No Way Back, Manhattan, NY (2026)

10/11/2026

A few more pics from our Tilman Brembs photo essay in NWB003, depicting techno’s coming of age in 1990s Berlin (and beyond) as the Wall came down and new freedoms opened up.

Details of each image below.

No Way Back 003 is on pre-sale until close of day October 26th | link in bio

1. E-WERK ON LOVE PARADE WEEKEND, 1995

2. JOEY BELTRAM AT TRESOR, 1993

3. TRESOR FOUNDER DIMITRI HEGEMANN & EDDIE ‘FLASHIN’ FOWLKES, 1993

4. RICHIE HAWTIN AT E-WERK, 1995

5. MAYDAY, 1994

6. MONIKA KRUSE AT ULTRASCHALL, 1994 (our cover image)

Much more from Tilman here: zeitmaschine_berlin

10/11/2026

Long story short(ish): one of the writers we feature in NWB003, Barry Cain – reporting on the bin liner-centric soul/punk fashion of the Lacy Lady club – went on to create Flexipop magazine. So we thought we’d take a look at that in this issue, too.

In 1980, teaming up with fellow Record Mirror journalist Tim Lott, Cain launched the mag, a colourful, chaotic title with a flexi disc on the cover – a playable record pressed onto a thin sheet of flexible vinyl.

Long before magazines routinely glued cassettes and CDs to their covers, let alone offered download links and QR codes, this was the stuff of punk DIY dreams. Flexipop discs featured everyone from The Selecter, Adam & The Ants and The Cure to Soft Cell, The Jam, Motörhead, Blondie and XTC.

Inside, the magazine was just as keen to dodge standard pop-mag formulas. There were macabre photo stories – a do******ix whipping Depeche Mode, Paul Weller taken hostage by the other members of The Jam – alongside a full-page shot of Boy George kissing Jon Moss, still a transgressive image at the time. Designer Mark Manning also took aim at the cool of The Face, lampooning its hard-times aesthetic as The Farce.

Then came a Meteors shoot involving buckets of offal, after which police seized copies in Blackpool and WH Smith banned the title for three issues. Flexipop never quite recovered. It limped on until July 1983, bowing out with occultist Aleister Crowley on the cover – officially issue 33, but naturally numbered 666.

The latest edition of No Way Back, NWB003 – 208 pages of carefully curated music and subculture material – will be landing on shelves and shipping direct from our online store in mid-November, but if you want to get in early, we’re doing the pre-sale at the moment.

Purchase before close of day on October 26, and we’ll add your name – with much gratitude – to the publication’s early supporters page. (link in bio)

NWB003 | Learning from, not longing for, the past

10/11/2026

February 1989. The Face’s John McCready heads to Detroit with Depeche Mode, the electronic, sometimes-pop band whose every mention in the press somehow always has to include a reference to Basildon.

Here they’re greeted as heroes by the city’s storied techno elite – as they are by dance music’s leading DJs and producers in New York and Chicago. They head to the Music Institute, where so many great techno records first get an airing, and the dots between breakthrough Detroit tracks and Depeche Mode’s music are enthusiastically joined.

“I used to play Depeche Mode as a DJ, before I even knew the name of the group,” exclaims Kevin Saunderson. “It’s real progressive dance, and had this feeling that was sooo European: it was clean and you could dance to it.”

Modus Operandum: Depeche Mode In Detroit appears in the latest edition of No Way Back, NWB003 – 208 pages of carefully curated music and subculture material, landing on shelves and shipping direct from our online store in mid-November.

If you want to get in early, we’re doing the pre-sale now. Purchase before close of day on October 26, and we’ll add your name – with much gratitude – to the publication’s early supporters page. (link in bio)

NWB003 | Learning from, not longing for, the past

Bonus: an advert for the UK launch of Bruce Willis’ Die Hard.

10/11/2026

In NWB003, we head with New York Rocker to the June 1980 ZE Records party at the legendary Hurrah club. 

Founded in 1978, ZE Records was integral to NYC's downtown music scene, blurring the spaces between punk, disco, no wave and art-school experimentation. Its roster included James Chance, Lydia Lunch, Cristina, Lizzy Mercier Descloux and Kid Creole and the Coconuts. 

New York Rocker, meanwhile, was often seen as an American equivalent to the NME, Sounds and Melody Maker, among the first US music papers to nurture an indie sensibility. Brought together by a small collective of enthusiasts, many of whom slept on the office floor, it was miles away from the glamorous, expense-account world of American magazine journalism, then enjoying its boom years.

Fashion designer Anna Sui was a collaborator; Jim Jarmusch was a contributor. So were Cramps drummer Miriam Linna and Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo. And its covers were at their most strikingly new wave when Elizabeth van Itallie served as art director from 1980 to 1982.

The latest edition of No Way Back, NWB003 – 208 pages of carefully curated music and subculture material – lands on shelves and ships direct from our online store in mid-November.

If you want to get in early, we’re doing the pre-sale now. Purchase before close of day on October 26, and we’ll add your name – with much gratitude – to the publication’s early supporters page.

(Link in bio)

NWB003 | Learning from, not longing for, the past

10/02/2026

It’s the summer of 1997 and a new sound is emerging. It’s riffing on vocal house and the original US form of garage-house, but throwing in chopped ragga vocals, dub effects, huge warping basslines, time-stretch techniques and a whole lot of jungle’s attitude.

Bethan Cole’s piece for Muzik in September of that year surveys the scene: the street-meets-high-style London epicentres like Twice As Nice and The Aquarium, but also DJs like Spoony taking the sound north, switching things up at the nation’s handbag-house superclubs.

“People want something new and radical,” Spoony says in the piece. “Jungle broke through because it was different. They’ve had two or three years of that and now they want something else, and that’s us.”

Though the name speed garage would soon fall by the wayside, much of its energy and swagger would carry through into UK garage, dubstep and much of what came in the early 2000s. Rooted in black music, flourishing in multiracial spaces, and part of a continuum stretching back through jungle, rave and sound-system culture – sounds with history, twisted into something new.

We’re featuring Speed Garage: Sound Of The Future in the latest edition of No Way Back, NWB003 – 208 pages of carefully curated music and subculture material. It’ll be landing on shelves and shipping direct from our online store in mid-November, but if you want to get in early, we’re doing the pre-sale at the moment.

Purchase before close of day on October 26, and we’ll add your name – with much gratitude – to the publication’s early supporters page. (link in bio.)

NWB003 | Learning from, not longing for, the past

10/02/2026

Our cover image for No Way Back 003 - Monika Kruse playing at Munich’s Ultraschall in 1994 - was shot by Tilman Brembs. When not serving drinks or fixing things, he caught a frontline view of techno taking hold across early 1990s Germany in the years immediately after the Wall came down.

He worked as the de facto caretaker and handyman at Tresor, housed in the vaults of a former department store - also behind the makeshift bar and helping put together the wall art and decor.

All the while, he photographed the scenes unfolding around him - at Tresor, but also at other clubs and one-offs in Berlin, Munich and elsewhere. In the new No Way Back, we tell the story through his photographs and his own fascinating commentary. It is wonderfully evocative stuff: a culture making itself up as it went along - highly DIY, scrappy and unselfconscious, before anyone quite knew what it would become.

Presented here (along with our Monika Kruse cover), just a few of the images featured in the story.

Slide 1: 303 pioneers Phuture at E-Werk, 1996 // Early morning outside E-Werk, 1994

Slide 2: Jeff Mills, DJ Hell and DJ Rok queuing at the Elektro bar, 1992 // Tresor back-office buffet for Underground Resistance (apparently they didn’t eat a thing 😂), 1991

The latest edition of No Way Back, NWB003 - 208 pages of carefully curated music and subculture material - will be landing on shelves and shipping direct from our online store in mid-November. But if you want to get in early, we’re doing the pre-sale at the moment.

Purchase before close of day on October 26, and we’ll add your name - with much gratitude - to the publication’s early supporters page. (Link in bio.)

NWB003 | Learning from, not longing for, the past

09/30/2026

When travellers from the West first started heading to Goa – some dodging the Vietnam War, others believing the hippie scenes in places like San Francisco and London were on the wane – the soundtrack, unsurprisingly, was psychedelia and acid rock. Fast forward to the mid-1990s and it was unrelenting psytrance, careering along at 135bpm+.

In between, though, came one of those lovely anything-goes phases, as guitar music started to make space for nascent electronic sounds, new wave and kosmische.

Goa transplants like Laurent and Fred Disko from France, Canada’s Dr Bobby and American Goa Gil were DJing from cassette tapes (apparently more hard-wearing in the sun and sand), using the Sony Professional Walkman with its pitch control and quick-response pause button to make chopped-up edits of tracks like Blancmange’s Living on the Ceiling, Boytronic’s Hurts and Soft Cell’s S*x Dwarf.

In the latest edition of No Way Back, we’re featuring Goa photographs shot between the 1970s and early 1990s by the likes of Sunny Schneider and Piers Ciappara – images capturing this sonic switch-over at hazy spots like Chapora Fort, Arambol and South Anjuna.

NWB003 – 208 pages of carefully curated music and subculture material – will be landing on shelves and shipping direct from our online store in mid-November, but if you want to get in early, we’re doing the pre-sale at the moment.

Purchase by close of day October 26, and we’ll add your name – with much gratitude – to the publication’s early supporters: page. (link in bio)

NWB003 | Learning from, not longing for, the past

09/29/2026

For the December 3, 1988 issue of NME, Richard Noise (better known as Richard Norris) headed to Belgium to check in on the sinister but camp, underground but overground sound of new beat.

By then, new beat was crossing the North Sea (no big deal these days, but music travelled much less back then) and arriving in the UK at an opportune moment.

Reflecting on writing the piece, Richard told us: "New beat seemed to arrive just as that first acid house summer was turning into autumn and winter, and this slower, colder, doomy music somehow fitted. It worked particularly well in those big London rooms too – Spectrum at Heaven, The Trip at the Astoria – because it was dramatic and quite cinematic. It had a scale to it."

A Split Second’s Flesh came first, then a flurry of dark and severe (but actually quite fun), slower-than-house tunes; followed by the obligatory compilations. For all its cultish appeal in the UK, Richard remarks the context was somewhat different back at glitzy new beat temples like Boccaccio.

“It was much more mainstream than you might imagine from the music. Boccaccio was a big, really well-appointed place – in some ways it had a similar feel to Amnesia in Ibiza. And the crowd was quite aspirational, borderline yuppie-ish really. Big hair, big cars, almost a bit The Hitman And Her.

"New beat was genuinely popular in Belgium. It was being talked about on the news. The records were charting. One compilation sold something like 40,000 copies – practically one per household! It wasn’t an underground counterculture in the way you might think of it in Britain. It was the culture."

We’re featuring New Beat: One Nation Under A (Slowed Down) Groove in the latest edition of No Way Back, NWB003 – 208 pages of carefully curated music and subculture material. It’ll be landing on shelves and shipping direct from our online store in mid-November, but if you want to get in early, we’re doing the pre-sale at the moment.

Purchase before close of day on October 26, and we’ll add your name – with much gratitude – to the publication’s early supporters page. (link in bio.)

NWB003 | Learning from, not longing for, the past

09/28/2026

In 1980, the DJ Chris Brown had a brainwave. Across the soul scene, from the suburbs through to the city centres, he saw different groupings and factions of young people bringing their own energy to the clubs and weekenders.

He thought it was a story worth telling, so he told it in The Family Album, a book that joined the dots between the different ‘soul tribes’, as he called them, telling their tales and publishing their photographs from all-dayers and weekenders everywhere from Reading and Purley to Oldham and Caister.

He chronicled a movement of thousands of young people, largely ignored by the mainstream media, travelling the country to dance to Black American music. In doing so, way before the style mags and dance mags, he was starting to codify club culture in the UK – its sense of pilgrimage and belonging.

Introducing the book’s 18 chapters, Brown wrote: ‘I sincerely hope that you enjoy the book and I’m sure that, if you’re part of the ‘Family,’ you’ll be able to look through these pages in years to come and still feel as pleased, as I know I will, to be able to say… “I WAS THERE!”’

We’re featuring material from The Family Album in the latest edition of No Way Back, NWB003. It’ll be landing on shelves and shipping direct from our online store in mid-November, but if you want to get in early, we’re doing the pre-sale at the moment.

Purchase before the end of October 26th, and we’ll add your name – with much gratitude – to the publication’s early supporters page. (link in bio.)

NWB003 | Learning from, not longing for, the past

09/26/2026

No Way Back is so back.

We’ve made it to NWB003 - we’ve had a lot of fun putting it together, and it’s just about ready to head out into the world.

It’ll be in stores from approx mid-November, but if you’d like to pre-order a copy, please go ahead! Running until close of October 25, do that and you’ll get your name added - with much gratitude - to the early supporters page in the issue. (link in bio)

We’ve stayed true to our ‘learning from, not longing for, the past’ maxim; curated material presenting a view of subculture before hindsight and received wisdom take over.

If you’re familiar with what NWB’s about, you’ll recognise some of the territory, such as NYC club culture and origin-era techno. But we’re also widening the lens. Thanks to the work of brilliant writers and photographers from some estimable magazines, we’re right there as soul boys and girls meet punks in deepest Essex; exploring mooted new movements like space-rock; witnessing Belgian new beat’s brief and curious moment; sampling Goa in the days before trance; experiencing the first rush of speed garage and grime.

More info on all of that to come. But for now, some detail about our cover photo. It’s from a collection of work by photographer Tilman Brembs zeitmaschine_berlin. In the early 1990s, he documented a fascinatingly textural perspective on techno as it started to find an identity of its own in Germany, this image of Monika Kruse included.

Kruse was among a first wave of women (see also the likes of K-Hand in Detroit and Miss Djax in Eindhoven) to break into the otherwise very male domain of the techno DJ, paving the way for so many who’ve followed in her footsteps, in Europe in particular.

“You have to fight,” she said in one interview. “You have to fight and prove yourself more than men… We have to prove that we really collect records, that we’re really hungry for the music.”

She’s pictured here - in iconic Disko B shirt - at Ultraschall, the legendary venue in the former staff facilities of Munich’s closed Riem airport, also known for hosting DJ Hell’s powerful sets.

If NWB003 sounds like your type of thing, we’d love you to pre-order a copy. (link in bio)

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