I’ve just touched down in Berlin. It’s a cloudy Wednesday in July 2016 and it’s been five days since my dad’s funeral. I’m standing on a residential street corner in Friedrichshain with a broken suitcase and no GPS. …

Charlie and I met by chance. She’d just moved to Berlin from Melbourne and was looking to sublet my flat while I was away — she’d seen my ad on Facebook and sent me a message. I liked her immediately. She turned up at my door like an explosion of…

This is a true story of a young girl with a big nemesis and even bigger dreams (even though Medium has tagged it in Fiction. But I don’t blame them; my mother’s behaviour is pretty unbelievable.) June 15th 1999. Prize Day. I’m sitting in a pew in a colossal church…

It’s a beautiful sunny afternoon in Berlin and I’m standing in the hallway of Tom Durston’s apartment in Neukölln. He’s originally from Leicestershire so the first thing he says is “Do you want a cup of tea?” and the second thing he says is “Keep your shoes on. I assume…

The evolution of a format, and what we can learn from Nipsey’s $100 Hussle. — Spring of 2002 and Curtis Jackson aka Fifty Cent has just been shot nine times. Two days later his label, Columbia Records, drops him. Simultaneously his controversial song Ghetto Qu’ran gets him blacklisted by the industry. It wasn’t Fiddy’s week. Despite some minor successes writing tracks and releasing mixtapes with…

New stations are forging their own culture and creating world-class content for global audiences.. — Rising from the ashes of the global FM stations, independent radio is delivering the depth and knowledge its mainstream predecessors could rarely conjure. And with the medium mainly on digital, the movement is truly worldwide, from Seoul to Hong Kong; Vilnius to Rio. Finally satisfying the cravings of the underground…

From Dopplereffekt to Daft Punk to Deadmau5, masks have proved a powerful marketing tool. — Throughout history, masks have been a symbol of ambiguity, mysticism and performance — a veil that conceals even as it reveals, using the visible to stand in for something we cannot or should not see. Even today, there’s something formidable about watching artists perform behind a mask. Maybe it’s the…

How filling a dancefloor can take your label to the next level. — ://about blank, November 2014. It’s below freezing but that doesn’t stop the 50-strong crowd waiting outside the Berlin nightclub to attend the first Oscillate party. …

We made it through a number of babysitters. Perhaps 10 or more as we grew up. There were a couple of young girls from France or Norway who would come and go. There was ‘Boo’ — a 20-something raver who smoked like a chimney. (Once after bed I crept downstairs…