Mantaray
Numinous Island

030303 co-founder Freek Fabricius made this record in honour of his friend Floris Bovee who passed away early in 2020. For the EP, Freek took some of Floris' musical ideas and reworked them - together with samples of Floris' voice - into four excellent mid-tempo tracks for the emotional dance floor. Expect dense and organic harmonies on this record, which really feels like a mini album and is among some of the most heartfelt and poetic electronic music we have come across as of late.

Domestic Exile warmly welcome the return of Grim Lusk, coming full circle to follow up 2018’s ‘SUNP0101’ after releasing under their Dip Friso and Sunny Balm aliases in the interim. ‘Diving Pool’ is a hallucinogenic concoction of marshy, aquatic, oscillated dubs and skittering, microtonal beat experiments. Grim Lusk's signature production style is in full effect, often occupying some liminal space nearing offbeat discordancy, but beautifully pulling together on the brink. Gelatinous machine funk rhythms and sweet, syrupy dub bass ooozing with a vibrant convergence of bright psychedelic greens, yellows and oranges, akin to bubbling sulphur pools and lava lakes, are present throughout the 6 tracks; Nuovo takes late 80’s drum machine patterns and twists them up with rough-cut vocal chops and long-form sampling of a 60’s film on the first iteration of ‘​​Il Gruppo”. Striding into the turbulent sea, Partans is kept jovial by rim shots, cymbals and snares fed back over the forward bass buzz. Not Enough is a bizarre, primordial, stretched-out gloop sludge half-speed version of the B-side track Too Much, twisted into new rhythmic territory by an off-kilter breakbeat sample. Diving Pool takes crushed, bouncing drum machines and loop-focussed experimentation to find incidental interplay between the two, whilst somehow retaining ebullient make-you-movable gusto. Angular rhythm and zealous sample manipulation seep through in Too Much, live drums patched, extrapolated and pulled further out in the mix, where jump cuts between familiar vocal chops and distorted tape delay contort manically- a warped, swinging echo of Slum Village's ‘I Don’t Know’. Wazoo rounds things out with the most club-leaning moment of the record, a saturated, throbbing atmosphere hanging over a beat-up, lurching drum sample layered with malleable pitched percussion and fuzz guitar. Peculiar shapes, fragmented shards of rhythmic patterns, crushed, crystallised snares, and congealed, jelly-like dubs; the music embodies a sense of carefree fun and playfulness, where dissolving layers of organic echoes, warm, slippery reverbs, and expansive phaser EFX stretch out into nebulous space…

A killer but hard-to-find track, In Love was originally released on the highly respected Smallfish Records as a limited 500 12in: the current asking price on Discogs is around £100.Now, In Love is re-released with some excellent additions as a new 4-track 12in EP 300 limited run.Four tracks that mix Techno/Deep House groove with rock-solid bass, Spaced-out Dub, Detroit and Acid influences, all uniquely Vertical Cat.In Love is a deep spacious roller with a delicious bassline and dubbed-out fx.Snow Creatures is deeper still, more Electro but still solid and spaced-out as f.Moss is a Detroit Techno masterpiece with Drexciya-tinged melodies and acid bass.You Shocker! concentrates the Acid with sweet beats and dubbed daft vocal cuts.Vertical Cat has released music on Vice, Smallfish, Sulphur, Projector and Achingly.

Nous'klaer audio presents Oceanic's debut album Choral Feeling. A rhythmically diverse electronic album full of sonic explorations and beautiful moments, all bound together by a sense of colour. The album touches on the core of what music can be for: a sense of togetherness, finding meaning in moments, a way to cope with loss and soundtracking dreams about a different future.