Фирма Planet Mu

Rome's Egisto Sopor has been making little waves with his releases for quite a while now. As POLYSICK he"s released a CDr album on Legowelt"s Strange Life Records and a cassette on the much admired 100% Silk label. As TheAwayTeam he"s released a DVD ,Relax & Sleep" and a CD ,Star Kinship" on Japanese label Maomoo, and is also one half of the low key video unit AAVV, whose work has graced many of the important releases of the new lo-fi electronic movement. ,Digital Native" is his first proper album, 15 tracks of glowing, nocturnal, analogue grace that hark back to acid house and early techno, but with a mood and intent that seem to be designed for watching images dance on closed eyelids. It's no surprise that his work as a video artist resonates so strongly with the music he makes. Polysick says of his approach, "When I make music I always have a visual part in mind. In this case, many of the tracks have been influenced by visions of tribal nocturnal mysterious explorations like in ,Preda" which is the Italian word for "quarry". I tried to convey a sense of mystery and danger with those swirling flutes and the timpani rolls too, like if you were in the middle of a jungle, in a deep dark night and you"re running away through the trees, haunted, like in some of those old zombie splatter movies from the ,80s.. same with ,Tic-Tac Toe", with that clock ticking and the deep bass..." Polysick has tapped straight into the synthetic pleasures of early dance music"s otherworldly pulses, the hypnotic arpeggios of Italo disco, soaring Detroit chords, cosmic disco, the "4th World" music of Jon Hassell and the library exotics of Piero Umiliani. Imagine a nexus between early acid house and Italo music being used for mental therapy, exotic travelling and imagining, exciting the brain waves and journeying into imagined spaces; ,Digital Native" is set in such an imagined line of enquiry - this is body music for the resting body. Style: Electro

Oriol Singhji was born in Barcelona but now lives between London and Cambridge. He spent some time in Boston studying music and posesses musical skills that set him above his peers. 'Night And Day' connects the dots between his musical tastes, from the 70 Style: Dance

Oriol Singhji was born in Barcelona but now lives between London and Cambridge, after spending some time in Boston studying music. With a skill that sets him above his peers, his music connects the dots between his musical tastes, from the 70s fusions of Style: Dance

Lead track 'Max Power' lives up to its name, mixing tight electro-soca drums with a barrage of ravey riffs that build up with strange transporting noises, creating an almost unbearable, driving intensity without ever having to reach for the wobbly bass or Style: Dance

Numan Khan from Manchester is a new artist for Planet Mu with an original musical style that mixes dub-step and grime influences, with an idiosyncratic take on rhythm, to great effect. This four track EP show-cases his styles from the A side with the lush Style: HipHop

NastyNasty a.k.a. Jasper Reeder is a San Francisco Bay Area dubstep producer whose Planet Mu debut 'No Names' pits a slither of pitch-altered mournful vocal melody against a rough modulated bassline and 8 bit chimes, to catchy and memorable effect. On the Style: Dubstep

Legendary producer and archivist of underground dance music in all it's raw and basic forms, Chrissy Murderbot's first album for Planet Mu is a collection of tracks that should come with the warning Be Prepared To Sweat. The last few years have seen Chris Style: Dance

Bussin Down is the first Planet Mu single from Chrissy Murderbot, who comes with a style inspired by his chosen city of chicago's juke and footwork scenes. He playfully mixes in elements of other styles of music he loves, such as R'n'B and dancehall, to c Style: UK Garage

Newly signed to Planet Mu, Travis Stewart aka Machinedrum is known to the electronic music cognoscenti as one of the finest, yet inexplicably underexposed producers out there. The songs on this EP are light and sun-hued with psychedelic, colourful sounds Style: Dance

Travis Stewart is a producer who's always been admired by the electronic cognosenti - for 'Room(s)', he's well ahead of the curve, approaching the album in a way he's never worked before. The tracks on 'Room(s)' were started on the spur of the moment, oft Style: Dance

The 'Videowave EP' is an End of Phase One sign-off for Kuedo, aka Jamie Teasdale, formerly of the influential production duo Vex'd. After two brilliant and very well received EPs, this is almost an addendum before a change in style with his forthcoming al Style: Electro

On his debut long-player 'Severant', Jamie Teasdale a.k.a. Kuedo has made an album of dreamlike music, loaded with his own preoccupations with futurism and escapism, that's very different from his musical past as one half of Vex'd. With his intentions re- Style: Dubstep

Kuedo is the new name for Jamie Vexd, one half of the duo Vex'd, one of the most legendary dubstep groups whose 2005 album "Degenerate" re-wrote the rulebook and was one of the founding documents in establishing the dubstep sound out of 2-step & uk garage, by bringing industrial, techstep, breaks and grime influences to the fore. Like Vex'd's work, the music on this EP is for keeps. It takes a while to immerse yourself and find your feet, but as soon as it falls into place, you know you'll come back to listen to it time and time again. Lead track 'Starfox' has a construction of rhythmically abstract beats giving the track a lurching bounce, while synthesizers play a game of call and response amongst layers of abstract computer game noise, which barely conceal the lush melodies at the track's core. hutter Light Girl' is a short track that rivals Burial's beatless instrumentals for the ability to paint imaginary scenarios in a listener's head. On the B-side, oy Construction' takes stumbling drums, a jagged sampled chord of female voice, tweaked synths and rolling bleeps through a see-sawing melody. Then the EP finishes with the charming low' which pits 2-step beats that sound like they are struggling through mud, against a spiky melodic bassline, marimba and airy female vocals. Style: Dubstep

Greek duo Keep Shelly In Athens' first EP for Planet Mu is in keeping with a consistent level of odd synth-pop that the label has released from Tropics to Vezelay, and Heterotic to Solar Bears. They first came to the label's attention with their remix of Solar Bears 'Cub', an awesome re-imagining of the track from SB's "The Was Coloured In' album. The remix is a monumental slice of cold but blissful synth pop, with stadium-sized reverbs and punched-in repetitive vocals over rumbling guitars and punchy drums. 'The Chains' has all the off-key atmosphere of an Italian horror film soundtrack with the band's female singer intoning a melody that could come from a 'Violator'-era Depeche Mode song. The whole song breaks down towards the end into an intense finale. The EP's title track 'Campus Martius' has a giant humming bassline, with electronic drums scratching away like insects flying at windows, as a gentle piano line ripples over the top painting a feeling of airy pleasure while vocal samples drop a melody at altered pitches in a scene of tentative bliss. Finally, 'Struggle With Yourself' pits Sarah's raw singing over a weird acidic bassline that could easily sound at home on a Coil record along with loose guitar strums, before the track breaks into light spoken word and angelic vocals, finishing off as it started, but with a stark warning Style: Electro

Right at the start of the year, Planet Mu - the label responsible for some of the foremost electronic albums of 2011 - present already a candidate for 2012's most questing dance-fuelling long-player. If you gave someone a description of Theo Parrish's most opiated brown-house excursions and asked them to copy that style without letting them hear it, the result might well come out like 'Hive Mind'. Of course, it might not too, but it's a nice idea to turn over, no? Much like the multitude of ideas that turn and twist and tumble and gracefully fold and unfold at length in Ital's creative vortex. Daniel Martin-McCormick's name has recently and increasingly become known in association with his disco / punk / echo band 'Mi Ami', or as 'Sex Worker' on the Not Not Fun label, or finally as 'Ital' on NNF's sister imprint 100% Silk, for whom he records a version of house music which is quite different still to the house-inspired sounds that emerge on 'Hive Mind'. Raised in Washington DC, Daniel has a history in the city's hardcore scene, having been in a band signed to the legendary Dischord label. However, he has always made dance inspired tracks too, but at a very different angle to your average guy with a copy of Logic and a passing knowledge of dance music history. Daniel's music is a stranger thing. Working best at high volume, it uses house's easy going 4/4 structure as a kind of camouflage for more out-there sonic explorations; subverting expectations, seeking out the links between the space and the sound-bending of dub and industrial's unsettling sonics with the grooves of classic house and the effects and black holes of minimal at it's weirdest. 'Hive Mind' has a sculptured feel; sounds twist in space, feeling almost three dimensional, and melodies pitch-shift in an unsettling way; voices dissolve in and out of these frameworks and the whole album has a unique, haunted feel; nothing is ever allowed to settle totally comfortably, everything vibrates. Opener 'Doesn't Matter (If You Love Him)' sounds a bit like Tackhead if they had made house music, using a flickering and confidently repeated phrase over a lumbering drum and bassline, introducing swirling and bombing synths into the mix. 'Floridian Void's' strange marriage of treated voices and swelling, pitch-bent chords and effects draws the listener into its strange atmosphere; it's an ambient house track of sorts, but the ambience here is a swirling, confusing, watery vortex rather than being fuzzy and new age. 'Privacy Settings' builds creepy wolf howls over a slow bassline and cold faraway banging drums, estranged from their usual disco setting. Next, 'Israel' picks things up again, with weird, pitch-shifting edited bells over dubby toms, all the while cold chords rushing in and out over this unsettling backing track. The closer 'Final Wave' restores the album back to something resembling normality, with a disco-like swing that recalls Moodymann's beat down productions but slid through brutal dub-like FXs that bring out a shade of strangeness in an otherwise happy groove. An entirely, unarguably, and irresistibly essential listening experience Style: Electro

On his debut album The Host works in a spacey interzone, using vintage gear to create dramatic panoramas for the headphoned mind. He creates a unique suite of modern impressionistic sonics that tumble and waft in and out of the mix, earthed with strong melodies that take inspiration from net-age genres while never recalling them directly. Throughout, he masters all the potentials of vintage synths, drum machines and reverbs, along with guitar and bass to explore a sound that sets him apart from producers working on computers, creating something much more band-like but rich with lively micro-detail. Opening track 'Neo-Geocities' is full of drifting synths and distorted drum machine toms reminicent of a jerry-rigged footwork style. 'Angel Fire' melts muted guitar and gentle keys into haywire 808 rhythms, while 'Internet Archaelogy' dubs hazy melodies, tape edits and bass guitar into murky but upliftingly melodic shapes. 'Hidden Ontology' riffs majestically over arpeggiated synths, while '3AM Surfing' and 'Summer Solstice At Cape Canaveral' sound like savoured quiet moments after a good night out. 'Rainy Sequences / Phosphene Patterns' is a dense and ecstatic blur of sound, coalescing into a pretty guitar melody weaving through the lush noise while 'Aeontology's pastoral drift is probably best appreciated horizontal, and the delicate and exquisitely detailed spring mood of 'Birthday Bluebells' is a gentle closer. A focused and unique artist with a strong debut which often suggest a similar musical language as that of Kuedo's "severant' Style: Electronic

>>> REPRESS <<< First released in July 2009, this one has been unavailable for the better part of a year, but you still keep asking for it, so here it comes again. When this came out, Floating Points' only previous release had been a 7 on their own Eglo l Style: Dance

"When Falty DL released his 2009 debut on Planet Mu,Love is a Liability, it was notionally tied to dubstep, despite not sounding much like the sound at the time. A combination of irregular but still funky drums, bass and light musical surfaces, it stood o Style: Dance

Following Falty DL's 'Phreqaflex' EP, which mined 2-step garage for inspiration, 'Endeavour' is a beauti-fully crafted and subtly constructed slow motion house EP. The title track kicks off with molasses thick chords, off-beat bleeps and drums which build Style: Dance

This three track EP from the aptly named Dream Continuum is a collaboration between Travis Stewart a.k.a. Machinedrum and Jim Coles a.k.a. Om Unit, who was the mind behind the Philip D Kick 'footwork jungle' tracks in 2011. The meeting came about when Travis and Jim realised they were working in parallel on the same concept of finding the sweet spot between mid-90's euphoric jungle and footwork, so naturally they set about working out how to find it together. The Reworkz EPmoves backwards and forwards in time with 'Be Free' treating jungle's diva samples with footwork pitch bending and repetition while adding huge uplifting chords that capture the euphoria of rave perfectly. It's then laid over tough, rolling 808 kicks and snares at 160bpm with a carpet of pumping, rhythmic sub-bass resulting in a new hybrid that is both fresh and energetic. Give A Lil Luv' is, if anything, even more euphoric, like rolling thunder with an intense, melodic use of samples and chord stabs with metallic breaks building into a spiky mesh of rhythms. On side B Set it' draws classic dancehall, soul and reggae samples across a perfect mix of fast juke cymbals and jungle amens, each part casually camouflaging the other, tempering footwork's sometimes intimidating sparseness and filling it with rich, warm and sincere rave energy Style: Electro