Post-Paradise, Birmingham, May/June 2019.

Extract

At the end of June, I had the unsettling pleasure of wandering through a blue fringed curtain and into the backroom-disco of Rowland Hill's miniaturised Eurodance clubnight. Presented at Post-Paradise in Birmingham, Interesting Times was a foreboding inoculation of nineties ‘lyrical optimism [in] an emotively charged minor key’. La Cream, Alice Deejay, Phutura, Aqua Ninja: their tracks have, as Hill writes in the programme notes, ‘melodies reminiscent of breaking news sound effects and beats that suggest states of both euphoria and emergency’ – this is music that brings an ‘unsettling blend of doubt and hopefulness’. Sash!’s ‘Mysterious Times’ opens with samples of thunder, later including the line ‘We're counting the hours and days to the end of all time’.