The Black Madonna, Glasgow
During the Boiler Room broadcast from Chicago’s Gramaphone Records store, it wasn’t just the locals cutting sassy shapes on camera. The DJs were giving it their all too, and the Black Madonna was having the most fun out of the lot: by singing, clapping, twisting and hugging her way around the room, her energy as a DJ – and more importantly, as a lover of house music – lit up the chat-room. For those who asked: “Who is she?” the answer is an impressive one. After starting out selling mixtapes from the back of her car, as a midwest teenager called Marea Stamper, she became the Black Madonna: booker for Chicago’s taste-making Smart Bar, talented producer, world-class DJ and vocal champion of underground dance music culture’s diverse and vital energies. Having recently smashed Berlin’s Panorama Bar alongside Derrick Carter and Honey Dijon, Glasgow’s next up for a lesson in real, raw Chicago house.
Sub Club, Fri
LM
The Bug, London
The Bug falls into the rich lineage of artists – the Blue Nile, Chic, latterly Skepta – who have one utterly brilliant song and quite rightly remake it over and over again in slightly different iterations. His mode is a slow and titanic dub skank that sends you into head-nodding so heavy you feel like an Easter Island statue, and it goes beyond loud into a sustained cochlear assault. He’s essentially taking reggae’s fixation on the end times and pushing it beyond the apocalypse into a scorched urban landscape, with even the peppy dancehall numbers coming laden with dread. Guesting on the mic as ever are Flowdan, Miss Red and Manga, straddling junglist patter, siren-backed torch songs and grimy barbs. They’re supported by more speaker-burning, Caribbean-facing bassheads in the form of D&B leader Dub Phizix and his regular MC Strategy, dubstep originator Mala and the Channel One Sound System, all similarly dialling up Jamaican rhythm to a bombastic, skullcrushing intensity.
Koko, NW1, Sat
BBT
Flux Presents Start Of Summer, Leeds
Flux aren’t known to do things by halves, but this Friday’s occupation of the city’s vast Beaver Works sees them set out their stall like never before, with a multi-faceted event spanning day to night. Celebrating their own “Start Of Summer”, Flux’s usual lean towards soulful house takes the centre of no less than six stages, promising a live set from Afrobeat act Nubiyan Twist, and deep and occasionally dubby DJ support from the likes of Lakuti. There’s tech house in the basement from Oracy, while the Warehouse space hosts sets from Leeds’s finest selectors all day.
Beaver Works, Fri
JT
Believe In... Billon, Romford
When you’re teaming up to make tracks with Todd Edwards (subject of this week’s Harangue The DJ), you know you’re on the right track. Having barely been on the scene for a year, Billon’s Ed Butler and Robbie Lamond must be feeling a sizeable boost to their egos, especially with a new EP that reveals they’ve also brought Hospital Records’ liquid-D&B hero Nu:Tone down the path of lithe, jacking UK house on a tight new collaboration. The new Disclosure, anyone?
Fiction, Sat
GTDC
Way Back Here With Low Jack, London
With releases on LIES, The Trilogy Tapes and In Paradisum, you might expect Low Jack to make techno with cobwebbed kick drums, but while there’s certainly a lo-fi aesthetic, the Parisian pushes it into truly exotic territory. His staggeringly good Garifuna Variations LP from last year was a collection of Honduran ethnographic recordings looped and phased into nightmarish repetition, and his DJ sets are similarly full of wooden percussion colliding with synthetic drum sounds – but there’s still room for rather camp and playful bursts of disco and 80s synth.
Dance Tunnel, E8, Sat
BBT
