Japanese-Lancastrian, Belgian-Mexican, and Irish-Nigerian collaborations lead the charge this month, reminding us that crossing cultures and traditions will always keep music fresh. There’s a lot of classic Detroit techno—even if it’s not from Detroit—along with a huge amount of heavy, heavy sub-bass too, as well as some reinvented futurist UK garage, 200-mile-an-hour Atlanta club bangers, and dreamy Norwegian genre-bending… A lot of it familiar, but again with that hybridity making it strange again and pushing things forward. Mash that play button and you’ll see what we mean!
ZOiD & Seo
Butterflies
Eseomo Ayoola Mayaki is a cult artist in the making. Under the aliases Seo and Moonbather, the Lagos singer-producer has made a mind-boggling quantity of dreamy, lo-fi alt-pop—all of it developing a unique sonic and imaginative world that’s all her own. Approaching her catalog is daunting, but thankfully she’s slowly increasing her international profile, with collaborations like this one with Irish jazz-techno explorer Zoid. He beefs up Mayaki’s sonics with a Detroit-y crunch without losing any of her off-beam charm on three originals and covers of Burt Bacharach and Kings Of Leon (!) songs.
L.S. Diezel & Launch DAT
Dubplate #5: For The Love Of
Vinyl
If there was one label that epitomized the weirder fringes of the UK illegal rave scene it was Southeast London’s Digi Dub. Inspired by industrial, acid, hardcore rave, and Aphex Twin—but always with the melodic sensibility of dub reggae at its heart—it produced gem after gem through the 1990s. Now, Mysticisms has collected four of the finest from Digi Dub artists L.S. Diezel & Launch DAT, from the neo-lovers’ rock of the title track through the slowed-down junglism of “Suicidal Dub,” the more minimal “Bad Boys,” and the nagging melody and skull crushing bass of “Skunk Funk.” If you want to transport yourself to a squatted Deptford warehouse in 1992, here’s your time machine.
Various Artists
10 Years of Dancing
Cassette, T-Shirt/Shirt, Poster/Print
Run from London by Nate Forest and Benedetta Sodini, the label Organic Analogue has always focused on dance culture with a human touch: Internationalist, but connected by appreciation of craft and musical and cultural intimacy. For their 10th anniversary, they’ve displayed this on a spectacular scale, with 31 tracks of individualist, funky electro, techno, acid, and ambient from their friends in Wales, Sweden, Georgia, and many more places. It positively glows with good vibrations—plus, there are beautifully produced and presented cassette editions, t-shirts, and art prints, which continue the mood and go to raise money for children in conflict zones.
Various Artists
Harmonic Frequencies Vol 1
Founded by producer, DJ, and NTS Radio host LDLDN, over its five years of existence, the label Natural Frequencies has favored quality over quantity. That’s very much the case with this super tight and tidy 10-track compilation. The mode here is very much classic Detroit techno, with crisp and crunching 909s playing off rich soul chord patterns—but there’s plenty of variety within that. We go from the aggressively mind-bending and body-rocking (e.g. Void Complet’s “Raw Shit”) to the complex and elevated (LDLDN’s own “General Principle”) stopping at all points in between. Importantly, it never sounds retro: this music was futuristic when it was invented, and it’s still futuristic now.
Twofold
22XL Remixes
First a mea culpa: we missed Atlanta producer Twofold’s debut album Black Armor in the Best of 2023 list. This was a huge oversight, as it marks the maturation of a properly important talent. And they continue to dazzle on this compilation of EP tracks with remixes from friends and comrades. There’s huge variety here, from technicolor game melodies to monochromatic minimalism, classic club breakbeat edits to abstract techno sound manipulation. But even at 28 tracks, it holds together as an album because Twofold’s tracks, in all their apocalyptic velocity and complexity, can bear reworking in just about any style and still retain their unique sonic personality.
SY Rockers
SOYO Dubs Vol 2
The endlessly prolific Yorkshireman Mella Dee is relentless in his pursuit of the perfect stripped-to-the-bone club banger, and here, with friend Reuben G, he’s come up with three. For these, they turn up the sub-bass to classic early ‘90s Yorkshire “bleep techno” levels—but the rhythms and production values are all 21st century, drawing on dubstep, minimal techno, even Afrobeats, with every shaker and every reverbed snare cutting through the air around you like it’s right there in the room. Turn town the lights, turn up the big speakers and let these manipulate space around you.
Maoupa Mazzocchetti
Cilicio
Belgium-based Maoupa Mazzocchetti is one of the finest exemplars of the heavy industrial sound zone where Latin rhythms, dancehall, deconstructed club, and advanced techno all blend together to create sounds that hit the dancefloor like sledgehammers. On this EP, which features collaborations with Venezuelan-via-Catalonia Cardopusher and Colombian-Floridian Nick León, he touches on all kinds of tempos and rhythms. But the highlights are the opening cyberpunk reggaetón outing “Mantequilla,” featuring the Spanish dancehall-punk yelp of his friend Clara!, and the brutally hypnotic techno of Monterreyan producer Regal86 remixing “tambien”.
André Bratten
Slay Tracks
Vinyl LP
The Norwegians have always excelled at finesse in experimental music, and André Bratten is no exception. The tracks on this surprise-drop album vary from skittery bossa nova dub (“A Fog”) to gurgling breakbeat acid (“Tunnel”), misty, bass-heavy techno (“Mint”) and rubbery trip-hop (“The Returner”). But all of them are united by a laser-focused attention to trippy micro detail, whether in diffuse textural sounds or individual pops, clicks, and creaks. It’s characterful, fun in a melancholy sort of way, and gets right under your skin.
Various Artists
Lost Paradise: Blissed Out Breakbeat Hardcore 1991-94
2 x Vinyl LP
This is an extremely timely compilation. As “jungle tekno,” “proto-jungle,” and other early ’90s breakbeat forms get resurrected and re-codified in modern DJs’ sets, it’s a potent reminder of just how varied—and how emotionally intense—the sounds really were during those peak rave years. This collection of lovingly remastered tracks goes from slow, early bleep and bass tunes through pounding hardcore techno to a lot of LTJ Bukem-like tunes where raging breakbeats tumble through warm buoyant chords and samples. There’s bliss here, but often it’s leavened with sadness, fear, psychedelic derangement or good old-fashioned blues—and there’s a wonderful sense of rules as-yet unwritten, of true experimentation by a generation finding its way.
Private Joy
“Stay In My Life”
This is one of a trio of single releases by the women and non-binary-focused collective Saffron—the others being a fantastic fizzing bit of Caribbean-inflected funky house from Fiyahdread and some subterranean techno dub from Yushh, each accompanied by a generous sample-pack allowing you to remix or just take inspiration from the work. This one is a lavish bit of timeless deep house from Private Joy—aka Pops Roberts of Manchester’s Lovescene neo-soul crew—and it pours out of your speakers like honey. It’s one case where the sample-pack might be of interest to more than just those with a hungry sampler: Skip through the individual sounds and you really get a sense of how much effort has gone into making each one not only sound like a million pounds while still fitting perfectly along with each of the others, hand in glove.
House Of Black Lanterns
Back to Back Special
Vinyl LP
It’s been a good while since we’ve heard from Dylan Richards, aka House of Black Lanterns and formerly King Cannibal. Under both guises, he’s explored many facets of bass music, always with a wonderfully mean and ugly edge. Here, he’s applied that to classic UK garage rhythms. These four tracks are kind of a variation on a theme, all built around snippets of rave and pirate radio MCs egging dancers on with an air of menacing ebullience, along with the kinds of rhythm and bass that would inspire dubstep and grime. But this is no throwback, either: The patterns may be old, but the production, structure, and vision are all futurist—these are transmissions across the mean streets of a 22nd century London.
Scotch Rolex and Shackleton
Death by Tickling
2 x Vinyl LP
Well this is just lovely. Two of the most unique producers in modern electronic music—Sam Shackleton and Shigeru Ishihara (aka DJ Scotch Egg/Scotch Rolex)—have come together in Berlin, and it couldn’t be a more natural fit. Together they’ve made a sprawling album of shamanic dub, very much in Shackleton’s classic mode of vast subs and fine percussion, but with Ishihara’s endless playfulness boosting the invention and psychedelic edge at every turn. It’s one of those rare records that feels like a living system, slightly different every time you play it. It’s a seething jungle of sound, occasionally forbidding but full of marvels and completely compelling.
