News — The Forum

Robert Yang has been one of the most prolific and recognisable figures on the San Francisco club and queer scenes since moving to the city in 2005. Musically minded since a young age, Yang is a child of the West Coast’s rave scene, whose taste quickly diverged to experimental electronics and the Warp Records back catalogue, retaining a now-resurgent DIY aesthetic while constructing and experimenting within his impressive analogue studio. As a DJ, initially spinning as Robot Yang, he was one of the founders and residents of the city’s Honey Soundsystem crew alongside Jason Kendig, Josh Cheon and Jacob Sperber...

It’s now been a year since Phantasy released Babe, Terror’s ‘Ancient M’ocean’; a full-length album and audio-visual experiment unlike anything the label had released before, and perhaps our most ambitious and outright unusual project to date. Telling a romantic ‘story that isn’t a story’ throughout its course, the world of Ancient M’ocean exists as both a full-length LP of leftfield pop imaginings awash in reverb and also as a short comic, tenderly illustrated by Michael Crook.Unfolding slowly but surely, ‘Ancient M’ocean’ takes it’s time to crystalise, and a year on, tends to leave the Phantasy office intrigued and beguiled, while...

As a musician, producer, graphic designer and DJ, Trevor Jackson has succeeded on the fringes of alternative and electronic music culture for over thirty years, periodically gravitating towards it's centre with his unique vision and attitude, the seeds of which were sown as hip-hop indebted teen in suburban London. There are almost too many unexpected turns and oft-forgotten interesting projects in his back catalogue, so for those unfamiliar, let's play the hits. He's designed iconic covers for the likes of Soulwax, Stereo MCs and Clams Casino, ran the feted Output label, releasing early material from the likes of LCD Soundsystem...

Nabihah Iqbal has always been a dab hand at defying expectations. Before her current role as one of London’s most consistently surprising producers and radio hosts, she’s thrived as an ethnomusicologist, a human rights lawyer and even a karate instructor. As Throwing Shade, her earlier releases on labels such as No Pain in Pop, Happy Skull and Omnimira veered from weirdo techno to deconstructed, glossy RnB. Suitably, she was also revealed as the vocalist on SOPHIE’s divisive PC-music head-turner, ‘Lemonade’. A fortnightly resident on NTS, a typical Iqbal show could be partly or solely dedicated to ambient, disco, funk, broken...