Hi,

Welcome to THUMP UK.

You’re probably wondering who we are, and why we’re here. I’ll start with myself, because I’m self-involved like that.

My name’s Lauren Martin and for the past six or so years, I’ve been writing about electronic music. Everytime I tell someone with a proper job what I do, I’ve been asked pretty much the same questions: “How on earth do you write about electronic music? There’s no words! It’s made with machines! What is there to say about DJs? They don’t even play their own music!“

I feel that Björk gave the best answer to such nay-saying when she said “If there’s no soul in the music, it’s because no one put it there; it’s not the tool’s fault.” Electronic music is a strange and beautiful creature. I’ve seen sixteen year olds built like the side of a fiver bounce on the shoulders of butch lads in the Sub Club during a riotous DJ Funk set, tops long lost to the sodden floor and sweat dripping from the ceiling. I’ve seen Autechre play to a blacked out hall with a single green laser beam for visuals – bloody Autechre eh? – and every weekend I see hundreds of people dancing in unison, occasionally looking over at the nearest stranger and smiling at one another.

Electronic music does have soul. We just have to put it there. It’s not just the task of the producers who make the music and the DJs who play it, but the writers that make sense of last night’s blurry haze, the filmmakers that show what life is like behind the DJ booth, and the ravers that turn bedroom blips into rapturous communion. And that’s where THUMP, the brand new electronic music and culture channel for VICE, comes in.

THUMP follows on from the continued success of VICE’s music channel Noisey as a challenging prospect: a platform in a world where popular culture and the underground are coming together like never before. We’ll host documentary films of unique stories, in-depth interviews with artists, and passionate opinion pieces from original voices, all with the sharpness that’s come to define VICE. These will sit side-by-side with the latest music, videos and exclusive premieres: of the live events and cultural moments that make electronic music as weird and wonderful as it is.

At the heart of THUMP UK is not just a crew of writers, but a crew of artists too. This is a new way of doing music journalism: where the artist can be a part of the story, not just the subject of it. No holier-than-thou reviews, no constant stream of copy-and-paste news, no tl;dr pseudo-academic essays. By flipping how a channel can document electronic music and culture, we would be amiss not to engage with the very people who we listen to and see perform every day. We’ll have columns run by the taste-makers that really know their stuff, and unique stories from the DJs, producers and radio hosts that, without, we’d have nothing to write about. Makes sense, really.

Sure, as a new channel emerging within a respected history of British dance journalism, THUMP UK is ambitious. Yet, electronic music and culture has never been as ambitious as it is now. Underground producers are working with the worlds biggest pop stars, clubbing is becoming a billion-dollar enterprise, and this crazy global diaspora of sounds is as rich in quality as variety. Now, what is popular, and what is boundary-pushing, don’t have to be mutually exclusive. We need a channel that reflects this.

Oh, and we’ve got some really great stuff coming up this week: brand new music videos from Erol Alkan and Mercury Prize nominee Jon Hopkins, a first-hand account of life as a touring DJ from BBC Radio 1’s Annie Mac, a never-before-seen interview with dance legends Daft Punk from 1999, a first look at Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaur’s photography fanzine, and much more.

Here we go then,

Lauren Martin

Editor of THUMP UK