From the Mailbox 73

DMG – Live the Dream Skittering glitchy rave from Daniel McGurty, aka DMG, now based in Edinburgh but a native of Blackburn. McGurty is painting with a delicate brush here, sketching around an absence of overt dancefloor kick/bass spine, but these two tracks from his upcoming album Live the Dream nonetheless evoke plenty of nostalgia for UK hardcore and rave. Blackburn was the epicenter of illegal raving in the UK in the late 80s and early 90s. Kids making great use of all the abandoned mills and factories that followed Thatcher’s hollowing-out of the industrial core of Northern English society is the perfect historic encapsulation of how and why raving was birthed as a response to economic insecurity and the approach of a post-industrial world. That large-scale raving has now become hijacked by tertiary and quinary sector corporate interests — a product to be delivered by hospitality and media companies, owned by the very sorts of global capital firms that pulled the plug on Western…