Dean Grenier
Four the Eight
Handworks

Dean Grenier has worn a lot of different hats over the course of his music-making career. Some of those hats involved now-retired aliases like DJG and Grenier, while others were related to his forays into drum & bass, dubstep, techno, ambient and a slew of other styles. Chalk it up to creative curiosity, or maybe just some good old-fashioned restlessness, but the California native basically never stuck to any one thing for more than a few years. Despite that, one characteristic did remain constant: The guy had a penchant for darkness, and routinely outfitted even his most banging productions with some combination of tension, dread, gloom and aggression.

It wasn’t a bad approach—Grenier’s catalog features a number of quality tunes—but it’s also something that he’s now left behind. A little more than a year ago, he not only started up a new label, Handworks, but immediately began releasing music on that label under his first and last name. As name changes go, it admittedly wasn’t all that dramatic, but what was dramatic was the degree to which Grenier also switched up his sound, pivoting away from the ominous confines of the hardcore continuum and instead embracing a particularly lush strain of what sounds like progressive trance.

Back in the day, his junglist pals likely wouldn’t have approved, but in 2026, Grenier sounds liberated, reveling in the cloudy textures and pastel atmospheres that define his newly adopted sound palette. Four the Eight is actually the fifth release since he made the switch—clearly the guy is feeling inspired by his new direction—and if there’s one thing the new record is emitting, it’s a palpable sense of bliss. Where many contemporary producers get cute and nibble at the edges of the prog template, Grenier dives in headfirst; “48 Amends,” for instance, offers nine-plus minutes of cashmere indulgence, and the record also includes a separate “Sky Version” that allows listeners to bathe in the song’s glistening expanse without being nudged toward the dancefloor by a pesky procession of kick drums.

Grenier sets aside the soft-focus lens on “Object Impermanence,” bolstering its twinkling melodies with some sumptuously cinematic swells, and later flirts with a bit of wormhole techno on “Opal.” The original—which is exclusive to Bandcamp—employs a strident four-on-the-floor beat and some braying, sci-fi-flavored synth blasts, yet Grenier skillfully dials back the aggression on “Opal (26 Mix),” maintaining just a hint of the source material’s crunch while swaddling the tune in a kind of swirling celestial drone. What he’s doing is probably closer to full-moon fodder than the sort of thing you’d hear at a sweaty warehouse party, but considering the nourishing nature of these tunes, he just might be on to something.

ssonne
night admin
Abundance

For all the attention that’s been paid in recent years to the ecosystem of ambient-ish artists affiliated with labels like West Mineral Ltd., 3XL, Peak Oil and Motion Ward, the vast majority of that attention has been focused on what’s happening in places like Berlin and New York City. Even so, small pockets of related musical activity have emerged in numerous cities and countries around the globe, including Spain, where producers like Nueen and Defled have turned at least a few heads with their own hypnotically hazy creations. (The former, in fact, has already appeared on Hyperdub, 3XL, Balmat, Good Morning Tapes and several other high-quality outposts.)

With the release of night admin, Barcelona-based artist ssonne has thrown his hat into the ambient ring, filling his debut album with weightless, static-laced sojourns and woozy experiments which seemingly attempt to connect the dots between Burial and the sludgiest beats in Young Thug’s catalog. Opening track (and clear standout) “Cursed Light Dub” falls into the latter category, mining bliss from its pools of reverb and rap snippets that have been pitch-shifted and Auto-Tuned into oblivion. The ghosts of Southern hip-hop also float through the freaky vocal production of “Electric Car Drift” and the looming bass tones on “Imaginary Spaces,” but night admin ultimately owes more to old Gas and Alva Noto records than anything from the hip-hop canon.

Though ssonne’s music never feels pastoral—there’s far too much post-modern dread in the mix for that—it does have something of a playful streak, as evidenced by the jaunty melodies on songs like “Sojapunk” and “Psyops.” Granted, those melodies are sometimes obscured by waves of soft static, but even when night admin is at its murkiest, bumming people out never seems to be one of the album’s objectives. With its gentle melodies and lilting textures, LP closer “To Julia” actually conveys a sense of tranquility, and while it most likely wasn’t meant as some sort of statement to the wider ambient sphere, it’s a sign that ssonne’s head is in a good place, regardless of who does—or doesn’t—listen to the record.

Abby Sundborn
Holding Pattern
A Colourful Storm

More than two years have passed since First Floor wrote about the cello’s growing presence in the experimental music realm, and since then, the avant-garde cellists have just kept on coming. One of the latest to make a splash is Abby Sundborn, though she’s already well known within Melbourne’s independent music scene, where she’s played alongside the likes of Tony Buck (of The Necks), Jonnine (of HTRK) and Lisa Lerkenfeldt. Holding Pattern is actually her second album, and unlike its predecessor, it features Sundborn’s voice, albeit only on a single song.

That song, however, is an obvious highlight, as “Shed” hypnotically blends the robust plucks of her cello with her (mostly) wordless, reverb-dusted vocalizations. Stretching out across nearly eight minutes, it’s a meditative and undeniably patient piece, yet the sparse arrangement infuses every note and syllable with a sense of emotional (and maybe even spiritual?) weight. Elsewhere on Holding Pattern, that weight resides solely in Sundborn’s cello, its every croak, creak and groan resonating across the stereo field and demanding listeners’ full attention.

From a compositional standpoint, Holding Pattern technically doesn’t do much, but perhaps that’s why it’s so effective (and affecting). Sundborn doesn’t appear to be interested in distracting people, or wowing them with her technical prowess. She merely wants them to listen, and sit with whatever feelings pop up along the way.

Phil Berg
Iso
SK_X

An excellent example of doing more with less, Iso is an EP which, intentionally or not, showcases the power of a good loop. Minimal but not mnml, it finds Phil Berg stripping techno down to its propulsive essence, putting the drums high in the mix and utilizing melody—which by and large appears in the form of tiny synth chirps—as another percussive element.

The title cut, which opens the record, is a veritable freight train, with each drum hit and bass tone adding to the song’s already imposing forward momentum. Brute force is something the track has in spades, yet Berg coaxes a palpable sense of groove from its mechanical churn, taking a few cues from Robert Hood and Sleeparchive along the way. “Rinn” and “Abyss” ease off the accelerator a bit, but they ultimately follow a similarly spartan formula, with the former folding in some sci-fi aesthetics and a subtly wiggly bassline while the latter employs a notably bashy array of drums. Berg then puts his head back down on closing number “Chimera,” barreling toward some unseen horizon as the song’s twisty synth loop injects just a hint of psychedelia into the proceedings.

Donato Dozzy
Hypno Trance
Spazio Disponibile

If any Donato Dozzy diehards were freaked out by the title of the Italian techno veteran’s latest EP, they can rest easy: the music on Hypno Trance bears no trace of dance music’s dreaded t-word. The trance he’s interested in is the kind induced by a bout of hypnosis, and he glides into that meditative state on opening cut “Hypno Trance 0,” a slow-brewing, industrial-tinged chugger that honestly owes to Bauhaus (or maybe Tones on Tail) than anything Tiësto ever did.

The pace picks up significantly on “Hypno Trance 6,” though the track’s urgent underbelly ultimately takes a back seat to its swirling mass of synth tones. Dozzy then keeps the pedal to the metal on closing number “Hypno Trance 9,” reveling in its crunchy sonics as the song practically sprints across across the dancefloor. As with all of the tracks on Hypno Trance, it’s a relatively stripped-down, no-frills affair, but Dozzy is smart enough to know that cluttering up the proceedings with additional bells and whistles would only sap the music of its potency.

Tristan Arp
(re)weave
Kapsela

In what sure looks like a “game recognize game” situation, Objekt—an artist renowned for having some of the most inventive and impeccably crafted rhythms in all of electronic music—has inked an EP from Tristan Arp, one of the few producers whose brain-bending talents rival his own. Considering that the Kapsela catalog already includes entries from gyrofield and PVAS, the young imprint is quickly becoming a home for outside-the-box thinkers, but re(weave) is easily the label’s best offering to date.

Born out of a period of relative instability—over the course of several years, the Detroit native logged significant time in both New York and Mexico City before eventually settling in London—the record has a distinctly jittery energy, with lively drum patterns that start, stop, wriggle and squirm like a toddler that’s been placed on time out and is struggling to cope. The bubbly beats and feverish hand drums of “Shapeshifting Dub” echo the percolating rhythms of gamelan, and the addition of what sounds like a trumpeting elephant take the proceedings even farther away from Western club orthodoxy. “Mutable Fields” takes a similarly percussion-led approach, though it heads toward a more celestial, almost psychedelic zone, dousing its drum hits in reverb as they weave through various twists and turns.

The whole EP is richly detailed and fascinatingly complex, but it’s on the record’s back half that melody assumes a starring role. The gleaming synth tones on “Forking Path”—a song built atop a sturdy array of mutant, not-quite-jungle rhythms—give the track an almost bioluminescent glow, and while the robotic vocal snippets and off-kilter drums of EP closer “Wish Server” directly channel the salad days of IDM, its soft and smudgy chords provide a welcome dose of tenderness. There are plenty of artists out there who like to get weird with their productions, but re(weave) is a good reminder that Tristan Arp is one of the few who can do so without sounding masturbatory and self-indulgent.

TSVI
Dance Tripping
Nervous Horizon

Banger alert! Regardless of whether or not you decide to spend time with TSVI’s new Dance Tripping EP, its opening number, “Music Is Moving,” is something you’ll surely be hearing all summer long. Brimming with energy and constructed atop a shuffling garage-house beat, the track relentlessly buzzes the dancefloor (at times, its hoovering synths genuinely sound like a riled-up swarm of bees), all the while nodding toward the confident strut and chunky basslines that defined some of big beat’s most madcap tunes.

The buzzing grows even more prominent on “The Wasp Track”—no, the title is not a coincidence—though it’s skillfully offset by some plinky, MK-style melodies. “Kataklisma,” on the other hand, leans into its inherent menace, pushing its muscular synths into the red and reveling in the distorted mayhem that results.

Those blaring tones are in many ways what Dance Tripping is all about, or at the very least are what the record will likely come to be known for, but those craving some of TSVI’s nimble drum programming can find it on both the EP’s title track and its wobbly closer, “Turbo Motion.” The latter pairs its serrated synth lines with a beat that practically gallops its way around the club, while “Dance Tripping” is a proper percussive workout, one in which the London-based Italian serves up an invigorating procession of clangs and bangs. According to the official promo blurb, the song is rooted in tech house, and that influence may be detectable to anyone who squints hard enough, but what makes it—and, frankly, the whole EP—such a delight is TSVI’s willingness to set aside his inhibitions and get truly rowdy.

Dona vs. DJ Plant Texture
Mistress 18 / Mistress 18.5
Mistress

One of the unexpected legacies of the mid 2010s is that many extremely talented producers who first emerged during that era are still releasing music under silly artist monikers. DJ Seinfeld has gone on to become one of the biggest DJs in the world. Ross from Friends releases records on Brainfeeder. And while Dona Basile was never part of the so-called “lo-fi house” circuit, he nonetheless found his footing around the same time, turning out scuzzy hardware experiments under the weed-indebted moniker of DJ Plant Texture.

Funnily enough, half of Basile’s latest EP—a double-vinyl effort released as both DJ Plant Texture and Dona—feels like a throwback to when lo-fi house was at its height. The tunes credited to Dona are the same sort of lethargic cuts that would have cracked the YouTube algorithm a decade ago, and if you slapped an irreverent graphic on the cover of Mistress 18.5 and told me it was the latest record from the E-Beamz label, I might even believe you. (There’s something deeply ironic about that, especially considering that the EP has been issued by Mistress, a label whose founder, DVS1, is known for taking dance music very seriously.)

Basile’s fuzzy house excursions provide a welcome trip down memory lane, but the EP’s strongest tracks are the ones from his DJ Plant Texture alias, which also happen to sound totally fresh. “Avoiding The” is choral, peak-time techno with a lovely breakdown that’s begging for a sunrise play, and the other highlight, “Shadows,” has a dubby wash to it, along with loose, swung drums that recall the deeper hues of Chicago house. Also on offer are a couple of satisfying hip-hop interludes, a clear sign that DJ Plant Texture is still cooking up new ideas.

J2Rk
Puma
Perfect Dark

Jackson Ryland is one of the key nodes that make up Washington DC’s underappreciated dance music underground. And, like many of the people in that scene, he’s hard to pin down. He makes otherworldly breakbeat-free jazz hybrids with Andrew Field-Pickering (a.k.a. Max D) as Superabundance, has issued techno and drum & bass in productions under his own name and also knows how to bang it out, crafting peak-time techno as Rush Plus alongside sparring partner Jus Nowhere.

During the past few years, however, Ryland has locked into a groove—a hardgroove. (Please excuse the pun.) Under his JR2k alias and via the curation of his Floorspeed label, he’s been pushing some of the funkiest techno north of 135 bpm, showcasing his own talents while also championing rising superstars like 1Morning.

His latest release, Puma, which arrives on San Francisco label Perfect Dark, contains four tracks of the good stuff. These are straight-up DJ tools where the drums are hard, but swung, and the melodies are both simple and stripped down to the studs. That doesn’t mean they are boring. Instead, the tracks are filled with hidden little gems, from the extended breakdown on “Piriformis”—where it sounds like a vocal sample is being processed underwater—to the title track’s legitimately terrifying acid line. In short, this is down and dirty hardgroove at its contemporary best.

Salamanda
Basil
Music to Watch Seeds Grow By

The idea behind the Music to Watch Seeds Grow By label is simple (if absurd): founders Tia and Wil (of The Ransom Note fame) ask artists to create ambient soundscapes that capture the growth of a seed. Launched in late 2024, the premise has already proven to be catnip for the who’s who of experimental ambient, with previous entries from the likes of Davis Galvin, E Ruscha V and Brian d’Souza.

The series’ latest installment arrives from Salamanda. The Seoul duo have quickly launched themselves (together and in their separate careers as Uman Therma and Yetsuby) into the highest echelons of the contemporary weirdo ambient scene with their technicolor approach to sound design and micro-rhythms. And, sure enough, Basil plays to their strengths. The drums click in and out of time across the record, while the melodies are filled with quirky chord patterns and tonal changes—just wait for the wash of chords that transitions “to to ki toki tok” from staccato stutter into full-on electronic catharsis.

On some of the record’s best tracks, they lock into fourth world-style grooves, and the chuggy “hungry snail,” the lapping hand drums of “allez, pousse!” and the swung rhythm on “the blue wine” might even work in a set alongside some of the slower neo-minimal tunes being released on a label like Wisdom Teeth. Elsewhere, however, Salamanda ditch all notions of the club in favor of psychedelic bliss. The sequence of “Basil’s dream” and “Basil’s ritual” is like a fever dream soundtracked by a DJ from NTS’ The Early Bird Show, with undulating pads and lonely guitar lines slowly building into a hot and humid symphony of maracas, violins and chaotic percussion.

If you, like me, kill a basil plant at least once a month, this record might be the wake-up call you need to attend more carefully to your herbs.

Grady Steele
Nausea
FELT

When someone takes the time to build and tour a custom soundsystem, there’s a tendency to assume that they’re either A) some sort of bass fiend or B) a high-end sound nerd who can talk endlessly about their passion for vintage tweeter arrays. Does Grady Steele (a.k.a. the co-founder of Formant Soundsystem) fall into one of those categories? It’s possible, but anyone looking for a definitive answer isn’t likely to find it in his spellbinding new Nausea release.

For starters, the record contains virtually no percussion, and the few beats that are scattered here and there are of the pitter-pat variety. And sure, there are a few noisy patches—namely the scratchy interlude “III” and the turbulent middle stretch of “VII”—but Nausea is by and large a deeply chill effort, and one whose charm is at least partially due to the lo-fi glaze of soft static that coats practically the entire record. Even more alluring is the sense of emotional tenderness that Steele has woven through his compositions; “V,” in particular, echoes the melancholic wonder that’s come to define much of Burial’s best ambient work, and the softly strummed guitar on both that song and the similarly excellent “I” make the proceedings feel even more intimate. Enjoying Nausea doesn’t require a massive speaker rig—in fact, it’s the sort of thing that might sound best when you’re cuddled up with a blanket at home—but its contents are bound to be affecting at any volume.

Rosa Pistola
Incorregible
Eck Echo

Incorregible is not Rosa Pistola’s first experiment with tribal guarachero, but it’s an album on which the Colombian-born artist fully throws herself into what’s long been a distinctly Mexican style. That development may not mean much to the bulk of dance music fans outside of Latin America—particularly those whose knowledge of the region’s electronic sounds doesn’t extend beyond recently coined (and deeply vague) terminology like “Latin club” and “Latincore.” But at this stage in her career, Pistola is less interested in teaching gringos and more interested in communing with her ancestors. Envisioning her new LP as a “bridge between the ancestral and the contemporary,” it’s no wonder that she’s zeroed in on tribal, a hybrid sound that combines elements of house, techno, cumbia and guaracha with an assortment of (admittedly synthesized) pre-Hispanic sounds.

For the uninitiated, tribal guarachero first emerged in Mexico City during the early 2000s, led by figures like DJ Mouse and Manuel Palafox, but it was in Monterrey where the music—and its signature fashion, including the infamous “botas picudas” (pointy boots)—truly exploded. Within a decade, the genre was so big that teenage trio 3Ball MTY was snapped up by Universal and briefly became a fixture on the Latin pop charts. Following that peak, however, the genre largely faded from the spotlight, save for the occasional nod from crews like N.A.A.F.I, which in 2014 issued the triple-disc Tribal compilation, and more recently followed it up with last year’s TRIBAL 2025.

With Incorregible, Pistola—who’s lived in Mexico for the better part of the past two decades—has slid right into that lineage, grabbing ahold of the genre’s irrepressibly bouncy, borderline seasick rhythms and utilizing them as what she describes as “tools for connecting with the spiritual.” Assisting her in that effort is Maribel Galicia, a Teotihuacán native whose Nahuatl-language poems infuse LP opener “Conejo y Luna” with added historical and emotional weight. That’s followed by “Teonanacatl,” a chirping tune that evokes visions of colorful songbirds, and other standout moments on the album include the acrobatic, chopped guitar melodies of “La Guitarra,” the pitchy, flute-filled “Flauta Nahua” and the sonidero-style toasting that adorns the galloping grooves of “Media Noche.” Pistola may be looking to link up with another plane of existence, but the portal she’s opened up clearly resides on the dancefloor.

Paperclip Minimiser
Topology Transform
Blank Mind

Succinctly describing the music of John Howes is no easy task, but that’s always been the case, even when the UK producer was making more club-oriented fare as Cong Burn during the latter half of the 2010s. (Technically speaking, the name Cong Burn is still active, but it’s now dedicated solely to the tools he creates in his work as an audio software developer.) In this decade, however, he’s been working under a new moniker, Paperclip Minimiser, and primarily releasing music via the impeccably curated Peak Oil label, which billed the project’s 2022 debut full-length as “elusively multidimensional constructs of stereo-panned synthetics and slithering ambient techno,” and followed that with this year’s II, a “wrinkled cyberpunk landscape” consisting of “shovelware blips and whines, spacious environmental echoes and lustrous, plasticky FM hits.”

In simpler terms, Paperclip Minimiser borrows heavily from ambient, dub techno and the most zoned-out corners of dubstep, forging a seductive détente between gaseous soundscapes and chest-rattling bassweight. The hypothetical comparisons practically write themselves, but whether you imagine “DMZ making tunes for the chillout room” or “Basic Channel designing a live set for FWD»,” you’ll be getting close to Howes’ musical headspace. And while II—an excellent album which came out only two months ago—was a moody effort that only intermittently nodded toward the dancefloor, the new Topology Transform EP, which was apparently written around the same time, travels even further afield.

Opening cut “TT A1”—in case you’re wondering, all Paperclip Minimiser tunes are named in this purely functional fashion—has a creepy-crawly quality, its broken rhythm and distorted bass tones scuttling along like insects making their way through leafy underbrush. “TT A2,” on the other hand, nearly does away with beats altogether, as Howes conjures up a hypnotic suite of weightless wiggles and echoing vocal fragments. Yet it’s on “TT B1” where he truly luxuriates in the ether, layering a seemingly endless procession of plush pads atop a surreal, almost Dalí-esque assortment of intermittent drum hits and synthetic chirps. Clocking in just shy of 12 minutes, the song is akin to dropping a couple of tabs of LSD and paying a visit to the local bird sanctuary, and as bizarre as that might sound, the trip—both literal and metaphorical—proves remarkably rewarding.

Hara Alonso
Music of Many Nows
FUU

Billed as a “field recording notebook,” Music of Many Nows might at first glance seem like an insignificant entry in Hara Alonso’s catalog, but the Spanish composer—who makes her home in Sweden—has built something special out of what she describes as “spontaneous phone recordings.” Utilizing sounds she captured in Granada, Stockholm, Barcelona, Chicago and Gothenburg, the record does on some level function as a kind of metaphorical diary of her semi-nomadic existence, but on a more basic level, it’s simply a beautiful collection of songs.

“Soft Wanderlust,” which adorns its blustering breeze and rattling found sounds with Alonso’s delicately tinkling piano, is a lovely standout, yet some of the strongest pieces on the record are its collaborations. On “A Second Is a Choir,” the resonant cello playing of Lia Kohl glides through a thicket of soft static, tranquil nature sounds and charming snippets of what sounds like a choir, while the blissed-out “Another Period of Time” largely cedes the spotlight to the reverb-drenched guitar riffs of Barcelona-based artist helga j. That celestial vibe continues on EP closer “Linnéplatsen,” where Alonso’s keys flutter like ballet dancers, their movements made all the more graceful by the song’s pastoral haze.

DJ JM
Rat Race
Fever AM

Over the course of its nearly nine-year run, Fever AM has gradually become one of electronic music’s top techno labels—and the funny thing is, it’s not really a techno label in the strictest sense of the term. That’s likely because its two founders, Mor Elian and Rhyw, are themselves the sort of producers who actively push against genre boundaries. Folding in elements of house, electro and bass music, they embrace the unorthodox and make a solid case that dance music’s liminal spaces are in fact responsible for some of its most creative (and most rewarding) tunes.

That philosophy has also shaped the duo’s curatorial approach, which helps explain how fellow boundary-blurring misfits like Ayesha, Xen Chron, Peder Mannerfelt, Naco and Hevlaran have wound up contributing to the Fever AM catalog. DJ JM—a Copenhagen-based Lithuanian who’s previously appeared on labels like Nervous Horizon, Turbo and Maloca—is the latest addition to the extended crew, and his Rat Race EP is a positively electric effort. “Skip” is a beefy bruiser with a flatulent bassline, while the bouncy “Never” grafts dubstep-style wubs onto a shuffling rhythm that owes more to speed garage than the traditional Berghain canon. Even better is “Cancel,” a playfully punchy tune that feels like a trip through a museum of retro mobile phone sounds, but it’s the EP’s title track that truly stands out, its whirring synth lines calmly rising into the air like a procession of untethered helium balloons. Funnily enough, “Rat Race” is the closest thing to straight-up techno on the record, and though its four-on-the-floor rhythm provides a sturdy foundation, it’s DJ JM’s playful energy that makes the song a real banger.

Untold
HEK036
Hemlock

Jack Dunning’s music as Untold has become synonymous with the darkest corners of the dubstep and post-dubstep world. It’s a shorthand for deconstructed club music made to soundtrack apocalyptic cities where sunlight is a distant memory. That’s why HEK036 is such a curveball. Dunning’s first EP in seven years is surprisingly light on its toes. Dare I say, it’s even a bit goofy?

I mean this in a good way. Untold’s music has always been minimal, but there are some shades of actual mnml on “Prince Rupert’s Drop”—the clicky bleeps and blops over the garage shuffle calls to mind producers like Christian Jay or Alec Falconer who fuse 2-step with minimal. On the absolutely gorgeous “Perfect! And Here’s Why It Matters,” the slanted melodies and occasional sweep of pads remind me of Thomas Melchior’s more sub-heavy releases on Perlon. Perhaps the biggest curveball is “Good Shoelaces.” It’s built around loose jazz percussion that slips in and out of time and some minor-key synth work, but even with its eerie melody, the vibe is way more Unsound than soundsystem.

The final two tracks, “It’s Not My Fault but It Is My Problem” and “Dogfooding,” are both vintage Untold (the former is a particularly banging tune), and they are also excellent. But it’s this new side of Dunning that makes this EP a real treat.

Hoavi
architectronics
Peak Oil

Kirill Vasin has proven himself to be a thoroughly versatile explorer, operating at the intersection of rhythm and tone while creating the kind of kinetic brain food that thrives amongst Peak Oil’s immaculate catalog. He’s been releasing music as Hoavi since 2013, but broke through to a wider audience around 2021 with efforts for Peak Oil and Balmat. His sound is that of the consummate modern music obsessive—expansive and swimming in multifarious influences, steering towards precise lines of inquiry filtered through a commanding grasp of the tools within his reach. He’s brushed with labels closer to home in his native Russia—most notably the constantly fascinating Gost Zvuk—but the broad sweep of his music seems less rooted in geography and community, and more in ideas and experiments.

It’s abundantly obvious listening to architectronics that Vasin is taking inspiration from Indonesian gamelan. He’s described in the accompanying text as having a lifelong appreciation of the traditional Southeast Asian genre, and it shows in the cascading, interlocking percussive and melodic patterns that shape out the movement of each piece on the album. This isn’t quite as direct as, for example, David Edren’s gamelan-inspired work as D.S.R. Lines or the more obvious connection in Uwalmassa’s modernist twist on the music. What Vasin does is elegantly fold the dexterous motion and tonality of gamelan into his own hand-wrought iteration—drumming on tables, tapping on glass—before he then applies all kinds of processing to arrive at something very much his own.

At times, his skittering patterns smudge through digital smokescreens as dubby low-end patterns create a more patient pulse underneath. There are textures and tones shifting across the stereo field throughout architectronics, the music’s dynamic modulation and micro details plugging directly into that ambiguous zone where electronic movement and organic sound coalesce into one captivating whole. This is vibrant, living music that requires focus to fully comprehend. Such is its knotty complexity, but therein lies the reward.

upsammy & Valentina Magaletti
Seismo
PAN

Your first impulse when listening to the excellent new LP Seismo might be to try and determine which elements were contributed by upsammy and which by Valentina Magaletti. After all, it shouldn’t be that hard with such seemingly different artists. The Dutch DJ and producer upsammy’s trademark sound arises from the combination of field recordings with IDM-inflected, laptop-based beats. London-based Italian percussionist Magaletti, meanwhile, is an incredibly tactile drummer, exploring the materiality of the drums in projects ranging from the ultra-delicate porcelain of the Batterie Fragile to the booming, dubbed-out spaciness of Holy Tongue.

The differences are obvious up to a point. On opener “It Comes to an End,” the percussion derives from a session at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum in which Magaletti played on different surfaces in the museum, while the playful digital melody is all due to upsammy. But as the album progresses, the boundaries blur. The frantic percussion on “Superimposed” may come from either artist or be passed between them, while the sampled voices recall Magaletti’s work with Moin as much as upsammy’s Strange Meridians LP. By the time we get to closer “Some Unimaginable World,” it’s easier to give up this forensic approach and give in to the track’s blissful drift.

Rather than focusing on what separates upsammy and Magaletti, then, we should pay attention to what happens when they collide. upsammy’s crystalline melodies take up the foreground while Magaletti’s drums give depth to each track, creating a porous and shifting landscape. At its best, as on “Hyperlocalize,” Seismo feels like being whisked through this space, glimpsing landmarks as they zoom by: piano chords rise like mountains and sampled voices say “Totalitarianism” or “We’re decentralizing the…” like a series of inscrutable billboards. It’s a whirlwind tour of a disconcerting world, half physical and half digital but wholly fascinating.

Blue Hour
Selva
Blue Hour

Luke Standing’s career is a microcosm of UK techno’s evolution in the 2000s. He grew up in Brighton listening to hardcore and jungle tapes before moving to Bristol for university and becoming immersed in that city’s dubwise scene. His earliest releases as Furesshu capture the moment when dubstep was becoming techno and techno was becoming dubstep. After university, though, he moved to Berlin around 2010 (also a vital part of UK techno’s story), where he started releasing harder-edged sounds as Blue Hour and, as the name might suggest, the music had a slightly melancholic feel to it.

Since then, he’s built up an impressive catalog of contemporary UK techno, brushing shoulders with the Berghain crowd (a track of his appeared on Function’s mix for the club), but also dabbling further afield with genres like trance (his remix of Agent Orange’s classic “Warm Love” is an absolute banger). Even with this CV, Standing has never quite reached the level of accolades as some of his Bristol or Berlin peers, but his debut LP, Selva, might finally get him the flowers he deserves.

Listened to one way, the record is a retrospective. We start with the bass-inflected techno of Bristol on “Arrival,” move into vintage Ostgut-style sounds with “The Chase,” get a taste of haunted trance on “Submerged” and finish off with some grown-up ambient thanks to “Portal.” But the record offers more than a tour of Standing’s greatest hits. On “Hidden Passages,” plaintive chords quiver on the edges of the stereo alongside the steel-soldered hand drums that makes a perfect duet of the tough and tender. And you’d be hard pressed to find a better piece of eerie afterparty psychedelia than the nightmare-inducing “Dreamscape.” Selva, in other words, showcases the versatile sound of a veteran producer who has built a career in dark rooms and knows exactly what works.

Alex Zhang Hungtai
Dras
Shelter Press

Alex Zhang Hungtai was an unlikely star of the blog era. As Dirty Beaches, he made dusty, loop-based music (often released on cassettes) that was catnip to the Gorilla vs. Bear crowd in the early 2010s. This act of his career culminated with 2013’s Drifters / Love Is the Devil, a transmission of tunes that sounded like they had been made to soundtrack a David Lynch western.

The Lynchian vibe has continued to define his career in the years since he dissolved the Dirty Beaches alias and started releasing records under his given name. (As cliche as a Lynch reference can be in the context of a music review, it’s warranted here; Hungtai featured in the Twin Peaks revival playing saxophone.) His music has also become more and more abstract, moving from the small stages of indie festivals to the Cafe OTO avant-garde.

Dras, his new full-length for Shelter Press, is his most barren release to date, but it’s also one of his best. The album is built around Hungtai’s saxophone playing, but this is not a saxophone like you’ve ever heard. On opener “Erg,” the instrument is filtered to sound like he’s playing a cello strung with barbed wire, its sharp, abrasive tones giving way only briefly to something like melody. Like the name suggests, “White Dwarf” is a dense track where the silences between the often harsh sax notes seem to soundtrack, if not the apocalypse per se, then certainly a world that doesn’t look at all like our current one.

But Dras isn’t all dissonant deconstruction. On “El Khela,” his saxophone seems to speak back to itself, creating densely layered loops that are like sunbursts of beauty. And on the short sketch “Xilitila,” he mutes the metallic harshness of the sax into a fragile, quivering meditation. All of this comes to a head on the gorgeous closer “Mazil,” which feels like it could be culled from the closing suite of some sci-fi symphony where little trills of melody are hung like constellations across the heavy low-end.

It’s not often that you hear a record that allows you to reimagine the capacity of an instrument. But on Dras, Hungtai has done just that. You’ll never look at a sax the same way again.