Dusky, Peverelist, und Willow

Techno as a whole seems to be a difficult genre to comprehend. On the one side we have the enormous party jams that can only really be stomached in a dark room filled with people raving so hard they could cause some serious harm with a single limb. On the other we have the austere, impenetrable head music that makes Phillip Glass at his most concrete sound like Oasis. It’s one of the very, very few genres of music around where the extremes of the genre are the most well-known. What better examples of this are there than Tomorrowland being one of the world’s largest music festivals the same year that Aphex Twin releases a top ten album the world over? However, London based duo Alfie Granger-Howell and Nick Harriman, otherwise known as Dusky, prove that the two extremes can be put harmoniously together in their live sets. Yes, the music draws influence from and contains samples from the likes of Jazz, Classical and avant-garde Electronica but that doesn’t mean that you can’t dance to it like an absolute maniac. In fact quite the opposite, the effect of such strange music being so danceable is unlike few others in the world of electronic music. Techno is a difficult genre to comprehend but so are most genres when you think about it, Techno just needs more artists like Dusky, who can bring together the best of both extremes and give everyone a show to remember because of it. Highly recommended.

Other than the fact that they’re called Willow and they’re from Belgium, it’s probably best not to cast too many aspersions about this particular band; both their sound and their image clearly has plenty of room for reinterpretation and reimagination. They’ve dabbled in indie rock i the past, but their most recent output has lent towards an eighties-inspired dancepop sound that uses synths instead of guitars. This has come to be reflected in their energetic live shows; as in the past, frontman Pieter Jan Van Den Troost provides the focal point for the crowd with his tirelessly vibrant performances, but instrumentally, they now mix things up woth both synths and guitar present on stage and setlists that tend to run all the way through their back catalogue. This summer saw them as staples of the European festival scene, and they’ve also toured both in their home continent and in the United States with fellow Belgians Wallace Vanborn; they’ve played intimate shows in the UK, too, where they retain a feverish - and burgeoning - cult fanbase