Stephen Rickinson

My Work

Black Rhino •

Cover Story: World Sound & Power - History Holds

In West London at the turn of the 1990s, selector and engineer Robert Tribulation took lessons learned in the 1970s with Great Tribulation Sound System and gave them durable form: a self-built rig, an in-house studio and label, and a circle of artists who treat dub as public work. The longevity of Word Sound & Power is grounded in practical theology, craft, discipline, and transmission. The stack rolls in, the control tower lights up, and the room is reorganised around pressure, clarity, and mes...
Black Rhino •

Cover Story: Toroki - Studio, Stack, and Session

Toroki works on both sides of the signal chain, builder, operator, writer and mixer, a Munich-based producer whose music targets air under pressure. The project began in the German steppers circuit and grew through networks that connect Bavaria to Bordeaux. A tight crew carries out the operation, with MélieMel on organization and Max on visual and technical duties, and a custom Toroki Sound System. Bucharest now gets a focused dose of that method at Black Rhino Residency #22 at Control Club on S...
Black Rhino •

Cover Story: Street Rigs and Roots in South Africa

South African sound system culture germinated in the pressure cooker of the townships, learning to survive under scarcity and speak confidently without surrendering its accent. Stacks and scoops build roving rooms for gathering, teaching, grieving, feeding, remembering. On October 18, that ethos steps onto a new stage as Black Rhino Radio hosts Kebra Ethiopia at Control Club, marking over twenty years of carrying the township method to the Eastern European faithful. Emerging from the shadows of...
MODERN TIMES REVIEW •

Nova ’78

Aaron Brookner and Rodrigo Areias’s Nova ’78 is an archive wired to the mains of mid-century power. The film assembles Howard Brookner’s 16mm footage (with Tom DiCillo also shooting) and Jim Jarmusch’s contemporaneous audio from the 1978 Nova Convention, a New York convocation where poetry, performance, and punk-era energy collided with the older counter-culture avant-garde. Live circuitry is the film’s thinking engine, as the convention wrestles with a problem that keeps returning under new na...
Control Club •

Album Review: Drew McDowall - A Thread, Silvered and Trembling (Dais Records)

Former Psychic TV, Coil, and The Poems member Drew McDowall’s A Thread, Silvered and Trembling moves like weather sealed within. Its four extended pieces ask the ear to inhabit changes of air rather than a simple sequence of hooks. Working with Randall Dunn at Brooklyn's "sound temple," Circular Ruin, McDowall anchors the sound in depth of field with a palette that reads as both chamber and electronic at once. It's a compact orchestra emulsified into a voltage that closes down the 10th Bucharest...
Control Club •

Album Review: Hinako Omori - stillness, softness… (Houndstooth)

a journey… was the 2022 debut from Hinako Omori, shaped by the concept of forest bathing and outdoor recordings. stillness, softness… draws breath inward and steadies the room until attention begins to thrum. Omori crafts thirteen linked vignettes that share a bloodstream through an analogue tone bed, warm with a faint electrical shimmer. What you hear is concentration turning into sound and returning as a durable calm. This calm opens the 10th edition of Bucharest Photofest as Control Club welc...
Control Club •

Album Review: Years of Denial - Love Cuts EP (Veyl Recordings)

In the hyperkinetic vortex of modern electronic music’s ever-subdividing taxonomy, Years of Denial remain obstinately uncategorizable. The French-Czech duo’s latest, Love Cuts EP, is both an interstitial passage between 2023’s Suicide Disco 2 and the forthcoming third instalment and an autonomous exercise in mapping love’s most labyrinthine territories. Here, love is refracted through a prismatic lens that captures its digital phantoms, forbidden geometries, toxic sublimations, and unvarnished e...
Black Rhino •

Cover Story: Channel One Sound System

If you want to trace the bloodline of UK bass culture, from blues dances and sound clashes to jungle, dubstep and the 2010s warehouse revival, follow the Channel One Sound System story. Run by selector Michael “Mikey Dread” Letts, this London institution stands as both keeper of the roots and a ritual for the community. Think hand-built speaker boxes, an analog signal path, single-deck discipline, and message music that treats the dance like public service. On September 27, 2025, Mikey Dread and...
Control Club •

Album Review: Warfield - Deathrock Devotionals Vol. 1

A thirty-year arc from a psychedelic hip-hop debut (My Field Trip to Planet 9, 1993) to the black-suited, synth-seductive hauteur of She Wants Revenge, Justin Warfield's songs always move with minimal parts, maximal voltage, and a baritone trained to set groove to image. Deathrock Devotionals Vol. 1, the opening installment of his solo project WARFIELD, is brisk proof that he always preferred the shortest route to the nerve ending. Five tracks that treat acceleration as aesthetic, memory as fuel...
Black Rhino •

Beyond the Branding Gauntlet: Durușa SummerHills’ Small, Human Festival

Across the world, the modern music festival has turned into an agent of the clout economy: endless lines of influencers angling for content, stages lacquered with corporate logos, a calendar obsessed with “growth” as if intimacy is some kind of failure. The music survives, but too often it’s backgrounded by activations and brand theatre—a grassy mall with louder subwoofers, prioritizing logistics over art, which itself is relegated somewhere past the merch tent. That’s the atmosphere many of us...
Black Rhino •

Album Review: Purelink – Faith

Purelink’s sophomore album, Faith, is ambient music as a ritual of quiet radicalism, reshaping both emotional and sonic terrain through collective intimacy and orchestrated subtlety. Comprising Tommy Paslaski (Concave Reflection), Ben Paulson (kindtree), and Akeem Asani (Millia), the trio relocated mid-process from Chicago to New York—a geographic shift that is vividly imprinted in the album’s textures and moods. If their 2023 debut, Signs, felt like introspection as sound, Faith moves in the di...
Black Rhino •

Album Review: Joe Armon-Jones - All The Quiet (Part II)

In All The Quiet (Part II), Joe Armon-Jones crafts a speculative narrative rooted in dub, jazz, and the urgency of improvisation. As the second installment in a two-part opus, released on his Aquarii imprint, the album concludes a dystopian allegory in which music has been all but extinguished, surviving only through the "paladins of sound"—a scattered few who resist algorithmic cultural flattening.

The seeds of All the Quiet were planted during lockdown, when Armon-Jones taught himself how to...
Black Rhino •

Album Review: Kae Tempest - Self Titled

“How many strangers will I upset today with my existence?” immediately draws blood as the surgically precise first line of Self Titled. The album that follows is the most exposed work to date from Kae Tempest. That isn't to say it is because it recounts their transition into a trans masculine identity (though it does), but because it sets aside myth and metaphor, collapsing distance in the process. Although prolific in their own right, Self Titled is the manifesto of an artist arriving.

Across...
Black Rhino •

Album Review: Marcel Dettmann - Running Back Mastermix: Edits & Cuts

Musical editing is an act of care. Rather than impose, the editor listens to what the original could be if placed in a new light. On Running Back Mastermix: Edits & Cuts, Marcel Dettmann steps into that role. Bypassing the traditional remixer or selector mentality, here he acts as an archivist and subtle technician. What results is a series of intimate revisions that refract past and present through each other.

As a three-LP gatefold (and cassette) release, Dettmann’s latest contribution to Run...
Black Rhino •

Album Review: Ostgut Ton - Klubnacht 01

In 2005, Berghain’s in-house label Ostgut Ton was founded as an extension of the club’s curatorial ethos, quickly becoming one of the 21st century’s most influential imprints. Across the 2000s and 2010s, its catalog read like a who’s who of Berlin’s techno royalty – Ben Klock, Marcel Dettmann, Shed, Planetary Assault Systems, Martyn, Barker, JASSS, and more. Ostgut Ton not only defined the “Berghain sound” of cavernous kick drums and hypnotic loops but also provided a platform for the lush, soul...
Eastern Daze •

Sound & Vision: Inside the 2025 DokStation Music Documentary Festival – Easterndaze

Published June, 2025
by Steve Rickinson

The Dokstation Music Documentary Film Festival concluded its ninth annual edition in Bucharest on June 1. Running the week prior, from May 28, across several screening and concert venues in the Romanian capital, Dokstation continues to attract fans of the niche non-fiction genre.

Music documentaries have been around almost as long as the documentary genre itself. However, this newfound popularity of music documentaries reflects a modern convergence of c...
MODERN TIMES REVIEW •

Will Europe watch as Hungary criminalises culture?

In Hungary, the space for independent voices is rapidly shrinking. A proposed bill titled «On the Transparency of Public Life» threatens to suffocate not only civil society and independent media but also the country’s embattled documentary film community. With Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s ruling party holding a two-thirds majority in Parliament, the bill is expected to pass later this autumn. Its implications are sweeping: organisations that receive foreign funding—including open EU tenders or...
Black Rhino •

Album Review: Planet Mu 30

The thirty-year trajectory of Planet Mu reads like the slow accumulation of a deviant archive; an ongoing catalogue of sonic extremophiles, genre miscreants, and rhythmic heretics. Founded in 1995 by Mike Paradinas, nominally as an outlet for his µ-Ziq productions, the label has long operated as a vector for electronic music's most stubborn nonconformists. Planet Mu 30, a sprawling 25-track compilation of new and previously unreleased material, neither eulogises nor summarises the label's prolif...
Control Club •

Album Review: Ora the Molecule - Dance Therapy (Mute)

Dance Therapy, the second LP from Norwegian polymath Nora Schjelderup aka Ora the Molecule, eschews the detached spectacle of contemporary electronica for an affective and narratively integrated structure, a psycho-cosmic libretto for disco existentialism. It pirouettes between synthetic and sincere, bridging private melancholia with the dancefloor’s ritualistic hedonism. In its best moments, it recalls the fluency of early Goldfrapp and the dramaturgy of Annie Lennox. But Schjelderup’s vector i...
Black Rhino •

Album Review: Hypnotised: A Journey Through American Trance Music (1992–2002)

The storied history of trance has long been Eurocentric. While the 1990s trance boom was dominated by European hits, DJ superstars, and megaclubs, a parallel movement was flourishing across the United States. Hypnotised: A Journey Through American Trance Music (1992–2002), compiled by Dutch historian Arjan Rietveld, spotlights this scene, charting a decade of American Trance across its distinct regional styles.

This is the fifth entry in Rietveld’s Hypnotised series. While the Netherlands, Germ...
Black Rhino •

Album Review: Djrum – Under Tangled Silence

Felix Manuel, known as Djrum, returns after a six-year hiatus with Under Tangled Silence, a sprawling album of creative reconsitution inspired by a Patti Smith quote: “We go through life. We shed our skins. We become ourselves.” Describing it as “electronic” refuses engagement with what it actually is—a document of emotional recursion encoded in rhythmic disturbance, the dialogue between chaos and catharsis, and pianistic memory of trauma and loss. Under Tangled Silence is a palimpsest shaped li...
Control Club •

Album Review: Porridge Radio - Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There For Me (Secretly Canadian)

Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There For Me is the fourth album from Porridge Radio, arriving with the quiet weight of experience. What began in 2015 as Dana Margolin's lo-fi open-mic project in Brighton has since evolved into something more volatile, sculpted, and carrying the tremor of the band's early urgency. After the chart recognition of Every Bad and Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky, Margolin found herself burnt out, heartbroken, and hollowed by momentum. Clouds is what...
Black Rhino •

Album Review: Sinners - Original Score & Soundtrack

"The blues is not about sadness. It's about survival." - Ma Rainey

Unlike here in Romania, he root of American horror is not Dracula. It the plantation. The original site of blood-draining, of bodies used up and discarded, of spirituals wailed into the fields. America is not the theatrical kind of vampire. It is something much cruder and bloodier, a shape-shifting organism that gorges on Black labor, culture, and spirit, leaving the bones to rot in shallow graves. Ryan Coogler’s feral new film...
Black Rhino •

Album Review: aya – hexed!

The second full-length album from aya, hexed!, is a dense and formally disorienting release that resists conventional critical framing. It can't be categorised by genre or affect; instead, it presents as an unstable system that attempts to function but is continually undermined by the conditions it has created. Across ten tracks, aya encodes states of addiction, gender dissonance, and psychic trauma into the very grammar of her compositions. But these are not addressed as simple lyrical content...
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