Buscar:ben shift

Bristol's Tara Clerkin Trio return to World of Echo and the EP format for a five song collection of quixotic, emotional redolence. But do not mistake their absence for inertia. If their musical output has been a little sparse during those in-between years, limited to a few solo ventures and an astonishing ten minute long piece as a trio, their time has otherwise been richly spent: continuous writing and recording, extensive live performances across Europe and Japan, a cultivation of local and more far-flung artistic connections (musical and otherwise), and a monthly NTS show that, through the voice of others, speaks most obviously to their own unorthodox interests. It's the conflux of that winding activity that leads indirectly to On The Turning Ground, 26 minutes of probing, thoughtful composition that draws from no one specific source. Their inspirations might be centreless, but the trio still possess a very obvious anchor in the form of their hometown. Bristol stands as a city of multitudes, heterogenous and vibrant in such a way as to allow it to renew and remake time and again. Tara Clerkin Trio drink from that same well, duly reflecting a rich musical heritage built on fwd-facing electronic subcultures and experimental urges.

As such, On The Turning Ground finds them subject to their own subtle internal evolution, the pervasive sense that you've caught them mid-bloom, on their way to becoming but never anything but themselves. The two instrumental pieces that bookend the EP stand as a perfect case in point, displaying an increasing mastery of compositional space. Pensive and restrained, 'Brigstow' and 'Once Around' both emanate an interstitial quality that's not so much after- as in-between-hours, miniature dub-folk symphonies held together by the kind of tacit understanding that remains the preserve of only the closest of family units. If those two tracks are shaped by a sense of shifting temporality, then the three vocal-led pieces that comprise the record's core feel like a gentle ossifying of aesthetic into something approaching their own unique form of avant-pop. 'Pop' is, of course, a broadly subjective concept, but there's no avoiding the overt sparkling melodicism of songs like 'Marble Walls' and 'The Turning Ground', undeniable re-directions of that late 90s impulse to bend pop sensibilities into off-centre terrain, to render the familiar new again. This is what Tara Clerkin Trio do, gently pulling the ground from under your feet, turning you to face something you'd not quite seen before. To view the world as they do: sideways, sometimes, all of the time.

Ashley Tindall, AKA Skeptical, returns in peak form with Blimp EP — the fourth release on his Rubi Records imprint — delivering four meticulously crafted cuts of uncompromising drum & bass.

Opening with the title track, Blimp sets the tone with a deep, steppy wobbler that nods subtly to the title track from his second Rubi Records release, Capsize EP. All the signature Skeptical hallmarks are here: hypnotic, pared-back metronomic drums and shimmy-inducing, undulating subs that demand movement. Yet this time there's a noticeable shift — warm, underlying melodic pads bring an unexpected emotional depth. It's not dreamy, but it is more introspective than we're used to, showing another layer to his sonic palette.

So Good flips the script entirely. A dark, cinematic growler, it leans into ghosted vocal fragments and a futuristic film-noir aesthetic. Tense, claustrophobic rhythms and sinister textures create an unsettling atmosphere — tailor-made for those lights-out, pressure-heavy dancefloor moments.

Third comes the undeniable monster of the EP, Technology. Trademark "stink-face" Skeppiness is in full effect from the first bar. Disjointed sci-fi stabs and eerie pads collide with clinical, almost militaristic drum programming, all anchored by a devastatingly weighty bassline. Movement isn't optional — this is pure Skeptical, uncompromising and lethal.

Closing the EP is Bad Generation, a sound system–influenced weapon that finds Skeptical operating at his dubwise best. Fusing minimal D&B with heavyweight, roots-inspired rhythms is no easy task, but here it's executed with effortless authority. It's equally suited to shelling down a rave or getting lost in a deep, eyes-closed session.

Four tracks. Four distinct moods. 100% Skeptical.
Blimp EP confirms once again that his sound continues to evolve — sharper, deeper, and more refined with every release.

Support: Ben UFO, Joy Orbison, Gilles Peterson, dBridge, Break, DLR, Doc Scott, Mefjus, Kasra, Kings of the Rollers, Alix Perez, Jubei, Dub Phizix, Flight, Tasha, Loxy, Lens.

Berlin Based DJ & Producer Johannes Klingebiel returns to Claptrap with “Dolce” a four-track EP served sweet, rich, and ready for peak-time indulgence.

Three original cuts and a heavyweight remix combine for a release that’s equal parts playful and potent. Consider this your sugar rush warning.

The title track, “Dolce,” is a warm and irresistible disco-house groover. Creamy acoustic drums lay the foundation while spicy xylophones and syrupy flute lines weave through the mix, striking a perfect balance between sophistication and pure dancefloor pleasure. It’s smooth, infectious, and built to move bodies.

Next up, “Follow The Line” blends shuffled house rhythms with 303 basslines and grainy vocal stabs. On paper, it’s an unlikely combination, on the floor, it locks tight. The result is hypnotic, driving, and effortlessly smooth.

On the flip, “Pink Forest” ventures into more mysterious territory. Built around an elusive, shifting time signature (one that even jazz-trained drummer Johannes struggles to explain), the track somehow feels both unpredictable and deeply groovy. It bends perception without losing momentum, a heady but danceable excursion into the unknown.

Closing the EP, Sun Damage delivers a remix of “Follow The Line” that both sharpens and distorts the original’s trajectory. Chunkier, weightier, and slightly off-kilter, this rework injects a tougher edge while maintaining the track’s hypnotic core, primed for late-night floors and heavy systems.

“Dolce” is indulgent yet refined, a release that balances musicality with movement, sweetness with punch.
Consume responsibly.

Rave-o-lution - Teknology EP (HDK-3)is a manifesto disguised in project.

Forged in the raw energy of the underground, Rave-o-lution - Teknology EP explores the connection between machine, movement and collective consciousness. This is not nostalgia, it’s forward motion. Teknology as a tool, rave as a language, evolution as a necessity.

Across four different versions, the same core signal mutates and adapts, shifting pressure, tempo and density while staying locked to its original frequency. Each version is built for a different moment on the floor, from deep hypnosis to pure mechanical drive.

Sometimes a pad emerges in the break, a moment of suspension where emotion cuts through the structure. A brief opening. A breath inside the system. Proof that even the hardest teknology carries feeling beneath the steel.

HDK-3 is made for soundsystems at full power, bodies in sync, and minds ready to disconnect from the surface and dive deeper.

No compromise.
No decoration.
Just rave — evolved.

Thomas Peter debuts on Hallow Ground with »changing bodies,« an album inspired by the resonance and reaction of objects with and to sound. The Swiss composer and sound artist has worked with sounds generated with various materials, field recordings, and an array of analogue and digital synthesizers to create five ever-shifting pieces full of twists and turns in which even silence plays a significant role. Peter composed and recorded the album over the course of four years in an inherently physical process, led by both his intuition and his perception—what you hear on »changing bodies« is an artist intently listening to the material world around him.

Peter laid the foundation for »changing bodies« by making field recordings wherever he went, whether in closed rooms, cities, or rural environments, while also recording organic-sounding material with different synthesizers as well as working with objects made of wood, stone, or metal. »I viewed all these sounds as a kind of language that I was trying to understand,« he says. »I paid close attention to differences between sounds in motion, rhythmic patterns, and dense textures.« He further describes this as an inherently corporeal endeavour, quite literally becoming all ears and internalising the different sounds.

This process of concretion led to one of abstraction when Peter translated the source material and its psycho-physical reverberations into new musical structures. He applied repetition, densification, and recombination to unlock their true potential. Across its five tracks, the album sets literally unheard-of sounds into motion, creating intricate dynamics without ever overwhelming its listeners. »changing bodies« was born out of listening intently and physically.
It is recommended to listen to it in the exact same way.

A label long synonymous with raw, off-centre electronics and uncompromising club tools, Bjarki’s bbbbbb recors welcomes a producer whose approach feels cut from the same cloth, London’s Henry Greenleaf. In an era where functionality often outweighs feeling, ‘Brawn’ is a record that doesn’t court approval; it insists on impact. Built for high-pressure systems and low ceilings, it channels force not as spectacle, but as design.

Greenleaf’s catalogue to date, spanning labels such as Par Avion, YUKU, and ARTS, sketches a restless trajectory between precision and collapse. His productions operate where rhythm becomes architecture: kicks land like poured concrete, subs buckle and flex beneath shifting percussive grids, and textures are stretched until they fray at the edges. Sound is treated as a physical material, layered and stress-tested, reshaped until the familiar mutates into something tactile and strange.

Across the EP, that philosophy takes full form. A1 ‘Brawn’ sets the tone with dense, piston-like drums and tightly coiled low-end pressure, balancing brute force with meticulous spatial control. ‘Jump Up To Be’ follows with a more fractured swing, percussive shards ricocheting across a framework that feels perpetually on the verge of rupture. On the flip, ‘Gawk’ strips things back to skeletal components, carving negative space between distorted pulses and menacing, warped rhythmic figures, before ‘UNTUNTUNT’ closes the record in driving fashion, delivering a raw, functional workout that reduces the groove to its bluntest, most hypnotic form.

True to the label’s ethos, ‘Brawn’ doesn’t chase trends or smooth its edges. It folds air and pressure into motion, pares club music down to its working parts, and leaves room for spontaneous chaos to erupt within the grid; moments where structure splinters, energy misbehaves, and control gives way just enough to keep things volatile. Engineered yet unpredictable, utilitarian yet unruly, the EP embodies the tension, unpredictability, and uniqueness that have long defined bbbbbb recors.

MTY-3.14 “π”, released on March 14, 2026, is the fifth and final chapter of a journey begun fifteen years ago.



This standard edition presents the final form of Polar Inertia across three 12" vinyl records, featuring 11 tracks. Nothing added, nothing removed—only the music, unfolding in full.



Images dissolve, words fall away. What remains are faint echoes, like footprints slowly erased in fresh snow.



This final opus does not close the path. It fades into it. π is not an ending, but a state: the moment where movement continues, even as the world turns silent.



A last step.
A final trace.
Still moving, beneath the cold.



POLAR INERTIA



We are no one because we want to be no one,
And to be no one we have to be everywhere and nowhere- Polar Inertia examines the enigmatic and blurry realms, embracing the art of obscured vision.


Encountering the collective Polar Inertia is much like being absorbed by fog and captivated by its ever-shifting forms and densities, with things being as indistinguishable as in a whiteout.



Formed in 2010 by a group of artists, Polar Inertia transcends visibility, delving into structures that lie beyond the public gaze. Layers upon layers intertwine within the fabric of Polar Inertia, extending beyond their profound electronic compositions and live performances. It manifests as a conceptual universe, where sound, monochrome aesthetics, and elusive narratives converge, much like trying to grasp the intangible fog. The entity that is Polar Inertia is involved in installations, print- and video work and texts created for different contexts and live in different spheres such as Palais de Tokyo in Paris or the Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art. Still, clubs and festivals are perfect spaces to experience these nebulous soundworlds and immerse in them. Fittingly, some of Polar Inertia’s appearances include the colossal halls of Berghain and Bassiani and at experimental festivals like Mutek Montreal and Atonal Berlin, that like to break with the classic club conventions.



Polar Inertia's sonic landscape unfolds with wafting textures accompanied by resonating beats and drones, reverberating through empty spaces, merging with the vast expanse of nothingness. Their sound exists at the crossroads of ambient, experimental, and deep techno, interwoven with vocal narratives. Since their inaugural release “Indirect Light“ on Dement3d Records in 2011, they remain a stronghold of relevance and captivation in the electronic domain.



Mastered by sixbitdeep, with artistic direction by Diplomatie Studio.

Following her contribution to Scenic Route’s Road Less Travelled 2, MS RAY returns with MELT — a defining new chapter in what Boomkat described as “adult contemporary soul.”

MELT is set to be a true benchmark for MS RAY - a five-track release that moves between the cathartic and the heartfelt, shifting fluidly between R&B, trip-hop and dream pop. Subtle yet expansive, it captures her most refined and emotionally resonant songwriting to date.

The EP features new single “Miss You” ft. Nourished By Time, a slow-burn duet pairing her velveteen delivery with his unmistakable, off-kilter pop sensibility.

Also included is “Signs,” her standout cut from Road Less Travelled 2, available here for the first time on vinyl, alongside three brand new, unreleased tracks that further explore her palette of nocturnal electronics, minimalist soul and soft-focus atmospherics.

A.Wild plots the course.

Goes Without Saying.

4 intricate signals for late-night movement. Remix from Eversines.

Club Blanco steps into a more finely wired zone with CBR004, a tightly detailed transmission from young Bristol producer A.Wild – a record that reveals itself slowly, layer by layer, like a signal sharpening in real time.

Still anchored with a raw, restless pull, A.Wild works with a more intricate palette here: interlocking rhythms, delicate textural shifts, and micro-melodic flickers that shimmer beneath weighty, rolling low end. These are tracks that breathe, evolve, and reward close listening just as much as late-night movement.

If previous releases moved through the static in broad strokes, CBR004 traces its own circuitry — precise, hypnotic, and quietly complex – mapping new routes through the Club Blanco continuum.

Das bisschen Totschlag’s new LP 0dB Headroom drifts through a cathartic kind of vulnerability—telling stories of losing, larking, and feeling everything all at once. Its soundscape echoes the act of remembering: manipulated samples and floating guitars bent through distorted electronics embody memory not as a fixed archive, but as something alive: tender, fractured, shifting. Moments come back in flashes—sometimes radiant, sometimes aching, always familiar, yet blurred and distorted. A beautiful mess that you can’t ever fully capture.
(FFO: Alex G, Wednesday, Maria Somerville)

2026 Repress

Melbourne’s DJ Ali is up next on Blue Hour Music with a powerful EP of fast percussive tribal groovers recorded live over multiple hardware sessions. ‘Interceptor’ kicks off the record with energising and rolling momentum laced in echoes of shamanic ritual. ‘Paradox Cell’ maintains the tension with a stripped back and pumping drum track enhanced by repeating tones and swirling winds that suddenly take over. On the flip ‘Nightwatch’ feels even more immersive, tunnelling down into hypnotic chambers where a voice guides and pulls the listener through a lucid void. ’Regeneration’ rounds up the record with an uplifting journey that begins to unfold with a series of shifting layers and hints of colour beneath a haze of euphoria.

The much-missed Vaughn Benjamin reminds us why his approach to reggae lyricism remains peerless with “Charges,” a standout track from the Polarities LP released on 7” vinyl for the first time. Arriving amidst an era of global economic shifts, the release feels forcefully timely. Genius metaphorical wordplay and wide-ranging subjects are distilled into a cohesive whole as the global economy and its entrapping neo-colonial rules come under the microscope. Produced by Zion I Kings with Tippy I at the helm, the track is anchored by the rock-solid drumming of Lloyd “Junior” Richards and the propulsive bass of David “JAH David” Goldfine. This release features a previously unheard B-side dub, giving space to the celestial synth work of the late Andrew “Drew Keys” Stoch. This series honours both the vocal and version culture of the reggae sound system and the profound lyricism of Vaughn Benjamin.

At the start of this summer, following a three-year hiatus for Daphni (punctuated only by his first ever collaborative Daphni track ‘Unidos’ alongside Sofia Kourtesis), he dropped ‘Sad Piano House’. The track represented something of a continuation in the Daphni catalogue, its roots growing from Cherry’s ‘Cloudy’ and its subsequent Kelbin remix, something in that song’s makeup having a profound effect when played on dancefloors by Snaith and countless others. ‘Sad Piano House’ deployed more intangibly irresistible bendy piano to equally satisfying effect and continues to achieve similarly rhapsodic dancefloor saturation.
Though a sizeable gap for Daphni releases, between Cherry and Butterfly however of course sits Honey, the latest Caribou album and one that saw the more instantaneous and dancefloor leaning traits of Daphni peaking through the cracks more than ever before. This blurring of the lines leads to an intriguing collaboration in Butterfly’s lead single ‘Waiting So Long (feat. Caribou)’. An unlikely duo - in that both artists are the same man, Dan Snaith - ‘Waiting So Long’ is not so much an identity crisis, ego trip, or the result of a chemical spill in the Snaith laboratory. It’s simply a track that Snaith felt for the first time belongs to both aliases, and might appeal to fans of both. He has never sung on a Daphni track before, and did not set out with the intention to do so this time, and yet this strange billing was born.

Daphni music has always been Snaith’s way of hitting directly to the core of the dancefloors he spends so much of his time playing to, and those dancefloors have been steadily expanding as his name grows, with the music following suit. This album however also draws from further back with a definite kinship to the very first Daphni album, the invigorating bag of ideas that was Jiaolong.
Butterfly is a showcase of the wonderful variety and surprising twists and turns that made that album such an exciting new prospect and that still to this day make Snaith such an intriguing DJ. There are more heavy hitters here, tracks that fill those dancefloors better than anyone, like ‘Clap Your Hands’ which picks up the energy of ‘Sad Piano House’ and flips it, exposing the gritty and intoxicating underbelly of Snaith’s hitmaking side, while retaining the playful urgency that runs through all of his work of late. Meanwhile ‘Hang’’s comic-strip horns are unpinned by gleeful force, unrelenting and thrillingly unshakeable. Elsewhere though comes a clutch of other tunes that might creep out somewhere more off the beaten path, a path Snaith has never stopped seeking in amongst his larger billings. ‘Lucky’ is squirmy and elusively intoxicating, ‘Invention’ skitters down meandering, inviting corridors, ‘Talk To Me’ grumbles and broods in the murk, and ‘Miles Smiles’ could roll on endlessly, so confident in its groove. There are no obvious peaks in these tracks or unifying moments, in fact many of them really have no business being on the dancefloor at all, and yet in the right setting, they could be the most fun to be had all night.

One such club is a good microcosm for the ethos of Butterfly as a whole. “Around the time I was finishing up this album I played a long set in a club called Open Ground in Wuppertal, Germany.” Snaith recalls, “It’s kind of, in one sense, the platonic ideal of the kind of club I’d want to play in. Every single decision has been taken, at great expense, with the aim of making the perfect sounding medium sized club room. But on top of it being the perfect acoustic environment it also is run by an amazing collection of people in a way that gives it a sense of community that dance music at its best provides. It is an absolute pleasure to play in that room to a crowd of people who come from all over. Playing in there you feel like you can play anything, and I played works in progress of pretty much every track on this album in my set there. Don’t get me wrong, I love playing a short set at a festival or in a more raw warehouse kind of club where you bang it out and only really functional music works but on record I guess the point of these Daphni records is to keep in mind a more expansive idea of dance music where the parameters are broad and the church is broad. I think that actually, putting really functional stuff next to weirder tracks (both on an album and in a dj set) might be the thing that’s still most interesting to me.”
This is the feeling that’s most palpable on Butterfly, and in every single time you see Snaith DJ. Right from the inception of the Daphni alias - and even before that – the thrill of trying stuff out, pushing at the boundaries has always been there and on Butterfly is present in all its twists and turns. It leaps all over the place and yet it hangs together, never feeling like a grab bag of dancefloor utilities but rather a distillation of all the strings to Snaith’s bow, exhilaratingly human and unified by one singular concept – simple and joyful exploration.

At the start of this summer, following a three-year hiatus for Daphni (punctuated only by his first ever collaborative Daphni track ‘Unidos’ alongside Sofia Kourtesis), he dropped ‘Sad Piano House’. The track represented something of a continuation in the Daphni catalogue, its roots growing from Cherry’s ‘Cloudy’ and its subsequent Kelbin remix, something in that song’s makeup having a profound effect when played on dancefloors by Snaith and countless others. ‘Sad Piano House’ deployed more intangibly irresistible bendy piano to equally satisfying effect and continues to achieve similarly rhapsodic dancefloor saturation.
Though a sizeable gap for Daphni releases, between Cherry and Butterfly however of course sits Honey, the latest Caribou album and one that saw the more instantaneous and dancefloor leaning traits of Daphni peaking through the cracks more than ever before. This blurring of the lines leads to an intriguing collaboration in Butterfly’s lead single ‘Waiting So Long (feat. Caribou)’. An unlikely duo - in that both artists are the same man, Dan Snaith - ‘Waiting So Long’ is not so much an identity crisis, ego trip, or the result of a chemical spill in the Snaith laboratory. It’s simply a track that Snaith felt for the first time belongs to both aliases, and might appeal to fans of both. He has never sung on a Daphni track before, and did not set out with the intention to do so this time, and yet this strange billing was born.

Daphni music has always been Snaith’s way of hitting directly to the core of the dancefloors he spends so much of his time playing to, and those dancefloors have been steadily expanding as his name grows, with the music following suit. This album however also draws from further back with a definite kinship to the very first Daphni album, the invigorating bag of ideas that was Jiaolong.
Butterfly is a showcase of the wonderful variety and surprising twists and turns that made that album such an exciting new prospect and that still to this day make Snaith such an intriguing DJ. There are more heavy hitters here, tracks that fill those dancefloors better than anyone, like ‘Clap Your Hands’ which picks up the energy of ‘Sad Piano House’ and flips it, exposing the gritty and intoxicating underbelly of Snaith’s hitmaking side, while retaining the playful urgency that runs through all of his work of late. Meanwhile ‘Hang’’s comic-strip horns are unpinned by gleeful force, unrelenting and thrillingly unshakeable. Elsewhere though comes a clutch of other tunes that might creep out somewhere more off the beaten path, a path Snaith has never stopped seeking in amongst his larger billings. ‘Lucky’ is squirmy and elusively intoxicating, ‘Invention’ skitters down meandering, inviting corridors, ‘Talk To Me’ grumbles and broods in the murk, and ‘Miles Smiles’ could roll on endlessly, so confident in its groove. There are no obvious peaks in these tracks or unifying moments, in fact many of them really have no business being on the dancefloor at all, and yet in the right setting, they could be the most fun to be had all night.

One such club is a good microcosm for the ethos of Butterfly as a whole. “Around the time I was finishing up this album I played a long set in a club called Open Ground in Wuppertal, Germany.” Snaith recalls, “It’s kind of, in one sense, the platonic ideal of the kind of club I’d want to play in. Every single decision has been taken, at great expense, with the aim of making the perfect sounding medium sized club room. But on top of it being the perfect acoustic environment it also is run by an amazing collection of people in a way that gives it a sense of community that dance music at its best provides. It is an absolute pleasure to play in that room to a crowd of people who come from all over. Playing in there you feel like you can play anything, and I played works in progress of pretty much every track on this album in my set there. Don’t get me wrong, I love playing a short set at a festival or in a more raw warehouse kind of club where you bang it out and only really functional music works but on record I guess the point of these Daphni records is to keep in mind a more expansive idea of dance music where the parameters are broad and the church is broad. I think that actually, putting really functional stuff next to weirder tracks (both on an album and in a dj set) might be the thing that’s still most interesting to me.”
This is the feeling that’s most palpable on Butterfly, and in every single time you see Snaith DJ. Right from the inception of the Daphni alias - and even before that – the thrill of trying stuff out, pushing at the boundaries has always been there and on Butterfly is present in all its twists and turns. It leaps all over the place and yet it hangs together, never feeling like a grab bag of dancefloor utilities but rather a distillation of all the strings to Snaith’s bow, exhilaratingly human and unified by one singular concept – simple and joyful exploration.

On Hungry Animal, Luke Temple continues to trace the invisible lines between the personal and the cosmic _ between what we feel, what we observe, and what we inherit simply by being alive. The album reunites Temple with Doug Stuart (bass) and Kosta Galanopoulos (drums), the core of his Cascading Moms ensemble, whose instinctive chemistry anchors the record's balance of rhythmic precision and melodic drift. Together they shape a sound that feels handmade and fluid, delivering sharp observations in soft focus. The album opens with "Clean Living," a tenderly libidinous groove, unraveling purity myths and self-discipline _ less a confession than a celebration of the futility of striving for perfection in a flawed world. From there, "Echo Park Donut" shifts into the memory of an unsettling vignette drawn from a violent incident outside Temple's Los Angeles home. The band moves with a quiet pulse beneath the story, suggesting both detachment and the surreal intimacy of fear. The title track, "Hungry Animal," grounds the album's broader questions: how well can we really know one another, or ourselves? Temple's lyrics circle around the idea that we are animals among animals, driven by instinct and affection alike. It's both playful and philosophical, one of the record's emotional centers. Temple's bandmates bring an understated mastery to these pieces. Stuart's melodic, infectious grooves converse fluidly with Galanopoulos's drumming, which breathes life into each song even as it gently propels them forward. The trio's interplay feels both weightless and deeply rooted _ commanding the listener's attention and empathy without ever forcing it. With Hungry Animal, Luke Temple and the Cascading Moms create a world where reflection becomes rhythm and consciousness gains texture _ a record of quiet revelations and deliberate grace.

With Spam Vol.2, KVR - Niels Broos, Dries Laheye & Lander Gyselinck - delivers its second statement.



Recorded in a beautiful studio tucked beneath a bridge in Rotterdam, the album distills a week of free improvisation into vivid, shape-shifting pieces. A beautiful chaos of bass guitars, synths stacked on clavs, drums and machines to get lost in, in between coincidence and intention. Jungle rhythms, elastic time, open structures and organic textures come together in a lively sound that feels playful as well as restless and deeply intuitive.



KVR is Niels Broos (Jameszoo, Binkbeats) on keys, Dries Laheye (STUFF., Selah Sue) on bass and Lander Gyselinck (STUFF., Lander & Adriaan, BeraadGeslagen) on drums.



For fans of Thundercat, Hudson Mohawke, The Comet Is Coming, Jameszoo, etc.

Força Maior combines the vital saxophone explorations of Pedro Alves Sousa with the infinitely subtle electronic processing of Pedro Tavares. Sousa (aka Má Estrela) is known for manipulating his woodwind through guitar pedalboards & amplifiers, creating far-from-ordinary sonics rooted in unceasing curiosity. For his part, Tavares (aka funcionário) conjoins video & sound work to create space for the pensive wanderings where memory and imagination interlace.

The album Morte Lilás was recorded over a week in June 2023 in Pedro Alves Sousa's family farm, located in the village of Ferreirim, near Lamego, in Portugal. The partly abandoned farm served as the residency, studio, and inspiration for the album: it is a 400-year-old granite farm that belonged to a member of the "40 conspirators"—a group that led the revolution for Portugal's independence from Spain in the 17th century.

Morte Lilás is a remarkable album of committed meditation. Each day on the farm was a recording day for the two Pedros: Sousa on sax & electronics, Tavares on sampler & processing. Apart from slight sonic incursions from the surrounds—the birds on 'Quinta à tarde'—and the sporadic use of sine tones, the source sounds all start from the saxophone. It is then processed both by Sousa & Tavares. The album unfolds as a saxophonic tapestry that breathes with quiet intensity. Each piece invites close listening, revealing fine gestures and tonal shifts that shape a contemplative, ambient space. Força Maior move with calm precision.

The album opens with the unhurried overture 'Quinta à Tarde' a Portuguese pun on Eno's Thursday Afternoon that announces the textures at play. Sousa's breathy entrance is paired with a soft, delicately shifting, backdrop. As the track progresses, time seems to stretch. The arrangement resists urgency, favouring subtle evolution over dramatic turns. Pensive layers shift & drift, creating a sense of suspended motion that brings the listener into the environs of Morte Lilás. 'Quinta à Tarde' is a long-form fade, shifting emphasis from Sousa to Tavares.

'Cubos' continues the gauzy feel, but with a more up-tempo tilt. Rhythmic clicks & pings setup a swung time for the sax to interpose melodic lines that are fed back & bent with cascading delays. Força Maior in distilled form.

Força Maior is in top form on the title track 'Morte Lilás', a sprawling centrepiece that showcases their command of atmosphere & emotional pacing. By turning up the reverberation & leaning into a continuous format, they dissolve the gap between hypnotic trance & articulate reverie. Then, a moment of stillness. The track pauses, not abruptly but like a tide pulling back, revealing the contours beneath. What follows is a return to the album's more relaxed architecture: understated rhythms, softened textures, and a sense of spaciousness that opens space for reflection. It is a transition that feels organic, as if the song itself needed to exhale before settling back into its contemplative groove.

'Menta' is another short-form miniature of the band's signature contours: beautiful loops of air pressure gradients that carry an emotive weight & light.

The album closes with 'Cascata do Inferno'. The title suggests violence, but the music whispers instead—an atmospheric cascade of breath & tone that emerges in slow, deliberate waves. Short melodic cycles are matched by shimmering electronic chords. It's a piece that rewards patience, draws the listener in to drift downstream, eyes closed, into the serene turbulence of its current.

Loaded with tension and anchored by bold textural and stylistic contrasts, Sam Slater’s third solo full-length finds the British sound artist, composer, and engineer grappling with his creative contradictions head-on.

Having spent a life time in bands and producing records, Sam transitioned somewhat by accident through his work with Johan Johansson into working as a composer on high profile projects such as his collaboration with Hildur Guðnadóttir on the Grammy Award-winning Joker and Chernobyl, and with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mstyslav Chernov on the soundtrack to the lauded 2000 Meters to Andriivka. Having a vast set of interests and influences is an asset when helping realise a directors vision for a soundtrack, but one's own musical voice can end up being constrained. In Lunng, Slater has gone back to his wildly divergent range of influences and rather than shy away from the extremes, he's used them to create a singular vision.

Take the opening track “Heatsick”: Slater imagines an extravagant fusion of 2000s drone metal and vintage British brass, welding ear-splitting overdriven drones and blown-out choral vocals to stirring trombone swells from veteran player Hilary Jeffery. On paper, it’s hard to imagine—but Slater’s intentionality conducts these polarizing elements into a surreal blur of sonic extremes, with the guitars’ relative harshness softened by Jeffery’s eerily nostalgic colliery echoes.

His last solo album, I do not wish to be known as a Vandal (Bedroom Community, 2022), showcased this breadth by assembling a team of collaborators including Sam Dunscombe and Yair Elazar Glotman. On this record he’s linking up with acclaimed multi-instrumentalist Maria W. Horn, idiosyncratic sax virtuoso Bendik Giske, versatile percussionist Adam Betts, and the aforementioned Jeffery, Slater ushers these players toward a lattice of calculated confutations.

Working to explore the tension between the divergent practices of his collaborators—Lunng was meant to be challenging. On “Praya”, Giske’s familiar overblown horn phrases are almost vaporized, vanishing among Slater’s weightless synths and Horn’s chillingly hoarse vocals. There are traces of Horn’s Funeral Folk project, but Slater shifts the emphasis, letting her voice brush past the other elements like a hallucination.

Slater’s use of extremes isn’t just in the micro; dynamics drive the album’s overall flow. “Praya” sets the stage for the record’s heaviest, most prickly moment: “Passengers”. Here, Horn’s voice cracks, rasps, and gurgles over serrated synths and Betts’ ritualistic drums. Slater turns an industrial symphony into a folk opera—dark, dramatic, and strangely beautiful—etched with Giske’s fluttering phrases.

But the mood soon shifts. Slater careens toward chaos, unleashing double-time rhythms and piercing textures familiar to anyone with a soft spot for classic black metal. These grotesque incongruities are deliberate; Slater surveys years of musical conflict and leans in, using dissent as fuel to build kinetic energy.

The weight of sentimentality bears down on “Black Metal Rewind (Night Drive Astra, 2006)”, melting teenage memories into hypnagogic ambience—shoegaze dreams whirled with angelic choral delusions. On “Death by Nostalgia, 1688”, he ventures further into polarizing territory, distorting AutoTuned voices with cryptic strings and medieval tonalities, unsettling any stable sense of past or present.

In this record Slater focuses on pure energy, color, and mood. Lunng distills years of listening into a bracing brew—boiling each sound down to its essence, then serving it with unflinching intent.

John Twells, 2025

Noctourniquet And then everything went black, at least for a while, at least for The Mars Volta. In the months and years following their fifth full-length, Octahedron, Omar kept on at his usual fearsome creative pace. In fact, he ramped up his output considerably, starting up his own Rodriguez Lopez Productions label and releasing a slew of solo albums. It was a practice he’d begun shortly after De-Loused’s release, with his solo debut A Manual Dexterity: Soundtrack Volume One, but as the decade reached its close, Omar grew to rely upon his solo recordings as an outlet for his prolific creativity, these albums often exploring musical pastures far beyond even The Mars Volta’s wide-ranging parameters. Before choosing to release music under his own name, Omar would always play it to Cedric first, to see if the frontman thought it had potential to become Mars Volta music. Shortly after Octahedron’s completion, Cedric flagged one batch of tracks Omar had cut with Deantoni Parks, a brilliant drummer and composer who’d briefly occupied the Mars Volta drumstool in-between Jon Theodore and Thomas Pridgen’s tenures, and whose volcanic creativity and unique, unpredictable approach to rhythm and composition had quickly made him one of Omar’s favourite artistic foils.

As with the music that made up Octahedron, the new tracks Cedric had optioned for The Mars Volta often veered far from the riotous, Grand Guignol visions of their earlier releases. It possessed the punchy, song-based focus of Octahedron, though this was a considerably darker, more menacing strain of pop, with synthesisers figuring heavily in the productions. Cedric took the tracks in 2009 and set about writing songs to the music. But no more new Mars Volta music would be heard until 2012. The years that passed in-between were nonetheless momentous, and busy, witnessing an unexpected reunion of the members of At The Drive-In, and Cedric joining his own side-project, Anywhere. But there wasn’t any sign of life within the Mars Volta until Omar, Cedric and their bandmates took to the road for a series of live shows in the spring of 2011, billed as The Omar Rodriguez-Lopez Group, debuting the songs that would become Noctourniquet. The album followed the next year, and it remains one of The Mars Volta’s finest, its electronic textures staking out unfamiliar but fertile new ground.

An unsettling, subtly turbulent listen, Noctourniquet found Cedric sketching out a story about “some sort of device that stops the darkness from bleeding”, drawing influence variously from the nursery rhyme Solomon Grundy, the Greek myth of Hyacinthus and the song Birth, School, Work, Death by British underground rockers The Godfathers. It was an album of dystopian futurism, signalled by the paranoid cyber-rock of opener The Whip Hand and its unnerving chorus, “That’s when I disconnect from you”. But it was also an album of inspired, unexpected moves and uncanny invention, like how Dyslexicon seemed to eerily evoke Blondie’s Rapture, before rushing headlong into its bruising chorus, tempos shifting restlessly throughout like quaking earth beneath the listener’s feet, or how Aegis put a brave new spin on The Mars Volta’s trademark rewiring of salsa’s overdriven passions, or how Cedric had never sounded as scary as he did on The Malkin Jewel’s mutant burlesque shuffle. Tracks like Molochwalker were sleek and concise in a way The Mars Volta had never really attempted before – which was all part of Omar’s plan.

“It had all been guitar, guitar, guitar, overdubs, everything fighting for space in the same frequency,” he explains. “So for Noctourniquet, it was all about subtracting elements, of sticking to how I made demos.” Deantoni’s presence helped revivify the group, playing against cliché and expectation, and taking each song in unexpected directions. “I’d beatbox a rhythm for him to play, to go with my guitar part, and he’d come back with three or four alternate options. It was so great.” Similarly, Cedric had never sung better than on Noctourniquet, staking out a fearsome spectrum from the chilling Tom Waitsian growl of The Malkin Jewel to the keening, beautiful vocalisation on Vedamalady, rising to match some of Omar’s most deft, most immediately effective and melodic songs yet. Indeed, Noctourniquet is the sound of a band discovering new ways to do familiar things, renewing their commitment to their mission, finding fresh inspiration a decade in, and shaking off any complacency that might have come with ten years of acclaim and success.

A chopped-and-screwed love letter to the sounds of rebajada – half-speed cumbia, pioneered by Sonido Dueñez in the 1990s, and born from an overheated turntable motor that didn’t make the crowd stop dancing. With Debit’s treatment, rebajada becomes an ethereal, at times intense ambient tapestry that’s also a history lesson.

Spend any amount of time pacing the streets of Monterrey, the bustling city in the north of Mexico where Delia Beatriz, aka Debit, grew up, and you’ll be sure to catch traces of cumbia echoing from Bluetooth speakers, DIY soundsystems, or car stereos. An Afro-Latin dance form and »practica cultural« originating in Colombia in the early 19th century, cumbia evolved rapidly in the early 1900s, as a localised sound played on drums and flutes quickly modernised to integrate European instrumentation like the accordion. When it reached Mexico in the 1940s, the sound shifted again, fusing with mariachi styles and integrating further vallenato folk elements. Eventually, cumbia spread across the entirety of Latin America, splintering into a spectrum of different musical styles such as chicha in Peru, and cumbia villera in Argentina. And over in Monterrey, cumbia inadvertently found its own idiosyncratic groove.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, waves of immigrants from across Mexico and Latin America headed to Monterrey to find work, making a home in Colonia Independencia. Colombian cumbia records, shipped in from Mexico City, Houston, and Miami, became the soundtrack of the neighbourhood, relaying familiar stories to a rural working class adjusting to their new industrial reality. The sound struck a chord with locals, and huge street parties hosted by ramshackle soundsystems known as sonideros unified the diverse community. So when cumbia rebajada materialised serendipitously in the 1990s, it emphasised and highlighted the memory distortions at the heart of the immigrant experience. Local record collector, selector, and sonidero Gabriel Dueñez had been playing cumbia for hours one night when disaster struck: his turntable’s motor overheated and slowed down, turning the music into a warped groan, with half-speed voices echoing over wobbly accordion drones and splashy drums. But the crowd kept dancing, and Sonido Dueñez realised he’d struck gold – cumbia rebajada was born.

Over the next few years, he dubbed a popular series of mixtapes, hawking them at the flea market on the dried-up Santa Catarina riverbed beneath El Puente del Papa, the bridge that links downtown Monterrey with Independencia. These woozy archives became the stuff of legend, poetically but subconsciously shadowing DJ Screw’s series of epochal cassettes that appeared over the border in Houston. Beatriz uses Sonido Dueñez’s first two tapes as the starting point for »Desaceleradas«, entering into a dialogue with time, culture, and geography as she recalls the sonic ecosystem that surrounded her decades ago, long before she emigrated to the USA. If 2022’s acclaimed »The Long Count« was an attempt to recover concealed pre-Columbian history in the face of colonisation, »Desaceleradas« jumps forward, figuring out how memory and shared celebration can resist a more contemporary form of cultural erasure. As AI systems scrape, blend, and decontextualise culture around us, leaving vapid slop, »Desaceleradas« proposes a slower, more careful, and ultimately more human kind of engagement. It’s an archive with a pulse.