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      The Techno Pioneer Jeff Mills Blazes a Trail to Space, and Beyond

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      At 60, the D.J. and producer is inspiring fresh generations with new work, including an LP that approximates the experience of traveling through a black hole.During a recent performance by Tomorrow Comes the Harvest that had some attendees dancing in the aisles at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, a thrilling rhythmic conversation began between the percussionist Sundiata O.M., who was playing African talking drums, and the Detroit techno pioneer Jeff Mills, who tapped out beats on a Roland TR-909 drum machine. Over a 90-minute set, the musicians boldly blended techno, jazz and modern classical, embodying the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s famous credo “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future.”Tomorrow Comes the Harvest began in 2018 as a collaboration between Mills and the Afrobeat originator Tony Allen, Fela’s longtime drummer. Despite their stylistic differences, they created a sonic language — based around total improvisation, not typically a techno hallmark — that Mills found so fruitful, he wanted to continue it even after Allen’s 2020 death. “My hope,” Mills said, during an interview backstage, “is that Tomorrow Comes the Harvest becomes an approach to play music — not always the same sound, but the idea of figuring it out while playing.”Mills has blazed a singular trail over the past four decades: from his 1980s roots as the Detroit nightclub and FM radio D.J. the Wizard to his early 1990s period with the politically conscious Motor City techno collective Underground Resistance to his solo work helping define the sleek, stripped-down minimal techno genre. While always known as a dazzling D.J., Mills has continually expanded his horizons beyond the booth, including on high-concept album projects that began with “Discovers the Rings of Saturn” from the group X-102 in 1992, up through his new LP, “The Trip — Enter the Black Hole,” released last week on vinyl via his own Axis label.Mills lifted Tomorrow Comes the Harvest’s name from a phrase coined by the science fiction author Octavia Butler, who was describing the potential power of seeds, properly sown, to influence the future. The metaphor seems apt for Mills’s entire career, which has inspired generations of electronic musicians, like Mali Mase, a 25-year-old D.J. and producer who releases music as Sweater on Polo.“To me, Jeff Mills is someone who exhibits mastery, not only in techno, but all forms of expressions he explores,” said Mase, who spun a set dedicated to Mills during the 2023 edition of Dweller, a Black-centered annual techno festival in New York. “It would be so simple for him to sit back and bask in the spectacle of his own greatness. Instead, he challenges the forms established, reinvents, and still beats it sicker than anyone on a drum machine.”Mills said he hopes that Tomorrow Comes the Harvest “becomes an approach to play music — not always the same sound, but the idea of figuring it out while playing.”Edwina HayWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      An Online Radio Station Where Everything Is Eclectic

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      Music played by D.J.s like Flo Dill on NTS encompasses obscure ambient tracks and timeworn dad rock. The approach has won it fans far beyond its London home.On a gloomy Tuesday this past March, a cohort of trendy young Britons was waking up to the sounds of underground ’80s R&B. And Swedish space disco. And the folk singer John Martyn.Flo Dill, host of “The Breakfast Show” on the online radio station NTS, was floating around in a small East London studio, quietly back-announcing those tracks and laughing at messages in the station’s lively online chat room. Like most morning radio hosts, she tries to ease listeners into their day, slowly bringing up the tempo. But unlike most morning radio hosts, Dill plays tracks in a mixture of styles that can run the gamut from obscure ambient music to timeworn dad rock.The NTS studios in the Dalston neighborhood of London.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times“The Breakfast Show” encapsulates the spirit of NTS, an eclectic revamp of traditional radio that draws listeners — and on-air talent — from across the globe. Since it was founded in 2011, NTS has grown into a big fish in underground music’s small pond: You could maybe go for an entire day listening to NTS and not recognize a single artist, and, even in Britain, the average person on the street would never have heard of it.But the station’s devoted fans are drawn to its shows, most of which are structured like D.J. mixes, with no talking between tracks; others play like Dill’s: modern, casual updates on classic radio formats, with genre-agnostic programming.Dill said in an interview that NTS works because, unlike traditional radio, which “spoon feeds” its audience, it doesn’t patronize or treat the listener as “a moron.” (NTS’s tagline is “Don’t Assume.”) She started volunteering at NTS in 2016, at a time when there were hardly any full-time staff members. Now, there are around 45 working across the station and its related businesses, which include putting on festivals and events and creating marketing campaigns for brands like Carhartt, Netflix and Sonos.“The Breakfast Show” should be a respite from the “relentless pursuit of beige stuff” in today’s culture, Dill said. The program is broadly accessible — she sees it as a portal into the broader NTS ecosystem, which can be “so specialist” — but considered and particular in its tastes.That spirit has thrived since NTS’s beginning, when the London D.J. and blogger Femi Adeyemi spun it off from a music blog he was writing called “Nuts to Soup.” In an interview, Adeyemi said he conceived of NTS as a cross between U.K. pirate radio — a fixture of the country’s music scene that he admired, but found “very restrictive” — and American college radio, which “had that free-form approach that I hadn’t really heard much of in the U.K.”Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times“I feel really proud that people trust me enough to put me on in the morning,” Dill said.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesIn 2015, NTS expanded, opening a studio in Manchester and one in Los Angeles the following year. Currently, NTS hosts around 700 shows a month — roughly 600 from residents, who host weekly, biweekly or monthly shows, and 100 or so from guest D.J.s — which come in from cities across the world, including Beirut, Lebanon; Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; and Melbourne, Australia. NTS broadcasts without advertising, instead relying on income from its commercial activities and a membership program called “NTS Supporters” to keep the station afloat. In March, the station averaged 360,000 listeners a day, according to its chief executive, Sean McAuliffe.Tabitha Thorlu-Bangura, the director of music and programming at NTS, said that the station “was the first platform in London that really reflected the breadth” of her taste as a young Black music fan with a genre-agnostic mind-set. It was that boundary-dissolving character that brings people to the station, she added.Dill said the station could also act as a bulwark against the idea that listening to music is a passive experience. “I want people to not think that music is just a background thing that’s on Spotify, that rolls into the next song and they all sound vaguely the same,” she said. (Around 40 percent of the music played on NTS is not available on the streaming service, McAuliffe noted.) “I want people to think that music is a really valuable, amazing art form, like a painting or a sculpture,” Dill added.Although it is based in London, NTS has global appeal. Nabihah Iqbal, who has been broadcasting on NTS for over a decade, said that she once received a message from a man in the Nubian Desert who listened to her show from the one spot in his Sudanese village where he could get cell signal.“What NTS reflects is the way that music consumption and connecting through music has changed because of the internet,” she said. “Listening to the station live, and being part of the chat room and connecting to people that way is a very real way of feeling like you’re part of a community.”The station’s listenership ballooned during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, and McAuliffe said there were now plans to “amplify NTS more.” It has never spent any money on marketing, for example, but plans to in the future. McAuliffe also said NTS would roll out a new feature of its app and website that “will enable more people to have a better music discovery experience” and “will get a lot more musicians and music rights holders paid at a time when they’re not getting paid enough.” He declined to give further details.With the platform getting bigger, Dill said she didn’t want its core identity to get lost. Adeyemi recently sold part of his stake in the company to Universal Music Group, the major label conglomerate that releases music by Taylor Swift and Drake, among others. (McAuliffe, Dill and Adeyemi all said that the company has no influence on the music that’s played on NTS, and has no seats on the company’s board.) The money from Universal would mean that NTS won’t get subsumed into a streaming service like Apple Music, Dill said, as happened to other independent radio operations, including “Beats in Space,” the beloved radio show hosted by the D.J. Tim Sweeney, which moved from WNYU-FM to Apple Music in 2021.“I have seen, over the course of my time, many things I loved go away because they can’t continue,” Dill said. “If someone wants to give us money, I’m fine with that.”Dill said that if the station were to professionalize too much, or stray too far from its intended goals, then it wouldn’t be for her anymore. “I get satisfaction from representing the station that I really believe in and I’m proud of,” she said. “I guess it comes back to trust. I feel really proud that people trust me enough to put me on in the morning.”Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York Times More

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      Mister Cee, Pioneering Brooklyn D.J., Dies at 57

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      Born Calvin Lebrun, Mister Cee was a pioneer in New York City’s hip-hop scene and helped boost the career of the Notorious B.I.G.Mister Cee, a disc jockey who was an integral figure in New York City’s booming 1990s hip-hop scene and was an early champion of the Notorious B.I.G., has died. He was 57.His death was confirmed on Wednesday by Skip Dillard, the brand manager at WXBK 94.7 The Block NYC, where Mister Cee had a show. No cause was given.Mister Cee, whose head-bopping mixes reverberated on New York radio for decades, was a hit D.J. on New York City’s Hot 97 for more than 20 years before leaving the station in 2014. He was the executive producer of the Notorious B.I.G.’s debut album, “Ready to Die.”Born Calvin Lebrun in August 1966 in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, Mister Cee grew up at his grandparents’ home and took to the turntables under the mentorship of an uncle who was a D.J., he told Rock The Bells, a satellite radio show, in November.He added that his early influences came from the radio, listening to the likes of the hip-hop acts World Famous Supreme Team and Awesome Two.“This turned into my passion for deejaying and having that dream that one day I wanted to be on the radio,” he said.Mister Cee lived out the dream on Hot 97 before leaving the station, citing the station’s new musical direction.“I might be the answer for now, but I don’t think I’ll be the answer five or 10 years from now,” he told The Times in 2014.Chris Green, a promoter at Capitol Musical Group who had known the D.J. since the mid-90s, said in an interview with The New York Times that year that Mister Cee “was the glue between the old and the new” on Hot 97.But Mister Cee, a highly-respected figure in the hip-hop community, continued spinning records in clubs and on radio shows. Before he died, he had his own show playing throwbacks on 94.7 The Block NYC.After his death was announced Wednesday, the station honored Mister Cee by playing a recording of his 2022 mix paying tribute to the Notorious B.I.G. for what would have been late rapper’s 50th birthday.A full list of survivors was not immediately available.A full obituary will follow. More

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      Annie Nightingale, Pathbreaking British D.J., Is Dead at 83

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      She was initially told there was no room for her on BBC Radio 1 because a woman’s voice lacked the authority of a man’s. Once she was on the air, she stayed there for 53 years.Annie Nightingale, who became the first female disc jockey on BBC Radio 1 in 1970 and remained a popular personality there until her final show, late last year, died on Jan. 11 at her home in London. She was 83.Her family announced the death in a statement but did not cite a cause.“This is the woman who changed the face and sound of British TV and radio broadcasting forever,” Annie Mac, a longtime BBC Radio D.J., wrote on Instagram after Ms. Nightingale’s death.Ms. Nightingale became well known in music circles in the 1960s as a columnist in British newspapers. And she was a familiar face to stars like the Beatles, whom she interviewed at the Brighton Hippodrome in 1964.“As Derek Taylor liked her, she was welcome at Apple,” the Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn said in an email, referring to the Beatles’ press officer and the company they founded in 1968.In 1967, she applied to be a D.J. on BBC Radio 1, the pop music outlet that had just been started in reaction to the rise of popular offshore pirate stations.But she found herself up against the station’s sexist hiring policy. She was told that its all-male D.J. lineup represented “husband substitutes” to the housewives who were listening, and that a woman’s voice would lack the authority of a man’s.“It came as a huge shock,” Ms. Nightingale told The Independent in 2015. “I was almost amused. What do you mean, ‘No women’? Why not?”But in October 1969, the BBC offered her an on-air trial. Before her first appearance, she told The Manchester Evening News, “I am sure that a lot of girls would make marvelous D.J.s if given the chance.”Before Ms. Nightingale became a D.J., she had become well known in music circles through her columns in British newspapers.Virginia Turbett/RedfernsShe was hired the next year for a weekday record review program, “What’s New,” and two years later she became a host of an evening progressive-rock show, “Sounds of the 70s.” Later in the decade, she became the host of a Sunday afternoon request show and a music interview program. She hosted a variety of other shows through last year.“From Day One, I chose the records I wanted to play and stuck to it ever since,” she said in her autobiography, “Hey Hi Hello: Five Decades of Pop Culture From Britain’s First Female DJ.” (2020). “I preferred the evenings, where I wouldn’t have to introduce playlist tunes I didn’t like. That would have been like lying to me.”Anne Avril Nightingale was born on April 1, 1940, in the Osterley district of London. Her father, Basil, worked in the family’s wallpaper business. Her mother, Celia, was a foot doctor. As a girl, Anne listened to children’s programs on her father’s radio and came to love that it could tune in to distant cities.“I still feel when you’re broadcasting, you don’t know where it’s going and it could be reaching outer space somewhere, and I am still in love with that, completely,” she said in an interview in 2018.After graduating from the Lady Eleanor Holles School, she studied journalism at Regent Street Polytechnic (now the University of Westminster) in London. She began her journalism career soon after, first as a reporter for The Brighton and Hove Gazette and then at The Argus, in Brighton, where she wrote a music column called Spin With Me. She later wrote a music column for a national tabloid, The Daily Sketch.In 1964, she collaborated with the pop group the Hollies on a book, “How to Run a Beat Group.”She found a measure of television fame on BBC’s “Juke Box Jury,” where she was part of a guest panel that reviewed new record releases, and as the host of “That’s For Me,” a record request program on ITV, and the Rediffusion network’s quiz show, “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” both in 1965.But she was best known for her time at BBC Radio 1, which began with some rocky moments because of her inexperience — like the time there was eight seconds of dead airtime when she accidentally pressed an “off” switch while a record was playing.“What I found difficult in those early days was being bad technically,” she told The Western Daily Press of Bristol in 1979. “Every time I made a mistake I thought they’d all say, ‘Oh yes, woman driver!’”She remained the only female D.J. on BBC Radio 1 — the “token woman,” she said — for 12 years. In 2010, when she was more than halfway through her 41st year there, Guinness World Records cited her for having had the longest career ever for a female D.J. (That record has since been surpassed twice, by the Peruvian broadcaster Maruja Venegas Salinas and Mary McCoy, a D.J. in Texas.)“It was not until the 1990s and the ‘girlification’ of Radio 1 with the likes of Sara Cox, Jo Whiley and Zoe Ball that Nightingale’s exceptionality became her longevity and impact rather than her gender alone,” Lucy Robinson, a professor at the University of Sussex, and Dr. Jeannine Baker, who at the time was with Macquarie University, wrote on the BBC website.Ms. Nightingale’s success went beyond radio. In 1978, she was named a host of BBC’s live music television show “The Old Grey Whistle Test,” where she focused on new wave music.After John Lennon was killed on Dec. 8, 1980, Ms. Nightingale and members of the “Whistle Test” staff were trying to round up people to talk about him. During the program, a producer appeared in the studio and told Ms. Nightingale, “Paul’s on the phone and he wants to speak to you.”“I had no idea who he meant,” she recalled on the podcast “I Am the Eggpod” in 2018. It was Paul McCartney.Ms. Nightingale in 2015. Throughout her career she championed new music, from progressive rock to acid house and grime.Graham Prentice/Alamy“He wanted to say thank you on behalf of Linda and himself and Yoko and George and Ringo,” she said. “And that’s what really got me.” She added: “I got back in front of the camera and it’s live and I thought right, right, you’re the messenger. And he said, ‘You know how it was.’”Ms. Nightingale’s survivors include a son, Alex, and a daughter, Lucy, whose name was inspired partly by the Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” Her marriages to Gordon Thomas, a writer, and Binky Baker, an actor, ended in divorce.Throughout her career, Ms. Nightingale championed new music — from progressive rock to acid house to grime.She described her visceral connection to new music when she was interviewed in 2020 on the popular BBC Radio 4 program “Desert Island Discs.”“It’s a thrill, it’s absolutely so exciting,” she said. “I actually get a physical sensation. I get shivers up and down my legs when I hear something that becomes very successful.” More

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      Mixtapes, T-Shirts and Even a Typeface Measure the Rise of Hip-Hop

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      For the last year, celebrations of hip-hop’s first five decades have attempted to capture the genre in full, but some early stars and scenes all but disappeared long before anyone came looking to fete them. Three excellent books published in recent months take up the task of cataloging hip-hop’s relics, the objects that embody its history, before they slip away.In the lovingly assembled, thoughtfully arranged “Do Remember! The Golden Era of NYC Hip-Hop Mixtapes,” Evan Auerbach and Daniel Isenberg wisely taxonomize the medium into distinct micro-eras, tracking innovations in form and also content — beginning with live recordings of party performances and D.J. sets and ending with artists using the format to self-distribute and self-promote.For over a decade, cassettes were the coin of the realm in mixtapes, even after CDs usurped them in popularity: They were mobile, durable and easily duplicated. (More than one D.J. rhapsodizes over the Telex cassette duplicator.)Each new influential D.J. found a way to push the medium forward — Brucie B talks about personalizing tapes for drug dealers in Harlem; Doo Wop recalls gathering a boatload of exclusive freestyles for his “95 Live” and in one memorable section; Harlem’s DJ S&S details how he secured some of his most coveted unreleased songs, sometimes angering the artists in the process.The book covers some D.J.s who were known for their mixing, like Ron G, and some who were known for breaking new music, like DJ Clue. Some, like Stretch Armstrong & Bobbito, whose late-night radio shows were widely bootlegged before they began distributing copies themselves, managed both.Left: A collection of original Ron G mixtape covers. Right: Lyrics from the Notorious B.I.G. shouting out mixtape D.J.s.Sonny Figueroa/The New York TimesHandwritten Kid Capri mixtapes. Sonny Figueroa/The New York TimesMixtapes were big business — one striking two-page photo documents a handwritten inventory list from Rock ’n’ Will’s, a storied shop in Harlem, which showed the breadth of stock on display. Tape Kingz formalized and helped export mixtapes globally, and more than one D.J. remarks about being shocked to see their tapes available for sale when they traveled to Japan.Mixtapes were the site of early innovations that ended up crucial to the industry as a whole, whether it was proving the effectiveness of street-corner promotion or, via blend tapes in the late ’80s and early ’90s, setting the table for hip-hop’s cross-pollination with R&B.Eventually, the format was co-opted as a vehicle for record labels like Bad Boy and Roc-a-Fella to introduce new music, or artists like 50 Cent and the Diplomats to release songs outside of label obligations. (The book effectively ends before the migration of mixtapes to the internet, and doesn’t include the contributions of the South.) Even now, the legacy of mixtapes endures, the phrase a kind of shorthand for something immediate, unregulated and possibly ephemeral. But “Do Remember!” makes clear they belong to posterity, too.That same pathway from informal to formal, from casual art to big business, was traveled by hip-hop’s promotional merchandise, particularly the T-shirt. That story is told over and again in “Rap Tees Volume 2: A Collection of Hip-Hop T-shirts & More 1980-2005,” by the well-known collector DJ Ross One.A collection of Public Enemy merchandise; the group was one of the most forward-thinking when it came to selling its brand. Sonny Figueroa/The New York TimesA collection of merchandise from Harlem’s Diplomats crew. Sonny Figueroa/The New York TimesIt’s a pocket history of hip-hop conveyed through the ways people wanted to wear their dedication to it, and the ways artists wanted to be seen. By the mid-1980s, logos were stylized and stylish. Public Enemy, especially, had a robust understanding of how merchandise could further the group’s notoriety, captured here in a wide range of shirts and jackets.In the 1980s, hip-hop hadn’t fully cleaved into thematic wings — tours often featured unexpected bedfellows. One tour shirt for the jovial Doug E. Fresh shows his openers included the angsty agit-rap outfit Boogie Down Productions and the ice-cold stoics Eric B. & Rakim.Many of the shirts in the book were made by record labels for promotion, but there’s a robust bootleg section as well — see the hand-painted denim trench coat featuring Salt-N-Pepa — reflecting the untapped demand that remained long before hip-hop fashion was considered unassailable business.This collection showcases some of hip-hop’s indelible logos: Nervous Records, the Diplomats, Loud Records, Outkast; shirts for radio stations and long-defunct magazines; impressive sections on Houston rap and Miami bass music; as well as promotional ephemera like Master P boxer shorts, a tchotchke toilet for Biz Markie and an unreleased Beastie Boys skateboard. That “Volume 2” is as thick as its essential 2015 predecessor is a testament to how much likely remains undiscovered, particularly from eras when archiving wasn’t a priority.Some of the earliest hip-hop T-shirts in “Rap Tees” feature flocked lettering that is familiar from the backs of Hell’s Angels and B-boy crews. The aesthetic is the subject of “Heated Words: Searching for a Mysterious Typeface” by Rory McCartney and Charlie Morgan, a heroic work of sociology, archival research and history that traces the development of the style, from its historical antecedents to the actual locations in New York where young people would get their T-shirts customized to contemporary streetwear’s re-embrace of the form.Custom T-shirts with flocked lettering for Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 5. Sonny Figueroa/The New York TimesA demonstration of how the lettering is impacted by the heat and force of applying it to other surfaces. Patricia Wall/The New York TimesThis typeface that, the authors discover, has no agreed-upon name (and also no fully agreed-upon back story) conveys “instant heritage,” the typographer Jonathan Hoefler tells them. The lettering derives from black letter, or Gothic typefaces, but the versions that adorned clothes throughout the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s were often more idiosyncratic and, at times, made by hand.The lettering style thrived thanks to the ease of heat-transfer technology, which allowed the D.I.Y.-inclined to embellish their own garments at will. It was embraced by car clubs and biker gangs (and, to a lesser extent, some early sports teams). Gangs were teams, too, of a sort, as were breakdancing crews. Shirts with these letters became de facto uniforms.McCartney and Morgan spend a lot of time detailing how the letters themselves came to be and track down the places where they were turned into fashion — spotlighting one store in the Bronx where many gangs would buy their letters, or the Orchard Street shop on the Lower East Side that provided letters for the Clash as well as shirts for Malcolm McLaren’s “Double Dutch” video and the cover of a local newspaper, East Village Eye.“Heated Words” is relatively light on text: It draws its connections through imagery, both professional and amateur. The book is an impressive compendium of primary sources, many of which have not been seen before, or which have been public, but not viewed through this particular historical lens.It’s a good reminder, along with “Do Remember!” and “Rap Tees,” that some elusive histories aren’t buried so much as they crumble into barely recognizable pieces. Devoted researchers like these can follow breadcrumb trails and piece together something like the full story, but some details remain forever out of reach, evaporated into yesteryear. More

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      Jim Ladd, Free-Form Radio Trailblazer, Is Dead at 75

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      An institution of the airwaves in Los Angeles and beyond, he capitalized on the freedom the FM band offered in the 1970s to blaze his own path.Jim Ladd, a maverick Los Angeles disc jockey who helped pioneer free-form FM radio in the 1970s, and who went on to become a rock institution and an inspiration for Tom Petty’s song “The Last DJ,” died on Dec. 17 at his home near Sacramento, Calif. He was 75.The cause was a heart attack, his wife, Helene Hodge Ladd, said.With his laid-back manner and his considerable equestrian skills, Mr. Ladd was known to longtime listeners as the Lonesome L.A. Cowboy, after a 1973 song by the New Riders of the Purple Sage. His expansive musical knowledge, saucy humor and outspoken political views made him a celebrity in rock circles — not only in Los Angeles, where he had storied runs at KLOS and KMET, but also nationally, thanks to his long-running hourlong syndicated series, “Innerview.”“Innerview,” which made its debut in 1974, featured interviews with countless rock luminaries, including the Beach Boys, Led Zeppelin and Elton John. It was heard on some 160 stations around the country.The same class of rock deity could often be found lounging around Mr. Ladd’s treehouse-like home perched on the wooded hillsides of Laurel Canyon. His house drew friends like Stevie Nicks, George Harrison and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, who featured Mr. Ladd on his second solo album, “Radio K.A.O.S.” (1987).More interested in challenging listeners with new sounds than spinning the same old chart-toppers, Mr. Ladd was well suited to the early days of free-form radio, which was made possible by a 1964 Federal Communications Commission rule preventing AM stations from repeating more than 50 percent of their formats on commonly owned FM stations in a single market.Mr. Ladd was said to be an inspiration for the Tom Petty song “The Last DJ,” an indictment of commercial radio.This allowed countless D.J.s like Mr. Ladd, on stations around the country, to shatter the Top 40 format on FM and take control of their own programming in an era when experimentation in rock was ascendant and rock itself was hailed as a force for social change.“Free-form radio was an approach to the music, and the show itself, which resulted in a highly personal and completely spontaneous new art form,” he wrote in his 1991 memoir, “Radio Waves: Life and Revolution on the FM Dial.”“Most of us never thought of it as a job,” he wrote. “A job was something ‘straight people’ did to earn ulcers. For us, it was more of a calling. We were guerrilla fighters for a generation of creative explorers, inmates who took over the asylum for just one purpose — to play with the public address system.”Mr. Ladd got his first access to this public address system in the late 1960s at KNAC in Long Beach, Calif., where he challenged listeners’ ears by playing the latest underground tunes and challenged authorities with his political passions, for example by stacking songs like “Universal Soldier” by Donovan, “The Unknown Soldier” by the Doors and “I Don’t Wanna Be a Soldier Mama I Don’t Wanna Die” by John Lennon as a musical protest against the Vietnam War.“The music at that time was filled with radical new ideas and a unique generational perspective,” Mr. Ladd wrote. “Alternative points of view not heard on the six o’clock news came through the music loud and clear. Songs about the peace movement, civil rights, Vietnam, drugs and the generation gap — and massive quantities of sex.”James William Ladd was born on Jan. 17, 1948, in Lynwood, Calif., the oldest of three children of Obie and Betty Ladd. His father was a bank loan manager who won three bronze stars as a medic in World War II; his mother was a banker.Mr. Ladd was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005.Lucy Nicholson/ReutersHis family moved to Vacaville, Calif., near Sacramento, when he was a child. After graduating from Vacaville High School, he returned to Southern California to study at Long Beach City College before joining KNAC.Mr. Ladd spent the early 1970s at the powerhouse Los Angeles rock station KLOS before moving to a rival station, KMET, where he remained until 1987, when the station changed its format and began showcasing smooth jazz. In his book, he derided the new sound as “a computer-programmed Valium tablet, dentist-office music for yuppies.”Even as FM rock stations moved toward more rigid playlists in the 1980s, Mr. Ladd fought to maintain his independence, in both music and message, often running afoul of station management. With his outspoken ways, he was said to be an inspiration for the 2002 Tom Petty song “The Last DJ,” an indictment of commercial radio that featured lyrics like “Well, the top brass don’t like him talking so much/And he won’t play what they say to play.”In the liner notes for the album of the same name, Mr. Petty thanked Mr. Ladd for “his inspiration and courage.” “Let’s say it may have been partially inspired by me,” Mr. Ladd said in a 2015 video interview.“I don’t want to say it’s about me,” he added, “but I am very, very honored, obviously.”Mr. Ladd made stops at multiple stations over the years. In 2011 he joined SiriusXM satellite radio, where he was a host on the Deep Tracks channel. He remained there until his death.In addition to his wife, Mr. Ladd is survived by a brother, Jon, and a sister, Veronna Ladd.In a 2000 interview with The Los Angeles Times, when Mr. Ladd was back at KLOS, he broke out a handful of papers: the station’s playlist schedule, which mapped out the songs to be played over the course of the day — until his slot at 10 p.m., which remained blank. As in the old days, he could play what he chose. The only thing listeners could count on was Mr. Ladd serving up his trademark catchphrase, “Lord have mercy.”When asked why he was allowed to follow his own muse when other D.J.s at the station were not, Mr. Ladd responded, “Stubbornness, stupidity, doggedness.”The station’s program director, Rita Wilde, quoted in the article, offered a different take: “Not that many people, if you gave them the freedom, would know what to do with it.” More

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      The 45 King, Who Produced for Jay-Z and Eminem, Dies at 62

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      The 62-year-old Bronx native infused a distinctive jazzy flavor in his beats. He contributed tracks to Queen Latifah’s debut album and produced Eminem’s “Stan,” among other hip-hop classics.The 45 King, the influential New York City hip-hop producer who worked with Queen Latifah, Eminem and Jay-Z, died on Thursday. He was 62.Born Mark Howard James, he took the moniker The 45 King because of his fondness for sampling old, obscure records. His death was announced on social media Thursday afternoon by a fellow hip-hop producer, DJ Premier.Information on the cause or place of death were not immediately available. An inquiry sent to James’s manager was not immediately returned.“His sound was unlike any other from his heavy drums and his horns were so distinct on every production,” DJ Premier wrote, referring to James as DJ Mark The 45 King.James, born on Oct. 16, 1961 in the Bronx, was a pioneer in the 1980s New York hip-hop scene and worked with early rap stars like the Funky 4, according to his website. He was known for his jazzy beats, showcased on his first hit track, the highly sampled “The 900 Number,” released in 1987. He slowed down a saxophone solo, “dropped the results over an irresistibly funky break” and the result exploded, according to AllMusic, adding that the horn line was “forever ingrained in the collective hip-hop psyche.”James worked closely with Queen Latifah, a fellow member of the music crew known as the Flavor Unit. James produced the hit song “Wrath of My Madness” on her debut album “All Hail the Queen” in 1989 and also contributed other tracks.“Thank you for teaching me taking me under your wing, teaching me about this thing called hip-hop, and so much more,” Queen Latifah wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday.James also produced Eminem’s “Stan,” released on the 2000 album “The Marshall Mathers LP.” The rap tells the story of a perturbed superfan named “Stan” and is set to a throbbing beat sampling Dido’s 1998 track “Thank you.”“I took a first verse and made into an eight-bar hook for Eminem,” James said in a 2021 interview clip posted to social media by Eminem on Thursday.“Legends are never over,” Eminem wrote on X, formerly Twitter.James’s other hits included Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem),” which sampled the musical “Annie” and a remix of Madonna’s “Keep It Together.”James credited much of his success and production style to the time he spent in the 1980s working for DJ Breakout, a Bronx hip-hop luminary.“I like to say I got lucky,” James said in the 2021 interview with the YouTube channel Unique Access Ent. “I was in the right place at the right time.” More

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      On Europe’s Dance Floors, Music Too Fast for Feet

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      Since Europe’s clubs reopened after pandemic lockdowns, young partygoers have been drawn to a hard, driving style of techno. It’s changing the way people dance.It was Friday night, and the clubgoers at the Sputnikhalle nightclub in Münster, Germany, were primed to go hard. Decked out in black clothes and sunglasses, despite the dim light, the young crowd chanted the name of Héctor Oaks, a Spanish D.J., as he began playing his signature muscular, fast techno. Standing on top of the club’s risers, the crowd barely tried to keep up with the beat. Instead of moving their legs, many just oscillated their hips.Neele Hoyer, 21, a college student attending the event, explained that most other German techno fans of her age had developed affinity for such breathless music. “It’s gone totally mainstream,” she said. Dancing to such a fast beat could sometimes be strenuous, she added, but “this is what’s normal to us.”In recent years, Oaks, 32, has become a prominent figure in a broader trend in electronic music. While conventional techno is often played at around 120 to 130 beats per minute, Oaks and other D.J.s often play at 145 or above. The resulting hard-charging, breakneck sound has become the defining sound of Europe’s dance floors since the lockdown phase of the pandemic.Dancing to such a fast beat could sometimes be challenging, said Neele Hoyer, a college student. However, she added, “This is what’s normal to us.”Valentin Goppel for The New York TimesAlthough fast electronic music is not new, its broader dominance is. A data analysis by the German public broadcaster RBB this summer found that the top electronic music tracks of 2022 had much faster tempos than similar songs in 2016. Specialist dance music publications like Mixmag and Beatportal have noted the trend, and many of the buzzy D.J.s of the moment, like Ukraine’s Daria Kolosova and the Polish D.J. VTSS, are known for cranking up the speed.“I see it everywhere,” said Casper Tielrooij, the founder of Dekmantel, a label and annual electronic music festival in Amsterdam. “It’s not only techno, but jungle and trance and drum and bass.” He argued that although the zeitgeist had started to change before Covid, the faster, harder genre of techno had “exploded during the pandemic” and tastes were partly being shaped by young people who had spent their late teens or early twenties in lockdown.Luigi Di Venere, a techno and house D.J. who often plays at Berghain, the Berlin techno club, said that “there’s this idea that they need to speed things up to make up for it, and in case it happens again.” He added that the less “organic” and more “robotic” fast music suited a generation of clubgoers more connected to online culture.While conventional techno is often played at around 120 to 130 beats per minute, many D.J.s in Europe are playing at 145 or above.Valentin Goppel for The New York TimesHe argued that the brisk sound is partly sustained by a kind of feedback loop: As some D.J.s play faster, their co-headliners imitate their style to keep up the energy in the club. “You can’t just be a grandma and go, ‘Tra-la-la, 120 B.P.M.,’” he said, adding that he believed the trend still hasn’t reached its peak.In an interview, Oaks said that he began developing his sound in 2013, by melding traditional techno sets with other genres, including trance. Music played at a higher speed, he said, causes dancers’ hips, rather than their feet, to resonate, fostering a movement more akin to hovering than dancing. “I’ve thought about this a lot,” he added.He recalled that the music he played was an outlier on the European club scene a decade ago. But he partly grew a following at Herrensauna, a Berlin-based queer party known for its harder sound. The Herrensauna D.J.s’ 2018 appearance on the influential Boiler Room platform, which hosts livestreamed sets, was a “turning point” for his kind of music, he said. “After that, you could see everything switched.”Héctor Oaks said an appearance on the streaming platform Boiler Room was a “turning point” for his kind of music.Valentin Goppel for The New York TimesThe style’s success was likely fueled by other developments, including the proliferation of online D.J. streams, like Hör, during the pandemic’s lockdowns. According to Di Venere, because these streams were often shorter than normal club sets, D.J.s were pushed to squeeze in as much energy as possible, and the high-octane results became a staple at Europe’s illegal pandemic-era raves.Since coronavirus-prevention measures were relaxed last year, the sound has now transitioned to the continent’s clubs, including in smaller cities like Münster, which has a population of around 300,000. Oaks is now regularly booked at venues in Ibiza, for instance, which were previously known for their softer, warmer sound.Tahliah Simumba, 25, a Scottish musician who D.J.s as TAAHLIAH, grew her following during the pandemic with pop-inflected sets that often culminated at 170 B.P.M. In a recent phone interview, she said that TikTok, the video app, has been crucial in shaping post-pandemic club culture. The app, which focuses on snappy clips, has a large user base of techno fans, and its short videos favor fast-paced music.She added that, as a younger D.J. raised in an online environment, her sound was largely developed in isolation from the dance floor. “I try not to be held back by hierarchical idea of what D.J.ing is,” she said. “I want to be having as much fun as possible, and what is D.J.ing, after all, other than playing music you like?”Instead of moving their legs, many dancers at the Sputnikhalle just oscillated their hips.Valentin Goppel for The New York Times More