MUSIC

Alien D, aka Daniel Creahan, is a staple in the NYC underground, known for his releases on labels including Lillerne, 1432 R and Banlieue Records. On his latest album, For the Early Hours of a World in Bloom – his first for Theory Therapy – Creahan takes us deeper into the dubby landscapes of his previous work, with a renewed focus on groove and movement.

Where Lillerne’s Spiritual World leaned toward ambient abstraction, Early Hours pulses with kinetic energy, with tracks like “Soil Dub” and “Sleepy’s Gambit” propelling us forward with dubwise rhythms crafted for the dancefloor.

The album thrives on its infectious, steady groove, with repeating phrases and subtle shifts that keep the music in constant motion. Nowhere is this more evident than on the gentle roller, “Breather.” Over 13 minutes, Creahan lets small variations in tone and a propulsive low-end evolve gradually alongside Ben Seretan’s guitar.

While Early Hours embraces a more rhythmic direction, it still retains the eccentricity and atmosphere that defines Alien D’s sound. Conceived in the first days after the COVID lockdown, there’s a hopeful quality to the music – flickering tones, soft percussive elements and organic textures that hover just behind the beat – making it feel both intimate and expansive. It’s as though Creahan has bottled those transcendent moments that can occur during the early hours of a party, when everything feels suspended in a state of potential.

Quickly following March’s The Fool - our label debut - Sa Pa reveals his new album Ambeesh on Short Span.

Coming five years after In A Landscape, and nearly a decade since his debut Fuubutsushi, Ambeesh is a collection of Sa Pa’s unreleased work.

Written between 2014-2019, the album has been conceptually curated as a follow up to his FORUM debut. Ambeesh possesses the unique language and liveliness of ambient, layered field recordings, and dub techno found in those earlier records, with those seamless skydives through pressure formations that were found on the Enter Sa Pa mix.

These pieces have been crackling under the surface of Sa Pa’s released work to date and there’s little else that compares. It’s a cache of some of his deepest and most texturally thrilling music.

Singular in its combination of atmosphere; Ambeesh presses on the body at the right volume, and moves in thrust and riposte with the listener’s circadian rhythms. Sa Pa continues to dissolve the border between club-informed experimentation and intimate headphone listening.

Ambeesh marks the artist’s return to his homeland Australia and an exciting new chapter.

Special Guest DJ — also known as Shy — has spent the better part of a decade quietly reshaping the experimental electronic underground. Operating from Berlin under aliases like Caveman LSD and uon, their work weaves between dubwise ambient, smeared club textures, and lo-fi dream states.

On Our Fantasy Complex, they channel that tangled web into a 40-minute suite of fogged-out mood music: sensual, angry, dreamlike. There are trace elements of shoegaze, dub techno and quasi-speed D&B, but it’s more hex than genre exercise — a lucid tangle of textures shaped by peers like Ben Bondy, mu tate, and Arad Acid add an extra dimension.

This isn’t ambient in the blissed-out sense, but a darker, dirtier kind of psychedelia — music that melts the line between introspection and club detritus. From the looming bass pressure of ‘How Long Can I Burn?’ to the dissociative haze of ‘Yoro (pt I & II)’, and finally the crystalline closer ‘Dream’, it’s a record that lingers like smoke.

The artist sometimes known as Huerco S. ushers a phase shift of sound to the shoegazing harmonic gauze of Make Me Know You Sweet, his immersive debut proper as Pendant. In this horizontal mode, Brian Leeds relays abstract stories from a headspace beyond the dance, placing his interests in the Romantic landscapes of JMW Turner, Robert Ashley's avant-garde enigmas, and Indigenous North American philosophy at the service of a more expressive, oneiric sound that sub/consciously avoids the trap falls of "chillout" ambient cliché. Across seven amorphous, texturally detailed tracks he establishes far reaching coordinates for both Pendant and the West Mineral Ltd. label, which aims to release everything except the commonly accepted, traditional forms of late 20th/early 21st century dance music, while also representing the work of his inner circle of friends, producers, artists. In that that sense there's a definite feeling of "no place like home" to his new work, but that home appears altered, much in the same way The Caretaker/Leyland Kirby deals with themes of memory and nostalgia. It's best described as mid-ground music, as opposed to the putative background purpose of ambient styles, or the upfront physicality of dance music. Rather, the sound billows and unfurls with a paradoxically static chaos, occupying and lurking a space between the eyes and ears in a way that's not necessarily comforting, and feels to question the nature and relevance of ubiquitous pastoral, new age tropes in the modern era of uncertainty and disingenuity. The results ponder an impressionistic, romantically ambiguous simulacrum of real life worries and anxiety, feeling at once dense and impending yet without center. From the keening, 11-minute swell of "VVQ-SSJ" at the album's prow, to the similar scope of its closer, Pendant presents an absorbing vessel for introspection, modulating the listener's depth perception and moderating our intimacy with an elemental push and pull between the curdling, bittersweet froth of "BBN-UWZ", the dusky obfuscation of "IBX-BZC" and, in the supremely evocative play of phosphorescing light and seductive darkness in the mottled depths of "KVL-LWQ", which also benefits from additional production by Pontiac Streator. Make Me Know You Sweet taps into a latent, esoteric vein of American spirituality that's always been there, yet is only divined by those who remain open-minded to its effect. Master and lacquer cut by Matt Colton.

Delicate glitches drifting like particles, ambient textures rising like mist—West Mineral, the seminal imprint founded by Huerco S. and a defining force in the post-2010s “Dubient” movement, returns with another essential release. Sleepdial is the solo project of Denver-based experimental musician Luke Thinnes, known for his releases as Dubharp on 100% Silk and as French Kettle Station on Slagwerk. This debut LP offers a soundworld where blurred drones and error-like noise artifacts linger with echoes of nameless, half-remembered emotions. Navigating the liminal zones between loop and non-loop, structure and collapse, it gently scatters fragments of memory into Dubient silence. A crystalline document of dreamlike introspection—one that glows quietly within the contemporary experimental continuum. Mastered by Rashad Becker.

A miraculous reprint of a great masterpiece. This is a work that still fascinates many listeners. Biokinetics", the ultimate masterpiece in the history of dub techno/ambient, was released by Porter Ricks as the first release for Chain Reaction, a sub-label of the sacred Basic Channel, and has been reissued by Mille Plateaux on 2LP and CD. Following three 12" releases, this was the label's first album release and is still considered one of its best. This is a masterpiece that reconstructs the spacious ambience pioneered by label bosses Mark Ernestus and Moritz Von Oswald into a gem of techno sound, infusing it with cold, isolated experimentalism and minimalism like early Plastikman.

Multila was the third album by Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti under the moniker Vladislav Delay. It compiles the Huone and Ranta 12" EPs Ripatti released on Basic Channel's Chain Reaction label in 1999 and 2000. The album features six hauntingly murky dub ambient tracks and the impressive 22-minute techno odyssey "Huone". 20 years after its original release as a full-length CD album (Chain Reaction), these timeless recordings of modern electronic music are now finally available for the first time as a double-vinyl edition. The label Keplar has been on a long hiatus and is now back with its KeplarRev series presenting vinyl re-issues of essential electronic albums from the '90s and '00s, as well as new recordings by momentous electronic and ambient artists. Drawings by Kaisa Kemikoski; Layout by Marco Ciceri. Remaster by Rashad Becker and vinyl cut by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering. Includes download code.

"Life films us exactly. Our experience of it, though, lies beyond images and descriptions. Emotions, coming in irrational flashes, are non-figurable. We lose our little connection to them very quickly. We look for forms which promise to take us to our own experience. We construct forms with this in mind: that they can take us to meet the subconscious. Multila's construction is principled this way. Fragments of experience, moments without definition or localization are captured within tiny fragments of time and then within one's mind space. We can look into it and see that experience has left some of its data to us. As we receive it, again and again, we are connected and reconnected to certain indefinable moments. Both during and after its recording, Multila is a tool to learn about the unintentional states of us. It is a way to see our own emotional loops. Multila is a soundtrack for vision." --Vladislav Delay (2000)

Heat is a surprise new double album from Shinichi Atobe for Demdike Stare. It follows on from 2017's From The Heart, It's A Start, A Work Of Art (DDS 023LP) and continues a run of highly enigmatic, acclaimed and completely unparalleled productions that follow their own timeless logic. There's no sonic fiction involved; this material really does just turn up on a CD sent by air mail from Japan to Manchester, sparse info, no messing, pure gold. What's that cover art about? It's probaby something to do with the balmy, slightly fucked, sun-stroked material within. "So Good, So Right", the ten-minute opener, will force you to forget about all the shit around you for a while. There are also several tracks called "Heat"; they're all killer. This music takes you elsewhere almost immediately; that fan on your desk is basically a summer breeze. In fact, this whole album is absurd, completely effortless, and a total classic. Find a more life-affirming electronic album in 2018, and there's an ice cream in the offing. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton, cover by Mat Thornton.

Shinichi Atobe’s fifth album for DDS, his first in two years. Deep and sublime, the classic Chain Reaction < > Chicago House vibe, but this time with a swarming Drexciyan undercurrent, somewhere between DJ Sprinkles, Dopplereffekt and The Other People Place, and yet still 100% Shinichi.

It’s odd working with an artist without ongoing dialogue; no context or an exchange of ideas. It’s all conjecture. Here's another CD of material in the post from Shinichi, two years more or less since the last one. No words except for the track titles. Oh, a photo this time.

‘Yes’, positivity, hope. But the album starts with a dystopian vision; something like Dopplereffekt’s sound-chemistry experiments, a tense builder. Big optimistic chasms open up, the Piano House euphoria of the title track, beautiful sunset closer 'Ocean 1’. But there’s a noticeable change too. 'Lake 2’ is more fraught sci-fi, 'Lake 3’ a sort of percussive Chain Reaction monster, 'Loop 1’, on a Drexciyan tip. 

It’s all coated in that weird - some people say infuriating - toppy production, witnessed this time in a more tempered and different formation courtesy of an amazing Rashad Becker master, all precise but loosely swung arrangements. Everything slow to unfurl but, also, everything in exactly the right place. (Boomkat)

From The Heart, It's A Start, A Work Of Art has its origins in early 2000, before Chain Reaction released the legendary Ship-Scope 12" (later released by Demdike Stare in 2015, DDS 014EP). Three of the tracks here are taken from an acetate cut at Dubplates & Mastering at that time, but which wouldn't see the light of day until now, including another batch of tracks taken from original masters. Only five copies of that acetate were ever made, so this is the first time any of these tracks are available for public consumption, and they rank among the finest and most distinctive in either the Chain Reaction or Shinichi Atobe's vaults. The material is effectively some of the Japanese producer's earliest work, showcasing the sort of tender, feminine pressure that would bubble up on the Ship-Scope EP and later be revealed in his new productions, Butterfly Effect (DDS 010CD) and World yet, for many reasons, they would lay sunk in his archive for the next 17 years. The tracks taken from that acetate are labeled "First Plate 1-3" and really are quite remarkable, having taken on so much character and added weight over the years that the incidental crackle of surface noise imbues proceedings with an added dimension that's hard to fathom. It basically sounds like a lost transmission making its way from Paul-Lincke-Ufer at the turn of the millennium to a new, completely changed world all these years later. The patina of crackle lends a mist-on-bare skin feeling akin to summer garden parties at Berghain in the stepping "First Plate 1", and gives a foggier sort of depth perception to the hydraulic, Maurizian heft of "First Plate 2", but it's the submerged euphoria of "First Plate 3" that hits the hardest; a heady, bittersweet reminder of days gone by. The other four tracks are crisply transferred from master tapes, relinquishing a sublime, impossible to categorize house variant that recalls everything from DJ Sprinkles to Ron Trent, yet with that weird, timeless production tick that by now has become something of a signature for this most distinctive and hard to categorize producer. Buoyant dub house and techno with lush, gaseous synths and keys. Remastered by Matt Colton from original tapes and worn actetates -- grit included; Limited copies.

Finally came out! MUST !!!!! The long-awaited analogization of the phantom gem that would have been reissued from our shop if there was no current situation. The original is a masterpiece of German dub techno genius Robert Henke a.k.a. Monolake, which was released on CD only from his own label in 1999, and is the first vinyl reissue from the current dub / ambient prestigious sacred place . Set in the vast Gobi Desert in East Asia, this is a masterpiece of minimal ambient sound, with a vast, profound and nocturnal soundscape. Official reissue under the license specifications of Henke's label . This is recommended as a lifelong product. Don't miss it!!

On their debut LP “Pome” for Quiet Time, Liai has given us a stunning work of expertly crafted rhythmic ambience, inspired by the intimacy and solitude of the midwestern countryside. Having grown up in rural Missouri, Liai channels the mixed feelings that can accompany solo contemplation in nature - expansiveness, sentimentality, vulnerability and eeriness. This deeply personal set of tracks took 3 years to make, revealed in the precision of sound design and use of space. The work feels at once familiar and organic, yet technical and futuristic, almost alien - a product of digital melodies, granular processing and frequent sampling of their own previous works.

Dots written by Atom™. Recorded 1994 at "Sel I/S/C", Frankfurt/M. Under exclusive license from the AtomTM_Audio_Archive.

Unavailable for several years and highly sought-after​, Space Afrika’s excellent, career-establishing sophomore album ‘Somewhere Decent To Live’ encapsulates a singular, nocturnal mood that’s still the most distinctive thing in their catalogue. A stunning arrangement of mutable ambient frameworks, it lingers in the air like a stubborn waft of smoke, acting as a clarion call for a bunch of likeminded spirits that up until that moment had been lurking in the manchester undergrowth. What seems like forever ago, way back in 2018, Space Afrika presented a bird’s eye view of the city at night with ‘Somewhere Decent To Live’; their first and only album for the sferic label. Unshackled from the requirements of the dancefloor, but still inspired and feeding off its spirit and romance, the pair acknowledged undercurrents of jungle, dubstep, ambient techno and deep house which fed into their home city’s late night economy for decades, dowsing their tributaries back to dub and rendering the findings as shimmering ambient vapour. Forming cloud-like shapes illuminated by slow pulsing strobes, the vibe is precise but elusive. The pair’s dancefloor urges become completely dissolved in favour of more suggestive downstrokes, underpinned by thick and gloopy subs, leaving the kicks in the club while they float overhead like the dead kid embarking his Bardo in Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void, evoking the neon romance of a classic Michael Mann night drive. The album weaves through eight interlinked scenes, drifting like spectral flanneurs from the Diversions-like opener uwëm/creãtiõn to intercept telepathic thoughts from Teutonic friends in the percolated and drizzly ambient clag of sd/tl, before arriving at the album’s most arresting moment on the widescreen yet immersive bly and its sublimely smeared timbral thizz… A modern classic.

Art by Solo Viola Tracks 3 & 6 feature Andrea Stella Mastered by Rashad Becker

Total Annihilation Beach is the latest collection from Caveman LSD, one of the handful of monikers of Special Guest DJ / uon / sometimes just shy. Their releases under this name have always had the character of sonic transmissions – crushed sine-waves hurtling out of a wormhole, remote pirate radio bandwidths, whale-song picked up on radar, and so on. Here, the signal seems to come from a place whose remoteness is not defined by distance, but adjacency: these are alternate reality bops. What does it sound like? Kind of solarpunk, but dirty; not at all an artifact from a hopeless culture. Percussion at the forefront; warm timbres and tones – never have I heard this producer play with tabla and tambourine loops as they do in “Lost Hours,” the opening track of the EP. The buildup holds tension and dynamics tight, with a vocoder-smoothed moan – sampled from the caveman’s own voice, on the low – alternating between two notes; when the beat decompresses for the first time two and a half minutes in, one hears the amorphous and cavernous pads we know so well from shy. “Bottle Service Angels” picks up with another acoustic drum loop, and a clap entering 18 seconds in swings the rest of the track into your hips – there’s even an alternate percussion interlude sandwiched in the middle. The drums are turned over by a distorted and delayed wave, almost like a cop siren, which finds an answer in the track’s final seconds: we hear them blaring, but distantly (the demo version of this track, from spring 2020, was called “ACAB Beat”). The B side begins with a textured, heaving slab of ambience: “The Sun Will Sink Into the Ocean.” It is perhaps the sun one sees setting over “Total Annihilation Beach” – a phrase that came to shy while tripping on LSD in San Francisco, which felt to them like a post-apocalyptic haven for the rich. Seems on point. There is a machinic repetition to the track, but also sweeping curtains of sound that move like mist. But what comes at nightfall? Not cops, not raiders nor bottle service angels – nothing, actually. Just a void into which one lobs praise. “H6 Remix” adapts a Mesopotamian hymn to the divine wife of a moon deity, dated to 1400 BCE; the strings of the sampled oud playing it out are rich and trail beautifully with reverb. Caveman LSD’s gesture of remixing such a song reads sincere – the reality we inhabit is likely just as brutal as the one to which these transmissions belong; however, in both, honor exists. Love follows.

The lifeblood of Basic Channel and Chain Reaction. West Mineral Ltd. has been expanding the horizons of current dub ambient music by nurturing labels such as Motion Ward, Experiences Ltd. and Daisart. Huerco S is one of the most prominent cult icons of the contemporary electronic music scene, and this is his latest album under the name Pendant. It was written just a week after "Make Me Know You Sweet", a milestone masterpiece of current dub ambient music. Surreal, trippy, alien soundscapes.

Good Morning Tapes back at the deep end on this new album from Josiah Wolfson’s X Or Size project, all washed out and reverberating dub in a mode you’ll want to sink into if you’re into Actress, NWAQ, Huerco S, Ulla. X Or Size throw just the right amount of darkened ambiguity into proceedings to render the sound at its most compelling, borrowing from the classic dub techno playbook with wave after wave of luxurious, eroded dub chords and fractured percussion somewhere between vintage Chain Reaction and the more contemporary wave of late night zoners as best exemplified by Actress’ ghost-in-the-machine productions, Huerco S’s comedown vapors and Ulla’s dreamtime logic. On DÆZI the ominous spirit of Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas enters the fray, albeit with more optimistic shading, while Whirled Why is pure rhythm & sound, like some alternate version of ‘Roll Off’ with a creeping bass drum added for the pure, slow skank. The title track closes the set with the album’s most club sharpened moment, taking the trace echos of Chicago House and wrapping it in so much delay and reverb that you no longer know where the hook begins and where it ends - like some malfunctioning looper finding its own fuzzy logic. The strongest release on GMT in a while - tipped to the deepest heads.

Special Guest DJ & Pontiac Streator are crimeboys, here delivering a debut album volley of ambient jungle and trip hop dub paying homage to influences including Vangelis, Burial, Silent Hill and the putative effects of N ₂O. ‘Very Dark Past’ is the pair’s immersive debut, with eight cuts that firm up a flux of etheric inspirations into a translucent body of aerosolised ambient and writhing rhythms primed for the back rooms. Working within etheric parameters established over recent years by their respective solo efforts and a plethora of collaborative projects by peers such as Huerco S., Perila, Exael, and Ulla,‘Very Dark Past’ digs into a now familiar vein of lathered cultural ephemera and rave nostalgia full of gauzy signposts and warm sentimentality that works a treat on stressed minds and bodies. Titled tongue-in-cheek in key with their mode of prophylactic rave safety, the crimeboys step off from the gentlest ends of LTJ Bukem or PS1-style jungle into pulpiest/soft focus ambient dance. Bladerunner vibes prompt the opening lushness of ‘holodeck blue’, and ‘trippin’’ trades in filigree ambient jungle delicacy, beside the caress of ‘deja entendu (dub)’ and frayed echoes of Timeblind in ‘red shift’, while a sublime highlight of spongiform subbass and fractalised breaks in ‘sex and drugs’ gives way to Burial-esque 2-step of ‘haunted tattoo’ and a weightless lushness approximating DJ Crystal or Photek underwater in ‘days go by’. Some hidden cuts on the vinyl edition too.

Latvian producer mu tate joins Utter with the ‘Faded’ EP, a collection of five mesmerising ambient electronica pieces. mu tate - real name Artur Strekalov - has been diligently and unceremoniously weaving his musical magic for the past half-decade. ‘Faded’ walks the same spectral path as his feted album ‘Let Me Put Myself Together’ (Experiences Ltd, 2020), which introduced many to Strekalov’s highly atmospheric, blissed-out sonic explorations. The EP glides along, each track enveloping the listener in a cocoon of undulating frequencies and ghostly rhythm, softly contained yet stretching out beyond into wide open space. Delicate, crackling sparks fizz in and out of perception above. It’s a trip alright! ‘Faded’ is available on limited vinyl and digital formats, mastered and cut by Anne Taegert at D&M. Artwork by AS, laid out by Alex Egan. A special insert designed by Art Crime is also included with physical copies.

Nachthorn, for midi-controlled organ Nachthorn takes its name from one of the 78 stops that make up the main organ in St. Antonius Church in Düsseldorf. This instrument, equipped with a system developed by the German company Sinua, offers the possibility of controlling all of its keyboards and timbres via a computer. The organ thus becomes a powerful synthesiser. This set-up allowed me to fulfil an old dream of mine : to create an entirely acoustic dance music piece with the organ as sole actor. Oscillating between dub techno, harmonic locked grooves or after-hours pop, Nachhorn proposes a hypnotic music piece whose lines sketch the outline of an imaginary warehouse.

After highly acclaimed releases from OK EG and Donald’s House, Wax’o Paradiso Recordings proudly welcomes Naarm/Melbourne producer Midnight Tenderness (Ryan Hunter) to the fold. Over four tracks the ‘Hydrosphere EP’ continues the label’s narrative of platforming contemporary antipodean psychedelia with three masterful productions and a remix from Boorloo/Perth’s Hame DJ.

As a producer with influences rooted in dub, street soul, boogie and the DNA of UK club music, Ryan draws down on the Middy T sound with the title track ‘Hydrosphere’, a blend of broken machine funk, glistening synth lines and beautiful crisp drum programming. ‘Rain Vibe’ takes the sound palette further adding a hefty wub for good measure. ‘Catamaran’ transports us back to the golden era on the Balearic isles, with the original evoking Ibizan sunset cruises whilst Hame DJ’s remix brings some Madchester chug to the mix.

For Balmat’s fourth release, we turn our attention close to home: to the Mallorca-born, Barcelona-based artist Nueen, aka Nacho Pezzati.

Nueen has been developing his highly personal style of blissfully Balearic ambient over the past few years, with releases on labels like Quiet Time Tapes and Good Morning Tapes. On Diagrams of Thought, he explores new depths in his sound. His atmospheres remain bucolic, but there’s a disturbance at work, a hint of uncertainty swirling beneath seemingly placid pads.

While Diagrams of Thought retains the ambient (or at least ambient-adjacent) focus of all Balmat’s releases so far, the album also marks new frontiers for the label; the album’s first half is graceful and largely beatless, but the mood grows murkier with the foggy drones of “Dome” and the intimations of liquid drum ’n’ bass on “Maxima”; “Veta,” meanwhile, might just represent the most forceful rhythm to appear on a Balmat release yet. 

Despite the album’s considerable range of moods, tones, and textures, it’s all tied together by a singular preoccupation, says Nueen: 

“Lately, I’ve become conscious of my fascination for the notion of the break, on a conceptual and musical level. What’s temporary and what’s permanent. Thinking and making out of what isn’t there, yet is. Some people would call it silence, but it could also be a skip of the needle, an ellipsis. Something very basic—or Basic Channelesque. A set of sounds and silences, structuring just a hint of rhythm. Sounds that become silences, and silences that become sounds. 

The other day, I was saying to someone that for me, the sound of electric current running through the power lines above the train tracks is the most ambient sound there is. That infinity in which you never quite grasp all the harmonics and reverberations. It’s a form of time detained or expanded. Recently, I’ve been rereading Morton Feldman—you can tell, right? Vertical time, the silence that sounds. A sort of sacredness. My mind is blown every time I walk into a church, for whatever that’s worth.” 

Jonas Wiese’s TIBSLC (standing for The International Billionaire’s Secret Love Child) presents its second album on the sferic label. ‘Hypertranslucent’ derives from the same recording sessions as 2021’s sprawling ‘Decisive Tongue Shifts - Situation Based Compositions’ double LP, with late Nineties ambient music being used as a particular source of inspiration to create evocations of massive cityscapes at night. and , after the post-industrial / deconstructed club. A work that integrates the Ethereal sound design of Mastering is also great with Stephan Mathieu! Limited to 500 copies.