First Floor #216 – The Beat Never Stops
a.k.a. A round-up of the latest electronic music news and a fresh crop of new track recommendations.
Welcome back to First Floor. I’m Michael McKinney, a writer based in Minneapolis. In my work, I cover electronic music in as many of its facets as I can manage—as fuel for raves or head-trips, as a vessel for histories, as a series of conversations and as an evolving tangle of traditions.
Shawn is still out taking a much-deserved break (in case you’re wondering, he’ll be back next week), so today I’m covering the latest First Floor digest. In the past week, a whole lot of names released critical material, running the gamut from from alternative-future radio plays to blood-curdling jungle, with plenty in between.
Beyond the new songs, there’s lots more worth digging into: Explorations of dance music’s legal and generational histories, a survey of modern hip-hop’s deep leftfield and memorials for two dance music originators, alongside a fair bit more.
REAL QUICK
A round-up of the last week’s most interesting electronic music news, plus links to interviews, articles and other things I think are worth sharing.
PC Music founder and professional rug-puller AG Cook has been dissecting pop and electronic music for the past decade-plus, to mixed results: Sometimes thrilling, sometimes confounding, sometimes disorienting and sometimes all of the above. In light of his upcoming album, whose title—Britpop—feels like a pointed gesture towards the radio and its histories, he sat down with Michael Cragg of The Guardian for an in-depth conversation.
Conrad Thompson (a.k.a. MC Conrad) recently passed away at the age of 52. The MC, who was best known for his work alongside LTJ Bukem, was a critical figure in drum & bass with decades of genre classics under his belt.
The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act was a 1994 UK law targeting music that was “wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.” The measure effectively banned raves across the country and sparked a public outcry. (It also came to mind a few weeks ago when Chechnya’s culture ministry banned music outside of the 80-116 BPM range.) Harold Heath explored the legacy of the law in a recent piece for DJ Mag, speaking with ravers and DJs who felt the full brunt of the legislation.
DJ Rashad passed away a decade ago, but the footwork legend’s sound is still rippling across the globe. In a new feature for Resident Advisor, Arielle Lana LeJarde spoke with a raft of DJs who have felt his influence, ranging from childhood friends to new-school selectors.
The boundaries between hip-hop and electronic music have always been porous, and nowhere is that currently more obvious than SoundCloud, where producers are cooking up some truly out-there beats and MCs are venturing ever further into the digital muck. That said, getting a handle on this world can be difficult, especially for outsiders, which is why it’s so great that Kieran Press-Reynolds—who just last week penned an essay for First Floor—has sketched out a roadmap of the contemporary American rap underground for The Face.
OBLIGATORY BOOK MENTION
Shawn’s first book is out now. It’s called First Floor Vol. 1: Reflections on Electronic Music Culture, and you can order it from my publisher Velocity Press. However, if you’re outside of the UK, it’s recommended that you either inquire at your favorite local bookshop or try one of the online sales links that have been compiled here.
JUST ANNOUNCED
A round-up of noteworthy new and upcoming releases announced during the past week.
London producer Actress has a long history of world-building, and he’s back at it again with a new album, Statik, that will be be released on June 7 via Smalltown Supersound. Two tracks—”Static,” a dimly lit ambient number, and “Dolphin Spray,” a lo-fi and sprightly synth workout—are already available to stream here.
UK artist Jon Hopkins has announced a new album. RITUAL, which is billed as “devotional, empowering and nurturing” and also features an extensive group of collaborators, will be issued by Domino on August 30.
Last summer, K-LONE released Swells, a blissed-out exploration of chillout and heady IDM. However, he still knows his way around the dancefloor, and will be releasing a new EP, Catching Wild, Pt. 1, on May 17 through the Aus label. The first track, “Give It Up,” is a low-slung cut that sits at the intersection of downtempo, dubstep, and 2-step, and it’s available to stream now.
Few artists have spent more time pushing the limits of Latin rhythms than Matias Aguayo, and on May 3 (i.e. tomorrow), he’ll de dropping something as part of his Cómeme imprint’s Cómeme Mucho series. Entitled Flouz / The Cash Song, the record also enlists the talents of Brooklyn firestarter Toribio, and his funked-up remix has already been shared.
Between its releases and club nights, Sepehr’s Shaytoon Records has been home for all sorts of club heaters, many of them with ties to the Iranian diaspora. The imprint recently unveiled its first release of 2024: Eyes of Pain, a six-tracker by Bay Area beat scientist Only Now. The EP is set for a June 7 release, but two tracks are already available to stream here: the title track, which tangles up no-nonsense techno and bhangra idioms, and “Punduro,” a drum workout made for gritted teeth and clenched fists.
POLAAR has long been a critical outpost for forward-thinking club tracks, and the French label will soon be celebrating its 10-year anniversary with Territoires Vol. 3, a compilation featuring the likes of Only Now, label head Flore, Nahash and others. The record is due to arrive on May 28, but one track, a SNKLS remix of Prettybwoy’s “Purify,” is available to stream now.
CARRÉ HAS BETTER TASTE THAN I DO
First Floor is effectively a one-person operation, but every edition of the Thursday digest cedes a small portion of the spotlight to an artist, writer or other figure from the music world, inviting them to recommend a piece of music. Today’s recommendation comes from Carré, a fast-rising dubstep talent out of Los Angeles. Though her city is generally better known as a hub for mosh-ready brostep than headier bass-centric offerings, Carré has been working hard to prove that Southern California ravers are far from braindead, dropping (intelligently) gut-rumbling sounds via Darwin’s SPE:C label and her own Fast at Work imprint. She recently inaugurated the latter outpost with an excellent EP called Soft Fascination, and here she shares a low-end-heavy gem from her digital crates.
O.M. Theorem “Lemma1-B2” (Self-released)
“Lemma1” checks all the boxes for me. I love how restrained it is—the song is both intricate and spacious at the same time. It really hooks me in with the way it builds, and I always find myself digging for tracks with the same feel and heavy bass, but no matter how hard I look for similar tunes, this one still stands out. It’s a great curveball 160 track that’s difficult to place in just one category, and I just think it’s a really memorable tune. The other O.M. Theorem releases are killer too!
NEW THIS WEEK
The following is a selection of my favorite tunes from releases that came out during the past week or so. Click the track titles to hear each song individually, or you can also just head over to this convenient Buy Music Club list if you prefer to listen to them all in one place.
Blood Trust “RLLR 24” (Straight Up Breakbeat)
Sometimes all you need is a white-hot drum break, but an amp-busting synthesizer is usually a welcome addition to any tune. On “RLLR 24,” Blood Trust—a critical name in new-school jungle—joins a real who’s who of modern hardcore, sharing space on the States of Art I compilation EP with Tim Reaper, Basic Rhythm, DJ Sofa, Mantra, and Jesta. It’s stiff competition, but Blood Trust brings the heat here, pairing lethal drum programming with gut-twisting bass. What really makes the track stick to the ribs, though, is its sheer dynamism—it feels like the UK producer is pulling something out and slotting something new in every four bars, rocketing between a million tiny variations without losing sight of the percussion-forward mania that makes the track work in the first place. It’s an acrobatic cut that nevertheless hits like a ton of bricks.
DJ Pitch “Juan Mecanico” (Blunting)
Between his work on All Centre and TT, DJ Pitch has had a hand in some truly bananas club music beaming out of the United Kingdom: billion-BPM dubstep, noise-inflected hard drum and some outright goofy percussion workouts. In that context, his latest release might come as a bit of a surprise; if anything, it’s a bit mellow. With “Juan Mecanico,” the London DJ and producer lays a stutter-stepping drum line underneath waterfalling synthesizers and just-so vocal chops. Depending on how you tilt your head, it belongs to all sorts of traditions: the MIDI vocals recall early Orange Milk experimentalism; the drums bring to mind broken beat at its bleariest; and its hyper-digital sheen feels like a bit of detritus salvaged from early-’10s Beer on the Rug. Most impressive, though, is how the track moves through these histories without getting bogged down by them. Its shoulder-rolling drums and lucid-dream synth tones should work equally well at peak time or 10 a.m.
Drumloop “DADDY” (Psychic Liberation)
Never mind the misnomer. As Drumloop, New York’s Daffy Scanlan produces haunted ambient music, using breathy vocals, deep-sigh synthesizers and meditative drones to suspend time. No percussion is needed or asked for. Her latest work, LIMITING MINDSET, is impressive for how wholeheartedly it commits to her aesthetic; think something between the fractured grandeur of Ravedeath, 1972-era Tim Hecker, the intimacy of Ruins-era Grouper and Malibu’s slow-motion disorientation and you’re starting to get there. “DADDY,” the closing track from her new record, is impressive for its sweep—the track is more or less a crescendo from pianissimo to mezzo-forte (tops), with aqueous synthesizers and deep-space drones swelling before an eventual retreat. This is ambient music as a tender, pained and monastic thing. If you tilt your head just right, it seems to suggest, you might see a few stars peeking through the dark.
Hodge & なかむらみなみ “Bounce on the Water (Flipped)” (TREKKIE TRAX)
Bristol producer Hodge has been responsible for all sorts of floor-focused delirium in the past several years, with a catalog that runs from muscular tech-house to skull-cracking dubstep. Everyday in the Club / Bounce on the Water, his latest release, is yet another left turn. For one, it sees him meeting up with Nakamura Minami, a Japanese rapper whose acrobatics find a fitting companion in Hodge’s style. “Bounce on the Water” is a satisfying bit of club-ready rap, with sparkling synthesizers dancing atop devil-may-care kicks, but the “Flipped” version is far stranger. The piano up top recalls all sorts of new age balladry, but the drums underneath sound like a juke track with half the channels on mute; when an organ blasts through the whole thing, it sounds like the ghost of a ’90s house track, or perhaps a ’50s Hammond solo.
Maara & Amor Satyr “Spiritual Ambush” (Wajang)
On first pass, Maara and Amor Satyr might not make a whole lot of sense together. Maara has been cooking up playful and energetic dancefloor material from Montreal for a few years now, with her best stuff infusing old-school trance with perennial optimism, while Amor Satyr specializes in gritted-teeth club music, all screw-face bass, high-speed dembow rhythms and steamrolling breakbeats. But their music is bound by a shared interest in pure club fuel and everything-at-once jubilee, giving them plenty of shared space to meet in. The self-titled track off a recent collaborative EP is a best-of-both-worlds scenario, with progressive house synth arpeggios, whirling hand drums and a limber low end. It’s a song where Maara and Amor Satyr strap their CDJs to a rocket and trust that ravers will follow.
Mia Koden “F.T.S.” (Self-Released)
A few weeks ago, London-via-Sheffield artist Mia Koden put out her latest mix. Entitled Made By Mia Koden Vol. 2, it offered a quick-and-precise 30 minutes of whipcracking dubstep from one of the UK’s finest. The mix also came with a promise: Its three most popular tracks would get soon get standalone releases. Those tracks are out now, on the cheekily titled 34U, and the best one—”F.T.S.”—shows the kind of stuff that makes Koden such a critical talent. It’s a 140-bpm bass-grinder, built on a raspy vocal sample and a tectonic low-end, its floorboard-cracking frequencies rattling into the open air. The song is driving and steely-eyed, to be sure, but it’s also awfully vertiginious. The sheer amount of negative space makes the whole thing feel pleasantly queasy; every time she pulls the bass out, it feels like she’s suspending the track over the edge of a cliff.
Nene H “All This for What” (studio LABOUR)
In their work, LABOUR (a.k.a. Berlin’s Farahnaz Hatam and Colin Hacklander) act as both archeologists and vandals, digging up the past only to crack it in half. (Their debut LP, 2020’s nine-sum sorcery, is remarkable for this bifurcated approach, blurring the lines between pitch-black ambience, desolate folk music and screaming walls of noise.) With GmbH: An Anthology of Music for Fashion Shows 2016-2023 Vol. 1, the duo enlisted a slate of like-minded artists (e.g. Fatima Al Qadiri, Lyra Pramuk, Gabber Modus Operandi, Asmara) and invited them to take their own crack at the hieroglyphs. However, it’s Nene H who ultimately steals the show. “All This for What” is built on a foundation of a reverb-drenched choral section and an acidic synth line, making that conversation between histories apparent from the jump. Even after the track picks up with a heart-in-throat kick drum and a bit of muted mallet percussion, it never shakes its ghosts. This is “bad dream chase scene” techno; it sits between umpteen worlds and is all the stronger for it.
Nicolás Jaar “archivos_de_radio_piedras_006_-_el-entre” (Other People)
When he crash landed into electronic music more than a decade ago, Nicolás Jaar took familiar idioms—bleary-eyed synth-pop, spine-tingling ambience—and moved them just a bit left of center. In recent years, though, he’s gone stranger still, tossing assorted electronics, folk traditions and spoken word into deep space. His latest transmission, Archivos de Radio Piedras, is his most obviously ambitious record yet. Its first 17 tracks—there are 49 in total—make up a radio play about a “speculative future Chile,” with stories of house fires, blackouts and familial resilience cast against all sorts of disorienting sounds, including clicks, beeps, whirs and the static one hears at the far end of the FM dial. The whole record occupies a uniquely arresting sonic world, but it’s worth pointing towards “archivos_de_radio_piedras_006_-_el-entre.” Here, Jaar twists between lo-fi crackles, no-bit synthesizers and garbled spoken word, pushing its various elements until the whole thing cracks open into a blast of noise-encrusted cumbia.
Patrick Holland “Blue Riff” (Verdicchio Music Publishing)
The music of Patrick Holland casts a sepia tinge over house, techno and pop. His best stuff, even at its most direct, sounds like it’s been pulled out of a time capsule, and the Montreal-based artist’s most recent release, Blue Riff / Mid Tide, is no different. The B-side is a quiet stunner of zonked-out balladry, all electric guitars tracing loops around each other while a drum kit shuffles underneath. “Blue Riff,” on the other hand, is tough and minimal floor-focused material, with a lo-fi drum machine chugging away as a few synthesizers run ellipses up top. At points, it recalls the psychedelic feel of Donato Dozzy’s extraterrestrial techno, but Holland is doing something slightly different here, angling towards the stars even as he casts the whole thing in a lo-fi fuzz that makes the song feel a bit nostalgic.
Viels “Alienazione” (Semantica)
Viels (a.k.a. Italian techno experimentalist Massimiliano Viganò) has a pretty clear-cut approach to the genre, usually offering up work that’s metallic, a bit grim and wrapped in chrome. His latest EP, Il Quarto Respiro (translation: “The Fourth Breath”) is no different, with sci-fi synthesizers and steely-eyed kick drums jostling for space in a way that’s claustrophobic and propulsive in equal measure. The opening track, “Alienazione,” takes this approach to a thrilling extreme using little more than a kick drum and a sheet of noise. The song starts out relatively simply, with a hi-hat and kick drum locking into a mechanical gallop, but it’s not long before a wash of sound—Distortion? Wind-tunnel field recordings?—blasts into the room, howling over the percussion and pushing everything into the red. Consider this one an exercise in white-knuckled minimalism.
VHOOR “Barulho da Água” (Empire)
One of the most thrilling things about funk mineiro—the stripped-back take on Brazilian funk that’s pumping out of Belo Horizonte—is its sheer economy. A typical track takes just a few elements and holds them in tension, trusting the power of machine-funk minimalism to hold it all together. “Barulho da Água” showcases the style at its electrifying best, and does so using little more than an earth-cracking kick drum, 2 a.m. synthesizer drones, muffled percussion and the track’s title, repeated into infinity. The whole thing sounds a bit waterlogged, with an aesthetic that recalls beat bolha, or “bubble beat,” a take on funk defined by its bubbling drum sounds. (Suddenly, the track’s title starts to click into place.) “Barulho da Água” is the sound of one sub-culture in a whispered conversation with another, and it pushes funk mineiro’s heavyweight minimalism into territories that are soft, playful and delirious.
That brings us to the end of today’s First Floor digest. Thank you so much for reading the newsletter, and, as always, I do hope that you enjoyed the tunes. (Don’t forget, you can find them all on this handy Buy Music Club list, and if you like them, please buy them.)
Have a great week,
Michael
Shawn Reynaldo is a freelance writer, editor, presenter and project manager. Find him on LinkedIn and Twitter, or you can just drop him an email to get in touch about projects, collaborations or potential work opportunities.
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