First Floor #278 – The Joys of Non-Algorithmic Discovery
Spotlighting some under-the-radar independent labels, plus a round-up of the latest electronic music news and a fresh slate of new track recommendations.
Kelefa Sanneh didn’t coin the term “poptimism,” but thanks to “The Rap Against Rockism,” a 2004 essay he penned for The New York Times, he’s routinely cited as its progenitor. What he wrote wasn’t an overtly fiery screed—Sanneh merely pushed back against the then-commonplace practice of evaluating all music through the lens of rock & roll—yet it’s often seen as the think piece that launched 1000 ships, kickstarting a movement that emboldened fans of even the most commercial pop, hip-hop and R&B to start demanding that those genres be taken as seriously as anything made by angsty white boys with guitars. Other factors came into play as well (e.g. the flattening effect of streaming and social media, the shift to online publishing prompting outlets to start chasing clicks in order to financially stay afloat), but within a decade of Sanneh’s essay first going live, the music journalism landscape had effectively pulled a 180. Rockism—and rock music in general—was passé, and even at the most notoriously snarky publications (i.e. Pitchfork), writers were not only covering the musical mainstream, but actively singing its praises.
What does Sanneh think about that shift? If his latest article for The New Yorker is any indication, his feelings are decidedly mixed. Examining the current state of music criticism—and, more specifically, questioning why it “lost its edge”—Sanneh acknowledges that the spectrum of music being covered these days is far broader than it used to be, but he also seems skeptical of the media’s drift toward star worship, and the tendency of modern writers to “frame musicians as heroes or villains in a fight for social justice.” And while he openly admits that he’s not sure exactly what the point of a negative review is in 2025, he also clearly misses the days when critics were less afraid to say something acerbic.
I too have a soft spot for those days, and while there’s obviously no shortage of negativity in the world right now—social media, which has far more sway over the discourse than the professional press, is absolutely teeming with vitriol—it doesn’t help music journalists’ credibility that contemporary critique so rarely has anything critical to say. Not a week goes by where I don’t see a viral post from someone—usually a disgruntled, middle-aged man—stating that everything published by the music press is “bought and paid for.” Anyone who actually works in music media knows that’s not true, especially when it comes to independent music, but the claim would nonetheless be far less believable if journalists (and the outlets they work for) weren’t so reluctant to say a bad word about today’s music offerings. (That being said, in an era of overzealous stan armies and aggressive online doxxing, some of the media’s reluctance to attack is absolutely justified.)
Nothing lasts forever, and after at least a decade of poptimism being the dominant critical paradigm, maybe another shift is on the horizon. Sanneh thinks it’s possible, pointing toward a few recent examples of prominent negative reviews before saying, “Perhaps, after the honeyed 2010s, music writers and their readers are rediscovering the pleasures of vinegar.” I’d like to hope he’s right, but what he doesn’t mention is that whenever the tenor of the cultural conversation does eventually head in a new direction, there’s a very good chance that traditional journalists won’t be the ones leading the charge. The Guardian this week published a rather pessimistic article about the decline of cultural criticism as a profession, citing the growing number of legacy publications that are either eliminating critics from their staff altogether, or pressuring them to do less writing and focus instead on making content for TikTok and other social media. Maybe that’s what we should really be worrying about.
Worrying, of course, is something that happens pretty regularly here at First Floor. Earlier this week, I found myself lamenting the short shrift that labels—and small labels in particular—often get in a music ecosystem that’s increasingly designed to prioritize the direct relationship between artists and their fans. Wanting to push back against that, I published an article highlighting five under-the-radar imprints that I think deserve more attention. My main criteria? Aside from the fact that they’re doing great work, the selected labels are all relatively small, and have received little in the way of media attention. In other words, it’s a list, and one that’s defiantly anti-algorithmic in nature, so if you’re in the mood for something which you most likely haven’t even heard of before, you can find a link to the article below.
Otherwise, today’s First Floor digest is stuffed with all of the usual bits and bobs you’ve come to expect: news items, new release announcements, suggested reading links, track recommendations … Basically, if you want to quickly get caught up on the most interesting stuff that happened in the world of electronic music during the past week, you’ve come to the right place. And as an added bonus, I’ve also lined up a special guest recommendation from Australian ambient / experimental composer Madeleine Cocolas, so make sure to give that a look as well.
Let’s get started.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:
Every week, First Floor publishes a long-form piece that’s initially made available to paid subscribers only. But if you’re not part of the paid tier, now’s your chance to see what you missed! The latest piece is now open to everyone, and it’s a list of five independent labels that have so far been largely ignored by the music press and whatever constitutes the modern hype machine. They’ve all had releases covered in First Floor before, but this piece is specifically meant to highlight the labels themselves.
REAL QUICK
A round-up of the most interesting electronic music news from the past week, plus links to interviews, articles and other things I think are worth sharing.
Tariffs are not something First Floor would usually cover, but Donald Trump’s new tariff regime—which eliminates the “de minimis” exemption that previously allowed shipments of goods worth $800 or less to enter the United States duty free—has already prompted postal services in France, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Japan, Australia, Taiwan, Mexico, India, Thailand, South Korea, and New Zealand to temporarily suspend the shipment of small packages to the US. This is not great news for record labels and artists selling their music and merch online, and the disruption has become so significant that Bandcamp has published a help article addressing the issue and is currently running a warning banner across its entire platform.
With her highly anticipated Friend album due to arrive next week, james K is kind of everywhere right now, providing fans with plenty of opportunities to get a closer look at both the artist and her artistry. Speaking to writer Cameron Cook in a feature for Crack magazine, she detailed her backstory—which involved, among other things, being raised by Deadheads in upstate New York and a multi-year stint in Berlin—and explained how her embrace of collaboration shaped the new LP. Digging deeper into her process, she also appears in the latest installment of Resident Advisor’s The Art of Production series, talking to Jacqueline Codiga about gear, her working methods and, yes, collaboration, spelling out what folks like Priori, Adam Feingold, Patrick Holland, Ben Bondy and Special Guest DJ brought to the table.
Climate change is one of those problems that’s obviously far too big for the music realm to combat on its own, but its effects are already being felt, particularly within the live music sector. In a lengthy new feature for DJ Mag, writer Becca Inglis highlights how fires, floods and extreme temperatures are already beginning to wreak havoc on the festival circuit, and explores the different ways that promoters are attempting (and often struggling) to adapt to this unfortunate new normal.
OBLIGATORY BOOK MENTION
My 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, I recommend 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.
A little more than a month removed from the release of his Attrition album on Planet Mu, Kenyan bass samurai Slikback has returned with a surprise new single, the biggest surprise of all being that the song is a collaboration with Skrillex. Entitled “Kixa,” it’s available now as a name-your-price download on Bandcamp.
Saxophonist Bendik Giske recently dropped Remixed, on which material from his self-titled 2023 album is reworked by Carmen Villain, aya, Hanne Lippard, Hieroglyphic Being, Wacław Zimpel and Beatrice Dillon. (Dillon, of course, also produced the original LP.) Issued by the Smalltown Supersound label, the full remix collection is currently only available on vinyl, and was first made available via Boomkat. A digital version is due to follow on October 3.
Having last released a full-length back in 2019, Steve Hauschildt has undergone quite the transformation in the ensuing six years. Aside from reuniting with his Emeralds bandmates for a run of shows in 2023, the American synth explorer also left his adopted home of Chicago, setting up camp halfway around the world in Tbilisi, Georgia. It was there that he completed his forthcoming new album, Aeropsia, which is said to focus on themes of “perceptual distortion, disconnection and renewal.” Cellist Lia Kohl features on the record, as does guitarist Michael Vallera, and it’s slated for an October 17 release on Hauschildt’s own Simul imprint. Ahead of that, he’s already shared LP cut “Your Call Is Important.”
Whether we like it or not, all of us—or at least all of us who use social media—are feeding the algorithm. ABADIR is probably as guilty of that as anyone else, but on his upcoming album, Kitbashing, he seeks to turn the dynamic on its head, feeding on the algorithm instead. Originally conceived as part of a live A/V show with visual artist Nicolò Cervello, the LP is said to use “audio snippets from reels, suggested posts and sponsored ads” as source material, which the Berlin-based Egyptian artist then shapes into intense rhythm exercises. It’s scheduled to arrive on October 15 via SVBKVLT, but opening track “Kicks and Clickbaits” is available now.
When Braiden first dropped “The Alps” back in 2010, it was a certifiable “big tune” in the burgeoning post-dubstep circuit. (It certainly helped that the track was not only released on Joy Orbison’s Doldrums imprint, but came backed with a killer Kassem Mosse remix.) Fifteen years later, the London-based producer has remastered and reissued the record, and the updated version—which is out now on his own Off Out label—also includes a previously unreleased song, “Reverse Psychology.” Even better, Braiden announced that he also has another EP called Raindance on the way; additional details are scarce, but it will contain the first new music he’s released since 2017.
MADELEINE COCOLAS 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 Madeleine Cocolas, an Australian composer, producer and researcher who’s currently living in Tokyo. Though her music largely resides in the ambient realm, it’s not designed for passive listening; Cocolas deals in both pastoral and turbulent soundscapes, and her extensive use of field recordings provides not only a link to the real world, but a palpable sense of history. Case in point: her most recent full-length, Syndesis, is rooted in sounds collected during a trip to her ancestral homeland of Greece. Available now, it’s one of several releases she’s done for Room40—one of Australia’s most venerated experimental music outposts—though her music has also appeared on labels like Superpang, Someone Good and Bigo & Twigetti. Beyond that, she’s also been tapped to score a number of films and perform as part of installations at various art institutions around the globe. Cocolas’ work has traveled far, but as her selection below makes clear, she remains deeply connected to the place where she spent her formative years.
Timothy Fairless “Tullamarine” (Dragon’s Eye)
I grew up in Brisbane, Australia, which has long had a thriving underground experimental music scene (although you do need to look for it to be rewarded). I met Timothy when we played a show together and he performed his album Rising Water using electronics and various glasses filled with water. It was mesmerizing.
“Tullamarine” is from Timothy’s latest full-length, Keep Talking To Me, released through the wonderful Dragon’s Eye Recordings. The album was designed to be a single work, but the opening track “Tullamarine” is a gorgeous standalone piece. Timothy weaves audio from decades-old home video recordings into a rich and layered sonic tapestry that feels like an intimate invitation to listen in on someone’s hazy memories.
LISTEN UP
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.
Crystal Sting “Fish Jelly” (POW)
Swaddling its warbling tones in a blanket of tape hiss, “Fish Jelly” opens Bubblegum Aquarium—the waterlogged debut album from Toronto-based duo Crystal Sting—on a rather introspective note. But as the minutes tick by, and the melodies start to become a little unhinged, the proceedings take a decidedly trippy turn, prompting questions like, “What would it sound like if Tim Hecker made a steel drum record?” Although the music’s faux-tropical sound palette remains constant throughout, it starts to feel like someone has cranked up the contrast on an old television set, distorting every texture and imbuing every color with an almost alien glow. What results is akin to an acid trip at Club Med, the sheer artificiality of the experience only adding to its psychedelic appeal.
Her Blur “Walk the Ripple” (Valcrond Video)
There’s a universe where “Walk the Ripple”—the opening track on First Blur, the debut EP from Torn Hawk and Jessi Long’s Her Blur project—is a standard-issue piece of dream-pop. In this universe, however, the song sounds like it’s being played off an old VHS tape that’s been salvaged from a flooded basement. Littered with patches of corroded static, the song doesn’t glide; it lurches, the pitch of its chunky, grunge-indebted chords intermittently speeding up and slowing down as Long’s ethereal vocals angelically float atop the murk. Pristine it is not, but in a time where so many artists are content to simply mimic ’90s tropes, there’s something deeply satisfying about Her Blur’s willingness to foul up familiar formulas and find a bit of hypnotic beauty in the ensuing mess.
Mirror Touch “Give Me Time” (Keysound)
Keysound has never done a record like this. The long-running UK bass outpost admits as much in the promo blurb for Twin Moon, the heavily Detroit-indebted new EP from Mirror Touch. But while this link-up might seem odd to outside observers, the London-based producer—who in the early 2010s ran the Dark Arx label—actually has a long relationship with Keysound founders Dusk + Blackdown. (For those curious, the details of that relationship were thoroughly unpacked in a recent conversation between Mirror Touch and Blackdown for the latter’s esteemed blog.)
Tapping into the warm glow of the Motor City’s more melodic side, Twin Moon is essentially an exercise in Midwestern machine soul, and “Give Me Time”—the EP’s only electro cut—is an obvious highlight. Funnily enough, the song’s vibrant synth line arguably sounds more like more Chicago than The D, taking a few (probably inadvertent) cues from Jamie Principle’s iconic 1986 track “Your Love.” Yet its snapping rhythms and neon pads provide a distinctly sci-fi feel, one that nods to Detroit greats like Drexciya and—in a sign that Mirror Touch still has a connection to the bass-centric sounds of the UK—also echoes the early Night Slugs catalog.
Immateriæ “Intergalactic (truglut's Panoramic Reshape)” (Intuition)
Hailing from Arenys de Mar, a beach town just up the coast from Barcelona, Immateriæ has mostly filled his new Intergalactic EP with hard-charging techno hybrids that borrow liberally from the tripped-out traditions of Goa trance. Those tunes are perfectly solid, but things get even more interesting on this rework of the title track by truglut, a Madrid-based producer who’s also a co-founder of the psychedelically inclined Eigenblau collective. Deviating from a techno framework, his “Panoramic Reshape” is (very) loosely rooted in drum & bass, and though it does employ a thick, roving bassline, truglut has notably dialed back the drums, allowing the song’s twinkling melodies to take the lead instead. The resulting track has something of a proggy feel, and junglists of a certain age might even be tempted to describe it as liquid funk, but what ultimately stands out is the degree to which the song feels refreshingly untethered to the dancefloor, opting to zoom through the clouds instead.
Dansa “Bobble Buster” (LuckyMe)
With a catalog that now dates back nearly two decades, LuckyMe has dipped into a lot of different scenes and styles over the years, but Dansa’s new Flustra EP is very much in line with the label’s signature sound. Maybe it’s the Scottish connection—Dansa hails from Edinburgh, while LuckyMe was founded in Glasgow—but the record exudes the same sort of manic, genre-blurring, speaker-rattling energy that defined early releases from artists like Hudson Mohawke and Rustie. (Outside of the immediate LuckyMe sphere, the work of producers like Addison Groove, Girl Unit and Sinjin Hawke also comes to mind.) The standout “Bobble Buster” is something like a turbo-charged grime track, albeit one that’s been fortified with buzzing basslines and thumping techno kicks, and Dansa adds to the madness with his twirling synth runs, which could easily double as sound effects on an old version of Mario Kart. Brightly colored, bursting with energy and a little bit brash, it’s a welcome reminder of just how fun—and free—bass music can be.
Grant Deane “With Less of a Jolt Than We Braced for” (◢sidehatch.)
Polarization has traditionally been thought of as a primarily political phenomenon, but it’s kind of everywhere these days, to a point where even techno hasn’t been able to escape its clutches. Although countless variants of the genre exist and are still being made, much of the energy in recent years has coalesced around the extremes, with cartoonish, gabber-adjacent mayhem on one end and dubby subterranean grooves on the other. The thing is, there’s a whole lot of sonic territory between those two poles, and “With Less of a Jolt Than We Braced for”—a highlight of UK producer Grant Deane’s new A Coruscating Hope LP—is a clear signal that some of that territory is quite fertile. I’ll leave it to the geeks to decide if the track qualifies as tech house or housey techno, but the track has a swinging, no-frills groove, its understated soul channeling the spirit of Mood II Swing before a flurry of squealing synths turn up the intensity in the song’s second half.
oliver “Wireframe” (North View)
Fresh off the release of his inviting debut album, Quiet Thud, oliver has delivered a two-song addendum. “Wireframe” is the first of those two songs, and with its insistent pulse and gurgling acid line, it’s actually something of a departure from the introspective confines of the Bristol-based producer’s previous work. That’s not a bad thing, and in fairness, the track is probably still more of a headphone jam than a big-room banger. Nevertheless, it largely abandons the “expansive and untamed coastline” at the heart of Quiet Thud, clearing the way for oliver to dive into what sounds like the shimmering seas of ’90s-era progressive trance. A risky move, perhaps, but listening to the interplay between his fluttering piano keys and shining synths, it quickly becomes apparent that his capacity to mesmerize remains intact at higher tempos.
fka Boursin “Listless Intertext (Frank & Tony’s Housebeat Dub)” (Scissor and Thread)
The original “Listless Intertext” is a floaty, not-quite-ambient excursion, one that stretches past the 12-minute mark as Bristol-based artist fka Boursin cuts a nonlinear path through broken beats and cloudy atmospheres. Deeply chilled and just a little wonky, it’s the sort of tune you can happily get lost in, but for those craving something with a little more structure, Frank & Tony’s “Housebeat Dub”—which, clocking in just shy of 10 minutes long, isn’t exactly compact either—combines the silky bliss of the source material with a shuffly, early-morning house groove. With its softly struck piano chords and a paper-thin coating of reverb that keeps the whole thing just slightly out of focus, it’s the kind of track you want to hear when the sun is coming up and you’re about to collapse after a marathon night of raving.
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.)
Until next time,
Shawn
Shawn Reynaldo is a freelance writer, editor, presenter and project manager. Find him on LinkedIn and Instagram—and make sure to follow First Floor on Instagram as well—or you can just drop Shawn an email to get in touch about projects, collaborations or potential work opportunities.