John T Gast – Claim Your Limbs
The Guardian has an exclusive debut of this track from John T Gast, whose debut – the most exciting underground dance LP of the year so far – is out on 23 February from Planet Mu. Gast has previously turned up alongside former Hype Williams soothsayer Inga Copeland, and he shares HW’s sense of obfuscation (his official press shot is of a lamb). But he also shares their fascination with dub and lo-fidelity. On Claim Your Limbs, a curl of Detroit techno melody probes upwards, as clattering percussion builds like mania, and heavy delay adds a blunted dub dread. Also keep an ear out for the insidious Infection, and the equally banging Congress, surely set to become another dancefloor favourite.
Radio Slave – Werk (DJ Richard Remix)
Radio Slave is a master of minimal techno, whose tracks such as Modena and Bell Clap Dance are the most gilded examples of the style’s late-00s golden era. Minimal is a high-stakes game though, where the few elements either hang together or slump into nothing, and his recent productions – including Repeat Myself and Werk, built around basic drum programming and fragments of ghetto-house vocals – sadly tend towards the latter. Praise be to White Material’s DJ Richard, who both builds upwards and excavates downwards on this remix.
DJ Sprinkles and Mark Fell – Fresh
Gender-questioning deep house icon DJ Sprinkles has been feted here before for her quest to make dance music the countercultural force it used to be. “If you’re in the US and it’s a straight, white club then it’s just a fucking nightmare,” she told the Guide last year. “These events are the celebration grounds for heteronormativity.” She finds a perfect bedfellow, then, in Doncaster’s favourite techno outlier Mark Fell – and indeed Tony Benn, who the pair sample in this new 12-inch. Like Larry Heard sampling Martin Luther King or Romanthony sampling Louis Farrakhan, they superpower rhetoric with the emancipation of house music, here using Benn’s exhortation to reject capitalism and the Thatcher-bred free market. An unlikely anthem to take the UK into a general election.
Rabit – Bloody Eye
Grime’s resurgence as the UK’s definitive outsider rhythm is one of the most heartening music stories of recent years, and Rabit is a new-school producer with the boldest vision of what it can become. He’s made tracks without drums, given electronic legends space to run free, and has done all of it from Houston, a city with its own rich outsider heritage. His new track Bloody Eye refuses to cohere, as steel feather of sound graze past one another and bullets are fired hopelessly into the air. It’s from a forthcoming EP on Tri-Angle, who also just announced a compelling Lotic release.
Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe and Ariel Kalma – Mille Voix
Robert Lowe has had a great career in the US underground. First emerging with 90 Day Men, he went solo with his project Lichens, where meditative drones co-existed with desert blues. Best of all though is his LP Timon Irnok Manta, made under his own name, which is destined for cult classic status: two long tracks of prowling pace, lulling loops and dub paranoia. It compelled the RVNG label to pair him with ambient musician Ariel Kalma for their collaborative FRKWYS release series, and Mille Voix is their first proper release. The French-born Kalma has made music across four decades, and is now ensconced in bucolic splendour in New South Wales – the pair recorded his surroundings, treated the sound and fed it back into a beautiful drone work that waxes and wanes in tune with nature. Their LP is out on 13 April, and comes with Sunshine Soup, an impressionistic documentary responding to the music by film-makers Misha Hollenbach and Johann Rashid.
