A new boxset from Eureka Entertainment collects five films from the DEFA archives, taking in film noir, Expressionism, melodrama – and denazification

At least twice, Germany has had among the most influential and important mainstream film industries in the world. First, famously, between 1919 and 1933, German directors, in what was called, not always accurately, ‘German Expressionism’, created the modern horror film with F.W Murnau’s Nosferatu and Robert Weine’s Cabinet of Dr Caligari, the modern science fiction film with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the morally ambiguous thriller with M, the film-essay with Walther Ruttman’s Berlin – Symphony of the Great City, and invented the indie film on the side, with Slatan Dudow and Bertolt Brecht’s explicitly Communist Kuhle Wampe, or Robert Siodmak, Edgar…

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The musician Gordon Moakes remembers the late Gary “Mani” Mounfield, the bass player’s bass player whose delicate but propulsive anti-rock energy was The Stone Roses’ life and soul in microcosm

Photo via The Barn

There’s a real nostalgic binary when it comes to the present-day view of Mancunian music from the 80s and 90s: it’s easy to see it as an amorphous blob of naive youth culture, macho posturing, retrogressive English exceptionalism, Blairite flag-waving. There’s plenty of the music from that time and its legacy that has come to be a music stripped of any meaning, a cultural signifier without the substance to back it up, empty posturing that denotes Englishness as imperial supremacy, cultural hegemony, a static norm of fallacious British…

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The track was finished on the duo’s tour bus off the back of their recent party at Manchester’s The Warehouse Project

Overmono have released a new standalone single, ‘Paradise Runner’.

Built around a sample from the 1996 song ‘All I Want’ by R&B artist Monifah, the song was finished on the duo’s tour bus off the back of their recent self-curated party at Manchester’s The Warehouse Project. After setting up a makeshift studio on the bus’ top deck, the duo completed work on the song as the sun came up.

The release of ‘Paradise Runner’ follows on from the brotherly duo’s sold-out headline show at Alexandra Palace, which took place last week, as well as a busy summer of festival shows that took…

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Jeremy Allen finds much to celebrate in an early doors odds and sods compilation from the Belgian underground powerhouse, Aksak Maboul

Before Aksak Maboul (documents & experiments 1969-1977) by Aksak Maboul

Many independent labels set out with high hopes only to end in dismal failure, whereas Crammed Discs began with modest aims and is still going strong 43 years later. Like Mute Records, the Belgian label was started first and foremost as an outlet to release the music of the artist who inaugurated it. Aksak Moboul, Marc Hollander’s band/collective/art project became the catalyst and, for a while at least, the proverbial footnote, that gave rise to an unlikely independent success story. 

Crammed has released somewhere in the region of 400 albums so far…

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Although they went to the same primary school, Duncan Wheeler knew little about Ozzy Osbourne until Jon Bon Jovi led him to a VHS of a gig that counts as one of the strangest live events in rock history

By the 1980s, the area had changed massively since Osbourne’s day. I was the only white child in my class, and in the space of a generation Prince Albert had gone from being a breeding ground for heavy metal fans and musicians to being a multi-ethnic playground in which Steel Pulse, The Beat and later Apache Indian were local heroes. I discovered hard rock and heavy metal just as I was leaving Prince Albert to go to the local grammar school (located…

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The Bug vs Ghost Dubs

Implosion

This icy, minimalist split between The Bug and Stuttgart-based producer Ghost Dubs conjures an oppressive Ballardian soundscape from menacing industrial textures and obliterating low-end

Implosion by The Bug vs Ghost Dubs

Footage from The Bug’s recent sold-out PRESSURE Berlin sets show heaving, sweaty crowds, losing themselves in Kevin Richard Martin’s genre-stretching dub and the pounding, cathartic barrage of low-end. Among the four sets and various guest spots, the line-up also featured the first b2b set between The Bug and Ghost Dubs, debuting material from this unsettling and introspective split, released on The Bug’s own PRESSURE label.

You can understand why Martin and Michael Fiedler, aka Ghost Dubs, said they felt nervous about launching this understated new material in a…

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Next year’s event will be headed up by Pulp, CMAT, Mac DeMarco and a secret act

End Of The Road has revealed the headliners for its 20th anniversary edition next summer.

Next year’s festival will be headed up by Pulp, CMAT, Mac DeMarco and a secret act who, the team behind the event said, will remain unannounced until the last minute, but will play on the opening Thursday night. Pulp’s appearance will mark their only UK festival set of 2026, and follows on from Jarvis Cocker playing a headline solo set on the Garden Stage in 2019.

More acts will be added to the bill in the coming months, with the festival returning once again to its base of Larmer Tree Gardens in…

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With one of the great rhythm sections of our time, the free jazz quartet take the pan-Islamic music of Ahmed Abdul-Malik to far out places – without sparing an ounce of its propulsive energy

[Ahmed] at the Fish Factory. Photo: Abby Thomas

Experiencing [Ahmed] in full flow is a glorious thing, as the band locks into a dense texture of squeaking saxophone, explosive piano clusters, pulsing bass and locomotive drums. It’s repetitious yet constantly evolving, sending crowds into the kind of frenzy associated with club music as much as jazz or improvisation. [Ahmed] aren’t interested in fusion or hybrids, but their state-of-the-art acoustic jazz is informed by the way masters from Count Basie to Jah Shaka, M-Beat to RP Boo organise sound and…

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The band’s frontman Ian Brown has taken to social media to pay tribute to the late bassist, writing: “Rest in Peace Mani X”

Gary ‘Mani’ Mounfield, bassist in the classic lineup of The Stone Roses, has died at the age of 63.

Writing on Facebook, his brother, Greg, said: “It is with the heaviest of hearts that I have to announce the sad passing of my brother Gary ‘Mani’ Mounfield. RIP R kid.” No cause of death was immediately publicly shared.

Ian Brown, lead singer for The Stone Roses, followed the news with a brief tribute on X, writing: “Rest in Peace Mani X.”

Born in Crumpsall, Manchester, Mounfield joined The Stone Roses in 1987, four years after the band was formed, and…

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The Caretaker, Factory Floor, Moin and more will play the three-day event next June

Manchester club The White Hotel is marking its 10th anniversary with a three-day festival, which will take place in Blackpool next summer.

The inaugural edition of THE BLACK LIGHTS will take in live sets from The Caretaker, Factory Floor, Moin, Joanna Robertson, Space Afrika, Blackhaine and Ceephax Acid Crew. Mica Levi will also play live alongside the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, while there will be DJ sets from Evian Christ, Mia Koden and DJ Flight, who will play back-to-back with Kode9.

“I went to Blackpool as a kid in the 90s,” The White Hotel’s manager Lucy Blackledge said. “I saw the Bee Gees turn the lights on. Now I want…

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