The dance music press gets a terribly hard time from their detractors, don’t they? So say the journalists who work within it to anyone who’ll listen – although we’ve noticed that these self-appointed gatekeepers of the underground are more than happy to read Ears To The House whilst simultaneously complaining about us.

Now, publications like Mixmag and Resident Advisor frequently like to tell us how much they do for underground dance music – or, to put it another way, how much they shine a light on things that otherwise would go unseen. Indeed, the outgoing editor-in-chief of Resident Advisor made it her mission to “raise the calibre of music journalism” – a mission that hasn’t gone terribly well under her leadership.

Not only that, but Resident Advisor had the barefaced cheek to call themselves irreplaceable when they applied for a bailout from British taxpayers in 2020. And whilst Mixmag managed to get through the choppy waters of the pandemic without being rescued with government money, a similar sense of entitlement and their own right to exist also prevails there.

So what are Mixmag doing this week to help advance the cause of underground dance music? Well, they’ve done one of their cover story interviews with a mysterious person called Evian Christ – or Joshua Leary, as his mother calls him. He’s a musician from Ellesmere Port in England’s north-west and is 34 years young.

Leary is certainly a curious individual, to put it mildly. His apparently edgy choice of profile photo on his verified Instagram account is of Raoul Moat. Would that be the same Raoul Moat who went on a shooting spree in 2010 that resulted in one death and two being wounded – only for him to commit suicide when his capture by police in a shoot-out was imminent?

Er, yes, it would be the same one. Casting aside this edgelord online persona, what does he have to say? Well, it’s certainly a gushing interview – there really isn’t another type at Mixmag – but even by their standards, this is really bad. Megan Townsend writes about Leary as if she’s a lovelorn teenager…

“Intimidating in his preference for the otherworldly, while simultaneously personable in his tongue-in-cheek irreverence and equal love of the perceived high and low brow. He’s an enigma, an agent of chaos, and the guy you’ve always wanted to chat about football with — all wrapped into one.”

Elsewhere in the article, Leary comes out with one of the strangest lines that any regular DJ has ever said – where he states “I’m not really interested in making people dance, I kind of want to break people”. Even Mixmag’s own readers were baffled by some of his words – with one even questioning “Is this comedy?” on their Instagram page.

All in all, the interview attempts to convey that Leary is both original and underground. Unfortunately, it fails on both grounds – what Leary is doing with trance is nothing remotely new to anyone who’s been listening for a while, and an artist signed to Kanye West’s publishing house and record label could hardly be referred to as underground.

In the meantime, be in no doubt – if you’re famous enough, Mixmag really will publish anything you say, no matter how ridiculous…