Damion Pell
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International DJ and promoter - email damion@my-musicology.com
Articles by Damion Pell
Exclusive Premiere – benjunnen – Heart EP (Vocal Mix)
We welcome one of our own. The London-based artist has spent years working in the background of electronic music’s infrastructure, as web designer and developer for Damian Lazarus, Crosstown Rebels, Seth Troxler’s Slacker 85 project and the Day Zero festival, and as part of the Decoded Magazine team. That accumulated proximity to the music and the culture around it has clearly informed the way he makes records of his own.
Deep Dish release #GU49 Dublin, the final part of their Global Underground City Mix Trilogy
Deep Dish make their monumental return to Global Underground with #GU49 Dublin. And what a return it is. 25 years ago, Global Underground and Deep Dish brought you the incredible #GU21 Moscow. Then came the seminal #GU25 Toronto, where Sharam and Dubfire showed the world how it’s done. Now, Deep Dish complete the trilogy with #GU49 Dublin. And it’s worth the wait. Sharam and Dubfire deliver a masterclass in mixing. This isn’t just an album. It’s a legacy.
Throwback Thursday: The Stanton SA-5, the battle mixer that banned the knob
If you ever fancied a mixer that treated rotary controls like an ex who still had your hoodie, this one was for you. Once again, we did deep into that particular kind of DJ gear that arrived to solve a problem almost nobody was losing sleep over, and then quietly wanders off into the sunset to join the rest of the gear graveyard. We have spent a fair few Thursdays in this very column digging up those beautiful misfires, and today we are adding another headstone. Say hello to the Stanton SA-5.
YouTube’s New AI Rules And What They Mean For Music Video
YouTube has quietly redrawn the rules on how artificial intelligence gets flagged on the world’s biggest video platform, and if you make a living from moving image, you should be paying attention. On 27 May the company announced two changes to its AI labelling system, both pitched as a tidy-up of the transparency framework it first introduced back in 2024.
Before Dubplates There Were Bones: The Soviet X-Ray Vinyl Story
How Cold War Leningrad pressed its forbidden records into other people’s skeletons, and why every bedroom producer who has ever cut a dubplate owes the lot of them a drink. Somewhere in a private collection there is a recording of Bill Haley spinning across a stranger’s broken ankle. Elsewhere there is jazz cut into a fractured pelvis, a tango riding a cracked rib, rock’n’roll grooved into the shadow of someone’s skull. These are real objects.
Sound Avenue just released Dimensions 04
Belgian imprint Sound Avenue returns with the fourth instalment of its Dimensions series, a various artists collection that lives up to its name. Founded in 2011 by DJ and producer Madloch, the label has spent well over a hundred releases blurring the boundaries between house and techno, building a reputation for quality, originality and carefully considered A&R. Dimensions 4 continues that tradition. The premise is simple but evocative.
Mint announces location of brand new 2500 capacity venue in Leeds city centre
Leeds-based events brand Mint, known for Mint Festival, Mint Warehouse and the former Mint Club, has officially announced the location of its highly anticipated new venue, Mint XL, set to open within the former PRYZM nightclub site on Woodhouse Lane in the heart of Leeds city centre.
Watch: Fergie Delivers an Exclusive Vinyl Video Mix for Decoded Magazine and Godskitchen
There are mixes, and then there are statements. This is firmly the latter. We are genuinely proud to present an exclusive video mix from Fergie, recorded specially for Decoded Magazine in partnership with Godskitchen, dropped ahead of the brand’s much-anticipated return to Birmingham. This is not a man dialling it in for old times’ sake.
New documentary explores London’s underground accessible club scene
A new feature documentary is in development exploring nightlife through the lens of people with learning disabilities and autism, following five long-standing members of London’s radically inclusive club scene over the course of a year.
London’s The Vinyl Factory exhibition that explores vinyl culture is coming to Melbourne
The Vinyl Factory: Reverb is now open at ACMI, inviting audiences to dive into sound and explore its impact on art, film and social movements. Co-presented with RISING, Melbourne’s premier festival of music, art and performance, the exhibition runs until 31 August 2026.
Godskitchen, Reloaded: Fergie Returns to the Room That Made Him
The last time Decoded sat down properly with Fergie aka Robert Ferguson, Daz Pearson was holding the dictaphone, the venue conversation revolved around Legends in the Park, and the phrase “global pandemic” was still something only epidemiologists used in sentences. That was 2019. Seven years is a long time in any industry, and in dance music it is closer to a geological era.
Australia’s Festivals Are Not Dying. They Are Being Asked to Pay for Their Own Survival.
When the organisers of Return to Rio cancelled their 2024 event in New South Wales, they did so citing a 529% increase in police and medical costs. The figure has been repeated often enough in the press since to start losing its weight. It should not. A line item rising by more than five times its previous value inside a single planning cycle is not a budget challenge.
From Funktion-One To Gold Plated: A Working Class Ravers’ Tour Of Ultra High-End Audio
A field guide to the very top end of hi-fi, where the cabinets weigh more than your car, the cones are cut from diamonds, and the price tags would buy you a small Greek island. Strap in. It is shear madness that lives at the very top end of the hi-fi world. It is a place where price tags wear extra zeros like jewellery, and where engineers will talk about diamond tweeters, zirconium baskets and aramid honeycomb spacers with the same straight face most of us reserve for tax returns.
Throwback Thursday: 3 A.M. Eternal, Dead Sheep and a Million Quid, The KLF’s The White Room Revisited
There are records you grow into, and there are records that arrive when you are ready for them. And then there is The KLF’s The White Room. It landed in March 1991 and, much in the way that modern EDM works for kids today, it was the stepping stone from the pop end of electronic music into everything underneath. A gateway record. The first taste of something deeper waiting on the other side.
Paul van Dyk Launches VANDIT Next Generation Mentorship Programme
Paul van Dyk and the VANDIT Label Group announce VANDIT Next Generation, a talent scouting and mentorship initiative designed to discover, support, and elevate the next generation of global electronic music producers. The programme is set to bridge emerging talent with the international electronic music community, offering creative guidance, personalised feedback, and professional release opportunities.
Native Instruments has been bought by InMusic
inMusic and Native Instruments today announced that inMusic has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Native Instruments, the Berlin-based music technology company behind some of the most widely used creative tools in music production.
Book of the Month – A Disco Pogo Tribute to Andrew Weatherhall
‘A Disco Pogo Tribute To Andrew Weatherall’ is the fourth in the hardback Tribute series — following Daft Punk, Aphex Twin and LCD Soundsystem — and the long-overdue successor to the now hard-to-find A Jockey Slut Tribute To Andrew Weatherall. This 300-page book includes the best bits from the first book plus another 200 pages of new oral histories, essays, interviews, photos and artwork plus a comprehensive family tree, timeline, discography and gear list.
The Quiet Epidemic: Why Mental Health In Electronic Music Still Isn’t Reaching The People Who Need It
Last night I was sitting in my Mum’s lounge in Adelaide, out here visiting family, watching an interesting documentary on mental health in Australia. The credits rolled and I just sat in the dark for a while, thinking. Not about the festival posters or the Beatport charts or whichever hype cycle is currently doing the rounds. Just about the people. The ones I’ve lost, the ones I miss, and the ones who are still here but quietly not really here.
John Digweed, GU019 Los Angeles: The Night America Finally Tuned In
There is a moment in every cultural shift where the room finally tunes in. For dance music in the United States, that moment was somewhere around the turn of the millennium, and Global Underground 019 is one of the records that captured it. Not EDM. That word did not yet exist in any meaningful form, and the culture it would later describe was nowhere near the surface. This was American audiences finally catching up with electronic music as Europe had understood it for the best part of a decade.
When Did Dance Music Become So Fucking Boring?
I have been chewing on this one for months and it is finally coming out, so pour yourself something stronger than coffee. When did dance music, our dance music, become so spectacularly bland? I do not ask that lightly. I have given the better part of three decades to this thing. Vinyl in milk crates, sweat on the ceiling, train back to whichever city I was living in at the time, repeat.
Thirteen Years On, Brighton Music Conference Is Still The UK’s Most Underrated Asset
BMC26 returns to the seafront on 20-23 May 2026. After (founded in 2013) thirteen years on the calendar (although lanched in 2014), our Editor argues it has quietly become the most important conference the British electronic music industry has. There are not many things the UK gets to do better than anyone else when it comes to electronic music infrastructure these days, but Brighton Music Conference is one of them.
Throwback Thursday – Remember When We All Agreed a Monkey Was the Future of Music
Throwback Thursday tends to reach for the good stuff. A classic twelve inch, a legendary warehouse, a night at Fabric when you still queued down the alley in the rain and didn’t mind. This week we are going somewhere else. We are going back to the brief, demented period when serious music industry people stood at microphones and explained, without laughing, that the future of recorded music was a picture of a monkey in a striped jumper.
The global electronic music business generated $15.1 billion in 2025, growing faster (7%) than it did in 2024
IMS Ibiza has unveiled the IMS Electronic Music Business Report 2025/6. Presented live at IMS Ibiza, the report returns for its twelfth edition, authored for the fourth consecutive year by MIDiA Research’s Mark Mulligan. The report provides a detailed view of the global electronic music economy, tracking both its commercial trajectory and its cultural momentum.
Polygon to launch London’s first dedicated 360° spatial audio listening room
A new spatial audio listening room opens in Soho next month, built around a 17.1.10 L-Acoustics rig and a programme that treats albums as events. It’s also a useful moment to ask what 360 audio is actually for. Somewhere in the second half of the last decade, the music industry decided that stereo was a problem to be solved.
Production Futures launches Make Noise to open live events careers to young people
Backed by Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, funded through LIVE Trust and powered by Audiotonix, the campaign puts real pro audio kit in the hands of 12 to 18 year olds through a national competition. Production Futures has launched Make Noise, a national campaign to raise awareness of the production and live events careers that sit behind every gig, festival and broadcast.
Rone announces first album in 6 years ‘Megaptera
Now The comically self-serious and outrageous 1936 morality tale, which warned the public about marijuana, became an unintentional parody and midnight-movie classic decades later. What’s a “good-bad” movie? It’s the kind of flick that might have you cackling, hollering or groaning, one that is not …
Rone announces first album in 6 years ‘Megaptera
Rone returns. After six years away from the studio album format, the Paris producer Erwan Castex has announced Megaptera, a fifteen-track record that arrives on InFiné on 12 June, alongside a feature documentary of the same project reaching French cinemas on 17 June. Both are named for the scientific genus of the humpback whale, and both stem from a premise that feels closer to field anthropology than studio practice.
How a two-second Kraftwerk drum loop became the test case for EU sampling law
After twenty-nine years, a two-second drum loop and enough litigation to fill a small library, Kraftwerk have lost the decisive round in their copyright dispute with Moses Pelham. The European Court of Justice handed down its ruling on 14 April, and while the case now returns to Germany’s Federal Court of Justice for its final chapter, the direction of travel is set. Sampling, under certain conditions, can qualify as pastiche.
Exclusive Interview – John 00 Fleming: Six Years, One Album, a Statement Worth Making
There are artists you admire from a distance for years before the timing finally lines up. John 00 Fleming is one of them. His name has been on our interview wishlist at Decoded for longer than we care to admit, not because he is hard to reach, but because a conversation with someone of his stature deserves the right moment. That moment, as it turns out, is now.
The Electronic Press Kit: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How to Get It Right
In today’s music landscape, talent alone isn’t always going to cut it. Whilst you’re busy perfecting your craft in the studio or behind the decks, there are hundreds of other artists doing the exact same thing, all vying for the same opportunities. The difference between those who make it and those who remain bedroom producers often comes down to one fairly simple element: professional presentation. Enter the Electronic Press Kit, or EPK.
Throwback Thursday: How Gorillaz Made the Most Unlikely Record of 2001 and Got Away With It
Some records arrive with a concept so odd that the music almost becomes secondary to the argument surrounding it. The debut album from Gorillaz was exactly that kind of record. Released on 26 March 2001, it was the work of Damon Albarn and artist Jamie Hewlett, built around four animated characters with fictional backstories and press shots containing no actual humans. People either got it immediately or they didn’t get it at all, and a fair number of them still haven’t made their minds up.
Fake Artists, Real Money: The AI Machine Quietly Bankrupting Electronic Music’s Future
Ghost production has never been a secret in electronic music (we even wrote about it back in 2016). It has always existed in the margins, understood rather than spoken about, a quiet arrangement between those who could make the music and those who had the profile to sell it. Since at least the early years of commercial EDM, bedroom producers have been crafting tracks that superstar DJs have released under their own names, pocketing flat fees in exchange for anonymity.
Throwback Thursday: The Technics SL-DZ1200 — Beautiful, Ambitious, and a Little Broken
There are pieces of gear that divide a room, and the Technics SL-DZ1200 is one of them. Even now, mentioning it to the right crowd will get you a knowing smirk from one person and an eye roll from the next. Released in 2004, it arrived at a genuinely awkward moment in DJ culture, right as Pioneer was cementing its stranglehold on the digital format with the CDJ-1000, and just as vinyl loyalists were starting to quietly, reluctantly, accept that CDs were not going away. Technics saw an opening.
Danny Howells: Still Digging Deeper After Three Decades
There are DJs who arrive on a wave of industry hype and algorithmic favour, and then there are those who build a career through years of patient, purposeful craft. Danny Howells belongs to the second category. Born in Hastings in 1970, Howells was playing local clubs in the late 1980s when a mix tape found its way to John Digweed, then establishing Bedrock as one of the more significant club nights of its era. Digweed heard something worth acting on, and Howells was invited into the fold.
Sennheiser’s Headphone Division Is Seeking a New Owner. The Industry Should Hope It Finds the Right One.
According to news reports from heise.de, Sennheiser’s entire consumer division is being put up for sale, and it is news that deserves attention from anyone working in the music industry. Some gear becomes standard not through marketing but through consistent, unglamorous reliability. The Sennheiser HD 25 is probably the clearest example of that in DJ culture.
Native Instruments Update: A Buyout, Not a Collapse
Back in January, when Nick Williams broke his silence and confirmed that Native Instruments had entered pre-insolvency proceedings under German law, we said the implications would ripple far beyond balance sheets. We also posed the uncomfortable question of what happens when the tools that define modern music production face existential financial pressure. Seven weeks later, we have something approaching an answer, and it is considerably more reassuring than the worst-case scenario many feared.
Throwback Thursday: The Cassette Tapes That Became a Culture — Mark Farina’s Mushroom Jazz
There are mixes that do not simply play in the background. They shift something in the way you hear everything else. The Mushroom Jazz series by Mark Farina is that kind of work. Eight official commercial volumes, released between 1996 and 2016 on San Francisco’s OM Records, that steadily and without any great fanfare rewired how a generation understood the relationship between the dancefloor and everything that came after it.
The Japanese Bar Format That Found a Second Home in Australia
There is a moment, familiar to anyone who has spent time in a proper listening bar, when the music stops being background and starts being the point. The conversation dips. Someone at the bar leans forward. A needle finds a groove, and the room quietly reorganises itself around the sound. Australia has discovered that moment in spectacular fashion.
The UK Draws a Line: What the House of Lords AI and Copyright Report Means for Creators
Governments around the world are quietly wrestling with one of the most consequential policy questions of the decade: how do you protect the rights of the people who make things, while simultaneously not strangling the development of AI systems that are reshaping entire industries? The European Union moved first with its AI Act and a text and data mining exception that drew considerable criticism from rights-holders. The United States remains a patchwork of litigation and legislative inertia.
Melbourne’s The North Rave – Belfast Returns for Its 22nd Edition
Belfast is back, and the city is ready to rave! Following their explosive appearances at Reminisce, The North Rave, Belfast returns for its 22nd edition, promising a night of pure techno! Headlining the mainroom is Richie Rich, spinning from open to close, delivering his signature Belfast 90s rave classics.
NSW Just Passed the World’s First Music Protection Law. Yes, Really.
Look, I don’t often find myself applauding government press releases (have a read ). They tend to arrive wrapped in the sort of breathless self-congratulation that makes you want to lie down in a dark room with a cold flannel over your face. But every now and then something lands that’s actually worth talking about, and the NSW Minns Government’s Music Bill 2026 is one of those things. Let’s set the scene.
Sorry We’re Late: Decoded Finally Gives Daft Punk’s Discovery the Throwback Thursday It Deserves
Look, I’ll hold my hand up. How this one slipped through the Throwback Thursday net is genuinely beyond me. I think I was mowing the lawn. Whatever the excuse, on a lazy Saturday with nowhere to be, there was absolutely no way we were letting this one go by without its proper dues. Some records demand to be written about eventually, regardless of how long you’ve kept them waiting. There are albums that capture a moment, and then there are albums that create one.
Point, Click, Mix: The Mouse That Thought It Was a DJ Controller
There are bad ideas, there are genuinely terrible ideas, and then there are ideas so magnificently misguided that they transcend criticism entirely and arrive somewhere close to performance art. The DJ Mouse, launched by DJ-Tech in August 2009, sits firmly in that last category. Cast your mind back to 2009.
The Great British Festival: Five Days of Music, Decades in Landfill
UK festivals produce somewhere between 23,500 and 25,800 tonnes of waste every year. That is not a vague environmental concern you can file away with good intentions. It is a concrete, measurable consequence of the way a significant proportion of the British public behaves when given a few days off and a field to sleep in. The numbers are grim. The average festival-goer generates around 2kg of waste per day.
Thirty Years of Forum Culture: How Dance Music Found Its Voice on the Internet
That sound, we all know it…….anyone who grew up trying to find out about electronic music in the nineties will remember. It was not a bassline or a breakdown. It was a sequence of beeps and hisses and a long, drawn-out screech that meant your dial-up modem was doing its thing, and in a few minutes you’d be online. Forty-five seconds later, if you were lucky and nobody picked up the phone, you were in. That was the gateway.
Global Underground announces Australia Tour ft Sasha, Danny Howells, James Zabiela, & Anthony Pappa
Global Underground’s Australia tour begins Friday 5thJune 2026 at Melbourne’s iconic Northcote Social Club, who’ve been presenting the best music to Melbourne since 1894. Then, on Saturday 6thJune, an all-dayer at Brisbane’s Eclipse, a venue superbly engineered for sound, scale and an immersive shared experience. The tour ends on Sunday 7thJune at Sydney’s famous Selina’s in a special finale, the Coogee Bay venue being a favourite for live acts and DJs alike for more than five decades.
The Record Crate Gets Its Long Overdue Redesign
There’s a particular kind of frustration that every serious record collector knows. You’ve spent years, possibly decades, building a collection that means something to you. Albums that represent specific moments. Twelve-inches sourced from dusty market stalls in Brixton, pressed gems from some back alley record shop, discoveries from digging sessions in Tokyo or Melbourne.
Thirty Years of Trainspotting: Time to Revisit One of Britain's Best Films
Three decades on from its release in February 1996, Danny Boyle’s film turns thirty this year, and it holds up remarkably well. Revisiting it now, what strikes you is not just how good it is but how specific and honest it remains about the world it came from. To understand why Trainspotting resonated the way it did, you have to understand the Britain it emerged from.
Amnesia Milano Unveils New L-Acoustics Sound System and 360degree LED Wall Original
Amnesia Milano has made a significant statement to open 2026, unveiling a comprehensive overhaul of its sound and lighting infrastructure. At the core of the upgrade is a new L-Acoustics system delivering consistent audio throughout the room, complemented by a 360-degree LED wall and a redesigned modular ceiling rig. The technical brief was straightforward: put the music first. The investment is already shaping the calibre of bookings.
The Numbers Don't Lie: SoundCloud's 2026 Music Intelligence Report and What It Means for Electronic Music
There’s a particular kind of report that gets passed around music industry circles, full of broad strokes and vague proclamations about what’s trending, designed more to reassure investors than to actually tell you anything useful. SoundCloud’s 2026 Music Intelligence Report is not that. It’s a genuinely interesting read, built on platform data rather than gut feeling, and for anyone paying attention to where electronic music is heading, there’s quite a lot in here worth sitting with.
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