BLOOD

Yeah the pace with this lot is relentless and the vibes are loose as fuck, this time finding Michael J Blood & Sockethead in duo mode, feeding screwed street soul and emotional jams into the blunted, early-hours. This is actually their debut merger, following trio actions with Rat Heart on a couple of ace ‘True’ volumes in recent years. On ‘Eating Late’ MJB pulls Sockethead away from his wildest inclinations and into a deliriously stoned dimension, where gloopy synths and restless subs tumble in and out of time, ample levels of smudged, nostalgic romance included. Plotted for slow-release thru the night, the album starts with bleary-eyed immersion therapy ‘aaa(a)’ on a sort a tip between classic Move D/Reagenz and some Frictional slow jam, before nimbly proceeding into R&G sampler ‘Try to Keep’ and the delicately jazzy deep house ‘Blown Out’. The tart darkwave of ‘Breathe Properly’ and Sockethead’s peal on ‘Heat Of U’ are perhaps best enjoyed like Wambsgans eating a songbird, napkin over the noggin, while echoes of Gescom’s fractal Disengage flex on ‘Recto-Verso’ and ‘Swamptrix’ give up one of the most satisfying sessions in either artist’s run over the last few years. Collect them all eh?

King of the house swingers (and shufflers, jackers, buckers) kicks off his bloodlines whitelabel series with two long sides of sweaty jams that act as a counterpart of sorts to that recent BLOOD LIVE tape, sniping groove-riding killers for the canny DJs.

The near half hour session portrays MJB deep in the flow in a way that seamlessly elides and blurs distinctions of his signature, jazz-taught and tracky studio and DJ tekkerz with mesmerising finesse.

Side A is a real killer, chopping out 15 minutes in transitional flux between multiple elements and nailing the in-the-blend, 3rd track effect as it snakes from salsoul hustle to a purring Motor City mode and riff-riding Prescription vibes.

Side B yokes back to big-boned, pendulous and tracky business glazed with glyding keys and pumping bass echoing Norm Talley, and switching up half way to a ruggeder offbeat tipping a cap at Theo.

Beatdown shapeshifter Michael J. Blood opens his 2025 account with lush and rugged turns of club and carpet sprawled groovers, vitally updating the palette with a fluoro synth quintessence that ditches some of the scuzz for a more widescreen, late night experience. The most impactful MJB album yet, especially if Actress, Gescom, Larry Heard or Shinichi Atobe are your thing.

As the story goes, Michael J. Blood was introduced to the world by Tom Boogizm on a fateful NTS show back in 2019, which was subsequently cut to vinyl by Finn’s 2 B Real Records in 2020. That record opened the door to a slew of crooked club mutations hailed among this decade’s most cultishly coveted, followed by jams with Rat Heart, Samizdat and Richie Culver, plus a cut for Chanel’s manc jamboree, before shotting four volumes of ‘Archetypal Artefacts’, a banging 12” for DDS, and the recent ‘Joy + Pain’ tape that now feeds forward into this new album, unlocking a whole new level to his sound.

‘Spaces in Between’ is the result of a concerted period of R&D in distinctive, helical tessellations of the NYC, Chi, and 313 DNA that pumps Blood’s veins, and has long pooled in Manchester’s fêted club sound. It’s a subtle but vital update of his palette, from the opening spiral of electrosoul-fuelled arps and pads in ‘AKNEW’ comparable to Gerald Donald as much as the Gescom/Lego Feet axis, into the soaring, proggy technous of ‘XPNDR’, and up to the deep house swag of ‘GO AGAIN’, the tutors of deep Afro-American jazz techno loom as large as north Manc cranks and SoYo soul boys on MJB’s sound here. 

By turns he has the club/afters/bedroom wrapped around his lil digits in squirming beatdown ace ‘TLG’, or spangled to heady bleeps of ‘IN BI SI X’, whilst really stretching out along cosmic jazz vectors in the weightless, airborne sensuality of ‘GT WHT UUUU GIVE’ and the atsro-planing keyboard meditation ‘Aluminium Rain’,  bringing it all back to root in the wall-banging house of ’SPACE BE’, for the heads. 

Cult-beloved experimental producer Michael J. Blood, hailing from North Manchester, returns with the second collaborative album alongside the elusive act samizdat, released on his own label BLOOD. Bathed in a sense of unease, this work weaves hypnotic loops, noise-fringed textures, and low-end pulses into a shape-shifting soundscape that blurs the boundaries between post-industrial abstraction and deconstructed R&B. A masterful blend of intimacy and abstraction, it’s a record that sinks deep into the psyche—perfect for solitary, late-night listening.

The manc undergrowth continues to sprout new nodes on this killer double album - production by Michael J. Blood, vocals and songs by Samizdat, a real dense cloud of tunes on a tip somewhere between classic Theo Parrish mixes - heavy on the EQ - and Darren J. Cunningham’s Thriller edits, with a mumbled, punk swagger all its own. Like all MJB gear; sleep on it, weep on it. Honeyed and screwed, this one carries thru a long tradition of spiky, anti-establishment expression, augmented by MJB’s genius production and Samizdat's blunted - almost slurred - vocal delivery; mystical, itchy and red-eyed. The duo embody a deviant aesthetic, but guide you thru their narcotic vapours with ease. Like some screwed Ugly Edit, it’s all slow, clipped and hazed to fuck, pitched, and extended, all abrupt endings and no-starts, just over an hour of the special stuff. Yeah these two weave in and out of each other like nothing else. “I seek to fold into Blood’s productions as I believe in the collaborative idea of euphoria, like being touched by each other’s inflections. We try to celebrate and to re-appropriate the notion of what it is to be artistic outside of a “creative industry”. The sam part of the word means “self.” The whole samizdat—translates as: “We publish ourselves”—that is, not the state, but we, the people.“ Aye. Whatever DIY means, surely this is it.