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Boiler Room hires new editor-in-chief
By Aly Barchi | Published on Wednesday 26 November 2014
Live-streaming platform Boiler Room has hired FACT/The Wire writer Joe Muggs as its Editor-In-Chief. The future (of online music content)’s bright, the future’s… boiled. In a room.
Muggs’ appointment spearheads a new emphasis on in-depth editorial content at the fast-growing London company, which, since it first started in an actual boiler room in 2010, has acted primarily as a straight online broadcaster for live sets by DJs and artists, mainly from private and invite-only locations.
Muggs says: “I’m like a kid in a sweetshop right now. I’ve been lucky enough to work with a lot of truly great publications and editors in my years freelancing, including ones that have forged new paths in a tough environment. To be given the chance to build something new and try and follow in their footsteps is the sort of chance that doesn’t come along every day, but to be given a resource as insanely awesome as the Boiler Room’s existing audio/video/events machine to build it around is almost incomprehensibly exciting”.
He adds: “We’re in a position to build something unique by bringing all these strands together, in fact. The team here are bang in the middle of everything that’s innovative and hopeful in the music world right now, and if we can reflect that editorially then we’re onto a winner”.
Boiler Room boss Blaise Bellville, meanwhile, says of his company’s new direction: “This is about developing a clear voice for Boiler Room. We do so much great shit, but people might not be aware of the thinking behind the programming, or how it fits into a wider context, because we don’t have that central editorial voice”.
Belville adds: “It’s tough to step into the crowded landscape of editorial sites, and half-assing it was never of interest to us. Now, we’ve got the disciplined team built up and ready, a visionary editor to pull together everything we are doing together, and we can do something that we think is going to be as compelling as everything BR has done before”.
And still babbling excitably on, he adds: “We may be known for dance DJ sets but there’s so much more: we already cover classical music, hip hop, grime, industrial techno, noise and God knows what else and are continually expanding further in all directions in terms of styles. We’ve documented and reported pivotal flashpoints for scenes past and present, and it’s time to build on that, so that as well as our audio and video, our writing will be a valuable archive of music culture”.
Recent evidence of Boiler Room’s new taste for all-things classical, for one, came earlier this week, when the site archived a so-named ‘Modern Classic’ collaboration by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and the London Contemporary Orchestra, taped live at Manchester’s Albert Hall. Watch that via BR now.
Jonny Greenwood & The London Contemporary… by brtvofficial
