the decision that the ‘60s simply weren’t a decade we could really fuck with like that – until Joseph Morpurgo proposed a listicle that I didn’t know I needed: the greatest electronic albums of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Perhaps a long-time Wire reader with a decade or so on me would’ve found this one unnecessary, but the thing about music is that you can never really finish talking about the old stuff – the canon is never set in stone, and new acolytes will always need the cheat lists.
Third, the only time I’ve ever asked for a selfie was after interviewing Carl Craig. Unfortunately it was for one of those orchestral techno albums but whatever: Carl Craig.
Fourth, picking the FACT mixes for a year or so (with Scott Wilson!) and being able to give so many artists some of their first ever write-ups in the weekly mix column (which lived on at Electronic Beats and The Face).
Finally, my favourite FACT mix remains Claude Speeed.
Recorded at: SRP Studios
Theme music: Jennifer Walton
Branding: All Purpose
06: Music journalism, the final farewell tour