First Floor #289 – This Is Getting Ridiculous
Superstruct and Sónar are fighting back, plus a round-up of the latest electronic music news and a fresh batch of new track recommendations.
Did you release new music during the last week? If so, I feel bad for you.
Why? Because there’s a very good chance that it will quickly disappear into the cultural ether—if it hasn’t been forgotten already.
This isn’t a commentary on the quality of music being released, which despite the industry’s increasing hostility to artists, encouragingly remains quite high. Regardless of what disgruntled folks—most of them aging dudes—may say on the internet, there is absolutely no shortage of good music finding its way into the world.
What there is a shortage of is a capacity for even the most enthusiastic and dedicated listeners to keep up with a sizable fraction of everything that’s being released. This is a topic I’ve written about previously, but in an era when it’s easier than ever to make, distribute and release music than ever before, the chances of an artist simply getting noticed—even by a handful of listeners, let alone journalists and other industry professionals—are becoming almost infinitesimally small.
In the run-up to publishing the First Floor digest each week, I go through a massive list of releases that have dropped during the preceding seven days. This list—which I’m nerdy enough to pull from a running spreadsheet of upcoming titles that I’m constantly updating—does not contain every single new release. It’s a curated selection, consisting only of releases that A) reside within the First Floor universe (i.e. are at least vaguely related to independent / “underground” electronic music) and B) I think might potentially be interesting.
This week, that “curated selection” contained more than 140 releases.
That’s probably the highest weekly total I’ve seen all year, but it’s not an unusual figure. These days it’s rare when my list—which, again, has been whittled down from a much larger volume of new releases—doesn’t tip over into triple digits.
Now, were all of the 140 releases on this week’s list actually interesting? Of course not, but a good chunk of them were, and due to the time / space constraints of the newsletter, I’m only able to feature a relative handful of them in today’s mailout. What’s worse, this phenomenon isn’t limited to First Floor. Even a fully staffed publication isn’t going to be able to properly listen to 140 releases in a week, and most of them publish even fewer recommendations / reviews than I do.
The same goes for managers, booking agents, label heads, A&R reps, playlist curators, club and festival programmers and pretty much anyone whose job involves evaluating music. They’re all overwhelmed, and in the face of that, their decisions increasingly have little to do with the quality of the songs and albums that come across their desk. It’s far easier to default to social media metrics and pre-existing social / professional connections, or latch on to “lore” and artist narratives (even if they’re invented) than it is to actually go through promos or engage in some actual digging.
Here at First Floor, I try my best to maintain those practices, and look beyond whatever happens to be hyped at the moment, but I’d be lying if I said that I gave every artist and release a completely fair shake. When there are 140 new releases to go through in a single week, most can only get a cursory listen, and even among the ones that do manage to grab my attention, only a limited number will make the final cut and wind up being mentioned in the newsletter.
So yeah, I feel bad for people releasing new music.
What I don’t feel bad about, however, is my voracious appetite for putting the business practices of music industry giants under the microscope, particularly when those giants are behaving badly—which is usually the case. Earlier this week, I dove into a shockingly brazen recent interview with an unnamed director from Superstruct—the UK festival conglomerate owned by much-maligned private equity firm KKR—and considered what it says about how the company intends to push back against its legion of critics.
You’ll find a link to that article below, and if you keep reading, you’ll find the rest of today’s digest, which includes the usual assortment of news items, new release announcements, suggested reading links and track recommendations. (And yes, all of the recommendations are plucked from that batch of 140 releases that dropped during the past week.) Today’s newsletter also includes a special guest recommendation from Kraków-based ambient / experimental artist Natalia Panzer, 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 usually first made available to paid subscribers only. This week’s article, however, is open to everyone, and it’s an evaluation of an interview with an anonymous Superstruct director, who recently spoke to right-wing Spanish newspaper El Mundo and pushed back hard against this year’s KKR-inspired protests. It’s not often that a corporate entity goes on the record in such an aggressive fashion, but it seems that the world’s second-largest festival promoter is not only unwilling to play nice any longer, but is also determined to cast itself as a victim.
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.
Following the recent departure of Sónar’s founders, the hiring of Brunch Electronik co-founder François Jozic as the festival’s new CEO has been greeted in many corners as yet another sign that the long-running Barcelona event is both creatively adrift and hopelessly in thrall to its bosses at Superstruct / KKR. Perhaps that’s what spurred the Belgian businessman to this week sit down for his first official interview with Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia. As one might expect, the resulting conversation—a decidedly softball affair which included little in the way of what could credibly be described as challenging questions—involved a lot of surface-level platitudes and reassurances that “Sónar will still be Sónar.”
What stands out most, however, is that Jozic repeated a narrative that first appeared last week in the aforementioned El Mundo interview with an unnamed Superstruct director: that KKR had been unfairly targeted, and that its non-inclusion in a recent UN report about companies profiting from businesses in occupied Palestine territories is proof that the boycott movement was misguided. At no point did he address KKR’s involvement in weapons manufacturing, surveillance technology, fossil fuel extraction or anything else along those lines, but he did make sure to once again position Sónar as an unwitting victim, stating that, “With all the controversy, we felt a little bit like hostages.”
Jozic also rejected calls for the city of Barcelona to take over the festival (“I don’t believe it’s the mission of the city government to enter into [that]”) and predicted smooth sailing in the months ahead, claiming that in the aftermath of the aforementioned UN report, Sónar is “no longer being met with any resistance.” That particular statement severely strains credulity, but we’ll likely have a better idea of how honest Jozic was being when the festival reveals the first names of its 2026 line-up, which he assured will happen “very soon.”Spotify has been hit with two new headline-grabbing lawsuits. As reported by Music Business Worldwide, the first involves the streaming giant’s Discovery Mode, which allows artists and labels to give songs an algorithmic boost on the platform in exchange for reduced royalty rates. The Spotify subscriber who filed the suit framed Discovery Mode as a form of “modern payola,” claiming that songs promoted through the feature wind up on playlists that are then inaccurately marketed to customers as being full of personalized recommendations. The second lawsuit was filed by California rapper RBX, who took aim at the streamer’s failure to prevent “mass-scale fraudulent streaming.” Claiming that 37 billion inauthentic streams had been credited to Drake alone, the suit seeks compensation for the “massive financial harm” that fraudulent streams have heaped upon legitimate artists.
In other less-than-encouraging Spotify-related news, Darren Hemmings this week published an article via his Network Notes newsletter pointing out that the streamer’s current Viral chart in The Netherlands consists almost entirely of “AI-generated, far-right supporting songs.”
With critiques of Spotify seemingly growing louder by the day, it’s no surprise that a bevy of would-be alternatives have sprung up. A few of those alternatives were mentioned in last week’s First Floor piece about the current state of Bandcamp, but a new Guardian feature by Daniel Dylan Wray goes further, taking a quick look at upstart outfits like Nina, Coda, Subvert, Lissen, Vocana and Cantilever and talking to some of their founders.
Fair Play, which describes itself as “a new independent initiative for transparency and accountability in electronic music royalties,” yesterday published its inaugural report. Created with the help of former members of the Aslice team, it’s billed as “the first data-driven insight into how UK performance royalties are collected and distributed within the nightlife sector,” and disappointingly finds that “only 36% of club performance royalties reach the correct creators, while an estimated £5.7 million are misallocated each year.” How does that happen? It certainly doesn’t that help that the rights organizations making the payouts aren’t getting accurate data in the first place; according to Fair Play, “less than 7% of 851 total UK nightclubs use Music Recognition Technology (MRT)” and playlists from “only 5% of DJ performances are voluntarily submitted to PRS.”
Many in the ambient / experimental music realm were disappointed when Australian label Longform Editions announced its closure earlier this year, but in a newsletter mailout that was published this week, founder Andrew Khedoori unveiled a new project, Residence, which he described as a reinterpretation of the artist-in-residence model for the digital space. More specifically, it will be featuring two acts, Cole Pulice and whait (a.k.a. more eaze and Wendy Eisenberg), who over the course of 2026 will each be creating four works, with the final work being a longform piece or suite.
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.
Drexciya co-founder Gerald Donald has had an unexpectedly busy week. Just days after the Latency label shared the news that Dopplereffekt (his long-running collaboration with To Nhan) had unexpectedly remixed Catalan avant-folk duo Tarta Relena, it was announced that the pair would soon be releasing a new EP of their own, Metasymmetry, via vaunted Berlin outpost Tresor. That record will be out on December 12, but in the meantime, the track “Collapse of Simultaneity” has already been shared, and this week Tresor has also reissued Drexciya’s Fusion Flats EP for the first time since its original release in the year 2000.
If someone photoshops your face onto a Pokémon character, puts the image on a sticker and then starts anonymously distributing copies of that sticker all over Europe, how are you supposed to respond? Rhyw was forced to grapple with that very question this year, and the Fever AM co-founder decided to address the situation by cooking up a brand new alias, Rhywtwo, which just so happens to rhyme with Mewtwo, the Pokémon character on the aforementioned stickers. The new moniker officially debuted last week with a self-released single, “Whatever You Do, Don’t Give This to Rhyw!”
A mere week after µ-Ziq (a.k.a. Planet Mu founder Mike Paradinas) dropped his excellent 1979 album via Balmat, the UK producer returned to the Barcelona-based imprint with an album-length addendum, Manzana. Available in full now, it’s said to evoke “the eternal spirit of braindance” and serve as “a logical extension of 1979’s world.”
Continuing what’s become an annual tradition for the celebrated Colombian outpost, TraTraTrax will be wrapping up 2025 with a new compilation, no pare, sigue sigue 4. The 18-track collection includes contributions from Mor Elian, Piezo x Priori, Nick León x DJ SWISHA, Doctor Jeep, Lechuga Zafiro and many, many others, and while it won’t be available in full until November 28, several songs have already been shared here.
Dan Snaith (a.k.a. Caribou) has a new LP on the way from his Daphni alias. Entitled Butterfly, it’s scheduled to land on February 6 through his own Jialong label, and features several singles that he’s released during the past few years. Those can all be heard here, where the Canadian producer has also shared a new track from the record, “Waiting So Long,” a tune which he cheekily describes as featuring a vocal from Caribou.
A veteran producer whose immense talents are often overlooked, John Beltran has completed a new full-length from his Placid Angles project. Featuring collaborations with Sophia Stel, Tom VR and Yushh, the album is called Canada, and while audiences will have to wait until February 13 for it to arrive, the LP’s title track is available now.
Following up on her acclaimed Luster album from earlier this year, Maria Somerville has pieced together an upcoming remix EP, Luster Remixes. Its tracklist includes reworks of the source material by Seefeel, Collie, Fatshaudi, YHWH Nailgun, oscar18 & Asa Nisi Masa and Boris; the first three of those can already be heard here, and the full package will drop on January 30 via 4AD.
Just this morning, the Zenker Brothers dropped a new EP, and while the Munich-based duo haven’t said much about it, the four-track effort is called Illusion and it’s available in full now through their own Ilian Tape label.
NATALIA PANZER 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 Natalia Panzer, a Kraków-based ambient / experimental artist and writer. Aside from collaborating on both live and recorded music with tibslc, Theodore Cale Schafer and Zaumne, she was also one half of the ana reme project, which last year released the quietly fantastic key album via both Lynn and blush. Her writing skills are similarly impressive, as the one-time FACT and Tiny Mix Tapes contributor has most recently penned texts for labels like RVNG Intl., Mondoj and Somewhere Press, and also flexes her music knowledge via her monthly NTS radio show. Panzer is currently finishing an album of narrative psychedelia with Shiner, but in the meantime, she’s taken a few moments to highlight something from one of her favorite records of 2025.
Iris Our “The Columns of Echo’s Lymphatic Library” (Recital)
Iris Our is a new collab from Kiera Mulhern and Sydney Spann, who together reflect and refract on “The Columns of Echo’s Lymphatic Library.” Taken from their debut album, Victual Vittle Bottle Cunt, this track reminds me of a broken mirror; the music is similarly tense, cracked, edgy, pointed and perplexingly gorgeous. The word “punk” also keeps circling through my mind, so I’ll float that one here as well. Without a doubt, it’s my favourite release of the year from an already iconic duo.
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.
Baltra “Gentle Tone” (96 and Forever)
Sounding like a time traveler from 2010, Baltra has perfectly—and perhaps inadvertently—recaptured the genre-blurring magic of the early post-dubstep era with his new standalone single “Gentle Tone.” Built atop a buzzing bassline that provides just a hint of menace, the song itself is actually rather sweet, its pitched R&B vocal clips dreamily fluttering among the NYC-based producer’s ethereal pads and garage-indebted drum programming. Brawny enough for the club and wistful enough for those who prefer to get into their feels, it’s a wonderfully sticky tune.
Kassian “Ghost Dub” (Faux Poly)
Continuing a move back into the club that began with the recent Channels: Remixed EP, Kassian are in top form on “Ghost Dub,” which headlines the UK duo’s first release on their own Faux Poly imprint in more than two years. A lively breakbeat cut with bright keys, a bruising, foghorn-like bassline and rambunctious, rave-indebted rhythms, it’s yet another example of Kassian’s ability to craft tunes that sound huge, but refuse to kowtow to the lowest-common-denominator dynamics that dominate most big-room-ready cuts. “Ghost Dub” could maybe be described as an “intelligent banger,” but even that fails to capture how plainly fun it is. Could “big not dumb” work as a genre descriptor? Probably not. I’ll keep workshopping the terminology, and in the meantime, hopefully Kassian will continue to make tracks like this one.
Jubilee “Lucky” (Numbers)
As tempting as it can sometimes be to write off all things Florida, the music of Jubilee provides a steady reminder that not everything that’s come out of the Sunshine State ought to be thrown in the garbage. “Lucky” is a standout from the Florida-raised, NYC-based artist’s new Main Character EP, which aside from being her debut release on the Numbers label, is an effort that’s packed with neon-streaked references to the glory days of Miami electro and freestyle. There are nods to Baltimore and Jersey club in there as well, most notably on lead track “Trippin’,” a collaboration with UNIIQU3, but “Lucky”—a song which actually samples her parents—is warmer and more inviting. Pairing breakdance-ready beats with gleaming synths and cooing vocal clips that recall Aphex Twin’s iconic “Windowlicker,” it’s the musical equivalent of strolling down Ocean Drive with a brightly colored popsicle in your hand.
Phèdre “Waccoon” (Parallel Minds)
As far as I know, the term “cutecore”—which in fashion circles apparently refers to a style inspired by 2000s childhood in Japan—has never gained much currency in dance music circles. Yet it feels like a perfect descriptor for “Waccoon,” an obvious highlight of Liquid Constancy, the new album from Phèdre. Born out of what are described as “mostly improvised live hardware sets,” one might expect a chaotic, rough-around-the-edges listen, but the LP is both polished and playful, especially on “Waccoon,” where the Toronto-based duo’s twee synths, bubbly sound design and wide-eyed vocal samples coalesce into something that’s kind of adorable, but also filters the spirit of 2000s R&B through a bouncy, breakbeat-driven framework.
Stenny “No Discipline” (Ilian Tape)
In a time when dance music continues to be dominated by outsized personalities and ceaseless self-promotion, the Ilian Tape label and its commitment to quiet excellence feels like a port in the storm. Stenny, who’s been part of the roster for more than a decade, has long embodied that ethos, not only offering up an impressive string of sharply crafted bass-techno hybrids, but largely allowing his music to do the talking. Sharp Fragments is the Munich-based Italian’s latest full-length, and it’s something of a brooding affair, albeit one that pairs its stone-faced countenance with kinetic drum programming and muscular basslines that stalk the dancefloor like a jungle predator. Static-laced LP closer “No Discipline” is particularly strong, as it taps into the same sort of thrumming tension that once defined the Skull Disco label before Stenny suddenly dispenses with percussion altogether and wraps up the album on a rather cinematic note.
Wata Igarashi “Echoes Beyond” (Dekmantel)
Though his 2023 debut album Agartha was defined by stylistic wanderlust, Wata Igarashi—an Amsterdam-based Japanese artist who’s widely recognized as one of contemporary techno’s most impressive and versatile talents—has taken a more focused approach on his new My Supernova LP. Much of the album could qualify as a frontal assault, its propulsive rhythms delivering a first-rate buffet of crunchy synths, rippling acid lines and, as Dekmantel says, “psychoactive arpeggio sequences.” It’s fitting that the tracklist includes song titles like “Shockwave,” “Meltzone” and “Unleashed,” but those looking for something more than just a good pummeling might want to check out “Echoes Beyond,” the sultry album closer where Igarashi turns down the temperature, turns up the atmosphere and indulges his passion for psychedelic grooves.
Ata Kak “Yasi Town” (Awesome Tapes from Africa)
The unusual career trajectory of Ata Kak—a Ghanaian musician whose 1994 debut album, Obaa Sima, only gained traction after it became the subject of the inaugural post on the Awesome Tapes from Africa blog more than a decade later—is one of the music world’s true feelgood stories. After abandoning music entirely, Ata Kak—who initially had no idea about the online fervor surrounding his music—was able to start touring extensively in the latter 2010s, and has continued to periodically do so, always beaming with an infectiously positive energy. Now, more than three decades after Obaa Sima was first released, he’s issued a follow-up LP, Batakari, once again combining hiplife rhythms with an electronic sound palette and his joyous voice, which alternates between rapping, scatting and singing. Replicating the charm of his debut was always going to be a borderline impossible task, but the swinging “Yasi Town” is the song that comes closest, its elastic bounce radiating sunshine as Ata Kak sings his heart out—almost surely with a big smile on his face.
Aris Kindt “Saichh Sequences” (Quiet Time)
Back with their first new material since 2017, Aris Kindt—a self-described “post-structuralist pop” project from Francis Harris and Gabe Hedrick—have returned with Now Claims My Timid Heart, an ambient-ish, static-laden album that is said to take heavy inspiration from the duo’s love of Basic Channel, drone metal and Franz Kafka. Sonically speaking, it’s a decidedly nuanced effort, albeit never a boring one. While Aris Kindt do prefer a slow simmer to a fervent boil, their compositions have an undeniably hypnotic allure. “Saichh Sequences” opens the LP with little more than patches of free-floating distortion and a barely-there pulse, but over the course of nearly eight minutes, it builds into an almost motorik groove, conjuring memories of the first Neu! album as the song’s gently twinkling melodies bring a bit of light into the proceedings.
Debit “Los Balleza” (Modern Love)
For many electronic music producers, celebrating and referencing the past is effectively an act of replication, but on Debit’s new Desaceleradas—an album directly inspired by her passion for the earliest strains of cumbia rebajada (a slowed-down version of the genre that first emerged during the early ’90s)—she’s elected to pay tribute to her source material by subverting it entirely. Born in Monterrey and currently based in NYC, she explained the LP’s genesis at length in a recent First Floor interview, but now that Desaceleradas is out in the world, its subtly insurgent energy is even more apparent, as Debit has stretched the music’s (already warped) accordions and rhythms into a sort of immersive oblivion.
In simpler terms, she’s created a drone record. Yet she’s done so while tapping into a lineage that deviates from the spartan seriousness (and, let’s be real, overwhelming whiteness) that the term “drone” generally entails. “Los Balleza”—one of several standout cuts on an album that’s undoubtedly most effective when consumed as a whole—has an almost haunted majesty to it, and its ghostly vibrations open an abstract portal into a blurry soundworld that only a relative handful of people north of the US-Mexico border are even aware of.
Ugnė Uma “Rage Love Strange Love” (Somewhere Press)
That voice. There’s plenty to say about Rage Love Strange Love / Someone Call Donna, the new 7-inch by Ugnė Uma, but it’s her otherworldly pipes that will leave listeners utterly mesmerized. How a member of the Lithuanian underground jazz and folk circuits wound up sounding like a more androgynous version of Billie Holliday is something that the Somewhere Press label hasn’t explained, but on opening cut “Rage Love Strange Love,” her soulful singing floats atop a rudimentary drum-machine beat and some somber piano chords—and, frankly, the song doesn’t require anything more. With her soulful, almost world-weary timbre, Uma could probably recite a takeout menu and make it sound like a tortured piece of poetry.
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.