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The long-awaited DJ Sprinkles reworkings of Will Long’s Acid Trax finally arrive on vinyl, beginning with this first instalment in a three-part EP series via Comatonse. Mastered by Terre Thaemlitz and cut by Rashad Becker, EP 1 features DJ Sprinkles’ ‘Acid Dog’ remix – a resoundingly trippy, sensual 11-minute journey of padded subs, shimmering percussion and richly layered 303 tones. One of the most immersive entries in the Sprinkles catalogue, it’s club music with both emotional depth and hypnotic power.
On the flip, Long’s original takes a more minimal approach, delivering a meditative groove that floats raw drum machine rhythms and restrained 303 sequences in wide-open space. Both tracks embrace the ascetic, introspective aesthetics that define this project.
Note: The correct tracks on this 12” are ‘Acid Trax N’ and ‘Acid Dog (DJ Sprinkles Remix)’ – centre labels are incorrect.
Artwork by Terre Thaemlitz.
CEM has gained international notoriety over the past years for bewitching club and festival audiences alike with his feverish, polymorphic and richly referential DJ sets. For his debut full-length album, FORMA, the Berlin-based Herrensauna founder momentarily departs the dancefl oor, instead contributing a refl ective and at times menacing compositional study on terror and temporal anachronism for our perplexing times. All six pieces were originally commissioned to accompany Portuguese artist Mauro Ventura’s performative installation of the same name, shown fi rst at the Volksbühne in 2022; the work engaged notions of labor and repetition through a multiplicity of gestural and corporeal interventions. Featured prominently on FORMA are the sound of bells—doorbells, meditative bowls, farm cowbells, Shinto bells—a motif CEM distills repeatedly onto the record to presage and work through both the violent specter of order and discipline, as well as the reparative qualities of harmony and retreat.
Opening the album with poignant synths, granulated bell hits, and double bass string drones is “The Calling”, which summons listeners into a rattling and twisting soundscape that dichotomously channels alertness and serenity at once. “Bells Corrupt”, in turn, transforms the comforting chime of bells into an alarming and insistent pattern as it evolves in pitch and form, recalling the anxious fi lm grammar of Italian giallo legends Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento or Czech animator Jan Švankmajer. “An Industrial Satire” is conceived as an homage to experimentalist Limpe Fuchs, known for her Dadaist use of self-made, metallic instruments and strings. The second part of the piece takes a staggering turn with the addition of ghaita—a Northern Moroccan double reed horn with a series of holes—sampled from the Master Musicians of Joujouka’s collaborative 1971 album with Brian Jones and layered alongside CEM’s own percussion work. The horn elements—linked to the ancient fertility rites of Pan—here culminate in a melodic embodiment of panic and celebration. “Statue Garden” is a minimalist organ drone piece interlaced with fi eld recordings accumulated through the musician’s recent travels across East Asia. Its dexterous balance of stillness and depth provides a contemplative interlude amidst the album’s vigour. The album closes on a provocative note with “The Sincerity Test” that features Berlin-based Lithuanian performance artist Gertrūda Gilytė, whose wry spoken-word intervention mirrors the kind of grotesque, deluded ‘positive affirmations’ that abounds on social media, suggesting a relatedness between narcissistic online speak and the rise of reactionary politics.
CEM is no stranger to the ever-threatening past and present of fascism, having been raised in Vienna within a Turkish-Kurdish immigrant household. FORMA thus emerges as a militant sonic offering and, through its razor-sharp interweaving of atmosphere and texture, conjures a fractured, albeit elegiac, space of possibility wherein time is out of joint and the circular motion of history with a capital H is dizzyingly thrown into disarray. As our world rushes forward into the past, casting dissonant spells might turn out to be our last rempart.
"A growing, single-minded confidence in his thing practically makes time stand still and places us right in the moment and momentum of the music. Crucially, whilst clearly referencing foundational styles, it’s a masterclass in innovation not imitation" - boomkat
Carrier presents Tender Spirits, the third turn on his eponymous series that explores his abstractions at its most sparse and cerebral.
Space maintains great purpose for Guy Brewer, having experimented with this previously for multiple drum-focused missives as Carrier. On his latest release, he treads deeper into the furthest regions of dub deconstruction, with Tender Spirits offering a serene path to the inbetween.
Across 8+ minutes, Light Candles, To Mark The Way moves towards the muted sublime; a gentle half time’d bliss that ebbs and floats across the enveloping mist. Slow Punctures gradually returns to dusk, eerily surveying the hollowed-out remains of its dub architecture with an off-kilter lurch. Carpathian echoes further in stark reduction, a weightless atonal zone anchored by the abstracted pressure suspended within.
Tender Spirits tracks Carrier at exciting new parallels, unfurling his most ascendant and capacious music to date.
Narciso has been running parallel to most of his contemporaries, staying close to the main lane but researching in his own distinctive way. He takes pride in "being free from limitations and conventions. To me, music doesn't follow fixed rules; it is a field for experimentation, where any sound can be transformed into something pleasing to the ear". Depending on what one considers "pleasing", this is a pretty challenging set of tracks. The artist never loses the balance, though, mindful of a certain "dance" context in which this music thrives, but it is also that same context that is being constantly twisted and reshaped into other forms. Some of those provide fresh ground for others to follow; some are of such individuality that no one else dares disturbance; some quickly return to a safer way of communication.
"Diferenciado" does communicate, but like words can be changed to sound different and still mean the same, such are music and sound with Narciso. It's not about alienation of the listener nor alienation of the self from the surrounding areas. "I believe music is present in everything around us." And if anyone can say her/his/their music "reflects vision, experience and perception", you know the end result is not often surprising or even that different from previous examples. Well, we stand by "Diferenciado" in its obvious distinctiveness, and if all the blurb so far may read like a nervous justification it's just because of the excitement in helping put this out into the world.
As a founding element of RS Produções, where Nuno Beats, DJ Lima, DJ Nulo and Farucox are also found, Narciso has been contributing to a spiritual and creative atmosphere that permeates the environs of Lisbon where that golden, inspired air has to fight for space with many kinds of instability. The beauty and drama of opening tracks "Ziu Ziu" and "Cabelinho" (this one with mate Farucox) should be able to touch any sensitive soul that appreciates the quirkiness often attached to pure expression. As in "Pipipi" too, for example, where melody and rhythm gently and moodily lead you into a brief but sudden interruption feeling like a change into another state of being. Do not shy away. Narciso steps up as himself, not as representative of whatever or whoever.
Japanese bamboo flute maestro and goat (JP) cohort Rai Tateishi makes an impressive debut statement with his holistic attempts to transcend the limits of ancient instruments to reveal gently delirious insights comparable with Jon Hassell, Phew, Bendik Giske, FUJI|||||||||||TA.
‘Presence’ is a triumph of improvised, elemental musicality that distills aspects of myriad folk traditions in pursuit of the artist’s own truth. For 40 minutes of singularly weird, locked-in performance, Rai Tateishi diverges his formative training in the shinobue (a bamboo flute) to applications for its elder sibling, the shakuhachi, and its distant relatives in the khene mouth organ of Northeastern Thailand and Laos, and even the Irish flute, with remarkable results returned from each.
Piece to piece, Tateishi adapts a spectra of unusual and extended instrumental experiments to articulate uniquely animist sound arrangements, with judicious use of a ring modulator and delay effects only subtly altering his sound in real-time, gelling the harmonics and smoothing off its contours. Some 15 years of studies and accreted knowledge of histories, timelines, and spirits are deftly tattered in the air and rebound in precisely complex ribbons that become all the more impressive by virtue of its in-the-moment recording.
Presented with no overdubs, the six works were recorded by label head and KAKUHAN/goat lynchpin Koshiro Hino across three days of adventurous improvisation capturing the breadth of Tateishi’s vision in a mix of succinct flights of fancy and one durational wonder where he really cuts loose. An opening piece of rapid percussive fingering and rasping sets the tone for increasingly intricate explorations of the shinobue, and bluesy cadence of a reedy Thai khene - antecedent of the shō - whipped into headier harmonic overtones, whilst his 5th piece for Irish flute best recalls Ka Baird or Michael O’Shea’s lysergic impishness, and a 13 minute closing piece most boldly fucks with folk and jazz traditions, in-depth and with the genre short-circuiting audacity of Rahsaan Roland Kirk.
Landing in the wake of prism-shaking works by Will Guthrie & Mark Fell, goat (jp) and Kakuhan; Tateishi’s ‘Presence’ more than lives up to NAKID’s impressive levels, unflinchingly operating by its wits with a verve and dare-to-differ moxie that gets at it from the first hit to the last, harnessing the kind of skill and ingenuity that’s distinctive but still strikingly minimal and overwhelmingly physical. It's a remarkable achievement.
Originally named „Merz“, this album should have been Merzbow's first vinyl release, but never came out on vinyl. So actually "Yantra Material Action" is „Material Action 1“, recorded in 1981 - with sticker and insert
The clear vinyl version is only available in the limited 99 copies boxset "artefAKTs from the Early Japanese Experimental Noise Music Scene"
Heavy, heavy, heavyyyyy rhythmic madness from Shackleton, Scotch Rolex and Omutaba, invoking new rhythmic traditions on an enchanted debut album for Nyege Nyege Tapes, twisting galvanic rhythms from HHY & The Kampala Unit's Omutaba into sozzled, psychedelic peregrinations. Dubby, kinetic and viciously mind-bending, it's peak gear if you're into anything from African Head Charge to Mark Ernestus' Ndagga Rhythm Force.
Leading on from Shackleton and Scotch Rolex’s maiden merger, ‘Death by Tickling’ in 2023, the duo pull in the dextrous limbs of Omutaba - known from his work with STILL, Metal Preyers and HHY & The Kampala Unit - for a dervishing session of dubbed-out and tumbling polyrhythms and psychoactive vibes as Three Hands of Doom. Shackleton’s hand on the tiller is patently apparent but, as with his recent works with Heather Leigh and Wacław Zimpel, he proves a mutable collaborator and porous to the shared spirits of fellow electronic music journeymen Scotch Rolex and Uganda’s Omutaba in four swingeing sections defined by their joint ability to diffract the flow between rolling and irregular grooves.
‘Ring Dirt’ opens the session with a limber display of monotone strings and suspenseful synth work that calls to mind Can sent economy class to the equator for ritual teachings. Enlightened, they proceed thru the lush, whorling metric calculations of ‘Insect Vibration’, layering shivering incantations and worm-charming subs with a frisson of field recordings. At this point fully attuned to each other, Omutaba’s Ugandan drumming is felt most powerfully meshed into the 10 minute matrix of rug-pulling and thunderous detonations to ‘Burnt Earth’, before they all buckle into the outright dread of a standout eponymous title tune that appears to follow rhythms from the Congo thru West Africa, to Haiti, via Japan and Berlin, and back to Uganda.
Both Shackleton and Ishihara have been on blistering form in the last couple of years, and 'Three Hands of Doom' feels like both a continuation and an extension of last year's 'Death By Tickling', weaponizing Omutaba's exhilarating playing into something that feels much, much more than the sum of its parts.
When Jako Maron reimagined Réunion island's politically-charged maloya sound on 'The electro Maloya experiments of Jako Maron', he focused on the genre's distinctive, revolutionary rhythms. Electro-plating the call-and-response thuds, he used the language of techno to upset the expected template, disrupting maloya's 6/8 pulse with modular bleeps and Roland kicks. He takes a different approach on 'Mahavélouz', focusing on the bobre, traditional maloya's only melodic instrument, a long bow amplified by a calabash that's known as the berimbau in Brazil. Maron was fascinated by the bobre's unique sonic signature, and noted that when it's usually played, it's drowned out by the louder percussive instruments. So he enlisted a number of traditional bobre performers to play a series of solos, using them to guide the album's four lead tracks and distorting and compressing the serrated hits until they stood confidently in front of his undulating roulér (bass drum) and sati (hi-hat) patterns.
"These four pieces are the culmination of my research into electronic maloya," explains Maron. "There's no need for words on this music; the bobre is the voice, and it is an ancestral voice. It's a reimagining of maloya kabaré in an electro form." This is the music that Maron has used to drive his recent live performances, so it prioritizes maloya's dancefloor potential. Swapping the traditional roulér and sati sounds for TR-606, TR-909 and TR-707 hits, he generates a hypnotic roll on opening track 'Paré po saviré' (rise up), forming a rubbery backdrop for Amemoutoulaop's acidic bobre twangs. Maron describes the track as a "call to bring spirits and people together", and using piercing feedback squeals to harmonize with the bobre, he introduces us to the voice that anchors the entire album. On 'Bék dann dir (try harder), he augments the bobre with glassy Korg Polysix chimes and Machinedrum sounds, and 'Zésprimaron'(the Maron spirit), ushers us towards a ceremony, shuffling his rhythm into a ritualistic throb, and using squelchy synth sounds to flutter into a trance.
Maron concludes his live bobre experiments with '1 piton 3 filaos' (one hill and three trees), and it's his most ambitious fusion, with hallucinatory flutes and technoid stabs rising weightlessly in-between Amemoutoulaop's frenetic performance. But this isn't the end of his investigation: Maron fleshes out 'Mahavélouz' with tonal studies that replicate the bobre synthetically. On 'Mdé prototrash', the characteristic ping is re-created by his modular system, and it's almost indistinguishable from the original instrument, buzzing and popping alongside Maron's surging percussion. The sound is more uncanny on 'dann kér Mahaveli' (in the heart of marvelous land) but no less affecting, knotted around synthetic bird calls and entrancing warbles. Even more idiosyncratic than its predecessors, 'Mahavélouz' is a bold step forward for Maron that builds on ancient foundations to construct a staggeringly new kind of dance music.
Anderson do Paraíso is one of the most influential and seminal DJs and producers behind the downtempo and dark baile funk sound of the city of Belo Horizonte. At 27 years old, the artist gained notoriety with songs that draw an unusual ghostly atmosphere full of suspense and mystery to the frantic whirl of the famous Brazilian beat.
Anderson started producing music in his bedroom in 2012, taking the Tamborzão funk from Rio de Janeiro as a reference. But his sound went through a profound transformation between 2015 and 2016 when he started attending Baile do Serrão, the street party in Aglomerado da Serra—the largest favela in Belo Horizonte and the second-largest group of favelas in Latin America.
When Anderson started going to Baile da Serra, the funk parties in Belo Horizonte were also experiencing a remaking in their geography and sound. The city has a funk scene whose history goes back to the 1980s. However, until the 2000s, the main bailes took place in closed spaces, on sports club courts, like Baile da Vilarinho. The music back then was closer to hip hop, with MCs singing verses about the hard times in the hood, violence, crime, hope, and faith in better days ahead.
However, in the mid-2010s, the bailes were popping up in the streets of favelas. And it was there that a completely new musicality emerged. The MCs focused on verses about sex, drugs, and having fun, while the beatmakers began to invest in more minimalist and ambient arrangements, with slow pace and full of reverb, highlighting beats with high frequencies, as heard in "Sadomasoquista" and "Duvida Não Letícia". This is the sound of Funk BH (or Funk Mineiro), a scene that has been influencing musicians on a national scale as Belo Horizonte DJs and MCs amass hits on streaming charts and go viral on TikTok.
Anderson do Paraíso— o "queridão", the "dearest," as he is also known— is one of the sound architects of this music. His signature is the contrast of electronic elements (such as the robotic sounds of "Todas Elas ao Mesmo Tempo" and the trap hi-hats in "Pincelada de Angolano") with classical music instruments, such as the piano in "Se Faz de Santinha," the violins in "Aula de Putaria," the soprano backing vocals in "Quarentena Cheia de Ódio" and the timpani used as snare in "Blogueira Que Virou Puta". "União dos Rlk" is a collab with two other producers, Ph da Serra and Vitin do PC, that showcases a intricate sound craft and a futurist vision of the genre in mixing different types of baile funk beats in a single track.
Brazilian funk became internationally known for its chaotic energy. However, Anderson's music has an unorthodox and innovative approach that strips down its elements for a radical minimal sound, underlining silence to build a cinematic suspense. "Blogueira Que Virou Puta" showcases the whispery voice of MC Paulin do G floating in a refined and sparse structure oscillating between sensuality and terror, while the haunted bells of "Chama as Sua Colegas' and the choir of "Ultimo Medo do Ano" conjures an haunted aura of baile funk. And yet people create different ways to dance to this sound, stretching the boundaries of the dancefloor.
Anchored by splintering syncopated beats and dramatic brass arrangements, 'TURBO MELTDOWN' is the forward-facing second chapter from HHY & The Kampala Unit - aka Portuguese sonic alchemist Jonathan Uliel Saldanha and Ugandan vocalist and horn player Florence Nandawula. The duo composed this one on the road, advancing the spiritual narrative they lavishly sketched out on 2020's 'Lithium Blast' and venturing into gloomier backstreets, adding cinematic pressure to their energetic fusion of mutant rhythms and apocalyptic fanfares.
Nandawula and Saldhana devised the project as a way to alloy their shared interest in diverse interconnected sounds - from gqom, jungle and funk to vintage horror soundtracks - and they view HHY & The Kampala unit as a collective effort. There's an extended cast on show here, with contributions from the Ugandan Homeland Brass Band's Kintu Jacob on trombone, and Congolese Afrofuturist collective Fulu Miziki's Sekelembele on percussion and vocals. On stage, they're also joined by dancer Junia and multidisciplinary artist Exocé Kasongo, both of whom help translate the collective's sonic concept into a hard-hitting, visceral experience.
Tense marching band snares lead us ominously into opener 'APEXPREDATOR', cut with gqom-inspired percussive snaps and backed up by Nandawula's audacious horns, that split the difference between Funkadelic and Prince. It's music that tramples over any pre-conceived genre boundaries, fitting gurgling AutoTuned adlibs and noisy electrical interference between its surging kicks. This time around, HHY & The Kampala unit train their gaze on storytelling, composing a spine-chilling, sci-fi tinged soundtrack to a disturbing dystopian future.
On 'NEON VEIL COLLAPSE', Nandawula's reverberating trumpet and trombone blasts perforate a dense mass of woody traditional rhythms that Saldanha interrupts with rave-ready hoover womps, and she captures the spectacle of Akira Ifukube's iconic 'Godzilla' OST (famously sampled by Pharoahe Monch on 'Simon Says') on 'RESONANCE RIOT', adding some monster movie zest to Saldanha's pneumatic ballroom-like thrust. 'TURBO MELTDOWN' is an album that never stops advancing, crashing through the neon-lit wreckage of a doomed civilization and orchestrating a party at the end of the world.
Prolific Portuguese musician and visual artist Jonathan Uliel Saldanha - of HHY & The Macumbas/The Kampala Unit - might be best known for his noisy, experimental excursions, but he's long been fascinated by the possibilities offered by the human voice. He's already composed a slew of choral pieces, such as 'Khōrus Anima', 'Del' and 'Plethora', and his last, 'Santa Viscera Tua', was an ambitious project for 150 voices. On 'Kembo', he builds on these experiences significantly, examining the commonality and shared spirituality of vocal music alongside the Kingdom Ulfame Choir, a seven-piece Uganda-based group of Congolese singers. The collaboration began at Nyege Nyege's Kampala studio, where Saldanha and the choir took the time to figure out their direction, singing together in an imagined language concocted from elements of Lingala, Swahili, Kikongo and French. Considering pre-linguistic communication, liturgical music and glossolalia (better known as speaking in tongues), their improvisations evolved into trances, with Saldanha's discreet electronic augmentations used only to accent the melodies and harmonies.
This process stands out immediately on opening track 'Boya Kotala' when the group trade poignant solos over Saldanha's aerated choral drones and ominous synthesized bass. The voices are suspended in time, cautiously referencing sacred music but disregarding the expected tropes, leaving hypnotic vapors that gust through the entire suite. 'Tokumisa Nzambe' is remarkably different, adding a brittle electro-acoustic pulse to the choir's tangled phrases that are ornamented with rhythmic chants and layered melodic outbursts. "Hallelujah," they repeat on 'Hosana', reaching back to familiar praise songs and building to a jubilant crescendo of voices. And later, on 'Nzambe Bolingo', the group's impassioned recitations are threaded through chopped, percussive vocalizations and exhalations. Taking a brief breather, Kingdom Molongi's words coalesce into a calming lullaby on the hushed 'Emanuel', and their appreciation of classic soul and gospel fizzes to the surface on 'Maloba ya Motema Nangai' with virtuosic wordless phrases that speak to the roots of the music, not its contemporary application.
'Kembo' is an album that investigates not just the mutability of language itself, but time, wondering how words and themes are reshaped as they tumble through history, picking up influences from various folk traditions, idiosyncratic pop forms and diverse quasi-religious expressions. Most of all though, Kingdom Molongi manage to highlight the enduring relationship between the voice and the spirit, and the transformative power of choral music.
Hailing from Tanzania's bustling cultural hub Dar Es Salaam - the biggest city in East Africa - young beatmaker DJ Travella is setting the breakneck pace for its musical evolution. He's been producing since he was just 10 years old and has already bent singeli into surprising new shapes, welding euphoric EDM breakdowns and earworm-y R&B riffs to the Tanzanian genre's frenetic rhythms. 'Twende' is a straight-to-the-point set of the producer's most requested secret weapons - four hyper-melodic floor fillers that were developed shortly after releasing his acclaimed debut album 'Mr Mixondo'. Featured on his popular Boiler Room performance, these tracks will be familiar to anyone who's managed to catch one of his sets.
Starting things out right with 'Trust', a wonky, festival-ready 170BPM ass shaker that shuffles a familiar singeli beat around wormy synths, Travella keeps things moving with the blink-and-you'll-miss-it 'Believe', a minute and a half of brassy pop fanfares and buzzing rhythms. On 'Mchakamchaka' he introduces quivering soukous guitar phrases into the mix, keeping up the momentum with crowd noise and pneumatic sound design vamps, and 'Vumbi Vumbi' slows things down, just a bit, splaying plasticky, acidic leads over blown-out syncopated beats. It's one for the feet, no doubt.
Recorded in Kampala, 'Mapambazuko' pairs Peruvian artist and researcher Alejandra Cárdenas (aka Ale Hop) with Congolese guitarist Titi Bakorta, who locate a balmy junction between their respective approaches. Bakorta's debut album 'Molende', released on Nyege Nyege Tapes in 2023, was an eccentric rumination on his years performing a unique fusion of Congolese soukous and folk sounds, and 'Mapambazuko' picks up where it left off, looping Bakorta's wiry guitar solos around Cárdenas' psychedelic Afro-Latin rhythms and fractured synths. Cárdenas' last run of albums have bounced her around the stylistic map: on the acclaimed 'Agua Dulce', she deconstructed traditional Peruvian rhythms with Laura Robles, while she traversed radically different territory on 2021's 'The life of Insects', imagining an abstract universe from the inside of a terrarium. All this experience - in pop music, electroacoustic experimentation and avant-garde minimalism - is applied to 'Mapambazuko' as she skews Bakorta's exuberant themes with subtle sound design elements and powerful, uncompromising drumwork.
Opener 'Bonne année' is a twitchy, effervescent party starter, with a frenetic rhythm from Cárdenas that gradually picks up grit, only enhancing the vivid soukous-inspired phrases from Bakorta. And on the title track, Bakorta's rubbery improvisations sound as if they're bouncing off Cárdenas' dissociated whirrs and squeals, while the duo's furious pulse holds their raw experimentation in check. Their worlds collide even more conspicuously on 'Una cumbia en Kinshasa', that identifies the similarities between psychedelic Peruvian cumbia and Congolese pop, and on 'Así baila el sintetizador' they ratchet up the tempo, smudging Bakorta's fictile riffs into Cárdenas' zesty oscillations. The acceleration only lets up on the album's gauzy finale 'Nitaangaza', where Bakorta plays dizzy psych-rock wails over Cárdenas' syrup-laced thuds and lopsided drones. And the album is filled out with three exclusive remixes. Kenyan sound artist KMRU strips the beat from 'Nitaangaza' and brings out its latent sensuality, adding light-headed pads and soft-hearted tones to re-contextualize the original track.
On her rework, Cárdenas augments 'Una cumbia en Kinshasa' with an even more belligerent rhythm, cutting further into Bakorta's glistening riffs and eventually guiding the track into chattering chaos. While Flora Yin-Wong marches towards the end credits with a sultry, percussive version of 'Así baila el sintetizador'. Slowing it down to a crawl and emphasizing the eerie, artificial landscape, Yin-Wong shines moonlight on Bakorta and Cárdenas' sun-baked grooves, providing the necessary wind-down as the party comes to an end.
The second volume of Nyege Nyege's career-spanning DJ Znobia retrospective, 'Inventor Vol. 2' continues the vital story of one of Africa's most influential artists - a producer, singer and DJ who's spent three decades inking his signature onto kuduro and tarraxinha. The label combed through Znobia's vast archives to assemble the four-volume set, picking out the most essential moments from over 700 tracks written between the late 1990s and the mid 2000s; these aren't just the expected dancefloor heaters either, but a sprawling anthology that shines a spotlight on Znobia's innovation and unhinged mastery.
On 'Inventor Vol. 2', Angola-born Sebastião Lopes' light-hearted sense of humor floats visibly to the surface. He samples the viral "Baby T-Pain" YouTube clip and flips it into a hypnotic wail on 'Choro do Corno', offsetting the melodic Auto-Tune layers with his idiosyncratic slowed-down kuduro thuds. Meanwhile, on the chaotic 'Beat Cursor', Znobia raids the Windows sound library, turning eerily familiar error chimes and message alert sirens into percussion that jerks and sways around urgent hand drum rolls and neck-snapping snares. But elsewhere, the magic that led vocal breakouts like 'Marimba' to cult status is thrust into the foreground.
Lopes' slippery, robotic voice curls through syrupy beats and FL Studio-powered electronic harp plucks on 'Sofre', mimics an early Talkbox on the electro-powered 'Dance Da Ma Ju' and shimmers into a soft, romantic coo on 'Monandengue'. Each track highlights the Angolan original's voracious appetite for experimentation, and expresses the parallels between Znobia's kuduro and tarraxinha innovations, and similar future-facing Afro-diasporic moves made in grime, early techno or Brazilian funk. Just check the wheezing synths, haunted flutes and hollow, driving percussion on 'Kuduro ou Hunderground', or the pizzicato blasts and garbled oscillations that shadow Os Bonitos' elastic rhymes on stand-out 'Wo Adji Wo'.
From humble beginnings, learning to mix with just a couple of semba LPs, DJ Znobia took his cues from local traditional sounds and used their groove to power a new musical movement. And with 'Inventor Vol. 2' we're provided with another piece of the puzzle, a sequence of visions that have provided the wider world with modernism, eccentricity and vision. We're still feeling the shockwaves, decades later.
Based in Kampala, Arsenal Mikebe are a groundbreaking Ugandan ensemble who playfully dance around the fringes of of acoustic and electronic music, infusing tempo-fluxed polyrhythms with dizzying chants and ghostly synthetic drones. The band is made up of percussionists Ssentongo Moses, Dratele Epiphany, Luyambi Vincent de Paul and was co-founded by Portugese sonic alchemist Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, together they straddle a unique custom instrument dreamt up by Ugandan master sculptor Henry Segamwenge, better known simply as Sega. By reverse engineering Roland's iconic TR-808 beatbox, they devised a steel-cast "percussion machine" that allows Arsenal Mikebe to seamlessly integrate bass-heavy electronic sounds into their frenetic performances, and it's this device that lies at the core of their debut album.
'DRUM MACHINE' is a rhythmic masterclass that's impossible to slot into any particular niche or other. Moses, Vincent and Dratele's kinetic beats appear to bisect each other, slipping between time signatures as fluidly as they pierce the membrane between the organic and the digital. On opening track 'Okuleekaana', brushy high-end hits coalesce into quivering patterns that bounce off the trio's guttural chants before the track's shuttled into peak-time by an ear-splitting distorted kick. Harsh death metal-style growls echo and spiral into the distance, and Sega's percussion machine is nudged into overdrive, its smorgasbord of distinctive pulses lifted skyward by glassy, evocative synths and resonant twangs.
It's extreme music, in a sense, but Arsenal Mikebe command startling dynamics, veering off course whenever possible. 'Omuzimu' is the perfect example, a labyrinth of itchy rhythms and anxious pauses that only slowly converges into a discernible beat, with its jerky bumps and muted crashes underpinned by eerie, almost inaudible B-movie whines and stifled shouts. And on the lengthy 'Boiller Omukka', the trio sing soulfully and wordlessly over feverish hollow thuds and cowbell knocks, referencing traditional Ugandan song forms while simultaneously excavating the bones of techno. It all builds up to the rubbery, intense 'Bell Ghost', that carves energetic vocal snippets into an undulating rhythmic concertina and fractalizes the atmosphere with swirling, psychedelic flutes and haunted intonations.
Since the release of 2021's 'Bubbling Inside' - a collection of Dutch wunderkind Guillermo Schuurman's most vital early productions, plus a few recent additions - the DJ and producer has been touring incessantly, introducing the wider world to his feet-forward, hybrid style. Rooted in the Netherlands' Afro-diasporic bubbling sound, it's an effervescent cocktail of dancehall, electro, EDM and R&B that fizzed to the surface back in the late 1980s, dominating Den Haag's vibrant club scene in the '90s and '00s. Spurred on by his uncle DJ Chippie, who helped co-found the genre, De Schuurman revitalized the movement in the late '00s, and has been instrumental in bringing bubbling back to the main stage, puzzling out its intersections with trap, techno and beyond.
'Bubbling Forever' is another unforgettable arsenal of acidic laser synths, Antillean tambu percussion and swirling vocal snippets, all anchored to an all-important dancehall swing - the backbone of the sound since its earliest days in Den Haag. Like its predecessor, the collection is a wide-reaching set of vintage cuts and twitchy new productions, kicking off with the curled 'Raw', an immaculate introduction to De Schuurman's world: cybernetic electronic swooshes, backed by rattling percussion and the kind of kicks that don't cut, they bounce. And although it's relatively hotfooted, De Schuurman's music is blessed with unexpected lightness, coaxing movement sensually rather than demanding it. On 'Stylez Two' for example, fiery screams and breakneck beats are disencumbered by steel drum chimes and cheery whistles, splitting the mood between the sweatbox and the carnival.
But De Schuurman's greatest talent is his ability to absorb ideas from all across the musical map. 'Scratchin' fuses urgent turntablist scrapes with nostalgic 8-bit bleeps, and on 'Bubbling Meets Kaseko', he teams up with DJ Electro to blend big-room air horns and wobbly synths with traditional Surinamese melodies and percussion. He even brings bubbling OG DJ Chuckie along on 'Gangster Sht 2', flipping rap samples and stuttering ATL trap percussion into a whirlwind peak-time banger. And there even a few moments when De Schuurman takes a breather and turns down the tempo a little: he pulls back on 'Fucked Up Industrie', layering tangy lead zaps over a hiccuping Caribbean step, and leads the album out horizontally with 'Fashion Week', curving plasticky flutes around piercing woodblock cracks.
Bubbling might be approaching its fourth decade, but with producers like De Schuurman constantly breathing new life into the formula, it's not about to disappear any time soon. 'Bubbling Forever' is some of the most viscous, energetic and original dancefloor material you're likely to hear this year. Play loud!
Growing up in Uganda, multi-disciplinary artist Ian Nnyanzi (aka Masaka Masaka) always knew he wanted to make music, he just needed enough time and breathing room to figure out what exactly his contribution had to be. He cut his teeth fashioning rudimentary hip-hop beats at a friend's studio on Makindye, a hill that overlooks Kampala's balmy Murchison Bay, and quickly realized that he wanted more. "Out here, everyone seems okay to listen to the same thing," he explains, and Nnyanzi wasn't interested in following the crowd. During regular commutes across the city, his mind was being cracked open by sounds from Dean Blunt, Slauson Malone, Arca, Jpegmafia and Vegyn; he knew he needed to show Kampala something similarly distinct.
'Barely Making Much' is a sprawling, ambitious album that's as sculptural as it is explorative, reaching through genre membranes and refusing to stay still for a second. Masaka Masaka wrote it over a fragmented two year period at Nyege Nyege's Kampala studio, and tapped into a jumble of interconnected sounds, from jungle and experimental hip-hop to techno and smoked-out, dubwise ambient music. He was particularly absorbed by the loose, open-minded production style he heard from Manchester's Sockethead, who makes an appearance on 'Before I go', a frayed tapestry of stuttering snares and floury breaks that billows into jazzy euphoria.
On 'cut right through', Masaka Masaka bends fictile piano hits through a lattice of Afro-Brazilian-style vocal chops, trap hi-hat rolls and serrated, synthesized bass thumps. Airy and energetic, the track makes an unexpected left turn when the hats transform into insectoid rasps that cushion a woody hand drum patter. Elsewhere, Nnyanzi isn't afraid to go straight for the jugular: on 'elv9t' he sets atmospheric, back room pads against booming, soundsystem-ready Southern rap subs, and on the kinetic 'let me out', he remolds hard techno in his image, knocking the 4/4 kick off grid to perplex seasoned dancers, and hammering the nail in further with swirling, psychedelic synth fuzz.
Even when Masaka Masaka's working in a more contemplative mode - like on the hypnotic title track and the fragile cinematic finale 'it's okay to dance alone' - he maintains the momentum, swirling otherworldly vocal loops and erratic percussion into pools of melted ambience. 'Barely Making Much' is a charming, hyperactive debut that wears its influences on its sleeve, playing like a lysergic, literate mixtape packed with layers and subtle gestures. Cool-headed and mysterious, it exposes the twilit side of the Kampala underground.
A twisted web of diverse musical references and puzzling ambiguities, NET GALA's debut full-length is either a noise album that's aimed squarely at the dancefloor or a future-proofed club transmission that's been muddled and obscured by incomprehensible distortions - maybe it's both. The title has been on the South Korean producer's mind since 2020, a tongue-in-cheek reference not just to the Korean-English (Konglish) pronunciation of Galápagos and NET GALA's queer identity, but to "Galápagos Syndrome", a term to describe isolated, localized developments within global businesses. In NET GALA's hands, it's an apt metaphor for both their idiosyncratic, hybrid sound and their similarly distinctive dissection of queerness away from the stifling structures of the global north. And across 11 frenetic, eccentric tracks, they reconfigure loose genre signifiers and queer cultural references, figuring out what these motifs might mean within a new framework. There are few entrenched definitions in South Korea, which gives NET GALA with a relatively blank canvas to paint an enigmatic sonic landscape that provides more questions than answers.
'Galapaggot' develops a sound NET GALA has been diligently refining over the last few years. They cut their teeth as a member of the local LGBTQ collective Shade Seoul, playing regularly at the notorious Cakeshop venue, and after releasing their dazzling first EP '[re:FLEX*ion]' on NBDKNW in 2019, spent time researching Shinpageuk, an early 20th century melodramatic theatrical style, to heighten the drama of 2021's SVBKVLT-released '신파 SHINPA'. This time around, they take an even broader view, surveying how far they're able to push dance music before it shatters into pieces. Samples are shoehorned into unseemly places, and snares and hats - the primary signifiers of many club sub-genres - have been eliminated, or swapped with alternate sounds. The result is an album that pulses with a familiar energy, but sounds completely unconventional. Nods to footwork, ballroom, grindcore and hard trance are obscured with jagged sonic contortions and hyperactive rhythmic quirks, ripped up and assembled into dazzling new shapes.
Punk/grindcore artist Supermotel K steps in to scream '90s and '00s Korean gay slang on 'The Dog', vocalizing sensually over NET GALA's galloping, blown-out kicks and trance-inducing synth cycles, and on 'Rac Cap Cu', NET GALA taps Vietnamese collective Rắn Cạp Đuôi to help elevate their epic club collage of grainy, militaristic rolls and celestial chimes, forming the track around a guitar riff from drummer Zach Sch. And NET GALA puts their own mark on ballroom with the pneumatic 'KATRINAKATRINAKATRINA' and 'Ha Dance'-approximating 'Cistem Boom', using the genre's rhythmic pulse and singular momentum as a springboard to jack up their quirky sound designs and and harsh distortions. On opening track 'Joappa' and its follow-up 'Paran', NET GALA injects fierceness and drama into footwork with frenetic tuned percussion and cynical eagle calls, and they push the volume to 11 on 'Warp This Pussy (For Kitty)', a cacophonous, jerky dancefloor weapon that's led by a playful vocal call.
Disturbing politics with humor and mischievous defiance in the face of misunderstanding, NET GALA makes a powerful statement with 'Galapaggot'. It's a bold album that ignores comfortable aesthetic stereotypes in favor of proposing a cunning new direction for Korean electronic music. And although it might be sometimes jarring, it turns frustration and uncertainty into a rallying call for the world's most nebulous fringes.
Is it noise? Jazz? Free improv? Rock 'n roll? Minimalism? Sound art? Punk? MOPCUT's third full-length is their most divergent, most genre liquefying statement yet, an album that creeps mischievously across the experimental scene at large, devouring its innovations and spitting away any lofty conceptual fat. With guest appearances from avant rap vanguard dälek, Philly poet and activist Moor Mother and esteemed turntablist and composer Mariam Rezaei, 'RYOK' oozes between various interconnected movements, constantly mutating and reanimating itself in the process. Unlike its predecessor 'JITTER', a set of 25 hyper-kinetic miniatures, 'RYOK' plays like cracked mirror image of classic album: nine dynamic, fully fleshed-out tracks that force us to question everything we think we know about structure, texture and physicality in music.
MOPCUT emerged back in 2018 as a collaboration between Taiwanese-American improv virtuoso Audrey Chen (on vocals and synth), celebrated Austrian percussionist Lukas König and idiosyncratic French guitarist Julien Desprez. Chen's visceral, electronically manipulated vocalizations - that range from guttural croaks to ear-piercing bawls - are already notorious at this stage thanks to a slew of vital solo works and diverse collaborations, while König's omnivorous approach to rhythm provides the backbone to albums like 2023's acclaimed '1 Above Minus Underground', and his collaboration with Elvin Brandhi and Peter Kutin, 'ParziFoooooooooooL'. Desprez, meanwhile, has spent decades turning a love of rock and jazz into an exploration of space and body movement, developing his own guitar technique that treats the motion of his feet on the effects pedals like a tap dance.
All of these various skills are laid out immediately on opening track 'SISMICA', when we hear Chen's stutters, wails and freeform improvised raps criss-cross with König's jerky stop-start beats and Desprez's juddering, metallic prangs. As an introduction, it works flawlessly, establishing the trio's sonic palette before they shift into fresh territory on 'WHERE TO BEGIN', forming their haphazard, chaotic noise into a bumpy beatscape for New Jersey MC dälek. Anyone who's been following dälek's output over the years will already know how comfortable he is rapping over unexpected backdrops, and his flow flawlessly marries with MOPCUT's punkish assemblage of oscillations, foley cracks and hoarse croaks. And after circling droned-out psychedelic rock on 'SEVEN ELEVEN', the trio curate an ominous, minimalist environment with 'REST TODAY', quieting their bluster for a moment to give Moor Mother's helium-voiced poetry the spotlight.
"I'm off," she squeaks. "No shadow, I'm beyond the planets." White noise hisses in the distance, while Chen's voice is reduced to a terrifying, phantasmagoric moan. This helps build the tension until MOPCUT's energy is released in under a minute on the title track, a rowdy improv-punk vignette that does exactly what it promises to. But it's the album's false ending 'Angelica' that provides the biggest surprise. A potent concoction of warbling, almost meditational drones, it's only intensified by Chen's unexpected operatic cries. It's not quite over yet, either: there's a "remix" from Mariam Rezaei that shows off her signature needle weaving technique, metamorphosing MOPCUT's live stems until they sound like industrial hardstyle, plus the 'TOPCUM REMIX', that ices the cake with a burst of instinctive machine noise.
On her moonlit second solo album, Hungarian Transylvanian vocalist, composer and performer Réka Csiszér composes an uncanny and chilling soundtrack that muddles the physical and spiritual realms, balancing crumbling realities with confident self-actualization. 'Danse des Larmes' is based on sketches commissioned for a theater production, and Csiszér widens the original concept of "Eastern European melancholy" by painting dreamlike memories from her childhood - of alienation, unconscious trauma and distress - into a hypnotic sequence of soundscapes that hum with tension, mystery and transcendence. She pulls from industrial music, dark ambient, Eastern European folk music and vintage horror soundtracks, smudging sludgy drones, dense electro-acoustic textures and her own breathtaking choral vocals until the roots vanish almost completely, leaving only ghostly traces behind.
The album follows Csiszér's acclaimed VÍZ debut 'Veils', a bold seven part audiovisual "body horror soundtrack" that spiraled out from her long-held interests in theater, cinema and opera. Those elements are still present on 'Danse des Larmes', but by examining her past, Csiszér is able to reach into the future, amalgamating gothic horror and speculative science-fiction. This is never more evident than on the album's eerie opening track 'Eden X', that juxtaposes wheezing synthesizer textures with soul-stirring choral echoes that liquefy into Csiszér's oily ambience. As the track washes to a close, Csiszér suspends her sounds in the silence, letting the obscured harmonies and rusted noise peer beyond the veil, setting the scene perfectly for the vastly different title track. Here, the influence of folk music bubbles to the surface, with distorted, eerily familiar vocal rotations that crack over woody environmental sounds. "I dreamt a dream tonight, that dreamers often lie," a processed voice speaks into the phantasmal forest. "In lovers arms they fade and die, I talk of dreams, I talk of lies, I dream of you, I dream of I."
Csiszér's voice is clearer still on the giallo-influenced 'Hyperálom', calling confidently across hymnal rhythms and woozy analog throbs, and on 'Angel's Throat', it's thrust into a parallel universe, reverberating wordlessly before Csiszér dexterously sculpts it into terrifying ferric shrieks and gaseous vapors. Elsewhere, she pays tribute to iconic Hungarian composer Mihály Víg on 'Vali 2.0', offering her own interpretation of 'Kész az egész', a piece featured in Béla Tarr’s 1987 film 'Kárhozat'. In Csiszér's hands, Víg's sardonic original is lifted into the clouds, obscured by celestial pads that drape around Csiszér's sensual, Julee Cruise-like vocals. It's a cunning way for Csiszér to trigger a memory and immediately obfuscate it, leaving a sense compelling disorientation in its wake. And that sense of terror and awe swirls throughout the album, questioning the horror of childhood trauma and the confusing echoes of the past and replacing it with something beautiful, and something new.
Made up of four lengthy hallucinogenic incantations, Het Zweet's first self-titled tape was originally released in 1983 and shouldn't be confused with the later 1987-released album of the same name. The project was conceived by Dutchman Marien Van Oers, who sadly passed away in 2013, leaving behind a breadcrumb trail of mysterious, ritualistic deployments pieced together using an arsenal of home-made instruments. And 'Het Zweet' finds Van Oers at his most mystifying and most primal, forming rudimentary sounds into surging, percussive atmospheres that peer back towards ancestral rhythmic geometries and caking his repetitions in ferric, industrial-era dirt. The name itself means "sweat" in Dutch, and there's an identifiably herculean quality to Van Oers' mantas - these aren't simply loops, by any means, but contemplative feats of endurance that reward patient, deep listeners.
Opening track 'Vocus' is the album's most haunted stretch, almost 12 minutes of spectral decelerated gloop that infuses a sequence of chants with the dilatory, caliginous energy of doom metal. There's an almost monastic quality to the pitch-skewed synths that introduce the composition, but that's quickly interrupted by molasses slow vocal cycles that rumble enigmatically next to Van Oers' barely audible vocalizations. The artist's kinetic drumming is thrust into the foreground on 'Tribus', but the ritual quality never disappears, his cyclic intonations adding color to the pebbly pots 'n pans cracks and cavernous oscillations. It's music that lodges itself between Muslimgauze and Z'EV, crafted for patient listeners who can perceive the elemental grooves lying just beneath Van Oers' trance-like patterns and discombobulating effects.
On 'Tribus', Van Oers intensifies the magick, playing a languid, lop-sided beat that twangs as it pierces the red, creating its own eerie distortion. Unmistakably psychedelic gear, it breaks down into wisps of guttural, groaning white noise and temple chimes that Van Oers uses to catch his breath before bellowing into a foghorn-like home-made pipe and rebooting the rhythm. And the closer 'Indus' is the album's most focused, starkest stretch, almost 15 minutes of gymnastic drumwork that's accompanied by a vocal mantra that simmers softly in the background. Over four decades later, 'Het Zweet' is still startlingly unique material; not quite industrial, not quite dark ambient and definitely not new age, it's music that's plugged into cultural history, re-imagining long-forgotten ceremonies as a feat of physical and spiritual endurance for both the performer and the listener.
A multidisciplinary artist and curator, Violaine Morgan Le Fur (aka Violence Gratuite) has spent the last few years sharpening her creative perspective, developing documentaries, producing exhibitions, and directing music videos and short films. 'Baleine à Boss' isn't just her debut album, but her first venture into music production; Le Fur had only begun to experiment with music software a few weeks before dubbing the record, a fact that makes this unique set only more bewildering. Singing and vocalizing candidly and producing each track alone, she sounds profoundly polished, invoking a beguiling haze of chanson, rap, no wave and experimental electronics that hovers around the margins of pop and the avant-garde.
Le Fur grew up in Paris's sprawling suburbs, and was provided with a diverse coterie of influences by her Breton mother and Cameroonian father. She's channeled her ancestry into her work before, splicing material from her mother's film archives with her own footage recorded in Bamiléké land to develop the autobiographical documentary 'À L'ouest' back in 2017. As Violence Gratuite, Le Fur thinks more cryptically, considering the vast forests of western Cameroon, lands ravaged by generations of bloodthirsty men and looping pulsing techno rhythms with fractured trap and the ghosts of French pop.
Her voice stands out proudly on opener 'Iséo', layered into a charming mantra over a brittle, grime-y beat assembled from stuttering samples and 8-bit blips. Acrobatic yet somehow casual, Le Fur splits her delivery, singing in French over undulating chants and spectral coos. And she switches up the flow on 'Olive', rapping in an icy cool deadpan while spiky synths bubble around jerky, Neptunes-like stabs. Then, on the nocturnal 'Smooth Operation', Le Fur guides us towards a moonlit ritual, crying sweetly into the darkness as hand drums and dreamy plucks chatter in the background.
On the title track, Le Fur strips the rhythm down to a moody, skeletal rumble, using rubbery drums and trapped chorals to mire herself in negative space. Speaking in a low rasp, she brings to mind Tricky's eeriest early material, or the wonkiest output of French no wave hybridist Lizzy Mercier Descloux. But the record switches gears relentlessly, lurching towards the Caribbean on 'Ragga Nieztches' and into spannered dembow on the hypnotic closing track 'Bad à Bras le Corps'. 'Baleine à Boss' is an unpredictable, labyrinthine suite that refuses to stay static, a variety show that's as comfortable in the club as it is at a fest noz.
Properly deep and mysterious future-primitivism on the debut recordings from a reclusive artist about whom we know almost nothing except that they hail from the Mesolongi region of western Greece. Uncanny ambient chamber spectres are the order of the day, with a sound that could have been conjured decades or just weeks ago - who knows - giving something like The Caretaker processing crates of rebetika instead of the usual ballroom dirges.
Aeson Zervas is yet another enigma to emerge from a country that, in recent times, has gifted us the inventive spirits of Christos Chondropoulos’ and Nikolas Rafael Hadjilaskaris’ nebula of projects spanning Live Adult Entertainment, Christian Love Forum and ElHellEll - not to mention Jay Glass Dubs - and which has made Athens a magnet for the Euro avant garde and experimental in-betweeners.
Zervas’ music exists in a space out of time, manifesting a more discreet sound than any of his compatriots, but sharing a feel for displaced, etheric space and timeless, nostalgic romance. His eight-part debut album summons the ghosts of Greek folk and classical music in slow moving arrangements set in eerily iridescent plasma. Uncredited voices and instrumentation are wreathed in hypnotic, noumenal plumes that settle on the mind like smoke caught by moonlight.
He clearly shares the hypnagogic allure and sozzled sensuality of The Caretaker, as though James Kirby was reminiscing on a past life or spirit quest in Greece, but he also somehow reminds us of the solemn beauty of Dominique Lawalrée’s Belgian attic meditations, distinguished by subtle flourishes of near black metal dungeon gloom and arcane synth flickers that jolt the mind into unusual states of curious delight.
Unmissable, if you know what’s good.