Tunisian leftfield experimentalist Deena Abdelwahed returns with an EP that ‘s taking her message back to the dancefloor. Straying away from personal identification, these tracks keep on focusing on sonic influences from her home region, be it in terms of rhythmic structure, sampling or other local sources. A highly versatile package for any forward-thinking DJ and further proof of this producer ‘s unique ability to fuse Arabic music references with club music.

Last week, Nicolas Jaar signalled that Against All Logic had performed a hard left turn, releasing an onslaught of a mix and an EP that made the older, warmer version of the project seem outmoded. Even so, the power and violence of 2017 - 2019, this new LP, is shocking. "Because if you can't beat 'em, kill 'em / If you can't kill 'em, fuck 'em," growls Lydia Lunch on "If You Can't Do It Good, Do It Hard." A booming electro rhythm re-enters and she catches the beat, chanting the track's title as if playing drill sergeant. Jaar has frequently asked that we move our bodies to his music, but never in this way. This is straight-up fight music. 2017 - 2019 isn't quite this lairy elsewhere, but most of it is jagged, hard-hitting and seriously over-driven. The change has Jaar sounding artistically replenished.
Some time away has maybe heightened the album's impact. Jaar's last major release was in February 2018, the Against All Logic album 2012 - 2017, where feel-good, sample-driven house, soul and disco were the prevailing moods. At the time, Andrew Ryce used words like "pastiche" and "generic" in a review, confirming the feeling that we'd come to expect, or even demand, a level of innovation from Jaar. He's an artist who, since getting his break as a teenager, had become a headline act off the back of strange, singular and often downbeat music. This seemed to stem from an uncommon curiosity. Away from the main tides of the international music scene these past couple years, Jaar has pursued a dizzying array of projects, including an artist residency at Het HEM in Amsterdam, a soundtrack for the famed Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín, and principal production work on the incredible FKA twigs album MAGDALENE. What appeared to plenty of people as a time of inactivity was, it seems, an intense period of creative development.
That Beyoncé is the first voice we hear on 2017 - 2019 is instructive of the bold new direction. Hers and Sean Paul's vocals are lifted from "Baby Boy" and layered over a crackling broken beat, an uncanny string-like instrument and inviting synth chords. A sample of Luther Ingram's 1972 soul song "(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don't Want to Be Right" appears on track two, a degraded house cut, thus establishing a template of sorts: 2017 - 2019 is an album of stylistic leaps, radiant melodies, difficult-to-place sounds and red herrings. Back-to-back opening tracks with instantly recognisable sample flips, for example, sets up an expectation of many more to follow. Instead, there are none. That is unless you can spot the source of the hip-hop loop on "With An Addict." Jaar casually filters it into the arrangement to create a half-time contrast with the main drums, a rolling footwork/jungle-style pattern that features percussion reminiscent of the "Apache" break. The poignant, daybreak melody caps a track that bundles the album's strongest qualities.
The stylistic leaps I mentioned are actually a bit of an audio illusion later in the album. Perhaps you could describe "Alarm," "Deeeeeeefers" "Faith" and "Penny," which appear consecutively, as all being house and/or techno. Each features a four-on-the-floor kick pattern and is made for the dance floor. But there's a significant scope of differences and ideas between them. The two-minute-long breakdown/build in "Deeeeeeefers" might be dismissed by some EDM artists as being OTT, with Jaar ballooning his damaged synth lines until the whole thing plops back into place as though nothing has happened. "Faith," on which he flexes the choral range of his voice, could have been signed to Innversions were it not so weird. The fantastic "Penny," meanwhile, is a 142-BPM techno track that less dogmatic DJs should be into—its chargrilled timbre, matched with groovy percussion and emotive melodies, is unlike most modern techno productions. Along with the buckled drum cut "Alarm," these tracks seem to gain inspiration from the subversion of templates that in the past Jaar himself has worked with.
All of which returns us to the idea of replenishment. The military man on the record's artwork, the copious levels of distortion, the brazen use of samples, the warping of genre tropes—on the surface it all feels like a "fuck you," perhaps at the state of things, perhaps at Jaar's own artistic history. If there is anger here, though, it's complicated, and it's almost always offset by hope or damaged beauty. Perhaps, instead, the noise is an alternate means of expressing something that before found a different form in Jaar's music. The hazy peculiarity of the past is now manifested in different materials and through some force. Maybe it's an idea to consider during the record's only moment of relative calm: "You (Forever)," the closer. The tender vibe here is reminiscent of Space Is Only Noise, the 2011 album that established his name, but the sounds are of a far-off time and culture. A decent sign of an artist evolving, in other words.

Modeselektor新厂SSPB开张以来一直是techno/house玩家的炸场首选，新单请来王牌Peder Mannerfelt

Credits▼
Artwork By – Andro Wekua
Mastered By – Bo Kondren
Mixed By – Hannes Bieger
Performer – Alexander Paulick*, Andreas Reihse, Detlef Weinrich, Thomas Klein
Recorded By – Tobias Levin
Notes▼
»Workshop Report« by Andro Wekua.
Promotional Copy. Not for sale!
Cardboard sleeve.

Enter a world of post-IDM, ambient and reggaeton, with a progression of deep synths, reverb, and percussion whose rhythms are born from the southern hemisphere. This is the world of DJ Python, a.k.a. New York based producer Brian Piñeyro, who also sometimes goes by Dj Wey, Deejay Xanax, and Luis. Making his Dekmantel debut with an extended EP of contemporary electronica, fashioned in his cult unique style, Python brings his deep-reggaeton style to the Dutch imprint.
With his first LP Dulce Compañia released in 2017, Python extended his cult status in the electronic music sphere with motives of ambient, and tropicale, all the time keeping his music deeply rooted in classic underground dance music. Along with a Breaking Through feature on Resident Advisor, an almost legendary appearance on Boiler Room — in which he ignited the room in Santiago with bellowing reverbs —, extensive touring, and a residency at New York’s Nowadays (healthy programmed by the team behind Mister Saturday Night), Python has dutifully snaked his way in today’s cult artist category. Making his next step with this six-tracker on Dekmantel, Python aggrandises his prestigious drum sequencing, merging the world’s of drone-driven electronica, cerebral synths, and steely out-of-this-dimension-dancehall.
The EP’s pening track 'Lampara' snakes and twists, like a rugged 90s London broken-beat, electronic exploration, evoking nostalgic feelings a la Boards de Canada. The retro aesthetic flows through with second track 'Tímbrame', where the tropical reggaeton percussion floats through wafty, deep synth melodies and chimes, like a vibey, emotive, come-down, get-down, post-party dancefloor filler. 'Cuando' steps up a gear, as the digital percussive rhythms go into overdrive, while 'Espero' goes all Gaussian, by offering a transportive, meditative expression. 'Be Si To' pulses into full Phython territory, chops-and-cuts-and-slices across a sleuth of Warping, proto-drones. The record’s final track 'pq cq' is a singular question mark about darkness, feeling, and trans-dimensional thinking, as the track shifts in-between kicks that feel one and the same between past, present, and the dub.

In March this year, the largest private real-estate project in US history opened on the west side of Midtown Manhattan. The critics hated it. Built over a mostly disused railyard, the $25 billion development, called Hudson Yards, is an opulent mix of high-rise flats and offices, a shopping centre, an arts space and a rose-gold folly the New Yorker called "a shawarma-shaped stairway to nowhere." This past July, I walked along the High Line on a cloudless Friday afternoon and gawped at its tallest skyscraper, thinking of its 1,100-ft high observation deck, an aggressive glass chevron, as an "up yours" to urban planning.
You don't have to guess what Madteo thought about it. On his last album, the exceptional Noi No, he referred to the city's hedge-fund daily as something that more closely resembled a public good. "What are you reading," Madteo asked on "Il Capoline" with a sneer, "The Wall Street Urinal?" His catalogue reflects a very different New York. You get a sense of his sardonic personality through track titles like "Laissez-Faire Couture," "U$b Schtick" and "Alan Greenspin," but the music's winding, unpredictable depth is more revealing. It can resemble a rickety train of thought, which runs from the bodegas, record shops and flea markets of his day-to-day in Queens to a ruminative, second-guessing inner self.
On Madteo's new album, Dropped Out Sunshine, we ride the whole route, starting in his lounge. In the first few seconds, a string section plays the sort of tragic refrain you hear in telenovas when the camera cuts to a hospital room. The patient, it turns out, is Drake. We get a shelling of MPC-triggered kicks and multi-pitched mantras like "This one's for you" and "Baby, you're my everything." Here, Madteo turns a seconds-long intro section of "Best I Ever Had" into a three-minute pummeling, wringing as much from its beat-length samples as possible. You wait for it to settle down, but it's a coin that keeps spinning until, in the last few seconds, the string section returns.
Madteo records often have a lived-in, curtains-drawn atmosphere, and there's a fair amount of that here. By the album's last third, this mood combines with a pleasant fatigue—the blustery gothic drone of "To The One Of Fictive Music" and "The Lies That Bind," a knackered study of Grouper, pull your lids down like graffitied shutters. That's no surprise given the LP's exertions elsewhere. Check, for example, the madness of "Resident Alien (Broke-'N-Steppers Reluctant Club Mix)," where ragga loops stumble amid record scratches that sound like police sirens. On hearing "Same Way"'s churn of tense, prickly synth chords, I suddenly wanted to hear a DJ mix them with a hyperswung 12-inch from A Made Up Sound. "NYC (Where U B?)," a rare but not unprecedented glimpse of full-on sunshine in Madteo's music, is a disco-house joy machine with Wu-Tang adlibs.
The titles of Madteo's music are full of sly ambiguities. In "NYC (Where U B?)"'s case, it's a reference to Ol' Dirty Bastard's yelp ("Where you be, motherfucker!?"), but it could also nod to a disappearing way of life. "I hang out a lot with older native New Yorkers," he said in 2016, "and they're constantly lamenting the loss of what they feel made the city truly great"—the possibility, he explained, to pursue a creative life while earning very little. Instead of bohemias like The Cedar Tavern, where abstract expressionists got shitfaced with Beat poets, New York was filling up with "$20 burgers and $15 cocktails, places for trust fund babies to sit with 'friends' and stare at their smartphone screens."
Some of the album's source material may already be on the Spotify playlists of these casually expensive restaurants. But Dropped Out Sunshine is unlikely to accompany a forkful of saffron fries. Take "Evol On," a punch-drunk trap cut with a hypnotically assertive warning: "I can't show no love to a snake / I can't show no love to a bitch who acting fake." "Would Eddie House Mind?" is even stranger. The titular blues artist sings about defiance—"Don't you mind people grinnin' in your face"—with a texture of heartbreak, encouraged by claps from a small audience. Coupled with the wail and grind of feedback, the effect is surreal. This spectral, out-of-time ambience adds an unexpected vulnerability. Yet the sentiment, of persevering against sceptics, is made stronger by its presence here, half a century later.
Between 2017's Scientrysts EP and this album, Madteo's releases had all come out on cassette, a format that seems especially suited to his grimy, freehanded style (it may also reflect a view on vinyl's creeping expense). On the most recent of these, the DDS-released Forest Limit, rotting field recordings and welts of noise constituted some of the unfriendliest stuff Madteo has made. As the tide has ebbed on "outsider house," his music has only become freakier. Sometime after Madteo asks, "What is going wrong with your life today," on Dropped Out Sunshine's final stop, the music's stoned fog begins to clear. We've come off the rails.

Boomkat Product Review:
NON Worldwide co-founder Nkisi rolls out an instant modern classic with ‘7 Directions’ for UIQ. A masterful debut album informed by African Cosmology and Congolese rhythms, it’s aesthetically comparable with music ranging from Æ’s ‘Incunabula’ to The Connection Machine’s ‘Painless’, Lee Gamble hyperprisms and William Bennett’s Cut Hands, but ultimately it’s peerless in the (hyper)modern field...
Specifically referencing the writings of Kongo scholar Dr Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau and the African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo, ‘7 Directions’ is offered as a gateway to hallucinatory mindstates via aerobic mysticism. Ultimately it is focussed on the idea that rhythm has the capacity to modulate and experiment with conditions of perception, and to disrupt predetermined expectations, and does so in the belief that new movements of energy can determine collective behaviour and generate new possibilities for knowledge production and dissemination - perhaps even supposing rhythm’s potential for premonitory pattern recognition.
We fully concur with Nkisi’s notions about dance music’s potential for transferring and conveying energy, both negative/ecstatic, abstract/intuitive, so it’s a rare pleasure to hear her limn those ideas so beautifully, effectively and open-endedly thru ‘7 Directions’. In each part she inimitably unlocks and retunes the body’s rhythmic anticipation with breathless batteries of incredible polyrhythms that arguably make the majority of Western dance styles sound like rote line dance music for folk with little imagination in their bones.
In each direction Nkisi’s drums writhe and rattle in a simultaneously ancient/futuristic style - ancient because they explicitly reference percussive traditions way older than Western civilization, and futuristic because they’ve never been presented in this way before, alloyed with cosmic synth pads that draw lines from Detroit to the Lowlands and back to source, way out in the cosmos. But rather than closed systems for study and analysis, Nkisi’s trax feel like living, bristling organisms or virulent systems that only become activated with user participation, where those ideas can begin to take root, grow and mutate via kinesis.
Even if you don’t dance in public and save ’7 Directions’ for your living room/bedroom/holosphere, listeners will get the best out of this album by putting something in themselves, by shutting their eyes and dancing with it.

Special Request drops the fourth and final album of 2019. Concentrating purely on the heavyweight original hardcore ethos of taking whatever you want from anywhere, these tracks are made for shelling down dances and losing your marbles.
Those who have been paying close attention will recognise the face-melting drum treatments from those instagram clips, constructed using purpose-built equipment and a healthy amount of irreverence.
Elsewhere we find clock mechanisms worked into the layers of various tracks, the voices of Francis Bacon, David Lynch and others & eventually one such clock speeding up to oblivion, merely hinting at where Special Request is taking you next...
Vinyl editions to follow in 2020 and will be released and deleted on the same day. Pay 0.00 for these downloads. Enjoy life.

Bedroom Tapes is comprised solely of lost material from a recently discovered box of cassettes that emerged in the process of a house move. These tracks capture some of Paul Woolford’s most wide-eyed and naïve creative impulses at a tender age.Seemingly lost forever, some were part of sessions that led to him being siged to now-defunct UK techno imprint Blue Basique. This is the first chapter in this archive and an intimate portrait of the artist at a key stage of his creative development.
The tracks have been carefully mastered with a loving hand by Matt Colton who has been meticulous to retain their idiosyncrasies.
Released on 2xLP vinyl - Cut and mastered by Matt Colton at Metropolis, manufactured at optimal media, Germany.

Andy Stott’s first release since 2016 and first EP since 2011, ‘It Should Be Us’ is a double EP of slow and raw productions for the club, recorded this year and following on from a series of EP’s that started with ‘Passed Me By’ and ‘We Stay Together’ early this decade.
Recorded fast and loose over the summer, these 9 tracks (8 on the vinyl) harness a pure and bare-boned energy, melodies subsumed by drum machines and synths; slow, rugged abandon. It’s all about rhythmic heat and disorientation, pure dance and DJ specials rendered at an unsteady pace, from percolated house and percussive rituals to moody tripped-out burners.
There’ll be a new Andy Stott album in 2020, but in the meantime... this one’s for dancing.

The much anticipated debut album by Giant Swan, the brainchild of Robin Stewart & Harry Wright; an acerbic marriage of energised, aggressive dance music, quaking bass and hypnotic electronic noise. Across a table of machines and pedals, incorporating abused guitar and liberal vocal manipulation, Giant Swan create a cross-breed of hypnotic bass, industrial percussion and disorientating energy delivered with telepathic intricacy. With strong ties to Bristol's deep musical heritage, Giant Swan are a maelstrom of potential energy, bleeding between several sonic movements that both obliterate and invigorate. Building on a foundation of rhythmic tension and frenzied improvisation, no two performances are the same as the duo re-build and destroy their twisted vision of techno-not-techno. Steadily assembling an arsenal of heavy hitting releases on Howling Owl (2015), FuckPunk (2016), Timedance (2017), Mannequin (2018) and most recently Whities (2018), their recorded output has been sculpted and refined into consummate snapshots of the unrivalled, ecstatic energy they fire from the stage through raw improvisation. Relentless touring of DIY circuits as well as festival stealing performances at the likes of Unsound and Atonal has seen their reputation take flight as an unstoppable force in live electronic music.

Arthur Cayzer and Jamie Roberts were in their early 20s when they released "Auflen Whip," a cavernous, clanking techno track from an EP that helped shape the style's future. You may have been the same age or younger, possibly burning through a student loan at cosy club nights soundtracked by a new wave of artists pushing mutant house and techno produced in the so-called "post-dubstep" era. Better known as Blawan, Roberts was among the best known of these acts at the time, mostly thanks to his ubiquitous 2011 smash "Getting Me Down," a sugary house track with a mean streak. That mean streak colours Karenn's productions today, though, as the snarling "Crush The Mushrooms" from their new album shows, the sound is far slicker than what we danced to eight years ago. Karenn have grown up, and so have we.
Recorded during an "intense studio session" in Berlin, where Roberts lives, Grapefruit Regret has a title that feels like an inside joke. But nothing about the music is funny. It burrows into your brain with nimble basslines and modulating bleeps, the energy shifting from track to track. Some, like "Kumquat," are colourful, pairing bleeps and synth zaps with steady, rolling grooves. Others, like "Raz," are more rhythmic, increasing the focus on low-end sounds. As with Wet Will Always Dry, Roberts' 2018 album, this record covers a range of sounds and moods without leaving the club. That's not surprising. As Karenn, Cayzer and Roberts spend much of their time together huddled over machines playing to packed dance floors, where they built a reputation for thrilling, powerful live sets. They use their studio time to recreate the energy of those sets, a task they've found difficult. "It's never possible to recreate the sound we get when we're playing live," Roberts said a few years ago. "That's why a lot of the records sound nothing like our live sets."
Even so, Grapefruit Regret bangs. From the chaos of "Crush The Mushrooms" to the contemplative chug of "Peel Me Easy," the deepest track Karenn have released, it presents a range of high-quality techno tunes that stand apart from ongoing trends. Tempos range from 100 to 150 BPM, with nothing that recalls Stanislav Tolkachev's paranoid loops or Kobosil's EBM grunt, two artists who, like Karenn, have helped shape the sound of modern techno, relentlessly copied by artists new and old.
That's partly why Cayzer and Roberts are vital. Their music exists in a realm of its own, not obviously influenced by the wider scene's shifting tastes. That doesn't mean they're not influential. Their militant early tracks inspired a wave of artists, reigniting interest in intense UK techno after years of softer sounds. Roberts once complained about a "saturation" of German-style techno, a feeling likely brought about by the dominance of DJs associated with the Berlin club Berghain. He and Cayzer helped draw attention elsewhere. If the techno in the '00s belonged to Marcel Dettmann and Ben Klock, the '10s belong to artists like Karenn.
Yet, testament to the way Cayzer and Roberts approach their craft, Grapefruit Regret is presented as nothing more than a collection of dance tracks made to play in clubs. It's pressed on heavyweight vinyl, landing without a lengthy press text or explanation (insider tip: the best house and techno often comes like this). Eight years after their first record, Karenn's unfussy approach has given us what might be 2019's best techno album, a remarkable collection of detailed, modulating tracks recorded on the fly. Cayzer and Roberts' unpretentious, off-the-cuff attitude feels too laidback for the impact of the music extracted from their mess of modular synthesisers. After all, as they once said, they're just "making noises."

Following a run of four incendiary 12-inches on his own imprint that drew attention from right across the dance music community, UK producer and DJ Paul Woolford delivers Soul Music, his debut full-length album as Special Request - diving even deeper into the raw energy of UK pirate radio influences that informed his previous EPs.
Using a studio built almost exclusively from vintage hardware and boosted by industrial-strength EQ and an FM transmitter, Woolford constructs what he refers to as "false memories" - broadcasting his material in order to sample and re-incorporate it in a myriad of different ways. The outcome of this unorthodox method is an album of considerable weight.
This debut will be released in two stages: 7th October sees the album released on a triple vinyl LP; whilst the CD and digital versions, released on 21st October, include a bonus volume featuring the Special Request VIP of Tessela's 'Hackney Parrot' alongside the remix of Lana Del Rey's 'Ride', further tracks from the previous 12-inches, plus unreleased reworks from Detroit's Anthony Shakir, New York's Anthony Naples, Leipzig's Kassem Mosse & Mix Mup, Chicago's Hieroglyphic Being and London's Lee Gamble. Not for the faint hearted...