west mineral ltd.

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

reversals and slippage toward glass, reconfigured
smasht past it
smeared the oil cross currents
and me
plant rotting its container, or, grains lovingly
no warm water to spit back
no cloth to tie

i glance back
refractions stack right.

a kiss that will stew until it evaporates
scuffed across my feet, feet crossed

bubbled trash that spilt intermittently,
who cleaned the air with a smudgey for you.

West Mineral return with a followup to Mister Water Wet’s 2019's subtropical ambient slow-burn debut ‘Bought the Farm’, expanding Iggy Romeu's horizons to contrast feverish Afro-Caribbean ambient jazz with jaunty illbient and atmospheric freakouts. Low-lit heat that’s highly recommended if yr into Nick León, Carlos Niño, Kelman Duran, Gonçalo F. Cardoso. Mister Water Wet continues to excavate the tropical soundscapes that simmer the producer's Kansas City home with his Puerto Rican roots, on a new album of extended vignettes and mood pieces that cross a late 90’s Mo Wax instrumentals vibe with present day feelings of displacement and ennui. LP opener ‘Bory’ tunes us into Water Wet’s weirdly fuzzed frequencies, where tremeloed strings and found sounds resemble what might have been a lost dean blunt x dean hurley sound design concept for Inland Empire, while ‘I Saw the Green Flash' opens a swirl of strings and traditional rhythms caught in a reflecting pool of canned classical orchestrals and 1950s theremin wails. 'Good Apple’, meanwhile, cranks up the mood with aged x looped piano paired with an undulating, bass-heavy shuffle that wouldn't sound out of place on a Kelman Duran x Martin Denny mixtape. 'When Kennybrook Burned to the Ground' leans into heady jazz vapours, spreading crackle over pitch-fucked horn samples, but it’s the producer's weird use of percussion that keeps us gripped: scattering his arrangements across the grid, mimicking an ensemble of players deployed in irregular formations. Romeu embraces trip-hop on 'Any Other Time', blending Afro-Caribbean percussion with a swung downtempo beat, while ‘Isthmus’ reminds us of the clatterbox plunder of Moonshake’s PJ Harvey hookup ‘Just a Working Girl’ - with all its asymmetric hooks. The extended closing track 'Losing Blood' takes a leaf out of Fennesz's glitched rulebook, stretching and folding disintegrating loops through an 11 minute descent into the elegiac aether.

NUG is the musical collaboration of artists Jordan Juras aka PVAS and Florian T M Zeisig. They previously released their debut album Napping Under God on 3XL (2022). Recorded February 2022 in Hinang, mixed November 2022 in Berlin.

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.

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.

A balmy set of hypnagogic electronics meshed to meditative rhythms is the order of the day on the third release from Huerco S’ West Mineral Ltd, huge recommendation if you’re into Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement, Spencer Clark or that classic Hallucinator gear on Chain Reaction. Everything on this label is gold...

Pontiac Streator previously appeared as a guest on the first West Mineral Ltd release, Pendant’s by-now classic Make Me Know You Sweet, while Ulla Straus is perhaps best known for her part on the cultishly adored bblisss compilation tape which introduced Huerco S.’s Pendant alias to the world at large. Their first album together is a bedroom-crafted confection where drowsy meditations smudge with lounging exotica themes in a blunted style to properly heavy-lidded effect.

Chat was recorded on July 5th in Pilsen, Chicago on Ulla’s bed after a long week spent dancing with friends, staying up all night typing in chatrooms, and hate-watching Fox news. The results channel that experience into four lop-sided creations that feel satisfyingly burned out and immersive, like the murmur of zonked chat between close friends.

In four parts; Chat One thru Chat Four, the record unfurls with a muggy mid-fi tension between its illusive fidelities, kindling a smoky atmosphere that colours listening spaces with seductive smells and a muggy, keening tension that recalls the minutes before sundown. This balmy feel of the surreal comes out in a sylvan patina of sweetened cicadas and curling pads urged along by a stream of wooden drums, variously recalling Spencer Clark on some kind of Aguirre soundtrack mission in the tropics, a heatsick Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement piece, or, in the dream-pop drift of the last part, like Leven Signs smudged by Muslimgauze.

Coolly serving to expand West Mineral Ltd's remit after that spellbinding Pendant album and a 12” of ectoplasmic dubs from uon, the flux of arid/fluid textures and para-dimensional fidelities in Chat feels somehow calming yet fraught with a somnambulant appeal that’s dangerously easy to fall for.

Pontiac Streator mints a solo debut for Brian Leeds’ (Huerco S.) West Mineral Ltd. label with a bouquet of plasmic ambient lobe strokers, dusted with the guest charms of Ben Bondy, Perila, Nikolay Kozlov, and Protozoa Project. Arriving as a more personalised pursuit of the genteel themes that bound his pair of albums with Ulla in 2018-19, ’Sone Glo’ portrays the Philly-based ambient avatar at his most slanted and enchanting with a sandman suite of late night ambient blissouts. It’s an effortless listen, lathering aqueous textures and wistful melodies into a therapeutic hush, blessed with a prized sensuality that has placed him at the bosom of the neo-ambient love-in over the past five years. A good handful of those ambient lovers chime into his sound here too, drizzling whispered vox and smudged hooks into his vaporous matrix with results that ooze across variegated strains of balmy to gruff ambient dembow with a deeply seductive appeal and mind-drift pathos. Streator steers clear of any tricks or stunts in favour of slow-burn textural depth and subliminal rhythmic hypnosis. He cuts straight to the heart on opener 'Atlas Obscura' with Protozoa Project’s soothing glossolalia suffused to a sloshing dembow groove that underlines the whole album’s subtle pressure changes. He patently cares for your downtime, gently EQ’ing the chakras with the tongue-tip lather of ‘Picture of the Woods’, and later placing Perila’s narration over liquid electro pulses on album standout ‘I Want Something’, while Ben Bondy lends a reverberant touch to ‘Purp Thread’ and Folder’s Nikolay Kozlov brings a thawed ambient thizz to ‘Heliacal’. Still, Streator is the inventive star of his own show, effectively doing for dembow what Kassem Mosse did with deep minimal house on the irresistible sway and heavy-lidded pads of ‘Ixora’, before liquifying limbs with the slinky roll of his instrumentals on ‘Surge XL’ and the eyes-down delicacy ‘Red Kings’.

Flaty & OL’s Serwed return to Huerco S’ West Mineral for their fourth album; straying from their usual bass abstractions into hi-gloss lab experiments with obvious appeal to disciples of Dopplereffekt, Vangelis or the 'Resident Evil'/'Silent Hill' OSTs.

Huerco S’ West Mineral label returns with lushly amorphous actions by Shiner, Pontiac Streator & Ben Bondy aka Shinetiac; together fused for an immersive flux of vapoured dub, chopped and droned Billie Eilish, and fidgety algorithmic jams.

There's not a single, specific sound you can peg to the West Mineral axis at this stage in the label’s evolution - it's rather a set of shared aesthetics that freely bend into various interconnected shapes. Shinetiac's contemptuous, critic-baiting gear is the ideal example; on their last album, 2023's 'Not All Who Wander Are Lost', skittery, ketamized IDM sparkled over Spice Girls samples and the Foo Fighters' 'Everlong' was transmuted into Sneaker Pimps-style trip-hop. 'Infiltrating Roku City' might be a little less blatant with its out-and-out poptimism, but it takes a similarly dim view of conservative "big ambient" snobbishness. Just a few minutes of 'Bluemosa' should be enough to let you know what's up; the overall character of the sound is hazed, with frozen pads and garbled, dubbed-out voices smudged into a mess of effects and samples. But it sups up different nuances as it wriggles, absorbing scampering breaks, dizzy acoustic guitar strums and half-heard wordless vocals, flipping in the third act to emerge from its shell as minimalist balearic folk-pop - something like Bon Iver doing 'Electric Counterpoint'.

Brooklyn's Shiner, Philly's Pontiac Streator and Berlin-based Ben Bondy navigate the labyrinthine streaming landscape, guided by their own private experiences of mindless doom-scrolling and cruising the darkest corners of YouTube. They formulated 'Infiltrating Roku City' while they were rehearsing last year and spent the winter stitching together various recordings and jams into a layered, dry-witted commentary on our algorithmic reality. Laden with inside jokes and refried memes, it's surprisingly elegant gear; handling the most unseemly elements like sonic recyclers, earnestly repurposing pop and nostalgia to create an atmospheric echo of contemporary reality. 

Screwing Chief Keef's enduring 'Citgo', 'Clublyfe (hulu)' emphasises the original's AFX-pilled euphoria with Robert Miles-style piano hits, replacing Young Ravisu's brittle 128kbps trap rhythm with a glitchy rattle that picks up dembow spikes as it rolls. 'I Hate Being Sober' vaporises the Chicago drill pioneer's 'Hate Bein' Sober', blocking out his voice with glitchy, downsampled interference and elasticated Rhodes. The trio team up with Orange Milk's goo age on the sublime 'Crisis Angel', catching a ray of Malibu's sunshine in the process, and reduce Billie Eilish's voice to a Romance-does-Celine cinder on 'Billie', stretching it to fit next to gassed Future ad-libs and swooping 808 Mafia sub womps. And although the album takes a murky diversion on 'Roku Axes Ultra’, and a cloud-stepping centrepiece ‘Purelink’ in homage to the eponymous dubbed ambient dynamos, it's back on course with 'Jiafei (NETFLIX)', taking aim at TikTok bot videos and welding screams from Florida metal band Underoath to AI-strength vocal curlicues.

Huerco S’ West Mineral label follow Pendant’s sublime 'Make Me Know You Sweet' album with uon’s wholly absorbing study in brownian motion and isolation tank ambience; a hypnotically lush exploration of underwater romance. If you're into the impeccable run of Vainqueur releases on Chain Reaction, this one's for you.

It’s the 2nd release from the enigmatic project, whose debut 12”s in 2017 was among the year’s standout ambient and dub-related releases. On this new one uon poetically describes three different behaviours of water and its amorphous states through a gently elemental push and pull of forces best considered in the vein of Basic Channel, Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas or the shimmering convections of Ross 154.

Beautifully elusive but crucially watermarked with a sense of originality in personalized style, Solaris opens the set with a 17 minute cut - a seemingly infinite journey through swells of diffracted chords and silty filters, simultaneously connoting sensations of opiated amniotic safety and oceanic infinity.

Where the A-side feels like floating in a lush mass, the bass-heavy articulation of his B-side’s J may well urge listeners onto the ‘floor with the same, inexorable traction of classic Vainqueur records, and in a way smartly reflects uon’s mutable DJ style, before the aqueous qualities of his final track Bus soothes to a deeper blue state of loved-up introspection which, like Solaris, could have have easily taken up a side to itself.

Bliss.

Impeccably produced and gripping West Mineral wooze from Naarm’s Yunzero, adding to our sizeable appreciation for the Aussie school with a sublime and frazzled set of gaseous, crumbling loops and effervescent soundscapes that plays like a mixtape we can imagine a descendant of Left Ear would grip in 2045. Based in Naarm, Jim Sellars is a strong new addition to the West Mineral stable, bringing with him a profound understanding of textural ambient, bass-heavy dubwise sounds and fractured beat music. After a few cassette releases for Naarm's own .jpeg Artefacts and the Chicago-based Lillerne Tape Club - home of West Mineral's Mister Water Wet and Ben Bondy - Sellars has assembled a record that jumps through sonic wormholes as it drags through soundscapes and meticulously chiseled technoid sketches. Dancing in and around an airspun grid weft with sampledelic fragments of ‘90s ambient dance music, Yunzero lucidly works a sound close to the expansive heart of West Mineral, measured with an equilibrium of drifting out-of-the-lines gauze and cogent, semi-melodic structures that move against convention. From our detached perspective, in the humid post-industrial flatlands of south Manchester, Yunzero’s music feels as though it maps mountain ranges and subtropical climes in its scale and democratic ecology of sounds, projecting escapist sojourns on the back of the eyelids. ‘Butterfly DNA’ lands gently on the mind, with imperceptible jump-cuts and transitions lending to the rolling rural simulacra feel. Plunging in with the cool splash and viscosity to ‘Drop of Honey’, the breezy tendrils of ‘Leaf’ give way to recycled ambient beat loops in ‘Ice Punk’ and the album’s most substantial cut - a nugget of a DJ Plead-like groove on ‘Cupid Television’. From herein the thread gets beautifully frayed between the kaleidoscope turns of slurred downbeats in ‘Snail’ and ambient floor hugger ‘Graffitti In The Pond’, while bush doof echoes perfuse ‘Acrylic Germ’ in a more fractious outburst that brings the album down to close with a surprise in the tail, a reminder that nature can nip as well as soothe.