No Tags

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. “Is this dubstep?” There once was a time when approximately 23% of all YouTube comments were a variation of this question. Dubstep has nearly always been disputed territory, with its early principles soon obscured by its brasher descendants as it became the UK’s most influential dance export this century.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. For the second in our series of live sessions in the OJAS Listening Room,we were joined by Al Wootton and Valentina Magaletti. The OJAS Listening Room is a carpeted sanctuary in the industrial belly of 180 Studios, centred around one of Devon Turnbull’s storied OJAS sound systems. Put simply, it makes records sound really, really good.

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No Tags 68: Djrum or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Clang 1× 0:00 Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -1:46:16 -1:46:16 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. 68: Djrum or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Clang Deep in the DJ trenches with a true virtuoso, live at the ICA. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. What makes a place creative? Why is it that some big cities are sad cultural wastelands, while others have got hit records, new genres and stylistic innovation coming out of the taps? The history of electronic music provides plenty of curious case studies, among them the post-war motorik of Düsseldorf, and the post-industrial futurism of Detroit.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -1:15:45 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Q1 report is here and the charts are clear: buy underscores. 📈 On this episode of No Tags, we talk through our favourite releases of 2026 so far – not to mention some music that we’re divided on, but felt was worthy of discussion regardless.

They say that if America sneezes, the world catches a cold – and you can be sure that patient zero is lurking somewhere in the Bay Area. This week we’re republishing an essay that first appeared in our (sold out) 2024 book, No Tags Vol 1, with an update from its author, Chris Zaldua.

Two-and-a-half years after swearing we’d never pivot to video, we’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into 2026 – or at least, into 180. This is a little more exciting than simply No Tags in video form, however (nobody needs to actually see us nattering on Zoom). Last month, we hosted the first in a new series of in-person and on-camera No Tags sessions in the OJAS Listening Room at London’s 180 Studios.

This Substack is supported by you lot. To receive every post and support us in our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. We all know what sound is, but are we any good at describing it? Outside of the ₊‧.°achingly beautiful˚.‧° cliches of the music journalist or the technical jargon of the academic, sound is pretty poorly served by everyday language. (And the English language is itself strikingly dependent on visual metaphors.

Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -1:12:37 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. So we had another idea for a movie canon. After blinking our way through The Moment – the recent mockumentary about Charli XCX by director Aidan Zamiri – we got thinking about a certain kind of music film that exists between the margins of biopic and rockdoc.