Opal Tapes

Permanent Vacation

sitting in the terminal at Barcelona airport, health safety warnings echo through empty architecture. feeling slow, and fast, out of sync with rituals and routines. structure and rhythm disintegrate into micro gestures appearing in random order, a daily psychedelia... amid all of the chaos and distraction in the last few years, its only through letting go that Ive found solid ground to stand on. These are some of the experiences and reflections that gave shape to Slipstream, a hallucinatory mini-album by the artist PVAS and the fourth release on Objekts label, Kapsela. Slipstream is an aural document of PVASs interior life, conceived not as a grab-bag of DJ-friendly tracks (although its clearly inspired by the club) but as a single, delicately crafted artistic statement. The entire record is shrouded in a flickering haze, worn through by smudged breakbeats and wiry drum machines. Wetland, with its swampy percussion and crystalline arps, echoes T++ and Kraftwerk. The radiant incandescence of Gathering Drift recalls GAS or Monolakes Hong Kong. Sampled breakbeats dip and swerve asymmetrically through Boba and Terminal. Across the record, textures and voices are reshaped by PVASs homemade algo-software, UMT, which, in PVAS own words, reconstructs one audio file by sampling another, resulting in output that merges their aesthetic qualities, creating rhythm with non-rhythmic sound files and abusing the stereo field. But the most striking union of technology and poetic self-exploration comes at the end of the record, in the title track, from words murmured through a classic vocoder: when i stop framing myself as a boundaried stone immovable, and powerful, and heavy when i stop figuring my deepest space as my own something which i am solely responsible i surrender, i surrender PVAS is Jordan Juras, a Berlin-based artist who grew up outside of Windsor, Ontario. He has released solo EPs on Isla and xpq?, and is half the duo NUG (3XL, West Mineral Ltd.). In addition to developing music software professionally, he has used his UMT software on records by Lyra Pramuk and Dylan Kerr. Slipstream was recorded from 2022 to 2025.

ESHU3EX / SNA016EX ESHUs main man Ivano Tetelepta strikes again with a double drop of EPs on his EX-series. The series, spread over both his ESHU and Siena imprints, are limited to his own productions and are cut on small amounts of dubplates that are spread between local record hub Waaghals Nijmegen, the ESHU Bandcamp page and his own Bandcamp page. On the ESHU part of this diptych Tetelepta kicks off with a classic 90s techno trip, something that we havent heard often from his hands. Its a high tempo roller with dusty percussion and heavenly pads (to honor the titels meaning). Flipping to the other tracks we get into more familiar dub heavy territory. An introvert smoked-out groove sets the tone, followed by a stuttering rhythm built up by glitches and chimes. To cover all Teteleptas sides, the fourth track represents his housier repertoire. Heavenly melodies and slow paced hazy rhythms close this well rounded first chapter and represent everything Tetelepta is known for. Jumping to the Siena slab, it gets more experimental. Siena has always been an imprint for experiments and impromptu jams. The ten track journey contains misty field recordings, haunting drones and captivating melodies. Its a very personal document of feelings transformed into frequencies, straight from the soul to the soundboard.

Finnish-born, Berlin-based producer Klas Lindblad (aka Freestyle Man, Sasse) dives deep into ambient and IDM terrain with Archipelago Files. Glitching textures, fog-like atmospheres, and fractured rhythms map a journey across imagined northern islands. Released via Electric Appliances, Moodmusics experimental imprint, the album is a meditative yet daring exploration from one of electronic musics most versatile voices.

Ship Sket is 26 year old Josh Griffiths. Originally from Dorset, hes lived in Manchester for seven years and forged his own path within the citys welcoming and close-knit music scene, arriving on Planet Mu this autumn with his debut album InitiatriX. Sonically the album is a homage to the UK styles that Josh loves: dubstep, grime, drill and rap, but on an emotional level its about spirituality, fetish, and latent darkness hidden by outward appearances. Josh says about his process I like happy accidents, messing around and resampling, and kind of seeing how far I can push stuff before it disintegrates in front of me. Not so much deconstructed so much as derailed; Ive heard my tunes on a club system and gone wow that mix sounds bad, but the tune is still popping. My approach is a lot more stylistic than it is technical. InitiatriX is a smeared mix of distorted pop, underwater drill, dubby musique concrète and the downright dada. There are dramatic string passages and naked piano; Josh drops from twitchy electronics to blooms of distortion, found-sound and lo-fi drum patterns and sometimes all those things at once. I do think of production as a divine practice because it is a mass-channeling of creative force. Putting together a track is drawing down energy and organising it into the best possible shape, like a huge elaborate puzzle. Sometimes the tracks will write themselves, and that is a beautiful feeling. This approach to writing is manifest throughout InitiatriX. Take Vendettas Theme (ft. Charlie Osborne) - a pounding drill beat covered in a layer of filthy distortion with demonic vocals rapping about spiders, alchemy and isolation - the vocals and sample chops forcing their way through the songs web of grit; or the subtle intensity of Mimikyus slow paced and ornate strings, cast against repeated cute bleeps and incidental details to form a hypnotic club tool. Permanent Kigurumis lonely melody, cloaked in a haunted atmosphere, rubs against explosive drill drums and a vocal snatch whispering Just Like You. Ship Skets music is strange and beguiling, rough and sensuous all at the same time.

Mood Hut

Throttle Records

PROMETHEUS began as an experimental performance built from light, sound, and myth. Reimagined as an album, it distills the essence of that work into a radiant, cinematic soundscape. At its core lies the figure of Prometheus - the one who stole fire and gave humanity both its brilliance and its burden. His defiance pulses through every act of creation, a reminder that progress is never without consequence. Blending electronic synthesis, digital manipulation, and fragmented field recordings, the album reflects on invention, transgression and isolation. Glitches flicker like sparks; drones stretch like mountain winds. PROMETHEUS reawakens the legend as a meditation on power, transformation, and the uneasy beauty of creation in the digital age.

xins WASTED lands on Appendix.files with nine pieces that drag the club through a compost heap of trash(ed) recordings, corroded basslines and scraps of rave memory, forming a porous archive of dance musics residues transfigured. Composed of field recordings of waste, the album doesnt recycle so much as ferment, mulching the detritus of dance culture into something gurgling, volatile, and eerily alive. Alongside the music WASTED expands into print and website: a zine and wasted.reluctant.promo hold xins texts hospicing dance music and unsustainability, extending the artists reflections on exhaustion, precarity and the cultural afterlife. Theres a sonic depth and mood here that sits somewhere between Raimes shadowed tension, Carriers electro-acoustic sleight and the spacious dub mutations of T++, while its textural apparitions feel as though theyve been dubbed over a battered Jon Hassell cassette the otherworldly nostalgia burned away, replaced with a hard-won momentum, like flooring it toward the next gas station before Immortan Joes war party closes in. WASTED reads as dance music after the fire: glamour gone, structures wrecked, a stubborn pulse still smouldering underneath. opening drifts in on fizzing debris and low-end churn, like a bin bag caught on a breeze. trash dub assembles a crooked percussion grid; compost believes in life after death hovers between hymn and hiss before plunging into the jagged kicks of wasted anew. Mid-record, enough to exhaust and indoors in time stretch the remnants thin, teasing collapse. The last sweep plastic legacy, no permanence, for now and apocalypse era (i dreamt i glimpsed eternity) folds exhaustion and faint euphoria into a single long exhale. Mastered by Ike Zwanikken, artwork and design by Amos Turner, WASTED is Appendix.files at its most thematically aligned: a porous document of cultural leftovers, decomposed into new sonic growths. For media inquiries, review requests, or interviews, please contact: info@appendixfiles.com

From Japan, Tokio Ono presents a stunning collection of fourth world & ambient dub explorations! Yokohama multi-instrumentalist Tokio Ono eases into the Accidental Meetings family with an array of Japanese folk tinged avant-dubs, drenched in beautiful texture. The elusive artist has spent much of his life in his hometown with a view of the Yokohama waters, before settling into a new environment in Tokyo where Peel gradually took shape. The essence of a given situation emerges as you peel it away, these tracks were inspired by the accumulation of days and flashbacks of memories: layers to peel joyfully from our lives, while offering a slightly shifted and refreshing perspective on ones surroundings. Its a dreamy journey from open to close, Onos world engulfs you in a blissful dubbed out wormhole. Featuring a flip from the sound system royalty of Seekers International to top it off, Peel is a unique and exquisite piece of work.

Rhythm Büro

In 1978, at the University of London, the Physicist David T. Kemp made an unusual discovery. Kemp noticed that faint sounds, known as Otoacoustic emissions (OAEs), revealed the existence of the cochlear amplifier, a mechanism responsible for sound sensitivity and frequency resolution. This discovery proved that the ear is an active rather than passive organ. Following this discovery the experimental music world embraced these findings by incorporating them into sound works. Maryanne Amacher was a notable early pioneer of this technique resulting in large scale sound works, the likes of which audiences had never encountered prior. Since these early explorations the use of OAEs has spread more widely in the experimental music landscape, notably by Editions Mego artists Florian Hecker and Marcus Schmickler. I believe the kick of techno can be an agent to shapeshift sounds and infiltrate settings - Jung An Tagen Stefan Juster aka Jung An Tagen is known for conceptual works and has a large back catalogue of intriguing ideas and sounds. Revenge of the Speaker People is another adventurous release, one which takes the Otoacoustic discoveries of David T. Kemp and applies them to a techno framework. OAEs are fragile and can collapse quickly when combined with other elements. Jung An Tagens success in combining OAEs with beats is therefore quite an achievement, without precedent. The first CD comprises the results of Justers experiments, resulting in some of the strangest techno committed to digital since the initial burst of the Mego label. A series of head spinning, ear tickling extreme electronic miniatures bleed in a continuous form. This adventurous and playful music would likely have many a raver run to the bathroom. There is a tangible subversive delight in mixing in such sounds to what is ostensibly club music. Because the record had this clear divide of beat + otoacoustics the idea came to see how the material would lend itself to a series of remixes. The second CD has remix contributions from a selection of artists from the Editions Mego stable alongside Justers own ETAT imprint along with DJ Nervoso from the Príncipe crew. The results are a headspinning variety of Otoacoustic mayhem as the likes of Evol, Thomas Brinkmann, Ellen Phan, Nik Colk Void and others fold these initial bizarre sounds into even more twisted shapes. Revenge of the Speaker People is a daring, playful and audacious release. One that will baffle your ears, neighbours and dancefloor clients.

On point, until it hurts. With a decade-spanning discography, several bands and half of SHXCXCHCXSH this restless creator presents himself. SSTROM embodies the calmly bold. Building a version of the modern disco that nobody asked for. SSTROM is the capsule that shocks and comforts, gathers and spark a new thought. The robust shell acts as a camouflage for the wild and wicked bleakness of the music he produces. If the contemporary club urge could be described as a helmet waiting to brake this experience is what you are after; surprising, uplifting and changing. With Avvik SSTROM carves out 6 somatically clear scenes articulating diverse textures, densities and states of aggregation. The constructions evolves as fractious rhythms strives for another order. Trial and errors bungys droughty, moist, stiff and tensile. Sstrom forces us to flicker in twitches between layers and dimensions beyond the given three. Written and produced by SSTROM Artwork by Klara Granstrand Mastered by Giuseppe Tillieci at Enisslab Published by Copyright Control ROSTEN 11 2025

Balmat

Fog is Marija Rasas debut album on Short Span as emer, and her first cut to wax. It follows a single featuring Ugne Umer for Stroom and a wonderful debut tape for the now cult (I hope!) incubator label Lilerne Tape Club. Its for dreamers. Very dub. Soul. Ambient too. A bit of Detroit-like post industrial imagining. You can read it is as a new and different version of a very classic dub technique from the producer in many ways - Marija at the mixing console and effects desk, conjuring a new versioned music through radical restructuring and an instinctive reshaping of space + melody + lyric in studio experimentation. Tracks are pinned down by thick and enveloping bass while other elements float in and out, fleeting narcotic or hypnagogic notes of fantasy and song form bob in and out of focus. Scant colours and disorienting voice and melody sit suspended, occasionally coalescing and breaking out into moments of radiant beauty and slowly burning manifestations of warmth and presence shooting through the heart and gut.

Ampoule Records

In an intricate lattice of ever-evolving electro exploration, Samuel Van Dijk is back on Delsin with a new EP. Under his VC-118A alias, the Helsinki based producer presents a richly textured, cinematic strain of machine funk that reaches beyond dancefloor functionality to test the expressive potential locked within electros crisp rhythmic framework. Theres a melancholic mood hovering over Avian as Van Dijk allows a subtle edge of distortion to creep into his flickering drum programming. The end result is a pensive sound that touches on the moodiness of orchestral composition, unfurling patiently across extended run times without losing focus. With his characteristic attention to detail and broad dynamic range, Van Dijk continues to offer up a sophisticated, emotionally-charged strain of electro like no other.

This release is a patchwork EP stitched from five different corners of sound. Old Leipzig buddies Steffen Bennemann & Vai open as W+L Schulze with something quietly luminous yet heavy in the low end. The title track A Place Like a Place by DJ Chrysalis sets the compass sharp toward leg-whipping energy, followed by Aguilas tribal-tinged rave momentum. Oase then slows the pulse with subtle textures and sampling finesse, before MTTY closes the showcase with a funky cut - another cherry on top of his string of strong releases this year. It less a neat compilation than a showcase of variety - a place where things dont match on purpose, but end up fitting anyway.

Warp Records