Top 100 Chart Placements
Updated 18 hours ago
Hessle Audio returns with Undertow, a new four-track EP from Swiss drummer, composer and electronic artist Arthur Hnatek. The first new release on the London label since Jasmin's Bite The Hand That Feeds You EP in October 2025, it introduces Hnatek's highly physical approach to electronic music. Based in Zurich, Hnatek has previously collaborated with artists including Barker and Stenny, while his solo work has drawn on his background in jazz, improvised music and club-oriented electronic production. Hnatek began Undertow with long, unplanned drum improvisations recorded across Brooklyn, Berlin and Switzerland, treating the performances as raw material, cutting, reducing and transforming them until rhythm begins to suggest melody, harmony and atmosphere. Using resonators, vocoders, tuned delays, spectral processing and the Torso S4 sampler, he gradually extracts an electronic vocabulary from the recordings themselves. Hnatek says "I felt a growing need to return to the drum kit with no plan other than to play. I wasn't trying to make electronic music with drums layered on top. I was interested in whether an entire electronic language could emerge from the drum recordings themselves." Across Undertow, the physicality and unpredictability of the original performances remain present even as the recordings are pushed into increasingly abstract territory.
Untold continues his journey reconnecting with the core sound of Hemlock, "Crop Milk" marking his third EP for the label in 2026. Five tracks locked in at 140bpm, this time taking on a deeper more reflective sound, with hints of nostalgia for the percussive energy and dense sonics of the early 2010s.