Beats Vinyl New Releases - News

The Time Is Yours - A year in the making, and Dogger & Mindstate’s return to 1985 Music. After the brilliant response from their Broken Home E.P last year, Dogger & Mindstate have been working hard to make sure they achieve the high bar they set. This is a fantastically musical EP and is proof that hard work is the cornerstone to their ethos and beliefs. This EP also features the legendary vocalists DRS and Liam Bailey, as well as Anile and K S R . True to form, they have excelled themselves once again. Out 3 July On vinyl and digital.

Masterworks Music are back on the vinyl trail with their 15th 12" release, with Italian disco stallion Gledd in charge of the disco funk.

While some EPs might offer some down time and lower-tempo numbers, Soul Shapes goes for the dancefloor jugular with all four cuts designed to get you up and grooving.

Lead track 'Light of Florence' cleverly builds with strings and stylish background synths before dropping into a soul-searching vocal and gorgeous keys. With driving percussion, a walking bassline and cleverly restrained dynamics, it builds and bubbles with endless groove.

Follow up 'I Just Want You' builds on that teasing disco funk by upping the tempo and adding in blaring horns, a sizzling Rhodes breakdown that will have you playing air keys and yet more disco groove. Peak time, warm up, opening slot, closing track - this will work anywhere.

On the flipside, 'Of Rainbows' is a brilliantly-worked filter disco track, cleverly teasing in the disco loop with drop-dead-gorgeous strings before dropping back down to a deep house (and we mean deeeeeep house) bassline that carries the track from start to finish.

Gledd closes out the all-killer EP with 'Your Mind.' With Chic-style wah-wah guitars, clever drum fills and yet another stonking bassline, it's another beautifully crafted disco groover that cleverly blurs the line between peak-time heater and perfect warm-up material.

Shaun Bateman takes centre stage for the latest release on Droogs under both of his Nolige and SB81 aliases respectively. As Nolige, ‘The Blue Hour’ is the holiest of Drum & Bass grails – a much sought af ter lost dub dating back to and damaging dance f loors f or over a decade. As SB81 ‘Drone Zone’ is future-bound with a nod to archetypal Drum & Bass foundations. A dualistic release that explores two sides of the artist.

These run of releases on ‘Existence Is Resistance’ comes from the Legendary Proto Garage Record Label ‘Same People’, and see’s Persian & Long time musical partner DJ Texsta, repressing some of their most pioneering UKG E.P.s.

Repressed for 2020 on White 12"

Irish Drum & Bass veteran Zero T returns to Amsterdam imprint The North Quarter with his “Former Self EP”. Following up from his ambitious multi-genre project “Baby Grand”, Zero T now strips things down to a focused five-track project that manoeuvres through a broad range of styles within Drum & Bass. From his Soulful reinterpretation of Mango x MathMan's “Lonely Night” to the dubbed out weight of “Clash” - with Bristol-based rising producer Myth - this is a well balanced EP that displays Zero T's expansive vision and is a testimony to his growth as a producer and technician.

7” single picture disc in clear plastic wallet

One of the most important artists in the development of the Horo sound, Astral Projection is the first full length ASC album for the Horo label. Astral Projection follows on clearly from 'Imagine The Future' with the development of the Grey Area sound progressing and becoming intrinsic to a large majority of ASC's current work. But this LP is not a Grey Area addendum, Astral Projection is a luminous artistic statement from a sonic perfectionist who the term 'sound designer' was made to define. An accomplished and much respected ambient producer, ASC weaves his talent for soaring emotive soundscapes with his undeniable rhythmic prowess across a cohesive 12 track sonic voyage that again accomplishes a rare goal in todays electronic music landscape - a commanding listen from beginning to end. Very few artists are as prolific and consistent as ASC, but we are confident Astral Projection will be revered as one of his finest moments in years to come.

Welsh DJ Sasha is active since the late ‘80s and achieved much success, both as a solo artist as with John Digweed. He was voted World No. 1 DJ in 2000 in the prestigious poll conducted by DJ Magazine (Dj Mag Top 100). His second album, Airdrawndagger, is considered as a masterpiece in the electronic music scene. It features co-production from Charlie May, Junkie XL and James Holden. Upon release, the album charted on the UK and US Albums Charts, peaking at number 18 and 157 respectively. The album features some of his best work, including “Bloodlock” (featuring James Holden) and the ultimate album closer “Wavy Gravy”.

This wonderful record is available as a limited edition of 1500 individually numbered copies on translucent red vinyl

Space•lab records launches its interstellar mission to bring wigglers and warpers from all corners of the galaxy with a V/A made in Birmingham. Adam Pits kicks things off with Real Taste Of Gravity, a rising, trancey journey with a wonderful proggy bassline and synths-a-twinkling. Desert Sound Colony & Dr. Baird combine for the warpy, acid-flecked bassy roller Space Bass Express before Breaka and Adam Pits join for a classy breaks track with bubbling EFX called The Show Must Go On, named after Nic reversed a van into a parked car after setting up the space•lab party where they all met. Inner Zone (Rupert Worthington, Alex Anderson and label head Nic Baird) round things off with their debut release Niaaru - a sunrise weeper for those who like breakbeats with their coco pops.

Asquith brings his own imitable brand of UK garage/rave/breaks hybrid to Hypercolour for an EP brimming with real underground vibes.

Hot on the heels of a series of 12”s on his own Asquith label, the Lobster Theremin head honcho drops four cuts of heavy, distorted bass brain melters on the ‘Time & Space’ EP.

Danish duo Lyra Valenza (aka Hjalte and Jens Konrad) operates on the outskirts of contemporary electronic dance music. Armed with a playful approach and a patchwork of digital and analogue equipment, Lyra Valenza carved their own space in the Copenhagen scene by genre-blending Jungle, UK Garage, and Footwork into a mix of forward-facing and euphoric dance music for 2020 and beyond. A testament to the duo's unique approach to sound design, they were selected for this year's SHAPE - a platform for innovative music and audiovisual art from Europe.

Lyra Valenza's latest EP, Nightshade Edition, is a package of sweet and dangerous cuts to the taste of dystopian romance. The prime dance floor material hits with metallic percussion and bursts of fluttering synths tuned with just the right amount of trance. From stepping UKG, to lush digital soundscapes, the four breaks heavy tracks are hyper-modern sonic experiments processed through a retrospective haze.

The Nightshade Edition EP is released on Lyra Valenza's own Petrola 80 label. It follows their 2018 debut EP "Scan Deliver" on UK imprint Opal Tapes and an appearance on this year's Kulør 006 compilation.

DJ Support
Marcel Dettmann - "thx"
Carista - "nice one! Love low b4. Thanks for sending"
The Black Madonna - "Great!"
Rroxymore - "really good EP !!!"
Desert Sound Colony - "All about that Sport Mode. Sick track!"
Danielle - "wickeddd!"
Otik - "this is seriously good"
Ciel - "wonderful release"

A lucid dream meeting of synth waves, aquatic jazz spirits and drum-triggered electronics.'Linha D'Água'translates as 'water lines', fitting for an album that traces boundaries between water and air through an echo chamber of dizzying oceanic layers and free flowing ideas.

This is not a record based on genres. It's an album that navigates through atmospheres, through explorations and discoveries, through curiosity and dialogue. The eight tracks were recorded in a single day in the studio, but it is the result of more than two years of collaborations.

Mauricio Takara and Carla Boregas are two towering figures of the Brazilian underground/experimental scene, where they provide the rhythm section for demented genre-bending trio Rakta. While that band is all ritual percussion and red-blooded passion, as a duo they're a blue-water flowing counterpoint. From the drums, Takara fires melodies and, with the synthesizer, Carla sculpts the sound. The result iscaught somewhere between abstract improvisation and propulsive rhythm. Each song's an organic layering of manipulated synthesizers and acoustic sounds; teasing new rhythms from the drum kit via MIDI (and a near-telekinetic bond between Carla and Mauricio).

Sometimes'Linha D'Água'driftsclosest to ambient music, as in the title track, in 'Mãe D'Ouro' and 'Bocca Chiusa'; sometimes it runs into free jazz, as in 'Traçado Entre Duas Linhas'. There are moments when Carla and Mauricio explore a universe of tension that comes closest to the cosmic music of 70s Germany, as in 'Rosa de Areia' and 'Constante de Distância'; in others they evoke the metallic sounds of Indonesian gamelan (on 'Execution').

Carla Boregas is a founding member of the band Rakta, which started in 2011. She co-founded Auta, a DIY space dedicated to adventurous music in São Paulo hosting artists like Feminine Hi-Fi and Deafkids. She is also part of the transdisciplinary duo Fronte Violeta.

Mauricio Takara also plays drums/percussion with the bands Hurtmold and São Paulo Underground (with trumpeter Rob Mazurek from Chicago). Takara has played with a dizzying array of improv / experimental / jazz figures such as Pharoah Sanders, Damo Suzuki, Yusef Lateef, Joe Lally (Fugazi), Naná Vasconcelos, Prefuse 73, Makoto Kawabata and more.

Repress...!

For the fourth release we welcome the crew the italian trio Paradise city Breakers with their debut EP. Heavily house and breaks influenced, the A side is direct and punchy, straight in-the-face, while the B side goes deeper and groovy, with a late morning vibe.
This 4 tracker EP is clearly made for the dance floor!

First Second Label drop their first 12' of the year from sub-tech stalwart and Woozy resident Sputnik One. Four tracks scaling intense percussive workouts and low end mutations. Early support from the likes of Ben UFO, re:ni, Peach & more.

Voiron debuts on Analogical Force with 'Drill'n'Voiron EP'. 5x Tracks where the 'fake Parisian' continues to blur the lines between genres through his own interpretation. Expect braindance blah blah blah inspired cuts so turn on those smoke machine and welcome to Voironland.

Swedish record label Trunkfunk celebrates the impressive landmark of 20 years releasing music with the first of a two-part vinyl sampler series. Championing the Scandanavian electronic sound, both samplers combined will form twelve tracks to be included in a twenty track compilation album to follow later this year.

“In this year of change, we wanted to reconnect with the roots of the label, inviting both old and new artists from our family to create twenty unreleased tracks to celebrate our 20th birthday. This compilation is a huge milestone for us and sets the tone for the future of Trunkfunk.” Trunkfunk

His Name Was Juri from Algorythm opens the release in style with celestial organ and lush bass. The track progresses with percussive elements creating an ever-growing state of hypnotism. Swedish house aficionados Jens Wickelgren and Polisen collaborate on It’s All Out, a classy piece created by the Jens Records and Compact disco label bosses. A murky bassline snakes in between breakbeat before bright keys shine through on this exuberant track. franskild, the Swedish production duo of Tim Soderstrom and Love Ojensa who have released on Kistuné Music and Lotss Records, bring their brand of melancholic and playful house music to Plastic Yacht.

Clarity’s first solo release on UVB-76 Music arrives in the form of a highly polished, firm footed quartet. Four grounded, heavyweight churners that sit proudly at the core of relevant Drum & Bass: Torsion, Stateless and Taking Effect.Across the three original compositions Clarity commands the frequencies of the contemporary breakbeat form. Completing the circle is Clarity’s remix of label mate Overlook’s All of Them Witches, an interpretive reimaging of an already bona- fide modern classic; poise, precision and execution.

Danny Scrilla returns for 2020 with six tracks of varying flavours for Cosmic Bridge. One of the key and foundational artists on the label, his sound is widely appreciated from forest raves to tiny basements alike.

DJ/producer Don Pascal has long been an advocate of fusing London’s sound system aesthetic with more traditional music from around the globe.

Following on from his 2014 release The Cali Experiment, (fusing Latin influences with the sounds of London’s underground club scene) we are happy to announce his forthcoming album The Dakar Experiment.

Featuring musicians from Senegal’s legendary evolving band Xalam, The Dakar Experiment is a sonic exploration fusing Senegalese musicianship and London’s Broken Beat scene.

As the homogenised sound of western pop permeates traditional music the world over, The Dakar Experiment offers an alternate pallet of influence, retaining tradition yet suggesting other possible paths.

The foundations of the album were laid at Henri Guillabert’s studio in Dakar over most of 2016 with Moustapha - Taffa – Cisse, Yahael Camara Onono and of course Henri and Don, then completed in London with an array of musicians, pulling on the city’s vibrant and re-emergent Broken Beat scene.

Featuring vocals by Lyric L, Rich BLK and Niara Scarlett, and remixes by EVM128, Trev and Xtra Brux, The Dakar Experiment is an exercise in finding what connects us in an increasingly divisive world.

Low frequency mastermind, Zygos, makes his Albion Collective debut alongside returning roots commander, Dubbing Sun. Their single, “Cradle To The Grave”, empowers the dancefloor in a unifying steppas style. Intensifying the marching bassline, prophecies from Rider Shafique and Ras Addis urge the revolution forward.

Reinforcing the A-side, Digid leads the lion charge, churning the bassline with rock steady grit. Stripping the anthem back to stone-shaking 140, Somah rebuilds the B-side with Trinity Centre brickwork and trenchtown mortar.

Reaching forward while honouring its roots, Albion Collective adds new dubstep super-powers to its roster while welcoming back some of the label’s earliest titans. Zygos and Dubbing Sun’s original mix and its flips are set to keep raves stomping from the “Cradle To The Grave”.

Martin Khanja (aka Lord Spike Heart) and Sam Karugu emerge from Nairobi's flourishing underground metal scene as former members of the bands Lust of a Dying Breed and Seeds of Datura. Together in 2019 they formed Duma (Darkness in Kikuyu) with Sam abandoning bass for production and guitars and Lord Spike Heart providing extreme vocals to the project. Recorded at Nyege Nyege Studios in Kampala over three months in mid 2019 their self-titled debut album fuses the frenetic euphoria, unrelenting physicality and rebellious attitude of hardcore punk and trash metal with bone-crunching breakcore and raw, nihilist industrial noise through a claustrophobic vortex of visceral screams. The savant mix of brutally adrenalized drums, caustic industrial trap, shredding grindcore inspired guitars and abrupt speed changes create a darkly atmospheric menace and is lethal on tracks like the opener "Angels and Abysses" , "Omni" or "Uganda with Sam". The gruelling slow techno dirges and monolithic vocals on "Pembe 666" or "Sin Nature" add a pinch of dramatic inevitability bringing a new sense of theatricality and terrifying fate awaiting into the record's progression. A sinister sonic aggression of feral intensity with disregard for styles, Duma promises to impact the burgeoning African metal scene moving it into totally new, boundary-challenging experimental territories.

Sublime synth and guitar compositions from Echolog on this 7 track LP. I was first introduced to Otto's work via his Conversions tape on Constellation Tatsu, and on Conte he has created something really striking and unique. Each piece is filled with movement and melody beginning with the synth pulses of "Depart" and "Conte" to the slow motion ambient swells of "Reflection" and "Centre".

t's early 1992, and we'd just created our first track using nothing more than a 4 track sequencer loaded onto an Amiga plugged into a crude 8-bit sampler. That track was "Rock Ya Body". At that time I worked part time in Rob Haigh's Parliament Music Record shops and had got to know him well. I had no idea the impact that "Rock Ya Body" would have as we played a tape of that first recording to Rob. On the strength of that one track, Rob decided to start up the PM label there and then. We sealed the deal over a few cans of Stella and it wasn't long before we'd written 3 more tracks. The tracks were mastered and recorded in Rob Playford's makeshift studio, who had just started his journey with Moving Shadow. Simon & Mark were now Syko & Mak and the Murda EP became the first release on the PM label. Remastered by Syko and Mike Badger during Lockdown 2020; unearthing and using stems and parts from the original tracks. This EP is where it all started...

Fresh from hot releases on HAVEN & Rave Selekts Dublin’s Tommy Holohan debuts on Dance Trax with 2 breakbeat-tek-crunch anthems - all systems go!

repressed!

Offering a visionary approach to the solo guitar, Milanese experimentalist Alessandra Novaga, delivers an expansive meditation on the late filmmaker, Derek Jarman, with "I Should Have Been a Gardener", presented by Die Schachtel.

Alessandra Novaga is among the leading figures within Italy’s thriving new, experimental, and improvised music scene, consistently rendering striking solo efforts, as well as equally noteworthy collaborating with Stefano Pilia, Paula Matthusen, Elliott Sharp, Sandro Mussida, Travis Just, and others. Remarkably ambitious and forward thinking, her approach to the guitar veers from the trajectories of visceral emotiveness and textural extended techniques that have held sway over the instruments applications within avant-garde contexts over the last half century, encountering her relentlessly deconstructing and rethinking its unique properties through applications of structure, resonance, space, and tone.

"I Should Have Been a Gardener" - building on from the territory explored within 2017’s "Fassbinder Wunderkammer" - is Novaga’s second LP to draw conceptually on her love for film. Rather than focusing on a fixed point of inspiration, the album takes form as a distillation, pulling from across the unique life, death, work, political commitment, and diaries of Derek Jarman. Emerging as an ethereal aural portrait of the man, sound - interventions of tonality with non-instrumental sources - and silence join in a single, unified body that seeks redemption and purification at the boundaries of life; an imprint that, like Jarman’s garden at Prospect Cottage, is magical - flowers blooming between the stones - hovering in the stark space between an endless sea and post-modern shadow of a nuclear power plant.

As remarkably listenable as it is challenging and pregnant with ideas, Novaga’s "I Should Have Been a Gardener" represents a strikingly at ease step forward in the potentialities of experimental music. Bravely taking on the ubiquitous expectations of the guitar, Novaga refused to relinquish the clarity of source and sound, forcing the ear to rethink what is accepted and known at every turn. An immersive journey from one of Italy's most important contemporary voices..

Dawl + Sween are back on Klasse Wrecks with a follow up to their well received 'Rise of the Humanoids' EP from 2018. The UK DJ-Producer combo is back with more of the same classic Electro-Break sonics that had the fans of the first EP feinding so hard. The mantra seems to be similar too, no frills and direct to the point with equal parts Bleep and Rave thrown in resulting in a no brainer buy of a record. SWITCH!

Derek Baron is a composer, musician, and artist. Curtain is a diary. Both in musical and non-musical situations, they attribute a filmic quality to their journal-like aural self-documentation. Dreams turn real then dissolve. Single phrases and events arrive and leave, abruptly. Yet, the overall sense of place that Baron creates is understood.

Opening Curtain is the eponymous piece. A 21-minute live chamber work for quintet recorded in 2018. A musical assemblage of glued-together fragments and scraps of sheet music from Baron’s past. Compositions wrote in the small margins and folds of paper; illustrated in the art booklet included with the LP. The flute, violin, guitar, keyboard, and bass clarinet phrases saunter at a pre-sleep pace, until a subdued, yet ecstatic Mass theme ushers in periodically. Delivering the warmth of life… it is a slow beauty. It brings me such happiness listening to this piece. Its continuity is cut with scissors and pasted about oddly… all soaked in a certain malaise; a resigned grace.

The next piece and other side of the LP, “Chancel,” is rather different. An audio journal flipped through, dropped on the ground, picked up and opened to another page. A confusing montage of world-ized musical snatches: car radios, church choirs emanating to the streets, moldy organs, domestic piano recordings. Similarly, machine vibrations, bodega conversations, and other environmental observations segue the harmony and disharmony of this listening experience. I’ll finish with some of Derek’s notes from the booklet: “Co-opting new achievements / Thank you for this incredible demonstration / This theatre of procedures / This consoling play of recognitions / No theatre but “what’s that”, / Nowhere for the silver ball to roll to. / How are we so in love.”

Composed, produced, and arranged by Eartheater alone, Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin draws a path back to the primordial lava lake from which she first emerged, as it also testifies to the reincarnating resurrections the project has undergone over its first full decade of existence. While the album renews her focus on guitar performance and legible structure, Eartheater balances the unabashed prettiness of acoustic harmonic songs with the dissonant gestural embroidery of oblique instrumentals. Having fallen back in love with the idioms that first captivated her, she worked to crack open the techniques that had fossilized inside of her, while still seeking to apply the electro-alchemical knowledge she picked up along her journey. The result of a laborious revival in fire, Phoenix recontextualizes Eartheater’s combinatorial approach to production within her most confident abstractions, adjacent to some of her most direct songs to date.

Eartheater composed and workshopped most of Phoenix over a ten-week artist residency (FUGA) in Zaragoza, Spain, housed in a sprawling, cubic glass facility that looked out over wildflower-flecked mountains. Following an intensive period of recording and touring, the residency provided her with an unprecedented period of solitude in the small Spanish town. Her newfound sense of isolation ultimately became liberating, leading her to sidestep the crutches and steady grids inherent to electronic music, and to conceive pieces rooted in her guitar and her desire to perform with other players live.

Eartheater’s voice glows brighter than ever at the center of Phoenix’s arrangements — her familiar operatic highs are grounded by newly expanded velvety lows, leaping lucidly up and down octaves. Her intricate guitar work flits across baroque fingerpicked passages and latches into cyclical figures that meet her voice in lush harmonic progressions. From her own guitar parts, to the orchestral string arrangements she wrote for the Spanish conservatory group Ensemble de Camara, to the harp and violin lines performed by her close friends and collaborators Marilu Donovan and Adam Markiewicz of LEYA, Eartheater’s applications of acoustic instruments bring an extraordinary emotional emphasis to her compositions. Phoenix prepares for a future where electronic sound — or even electricity itself — isn’t guaranteed, but where her music could still come to life with a group of hands dexterously winding across instruments against the light of the fire. Eartheater drew inspiration for Phoenix from geological imagery, whose turbulence and potential for genesis mirror the trajectory of her own life and relationships. The album’s instrumental pieces directly reference these moments of upheaval, colliding audio of volcano and lightning storms with resplendent string and vocal arrangements. “Volcano” looks out over the album from its peak at the center, its tectonic plates colliding in towering melodies and layers of vocal harmonies, as piano accents crest and cascade down the mountainside. When Eartheater sings, “I’m still building mountains underground,” she is trying to reconcile the pinnacles of her ambition with the comforts of a simple existence buried beneath the surface. “Diamond in the Bedrock” finds her admiring the gemstone forming under intense pressure inside her, but rejecting the romantic promise that the diamond signifies, choosing instead to escape a relationship that has come to stifle her.

With the album’s subtitle, Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin, Eartheater imagines being tempered to a state of perfect equilibrium, suspended between melting and freezing, where fire could streak across her body and appear as a crystalline blush. This image captures the tension at the heart of the Eartheater project, as she decides how best to distill her passion and render it cool to the touch; to find beauty in simple pleasure, while keeping one eye fixed on the peaks that loom in the horizon. The album is mixed by Kiri Stensby and mastered by Heba Kadry, featuring photography by Daniel Sannwald.