"Tapping into a shared affinity for early trance – as in short for transcendental – Function and Nastia Reigel come together on Dekmantel with ‘Devocion’. Bridging the past and the future, this partnership draws deeply on brooding, melancholic early-90s sounds and supercharges it with the immensity of modern techno.
The project began when Nastia Reigel shared a series of discoveries with David ‘Function’ Sumner – records rooted in the rave-leaning edge of the era, spanning labels like R&S, FAX and EXperimental. He responded that this was precisely the music he had been absorbing while coming up in the thick of New York’s club and rave scenes and beginning his journey into DJing. The excited exchange of deep digs around this niche of dance music history naturally led to a conversation about collaborating on music in this vein, and Devocion is the result.
Familiar genre touchstones are everywhere, from the plaintive bleeps and understated breakbeat roll of 'Eternity' through the sad-eyed arpeggios strafing on the edges of 'Reverence' and on to 'Flowstate's blue-hued acid lines and 'Orion's sky-scraping gated pads. But Reigel and Sumner deploy these strongly coded elements with poise, feeding into a richly rendered production that feels anything but old-school. The emotive streak is wielded with care, spelling out the mood without losing the steely, shadowy sensibility that tracks through their respective catalogues.
In a perfect demonstration of honouring the past while embracing the present, Devocion EP lands as a distinctive artistic statement on its own terms."
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Continuing his refraction of the rave continuum into pointedly dislocated, delicately bruising sound system meditations, Low End Activist returns to Peak Oil with a second instalment in his Airdrop series. This time around, he channels the ghosts of foundational tech-step and the quantum leaps of late-90s D&B to provide the inspirational fuel for his skeletal, astral constructions. A strong stylistic thread continues to weave through the LEA output from his earlier self-released EPs and Sneaker Social Club albums, where haunted atmospherics, blown out subs and snatches of breaks dart around each other in empty dancehalls, but the finer point of the sound design and synthesis makes very specific references to landmark moments in hardcore's evolution.
By weaving his own autobiography into the music, the Activist maintains a fundamental theme of his work to date. 'Colin's Golf', 'Smithy's Porsche,' 'Merv's Lazy Eye' and 'Brillo's Teeth' are all personal codes harking back to the formative Oxford rave scene. With the framework in place, he uses textures, timbres and studio tricks from scene-leading pioneers and local heroes of the era as ingredients in thoroughly modernist concoctions. None of the reference points are deployed as literal callbacks — they're waymarkers for the creative process and faint triggers bedded deep into Airdrop II's strange formations. Fleeting sonics might trigger latent memories for those who were there. For everyone else, Airdrop II is another step further along rave's eternally unspooling odyssey, guided by decades of precedents on a path into the future.
The latest wayward soundsystem sonics on the Social come from Wroclaw in Poland courtesy of dadan karambolo. As part of the strictly legit SPLOT crew karambolo is spearheading a vibrant community of bassweight freaks digesting all the best misfit club music from the cracks between — a hint of dubstep, a twist of techno and plenty of advanced sound design, all poured into a thoroughly modern, richly realised brew.
Having previously snuck tunes out on SPLOT’s in-house label and the respected Awkwardly Social crew out of Berlin, karambolo delivers an extended statement with his Sneaker Special Club debut. Subtle pressure is the order of the day as he zeroes in on evocative soundscaping and a subdued mood, all while piling on ample low end intensity and edging some sharp angles out of the meditative roll. Even when minuscule slithers of amen breaks sneak into ‘Awkward Expression’, the ambience remains somewhere between dream and dread while ‘Huskarl’ scatters industrial jackhammers across a vast tundra of drone.
‘Done For’ steps forward a touch more forthright with its grime-coded bass spasms, deploying the kind of bludgeoning physicality and ruthless reduction you might associate with fellow Sneaker alumni, Mars89. ‘Burbot’ also switches the script for a cheeky B3 that toys with 80s electro chopped into a snappy breakbeat and underpinned with a sticky synth line. Sidestepping direct dancefloor routes in search of different ways to achieve movement in the club, karambolo has more than matched the over-arching Sneaker ideal with an assured, original transmission from the outer limits of the soundsystem.
Just when you thought every holy grail must have been unearthed by now, here come Basic Unit with their deep cover late 90s masterpiece Timeline, the dankest darkcore-electronica-tech step album you've likely never heard.
Ben England and Rick Dallaway formed Basic Unit and debuted on Moving Shadow in 1997. They also moved on Nocturnal, a cult label that reached beyond D&B to platform some more experimental sounds. It was a short-lived label with some ominous footnotes — 'Several people involved with Nocturnal have vanished or are dead' reads the label's Discogs description. But in 1998 Nocturnal put out Timeline, a CD-only album from Basic Unit that cut a sharp, scathing figure against most D&B of the era. England and Dallaway embraced the album format as a chance to go deep, inhaling their inspiration from early days Autechre as much as Source Direct and boiling down the results to a steely, minimalist framework.
The likes of 'Resolution' are desolate, stark workouts that feel fractured and raw enough to align with early grime, complete with the strings, but the rhythms move in mysterious formations designed to confound like the most bloody minded electronica artists of the late 90s. Blown out bass and scattered flurries of machine gun breaks, squashed tundra drones that sound like they were pulled from 10th generation VHS b-movies and bit-crushed animal grunts fit for a Mega Drive beat 'em up. The sonics are redolent of the times, but Basic Unit chisel them mercilessly into their spartan vision, deploying brain-frying beat science with a stern restraint.
It's the kind of record that gives so much while holding so much back — a deadly tease that has flown under the radar for too long. This is the sort of shock reissue material that gets us gassed at Sneaker, and we're proud to be giving it a re-boost and a first ever outing on wax, all the better to shock you out.
Vel launches PURR with an infectious first VA: P:\URR(V1)_pleaseinsert_ILOVEYOU
On April 18, 2025, Vel unveils the first-ever VA on her new label, PURR, marking a significant milestone in her rising career.
Titled P:\URR(V1)_pleaseinsert_ILOVEYOU, this six-track compilation, featuring six cutting-edge artists, is ready to infiltrate and corrupt the electronic scene.
An infected transmission of club energy, ASMR, and mental overload With P:\URR(V1)_pleaseinsert_ILOVEYOU, Vel curates a lineup of fearless programmers. Each track is engineered to execute in the club environment, embedding ASMR-like frequencies and intricate sonic patterns that phish the listener’s senses. This release encrypts a new strain of fast, introspective, cerebral electronic music.
A paradox in code: when love mutates into chaos. This VA draws its core inspiration from the infamous ILOVEYOU virus, a digital plague born from obsessive passion, proof that an emotion too powerful can spiral into devastation. Much like the virus that once spread uncontrollably, P:\URR(V1)_pleaseinsert_ILOVEYOU infiltrates the mind, its hypnotic intensity spreading through each beat.
With mastering entrusted to In Aeternam Vale and visual identity crafted by Yann Rachon, this release is set to deploy worldwide, embedding its signature into the circuitry of contemporary electronic music.
Clear Vinyl
On Rock Island, their second LP, Palm produces evidence of a distinct musical language, developed over time, in isolation, and out of necessity. On the island, melodies are struck on what might be shells or spines. Rhythms are scratched out, swept over, scratched again. Individual instruments, and sometimes entire sections, skip and stutter. There is the sense of a music box with wonky tension or a warped transmission in which all the noise is taken for signal.
Like other groups so acclaimed for their compulsive live show, Palm has been burdened by the constant comparison between their recorded material and their touring set. On Rock Island, they render this tired discussion moot, using the album form to present that which could never be completely live, reserving for performance that which could never be completely reproduced.
Despite appearing behind the instruments typical of rock music, Palm trades in sounds of their own making. On these songs, one of the guitars and the drum kit are used as MIDI triggers, producing an index that can be combed through later and replaced with new information. The percussion is sometimes augmented so as to suggest a multiplication of limbs. The strings are manipulated to choke, crack, and hum like other instruments, or other bodies, might.
Working again with engineer Matt Labozza, the band spent the better part of a month in a rented farmhouse in Upstate New York. With the benefits of time and space, Palm recorded the various elements piecemeal, only rarely playing together in groups larger than two or three. While some members tracked, others holed up in the next room, experimenting with quantization, beat replacement, and other methods borrowed from electronic music. Even accounting for the many labors that brought them to be, these materials seem produced by an organic logic. Their complex friction forms a habit of thought, scores a network of grooves on the floor of the mind.
This is music with dimensionality. Sonic objects are deployed, developed, and dissected in various states of mutation. The listener flits about between the field and the lab. The tone is warm in a way only the sun could make, the pace as forceful and as variable as a gale. Whether one locates Rock Island in a sea or in a refinished attic (as in Greg Burak's album cover), whether one escapes to there or is banished, its psychic environs are charted clearly enough. Only at this remove from the mainland can we sense the conditions necessary for such a strange species of sound.
On Rock Island, their second LP, Palm produces evidence of a distinct musical language, developed over time, in isolation, and out of necessity. On the island, melodies are struck on what might be shells or spines. Rhythms are scratched out, swept over, scratched again. Individual instruments, and sometimes entire sections, skip and stutter. There is the sense of a music box with wonky tension or a warped transmission in which all the noise is taken for signal.
Like other groups so acclaimed for their compulsive live show, Palm has been burdened by the constant comparison between their recorded material and their touring set. On Rock Island, they render this tired discussion moot, using the album form to present that which could never be completely live, reserving for performance that which could never be completely reproduced.
Despite appearing behind the instruments typical of rock music, Palm trades in sounds of their own making. On these songs, one of the guitars and the drum kit are used as MIDI triggers, producing an index that can be combed through later and replaced with new information. The percussion is sometimes augmented so as to suggest a multiplication of limbs. The strings are manipulated to choke, crack, and hum like other instruments, or other bodies, might.
Working again with engineer Matt Labozza, the band spent the better part of a month in a rented farmhouse in Upstate New York. With the benefits of time and space, Palm recorded the various elements piecemeal, only rarely playing together in groups larger than two or three. While some members tracked, others holed up in the next room, experimenting with quantization, beat replacement, and other methods borrowed from electronic music. Even accounting for the many labors that brought them to be, these materials seem produced by an organic logic. Their complex friction forms a habit of thought, scores a network of grooves on the floor of the mind.
This is music with dimensionality. Sonic objects are deployed, developed, and dissected in various states of mutation. The listener flits about between the field and the lab. The tone is warm in a way only the sun could make, the pace as forceful and as variable as a gale. Whether one locates Rock Island in a sea or in a refinished attic (as in Greg Burak's album cover), whether one escapes to there or is banished, its psychic environs are charted clearly enough. Only at this remove from the mainland can we sense the conditions necessary for such a strange species of sound.
When the whole world collapses around you, sometimes the only thing you can do is stomp it all loose. Erin Anne's second album, the gleaming, electrified Do Your Worst, charts that uninhibited romp through disaster. Written amid the rubble of personal grief and professional disappointment, later exacerbated by the devastation of a global pandemic, the record deepens Erin's venture into the blur between human and machine, adding a new roster of digital instruments to the mix. Drawing on dark, glossy '80s synthpop as well as the unabashed bombast of bands like The Killers, the L.A.-based songwriter deploys a cyborg persona to articulate a feeling of displacement from the world as a queer artist struggling to survive the machinations of late capitalism. With bright, interweaving synthesizers and ripples of Auto-Tuned vocals, Do Your Worst poses a dare to the world: Whatever you have in store, I'll take it standing.
Erin began writing her second album not long after adding a MIDI keyboard and vocal processing hardware to her home studio setup. While exploring her new gear, she found that she could work in the same vein as the artists and producers she loved the most. Do Your Worst takes inspiration from the music of Patrick Cowley, the disco and hi-NRG producer best known for working alongside Sylvester. Erin was taken by Cowley's use of vocoder on the 1982 album Mind Warp, where his distorted vocals create a queer, mutant subjectivity. That album rang out against the cataclysm of the AIDS epidemic; Erin found resonance in Cowley's music during the present-day pandemic. "I have found the most catharsis and the most safety in listening to the music of people in really, really horrific circumstances making something lasting and profoundly beautiful," she says.
Throughout Do Your Worst, which was mixed by Sarah Tudzin of Illuminati Hotties, songs like "Typhoid Mary" and "Florida" reckon with loss, despair, and abjection. "This Hungry Body" sears through pandemic-era touch starvation, while "Mirror Mirror" attends to the noxious but necessary funhouse of social media. On the playful, guitar-driven “Eve Polastri’s Last Two Brain Cells Have a Debate,” Erin uses the spy thriller TV show Killing Eve to explore queer codependency and masochism. Among these fraught subjects, Erin Anne finds opportunities for release. She stages internal conflict on a scale so massive that its details start to become clear; if they don't resolve, they at least become palpable.
"I’m very much a maximalist when it comes to production. I like vast landscapes. I like a stratosphere and a core -- I want the bass to be beneath the floor," Erin says. "This record is, in a lot of ways, a collection of some of the first moments that I was technologically able to achieve accurate renderings of how I hear my own emotional world."
Hot on the heels of his Position Displacement EP, Fraxinus follows up with 4 warehouse-ready cuts on Powerplant Green — kicking off a new series of colour-coded white label 12”s for his label Powerplant. Further stripped back and even more dancefloor-focused, this series sees the artist developing his knack for propulsive rhythms & colossal kick drums. Less of a journey than the label’s first release, Powerplant Green sheds all semblance of emotion. Straight from the first beat, ‘Disruptor’’s rasping acid twinge doesn’t let up, even amid clattering percussion folding in on itself. ‘Torsion’ features a rolling, swung-out rhythm; slow & stepping, but with enough groove for the dance. On the flip, an intense barrage of drums drives ‘Proponent’ through its blistering 6 minutes, backed by disembodied voices calling out from the ether. ‘Pacer’ rounds out the sequence with its steady, controlled build-up, before ejecting the surplus percussion & dropping the listener down a precipice. Fraxinus once again serves up a singular selection of driving futurist techno, built for club-deployment. This time around the intensity is heightened, elements stripped back, rhythms pushed further.
Favorite Recordings proudly presents Deux, second album of French Jazz-Funk quartet Aldorande. In this new chapter, the four explorers pursue their interstellar trip on the Aldorande
planet, deploying their ever deeper love for the 70's Jazz-Funk & Fusion scene. Extending their first
visions of this new world, the bigger-than-life arrangements of this second album reflect again their
high attention to dramatic narrative schemes, breezy Brazilian vibes, tempestuous funky grooves and
strong cosmic melodies from outer space. Classic and contemporary at the same time, Deux is built
for the like-minded souls still looking for the perfect beat.
Twisting time and space but never forcing the groove, the band dives more profoundly into the
Cortex influence of their compositions, with intense female back vocals fitting perfectly into their
cinematographic vision. Like a cry in space, could these esoteric incantations be heard by Aldorande's
divinities? Or will they be more impressed by the super-tight rhythm section with its bangin' basslines
or an irresistible blend of drums and percussion? In the end, they probably would have to surrender
after hearing the infinite echoes of the synthesizers and horns reflecting in the atmosphere. Deep and
thoughtful, the travel has only begun but it seems that so much has already been experienced.
Breaking the code, they opened the gates to a rebirth. One that could be only accomplished by finding
the “Pierre des Mondes”, deeply buried somewhere on Aldorande - the only key to solve the riddle of
the groove. Mission accepted.
You'll find in Aldorande some of the best French jazzmen including bandleader and founder Virgile
Raffaëlli on bass (Setenta & Joe Bataan, Camarão Orkestra), Florian Pellissier on keys (Iggy Pop,
Setenta, Cotonete & Di Melo, …), Mathieu Edouard on drums (Chassol, De La Soul) and Erwan
Loeffel on percussion (Camarão Orkestra, 10LEC6). On this album, they took the initiative to invite
two guests on some tracks: AOR singer Al Sunny and killer guitarist Laurent Guillet (Le Soldat Rose,
Setenta).eir ever deeper love for the 70's Jazz-Funk & Fusion scene. Classic and contemporary at the same time, Deux is built for the like-minded souls still looking for the perfect beat.
Available on November 19th 2021 as Tip-On Vinyl LP & CD.
GEORGIA's new kaleidoscopic hyper-music-entity "State Effect (Accel)" expands the NYC's duo project in a high-dimensional phase space—and does so within their all-kind-of-music frame.
State Effect (Accel) is happening this very moment, it is a positive cry for change—a brilliant plan.
This record is "viscous" — whatever I do, wherever I am, it sort of "sticks" to me.
It is "nonlocal" — its 'accelerated' effects are globally distributed through a huge tract of time. It forces me to experience time in an unusual way.
It is "phased" — I only experience pieces of it at any one time.
It is "inter-objective" — it consists of all kinds of other/multiple entities but it is not reducible to the sum of its parts.
This music reveals the present and its psychic dimension, no titles could have been more relevant.
Justin Tripp and Brian Close's new kaleidoscopic hyper-music-entity expands their GEORGIA project in a high-dimensional phase space. A great work of cognitive music mapping that plots all the states of a system — Lovely bubbly HTML.
The eight tracker long playing make extensive use of the vocal participation of Paris/Berlin-based artist/DJ MARYLOU aka OISEAU DANSEUR and Gabi Asfour of visionary NY fashion collective threeASFOUR.
Ottavia Records comes with OTTEP10 from G.I.N.O. who was part of the duo “Code Deploy” (which released music on labels such as Budare). The first track is “Alucinogeno” plenty of atmospher sounds and groove which are mixed with smooth vocals. Then, Dj Honesty comes with an incredible "Alucinogeno" remix, a highly effective dancefloor cut in which you can find house vibes. For the 3rd reference, Franco Cinelli arrives with “Paramus” Remix, a track that will involve you from the beginning with solid bass lines and melodies, in an emotive deeper track. Finally Imperatrice & Groove Circus have versioned paramus and the result is a track plenty of groove and unexpected changes influenced by a music range from acid to minimal.
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