Jaša Bužinel reflects on the importance of outside recognition and the influence of industry-fed dogmas on the success of aspiring artists, and reviews releases covering devilish UKG, Swedish minimal tech, bubbly deep house from Japan and more

XEXA

While reviewing the latest DJ Babatr release, I pondered on how important outside recognition is for an artist’s confidence. I imagined myself as a young artist, and wondered how tutorials on ‘how to make it’ would shape my expectations of being discovered. Industry-fed dogmas have had a massive effect on how people approach music-making. Some young artists influenced by this content have an ingrained belief that if your stats do not improve immediately, you should give up.

Is it really true that you cannot put out music without making content about studio work? Do you really have to stick your face on everything to feed the algo? Should you really care about being included on playlists? Is it necessary to collaborate with dubious brands for a few quid? Is this what defines a professional? John Coltrane said multiple times he despised this word. This anti-industry ethos has been somewhat lost post-COVID, and I think we should transmit it to younger generations who have found themselves in this weird “no alternative” situation, which is arguably way worse than for someone who released underground dance music in 2011, or even in 2016.

When I now see youngsters starting out as producers, many seem to have a 360-degree understanding of how things should be presented, as if they attended a three-day crash course on the music business. In my base of Slovenia, the same is true of promoters who sell their “underground techno” events using the same PR language (mostly Chat-GPT-generated) and aesthetics as commercial promoters selling tickets for Balkan pop acts. Even more hilarious is seeing DJs who have played two shows cosplaying as headliners on Instagram. This is not just true of the commercial arena, such image-building strategies have seemingly penetrated all corners of the music scene.

Once upon a time an imaginary line existed that few non-mainstream artists dared to cross. You would immediately get a bad reputation among people who had strong opinions on what is acceptable in this perverted industry. That line is now inexistent. It is easy to write this when you do not have to pay for pills with your music, but I miss the DIY ethos that emerged from that line: going against the grain, believing you should not sell out, and cringing at the mention of developing a ‘brand’. Perhaps Ireland’s basic income scheme for artists is one way of helping artists truly focus on their creativity without betraying their beliefs for the sake of survival.

Still, what few tutorials and professionals will tell you is that you can also just make music for the sake of it, without your existence depending on it. It is okay to just be a small artist with a small following. No social media presence, no master plan, no big ambition. If your music is any good, it will inevitably be discovered and recognised.

On his debut full-length record for Modern Love, Guy Brewer lures the listener into a monochrome soundscape in the shape of a grimy power station where you walk from hall to hall, each with its own arrangement of massive nebulous objects made of unknown materials. It is like roaming through the ruins of Texas’ Stargate LLC a thousand years from now. As you wander, these autonomous objects swing gently, producing distinct (ar)rhythmic noises – clinks, clangs and clunks, tings, rattles, jingles and jangles – all characterised by a church-like reverb. Some have that singular patina of a metal rod being dropped in a large hangar, but emulated in multiple ways. In this eerie zone, the uncanny feeling of being constantly observed is always there, even though there is nothing alive around.

The only apparition comes with ‘That Veil Of Yours’, an isolationist pop experiment where Voice Actor’s mumbled whispery voice transfixes you like a ray of light though a thick canopy. A similar sensation flows through your body during closer ‘Offshore’, co–produced by Memotone. The sense of relief is immense, like stepping out of darkness and drowning in morning daylight.* *On Rhythm Immortal, the academic approach of electroacoustic music is complemented with the sensory effects of dub techno, D&B and trip-hop, coalescing into a vaporous entity of its own that exists beyond quantised metres and palpable times.

I used to associate Gothenburg with ‘Blinded By Fear’ by At The Gates (RIP Tomas Lindberg), until I found out it is also home to Aniara, a label with a close-knit roster of artists, and a pronounced sensibility for the proverbial ‘Swedish melankoli’. After a four-year hiatus, the imprint relaunched in 2023 under the helm of Sjoerd Oberman, founder of Rotterdam’s Nous’Klaer Audio, and has been gifting us consistently solid releases since. The label’s stripped-down and dubby minimal tech-via-deep house aesthetic largely relies on repetitive grooves and signature pensive, at times bone-chilling, atmospherics, though some of the label’s protegés also have a knack for sounds that veer towards the soulful.

As in nature, there is beauty in stillness, and this reflects gorgeously in Dorisburg & Efraim Kent’s two tunes. My feet get cold listening to ‘Wired To The Mainframe’ and ‘X-Files Groove’. Vast and airy, on closer listen, they reveal icy mental spaces ready to be inhabited on the floor. In contrast, Arkajo’s touch for balmy percussive elements in his perky broken-techno workout ‘Consequence #1’ leaves a more tropical impression. But after this pleasantly warm and playful session, the halftempo D&B roller ‘Consequence #2’ again sends shivers down your spine, its intricate polyrhythmic constructions perplexing the brain as if experiencing Ganzfeld-effect-induced hallucinations.

I never listen to music in spectacular natural settings, but this one gets a pass. Absolutely no noise-cancelling, though! It should blend with the surroundings. The sophomore LP by Susannah Stark, known in some quarters as the Queen of Fife, is a departure from her ethereal experimental pop. It should ideally be consumed while resting inside arcane stone circles, on top of prehistoric mounds, inside alcoves, near incantated rivers, and below weird geological formations. Recorded with an ensemble of musicians with experimental and folk backgrounds, the intertwining of Gaelic folk tropes, serpentine drones, modular ornamentations, field recordings and rich timbres of various instruments (harmonium, trumpet, percussion, accordion) unfolds organically.

Stark’s hypnotic incantations in Gaelic and, in a few songs, English are distinguished by perennial charm. There is something inherently enchanting about attentively following the melody of an unfamiliar language, transcending semantics. The album evolves from composition to composition. ‘Caochan’ and ‘Minor Gestures’ have a new-agey, sun-soaked vibe. ‘Mu choinneamh, ri taobh’, featuring Cider’s haunting voice, sounds more like an animistic funeral procession (and a tribute to Scott Walker’s ‘Dimple’). Others, ‘Dithis phrìosanach’ and ‘Trì stiùirichean’ particularly, evoke the image of a druid-led offering for the Mother Goddess. Music for grounding with dirt-caked legs. Do not conflate it with new age esoterism, though.

Imagine riding the night bus home, drowsy after another day in your cubicle. Just you, the driver and another person. This stranger is fiddling with their Ableton stems with headphones on top volume in the seat in front of you. In that exact moment, they sound so momentous, so moving, your eyes start to water. A casual shared intimacy with a massive impact! Portuguese producer and vocalist XEXA’s songs could be interpreted as such bursts of spontaneous expression. While she occasionally nods to the Príncipe sound, her beats are mostly constructed from uneven rhythmic pulses with an almost improvised touch. Her captivating voice **– **otherworldly and deep – is presented in various timbres, and her synth motifs fall in between established melodic modes. Her music seduces you, though not by being erotic. The separate elements, including processed pianos and trumpets, are used sparsely, yet songs never come off as empty or repetitive. ‘Kizomba 003’, a sensual slow burner imbued with the artist’s mesmerising Portuguese pathos, even suggests untapped potential in the pop sphere. Due to its exploratory bent, *Kissom *comes across as an exercise in soul-searching from an auteur producer/songwriter who is trying to appease her creative urge by making music beyond any genre box.

Will Hofbauer’s Third Place brings more melodic goodies to the table here. Sakura Tsuruta’s 2019 debut for the now dormant Ljubljana label Bardo Records, particularly ‘Dystopia’, had more in common with late 80s new-agey electronica than the modern dancefloor. Functionality plays a much bigger role on her latest EP, which admittedly does not propose anything particularly disruptive. Her aesthetic draws parallels with trendy prog-house and bubbly deep house aesthetics. Yet her tunes are particularly catchy due to her affinity for shimmering melodies and lush vibes. Names like rRoxymore and Salamanda immediately spring to mind. Laidback and yet somehow propulsive, I associate this strain of house with iridescent colours.

Descending arpeggios and four-to-the-floor kicks with soft edges abound in the pretty tune ‘Euphorique’, whose soothing aura reminds of early Italo house. On ‘Voices’, a mid-NRG deep house cut with intertwining harmonies and pads, the yearning gets even more intense. The title track, an atmospheric piece of liquid D&B-through-trance mutations, has a somewhat romantic quality, while the cascading polyrhythms and plucked zither-like textures of ‘Lucid Bubbles’ somehow brought back from my subconscious the opening theme and scene from the cult TV show Eyewitness.

A self-taught sound designer, Yosi Horikawa is a master of spatially sculpted natural sounds who has been manipulating recorded, made-up and found sounds since he was a teen. His sonic creations seem to physically occupy a certain space considering his background in architecture and architectural acoustics. A producer now at the peak of his artistic prowess, his third album showcases his tendency for soundscaping to its fullest. You could say he is a traditionalist in the world of electronica and sound design. He tends to approach his source material in ways that result in pleasing textures, familiar and calming in an almost new age fashion. Nothing is too distorted or saturated in his sound palette. The man obviously loves to spend time outside absorbing his environment via expensive 360 degree mics, and this obsession gorgeously translates into his productions.

Titles like ‘Metal’ and ‘Soil’ often suggest a song’s essence. ‘Kozu Island’, with its breaking waves and wistful synths, probably reminds him of the beaches of this volcanic island. ‘New Orleans’, packed with jazzy syncopations and heavy thundering, conjures the image of a stormy night in The Big Easy, and ‘Snow Bird’ transposes the elegant movements of winter flocks into floaty arpeggios. *Impulse *might be a bit geeky and conceived for audiophile consumption, but its unpretentious quality and immersive sound image make it so much more than hi-fi material.

Josi Devil’s Hessle Audio debut, released in February, was a huge leap forward compared to his earlier explorations of noir dubstep, ragga trip-hop and mutant dancehall. Perhaps guided by the Hessle trio, he transitioned into skippy UKG rhythmics while further developing his flair for unsettling atmospheres. Dark, hefty and all-out devilish, his sound stands in contrast to the bouncy and ecstatic new-gen speed garage typical of his peers. The title track from his new EP for Nervous Horizon is a head-turner that might have caught your attention at summer festivals, and it encapsulates his development brilliantly. Its low-slung tech-garage beats, distorted wobbling, mechanical neurofunk textures and time-stretched, siren-like female vocal samples will put you in dance or flight mode.

‘Duinpan’ boasts even more low end pressure, and were it not for its skippy hi-hat and snare syncopations, you could describe it almost as straight-up techno. TSVI contributes to ‘M.e.S.’, which takes inspiration from Nervous Horizon’s established sound, bringing to the fore elements of dembow, as well as 4×4 stomping and gun-cocking grime riddims, which interchange under a cascade of distorted synths and incomprehensible vocal bursts. Josi Devil seems like a chill guy, but his music will make you fear him.

We still lack the adequate terminology to dissect in detail the various strains of contemporary bass music coming from North Africa and the Levant. Muskila, a Copenhagen-based producer with roots in Northern Kurdistan, shares his sensibility for Arabic folk, pop and hip hop with kindred spirits from the wider region. His offshoot of bass music, though, neither feels tech-y and deconstructed, nor pop-adjacent. Rather, it is a dubwise affair. The thundering kicks and earth-shaking subs of ‘JAH NAM (INTRO)’ will cause bowel tremors when played on a large stack, and the crispy snares and percussion intermingled with hallucinatory vocal chops in the dubstep roller ‘YARAO’ will turn you into a dancefloor goblin.

‘68’ could have been enhanced with some decent bars spat over its restless beat, yet Muskila takes this route on ‘I Am’, featuring Nigerian rapper Aunty Razor, instead. Her commanding Youruba rhymes and Muskila’s punchy production mark the EP’s highlight. ‘Eternal Fire’, which surprisingly boasts some solid four-to-the floor kicks, feels like a heartfelt salute to DJ Plead’s hallucinatory percussive workouts. On ‘Sticky’, he discards psychedelia altogether for violent bass contortionism à la Hassan Abou Alam and Toumba, who also contribute to the EP with their solid remixes.

Palestinian producer Julmud gave us one of the most exciting releases of 2022 with Tuqoos*, *so expectations for its follow-up were reasonably high. *Kam Min Janneh, *translated as ‘How many heavens’, unites him with producer Acamol and rapper Haykal. You could call them a band, since the album is obviously a product of a community that stuck together during one of the darkest periods in the history of Palestine. The messages in Arabic are obviously lost on me, but there is a strong current of resilience running through their tunes, manifested in the way they spit their rhymes, fiercely and passionately. Your gut tells you they are rapping about serious political stuff, though liner notes also mention some humorous interventions.

The urgency of the moment is encapsulated in their dusty broken beats, some of the most beautifully textured in recent memory. They range from quasi-oldschool sample flips and abstract percussive pulses to drill bass glides and trap-like beats, as we travel through different moods, shifting from aggressive (‘Ben Il Wasakh’) to ritualistic (‘Dihhyyet Samaana’), mystical (‘Safh Il Jabal’) to celestival (‘La B‘eed’). While more hip hop-indebted than its predecessor, *Kam Min Janneh *is a cleverly produced and overtly ambitious album conceived with an auteur mindset to sound like no one else.

In a year loaded with lengthy compilations which you can hardly digest in a single sitting, the tenth anniversary release from Bristol’s Timedance is the one you definitely should not miss. That is if you have a keen interest in what is going on at the left-leaning end of functional dance music. Featuring a roster of producers du jour – literally all your favourite artists including veterans and newer names – *TD10 *serves as a meeting point for the various global trajectories that have been developed by this loose coalition of bass and techno heads who have a technical prowess for brain-melting sound design.

The UK might be the place where the seed was planted for Timedance, but in 2025, club music would not sound half as spellbinding were it not for the local influences introduced to this aesthetic by artists such as Brazil’s Badsista, China’s 33EMYBW, Colombia’s Verraco and Mexico’s El irreal Veintiuno. The tracklist is immaculate, containing no skips for its 23-track run. If I really had to pick one must-listen tune though, it would be Minor Science’s ‘Mortals’, the weirdest and funniest club-adjacent production of the year where hip-hop, video game soundtracks, metal riffs and screamo vocal chops transmute into something beautifully absurd and hilarious.