Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Kurt Wagner thoughtfully massages his cheek with his tongue and launches into another tight, cryptic slice of something. ‘Alternative country’ doesn’t seem to fit, certainly – there[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
How to stop time: people talk a lot about the imperceptible shifts of detail in ultra-minimal techno tracks, but I don’t think any listener truly notices them until after playback. That would imply a[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Anyone who’s read the British tabloids in the 1990s learns to recognise the purse-lipped nudges and twitched-curtain insinuations that have become the endlessly reported cousins of inexplicable crime[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Sure, it doesn’t get much crasser than this; two jovial, ageing D.J.s making a record of piledriving dancefloor unsubtlety. But then one of the best things about commercial dance culture has been the[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
“Presto! Read the Communist Manifesto…” More Benjamin than benjamins, The Coup’s tough-talking Marxist hip-hop might initially smack of Michael Franti-esque talking down or the funkful but funless […]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
The thing about the early Warp records is that even though the people involved had the potential and motivations to mess about making electronic artmusic (as borne out by virtually every Warp release since[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
So on the one hand you have the most boiling, advanced, raw-edged, up-for-grabs, funny music of my lifetime, and on the other you have Suede. Guess which I was listening to? Guess which everyone else I kne[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
The first jungle 12″ I ever bought. I called it ‘jungle’ though it barely was – most SHJ tracks were soft-soled ambient washes with politely bustling breakbeats, or else they were f[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s
Riot Grrrl had jack-shit UK impact outside London and Glasgow, and Bis went from being a bad joke to just boringly being, and so here’s the best, crassest, funniest splenetic shriek-pop of the decade[…]

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s 
Urban Debussy beat: Mary J’s aqueous introductory bubblings convinced me that swingbeat was worth it, that its hard and glamourous stare masked multiple sonic joys, that the mutterings of crits abo[…]