Forthcoming: September 2026

This one took five years, and I only know that because Tarjei Nygård let it slip in an interview in 2021. It was about 85% done back then: trips up to a mountain hytta with Are M. Foss, gear hauled in on snowmobiles, friends coming and going, the record taking shape across a lot of seasons and a lot of firewood. Some of it pop, he said, some ambient, some outright experimental, and a banjo on one track.

Nine tracks held together by atmosphere and a shared sense of place rather than by genre, built from guitar phrases, synth lines and whatever the forest was doing that week. Both members have releases on Full Pupp, Eskimo and ESP Institute behind them. This doesn't sound much like any of it.

Three records old, this label, and already worth paying attention to. It started as Amor Fati, a page Ivan Smagghe and Niv Arzi of Red Axes set up during covid to give edits away for free. When they decided to press things properly they went straight for it: two Vilnius DJs they had spent years running into at Opium and Gallery 1986, then a Corsican producer with a Roman Flügel remix on the back, now this.

The label text reads like it was written by someone who has known Shonky for twenty years, all late hours and Parisian dawns. He is one third of Apollonia and has been a fixture in French house since the mid-2000s, with the rare quality of finding his way into your set without making a fuss about it. Four tracks, solid and trippy at once, house and techno dissolved into head-down ecstasy.

1990. Ben Cenac, better known as Cozmo D of Newcleus, wrote this to flow around Yvette "Lady E" Bracey's vocal. Smooth, laid back, deep and really sexy, in his words. He got it. It went out on his own Power Move Records, and his distributor Gregg Fore heard it and pushed him into making the full EP that Rush Hour reissued back in 2012. The Newcleus lineage means there is as much electro in its bones as deep house.

Three mixes of the original here plus the Cozmic Remixes, with the Cozmic instrumental on vinyl for the first time. Thirty-six years old and still built for four in the morning.

"House music into the living room" was the slogan Haruo Chikada produced this under in 1989. Koizumi was a pop star, this was danceable kayōkyoku, and it came out of the Shibaura GOLD orbit at the moment Japanese club culture was working out what it wanted to be. It now sits at the centre of the technokayō revival that European diggers have spent the last few years working through.

First time on vinyl, and done properly: the remastered original alongside rare and previously unreleased remixes from Chikada, Soichi Terada, Hiroshi Fujiwara and OMB, sleeve art directed by Midori Kawano, European distribution through Rush Hour. Antal picks the Moody Strings mix. I would not argue.

Before Berlin, before Ombra International, Luca Venezia was Drop the Lime, running Trouble & Bass out of Brooklyn and making rave music. He has talked about the turn since. In New York he felt he always had to give a little, play something wavy and then drop a house track to hold the room. Berlin was where he worked out he could just make what he loved. Then came the Next Wave Acid Punx compilations for Eskimo, three volumes covering the years when industrial, EBM, new beat and Italo were still finding each other. He closed the trilogy earlier this year, so this is the first thing out of him since.

Perfect High is the most floor-facing record he has made in a while. Detuned, chorus-heavy leads on the title track, clockwork percussion through "Weapon Of Time", ominous choirs on "Dare 2 Dream", all of it pinned down by gated R-50 rhythms. He closes with "Blasted", a synth-driven groove with Andi from New York on it, glossy as patent leather.

Second Norwegian record on the list, and his debut for space•lab. Hajem runs Boring Crew Records and has spent years working through house, dub techno and 2-step before arriving at the hypnotic end of techno. "E44Z" opens it driving, sharp riffs and synth lines floating over the top, and "X66Y" goes psy-tinged with sci-fi textures worked into the groove rather than laid over it. The title track closes stripped back: airy, faintly eerie sound design, careful percussion, a deep rolling bass that stays after the needle lifts.

Ten years is a long time to leave an alias alone. Gove Kidao founded Ivy Lab, and this is his first solo record as Sabre since, back on the label that shaped his early work. He is direct about what he was after: an experiment in untamed distortion, and a raw, punk perspective aimed at a scene he describes as known for spotless precision. The names he cites are JK Flesh, Emptyset, Shapednoise and Slikback rather than anything from drum and bass, and you can hear all of them.

Four stripped-down tracks that lean into wear, repetition and rough texture without losing the rhythmic detail Sabre has always had. Thematically a drum and bass record. Conceptually somewhere else. One for the Veldig Klubb massive.

Michael Watters announced this album before he had finished it. Between Veils arrived on Samurai last year, then the Wave Interaction EP earlier this year, billed openly as a precursor to the thing you are now holding. It takes its cue from Daphne Oram, who co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and then left to build a machine that read shapes drawn onto film as sound. What Watters is after is what electronic waveforms do to human perception, and he means it literally.

It runs between half-time and full 170 and climbs from one heavyweight to the next. "Induced Resonance" sits closest to drum and bass, thin quick percussion up top. "Rational Echoes" and "Scanning Waveband" hold a techno-coded tension. "No Panacea" rolls half-time under enormous kicks, and "Celetal Emergence" opens into somewhere roomier where microtonal bends leave everything slightly unsettled.

The digital runs to eleven tracks. The double LP trims it to eight.