Forthcoming: October 2026

Draaimolen built a new stage last year called the Moon, meant for ambient and slower-moving music rather than house and techno at full speed, and handed the opening slot to Wata Igarashi and Kuniyuki Takahashi. Four hours. Friday, from noon. Entirely improvised. The two had respected each other for years without ever playing together, and the festival, not the artists, gave the project its name: a reference to Dalí's melting clocks and the way time stops mattering much inside a dream.

This record is what came out of it. "Blue Sun" was rebuilt from studio rehearsal tapes and carries the freshness of the ambient jazz that ECM and Windham Hill were putting out decades ago. "Liquid Dunes" lets flute and percussion dissolve across ten minutes of abstract texture. "Cloud Touch" surfaces inside a swirl of pulsing downbeats and arpeggios. Both of those were cut from the Draaimolen recordings.

Kuniyuki brings the organic textures and the deep grooves, Igarashi the sound design and the psychedelic tension. They are booked to do it again this year.

If you listen to Astral Journeys, start here.

Recursion, Rifts, Adlas & Circuit 900, Staim, Chris Doria, Tils twice. The Magic Power roster reads more like a circle of friends than a signings list, and the Berlin label has taken ten records to get here without hurrying any of it.

Four tracks, minimal in the proper sense rather than the marketing sense. "Chess" and "Liquid" on the A, "Jaja" twice on the B. The second version is a Last Call mix by Loidis, which is Brian Leeds of Kansas City working under the name he uses when he is not being Huerco S.

Keplrr is retired. He spent several years under that name and built a solid reputation with it, on Control Freak and Midgar, and this is the first record with his own on the front. It lands on can you feel the sun, the label Call Super and Parris run alongside their NTS show, which exists more or less to pick apart the assumptions of dancefloor house.

Four tracks, brighter in colour than the Keplrr material. "Flutter" is a cosmic stepper that pins tight drums to a weightless melodic bed. "Love Groove" ties a vocal from GRACE founder Katiusha into a tangle of melody. "Symmetry" runs an awkward rhythm under a slow rave tension that rises as the bassline swells, and "Molecule" closes it somewhere deep, with traces of Detroit and some badly behaved theremin.

Twenty-five years in and still no computer on stage. Vincent Fries plays vintage hardware, analogue synths, drum machines, circuit-bent whatever, live and without a safety net. He came up as a DJ good enough to win national and European championships, mixing up to five sources at once, which is where the nickname the three-armed bandit came from. The Italo Brutalo name started as a studio joke with an Italian friend and then quietly became the main project.

Six tracks, three a side, moving between EBM-laced rhythms and jagged techno figures with detours through electro, italo and cosmic space. Mechatronica have been running club nights and releases out of Berlin since 2012. Kald Pust would have no trouble finding room for this.

She made it for her own sets. A couple of years shaping the sound in the studio, a touring calendar heading in every direction, and a clear idea of the journey she wants to build in a club.

This is her first original release for Altered Circuits, the Brussels label with Legowelt, DMX Krew and Innershades in the catalogue. Trance-adjacent on the A side, mid-bass acid rolling under a solid kick, then conga patterns and stranger percussion on "Wireless" that build for minutes before the synth lead turns up. "1031" closes on a live guitar-bass pulse and a vocal you cannot quite place.

Playdate territory.

Watechno is his own word. Wa for Japanese culture, the rest self-explanatory, and it covers what he has spent years doing: getting traditional Japanese instruments, jazz and techno into the same room. He is blunt about the risk in it. Most Japanese music mixed with Japanese instruments, he has said, he dislikes.

Sankaku means triangle and is his fourth for MUSAR. The title track goes straight at the floor, hypnotic rhythms and sharp acid drops. "Tsuppari" takes its name from the rapid hand thrusts in sumo and moves accordingly. "Kono Kanjitte" slows into something acidic and jazz-tinged for hazy nights, "Ariake" is named after the sea and opens into real space, and "Itsukushimi" ends on a wistful, faintly Hitchcockian note.

He also records as Suemori.

Five tracks that refuse to sit still. Rolling progressive at its most energetic, tight low end, hammering drums, restless basslines, with sa+ga's vocal processed and bent into something humanoid. Listen properly and there are nods to trancey breakbeat, to big beat from the Ray Of Light years, to Detroit electro and contemporary British techno, plus a psy-leaning swirl over the top. None of it reads as pastiche. It goes into the machine and comes out theirs.

Pureblast are a Paris duo who built their reputation on stage before they built it in the studio, and it shows in how this sits together. Punctuality's twelfth release, and the closest thing here to an Alvedans record.

The Botlek is the petrochemical port zone west of Rotterdam. Flares, pipework, nobody around. Bas Mooy has named a new Mord sublabel after it, which after a decade at the hard, functional end of techno is about as on-brand as naming goes.

Ritzi Lee takes the first release. He has been one of the artists closest to Mord for years, and the Negentropy trilogy he made for them is some of the label's most durable material. Ten tracks across two records, split between named pieces like "Lagrange", "Cherenkov" and "Ergosphere" and a run of others marked only with AS codes. Industrial in how it is built rather than how it is dressed.