Stephen Rickinson

My Work

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...
Black Rhino •

Album Review: Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs — Death Hilarious

These days, music should not be made for times of peace. It needs to be made for grinding down your molars, cackling maniacally in new media solitude, and what's playing in your head when your phone lights up with its endless scroll of bad news. On their latest, Newcastle's Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs (Pigs x7), understand this dark schematic, providing no gentle entry into Death Hilarious.

The fifth studio album from Pigs x7 detonates across nine blistering tracks, delivering a convulsi...
Black Rhino •

At the Heart of the Bubble: One World Romania Looks Inward and Outward

On a sunny April Saturday afternoon in the park, Andreea Lăcătuș sat with me for a revealing conversation on the stakes, strategies, and struggles behind Romania’s most politically attuned documentary film festival. Now in her second year as Festival Director, Lăcătuș took over the role from acclaimed filmmaker Alexandru Solomon (Arsenie. An Amazing Afterlife, The Great Communist Bank Robbery), who helped establish One World Romania as the country’s most vital human rights-focused cinema event....
Black Rhino •

Future Retro Visions: Tim Reaper, Blackeye MC and Jungle's Next Frontier

London-born producer Ed "Tim Reaper" Alloh has spearheaded a renaissance of breakbeats from behind the decks and the desk. A web developer by day until recently, Reaper spent years in the margins of the drum & bass scene. Cultivating a style that bridges old-school ferocity and forward-thinking experimentation, his tracks are immediately recognizable. They are familiar in their foundation of classic chopped Amen breaks and booming basslines, yet futuristic in their sideways lurches and sonic jux...
Black Rhino •

Gorgon Sound: Essentials

Gorgon Sound is the collaborative alchemy of Joe McGann (Kahn) and Sam Barrett (Neek) dedicated solely to reggae-dub investigations. Emerging from Bristol's bass-heavy underground, the duo has made anachronism their badge of honor: cutting one-off acetate dubplates, championing vinyl-only releases, and drawing on a Jamaican sound system lineage that Bristolians absorbed through institutions like Teachings in Dub and St. Paul's Carnival.

Gorgon Sound's music is a conversation across decades, 70s...
Black Rhino •

Mic Check: The Radical Legacy of the MC

On a spring night in Bucharest, Control Club vibrates before a single word is spoken. Gathered at the city's sound system faithful for the eighteenth installment of the Black Rhino Residency - April 19. On stage, Rider Shafique steps to the mic. Later in the night, Blackeye MC will trade versus with Tim Reaper’s retro-futurist Jungle. Behind him, the Bristol-based duo Gorgon Sound cue their first brooding riddim. Shafique allows the bass to fill every corner before releasing his low, deliberate...
Black Rhino •

Album Review: Sandwell District — End Beginnings

By the time End Beginnings landed last week, the myth of Sandwell District was already half fossil, half flare. This is not a mere return but the reanimation of a fractured, aged, yet unmistakably alive sonic body. And if that body walks with a limp, it's one earned through a decade of silence, estrangement, and, most recently, grief.

The death of Juan Mendez, the artist and producer known as Silent Servant, hangs over the album as its gravitational center. It shapes the sound, structure, and e...
Black Rhino •

Album Review: Tim Hecker - Shards

Canadian composer Tim Hecker has meticulously arranged static storms into intricate cathedrals from digital decay for two decades. His albums like Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again (2001), Harmony in Ultraviolet (2006), and Ravedeath, 1972 (2011) established him as a formidable presence at the intersection of noise, melody, and melancholy; his soundscapes always operating in the margins between grandeur and disintegration—the architecture of sonic ruin. His latest work, released last month, Shards,...
Black Rhino •

Album Review: REAL BAY SHIT

Hardcore thrives in the margins, basements, and back rooms where bodies collide. Through the various manifestations of late-stage capitalism, California's Bay Area knows this better than most. Here to draw a line in the sand by a scene that refuses to be displaced is the compilation, REAL BAY SHIT. With seventeen previously unreleased tracks, the album is a roll call of the region’s heaviest hitters. All proceeds go to Crossthread San Jose, a nonprofit working to establish a much-needed DIY venu...
Black Rhino •

Album Review: Anthony Joseph – Rowing Up River to Get Our Names Back

The poetics of reclamation have long been Anthony Joseph’s artistic lodestar. His corpus eschews fixity, expanding at the volatile juncture where history and futurity, oral tradition and avant-garde formalism, Caribbean epistemologies and radical ecologies intersect. His latest work, the incantatory and topographical 'Rowing Up River to Get Our Names Back', mobilizes language as an act of retrieval and sound as a place of resistance. Produced by Dave Okumu, who aptly navigates diasporic jazz abs...
Black Rhino •

Killa P & Numa Crew - Killing Time

The two artists' convergence on Killing Time is a seismic event in the sound system cos that weaves dubstep to jungle, grime to reggae. On December 28, Numa Crew and Killa P also join forces on stage as Black Rhino Radio welcomes them to the 15th edition of its residency at Control Club.

The album's roots can be traced back to the early 2000s, when Killa P, born Patrick Knight, was a member of Roll Deep, the grime collective that served talents like Wiley, Flowdan, and Dizzee Rascal. With a rep...
Black Rhino •

Legowelt - A Field Guide to the Void

Through its deft traversing of the house, techno, electro, and ambient genres, Legowelt crafts an immersive voyage through past and future, humor and depth, solitude and community. With the album, Legowelt (aka Danny Wolfers) doesn't just reinforce his master-level hardware credentials but also his storytelling ability, unafraid of taking the piss out of his own genres along the way. On November 15, the Dutch West Coast legend will highlight the 14th Black Rhino Residency at Control Club.

A Fie...
Control Club •

Interview: LALALAR

Despite the evolution in their music, one thing remains constant: LALALAR’s commitment to forging their own independent path. With En Kötü Iyi Olur, the band proves that there is room for hope, creativity, and, most importantly, resistance even in the darkest times. Ahead of their 16th anniversary of Control Club appearance on Saturday, October 5, we spoke with LALALAR about their previous performances at the venue, the importance of independence, the political and economic situation in Türkiye,...
MODERN TIMES REVIEW •

Utopia on parade | Modern Times Review

An IDFA Luminous word premiere, Andra MacMasters’ debut, Bright Future, is an evocative peer into a lesser-documented but consequential moment in Cold War history: the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students, held in Pyongyang during the sweltering summer of 1989. This archive-laden documentary examines the ideological fervour and human encounters that unfolded against a geopolitical landscape on the brink of monumental transformation.
Just five months before the Romanian Revolution swept Ni...
MODERN TIMES REVIEW •

Abuser at home, victim in the fields | Modern Times Review

In Tata, directors Lina Vdovîi and Radu Ciorniciuc (Acasa, My Home; 2020) present a layered exploration on the complexities of reflection and reconciliation. Premiering at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival, the film is both an intimate familial narrative and a broader social critique of embedded patriarchal structures, migrant exploitation, and domestic violence in a region (and world) seemingly mired in constant economic and ideological transition.
The film follows Lina’s journey to...
MODERN TIMES REVIEW •

Cultural sanctuaries amidst relentless urban development | Modern Times Review

Ben Mullinkosson’s The Last Year of Darkness (2023) provides a vivid exploration of the lives of young (primarily) queer individuals in Chengdu, China. The high-contrast film centres on Funky Town, an underground nightclub that serves as a sanctuary for its patrons amidst the march of urban redevelopment outside its walls. Through this lens, Mullinkosson captures the intersection of personal identity and broader socio-economic shifts, shedding light on the impact of gentrification and capitalist...
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