Making a welcome return nine years on from his last outing on Dekmantel, Makam offers up a generous helping of wayward grooves that take his curious spirit even further into unmarked territory. With a strong dub sensibility grounding his rich tapestry of percussion and instrumentation, Guy Blanken follows his own path to arrive at an album that embodies house music as a launchpad for experimentation. Blanken says himself he was determined to approach his first Makam productions in years from a place of total freedom Its not a single direction, but rather a landscape of sounds, moments, and textures. TARP feels like a new beginning, a free project that just had to happen naturally. The steady pulse of the club remains a guiding principle boldly manifested on heads down roller Static Shade, but even in the lilting organic loops and tumbling percussion of Forgive there is a funkiness thats beholden to continuous movement. At times the direct thump of 4/4 disco juts out as a call to dance, not least on Flying Birds and La Tuna, but elsewhere the rhythms are more slippery. Dub In Loen plots a delicate path through dub techno and Lummel Spirit casts off into pattering Balearic bliss. The pervasive dub mood of the record comes to the fore on expertly crafted stepper Diagonal Rain and crooked album opener Clear Skies. Jackie B lands as a love letter to quintessential deep house, and yet still theres a left-of-centre charm that gives the track a personality that is pure Makam. Exuding warmth and imagination at every turn, TARP is the perfect example of how to make a groove-oriented album a rich home listening experience. There are ample moments primed for the spectacle of the dancefloor, but the mellow hue and broad sweep of approaches make Makams welcome return utterly compelling from end to end.

Making a welcome return nine years on from his last outing on Dekmantel, Makam offers up a generous helping of wayward grooves that take his curious spirit even further into unmarked territory. With a strong dub sensibility grounding his rich tapestry of percussion and instrumentation, Guy Blanken follows his own path to arrive at an album that embodies house music as a launchpad for experimentation. Blanken says himself he was determined to approach his first Makam productions in years from a place of total freedom Its not a single direction, but rather a landscape of sounds, moments, and textures. TARP feels like a new beginning, a free project that just had to happen naturally. The steady pulse of the club remains a guiding principle boldly manifested on heads down roller Static Shade, but even in the lilting organic loops and tumbling percussion of Forgive there is a funkiness thats beholden to continuous movement. At times the direct thump of 4/4 disco juts out as a call to dance, not least on Flying Birds and La Tuna, but elsewhere the rhythms are more slippery. Dub In Loen plots a delicate path through dub techno and Lummel Spirit casts off into pattering Balearic bliss. The pervasive dub mood of the record comes to the fore on expertly crafted stepper Diagonal Rain and crooked album opener Clear Skies. Jackie B lands as a love letter to quintessential deep house, and yet still theres a left-of-centre charm that gives the track a personality that is pure Makam. Exuding warmth and imagination at every turn, TARP is the perfect example of how to make a groove-oriented album a rich home listening experience. There are ample moments primed for the spectacle of the dancefloor, but the mellow hue and broad sweep of approaches make Makams welcome return utterly compelling from end to end.

Making a welcome return nine years on from his last outing on Dekmantel, Makam offers up a generous helping of wayward grooves that take his curious spirit even further into unmarked territory. With a strong dub sensibility grounding his rich tapestry of percussion and instrumentation, Guy Blanken follows his own path to arrive at an album that embodies house music as a launchpad for experimentation. Blanken says himself he was determined to approach his first Makam productions in years from a place of total freedom Its not a single direction, but rather a landscape of sounds, moments, and textures. TARP feels like a new beginning, a free project that just had to happen naturally. The steady pulse of the club remains a guiding principle boldly manifested on heads down roller Static Shade, but even in the lilting organic loops and tumbling percussion of Forgive there is a funkiness thats beholden to continuous movement. At times the direct thump of 4/4 disco juts out as a call to dance, not least on Flying Birds and La Tuna, but elsewhere the rhythms are more slippery. Dub In Loen plots a delicate path through dub techno and Lummel Spirit casts off into pattering Balearic bliss. The pervasive dub mood of the record comes to the fore on expertly crafted stepper Diagonal Rain and crooked album opener Clear Skies. Jackie B lands as a love letter to quintessential deep house, and yet still theres a left-of-centre charm that gives the track a personality that is pure Makam. Exuding warmth and imagination at every turn, TARP is the perfect example of how to make a groove-oriented album a rich home listening experience. There are ample moments primed for the spectacle of the dancefloor, but the mellow hue and broad sweep of approaches make Makams welcome return utterly compelling from end to end.

Making a welcome return nine years on from his last outing on Dekmantel, Makam offers up a generous helping of wayward grooves that take his curious spirit even further into unmarked territory. With a strong dub sensibility grounding his rich tapestry of percussion and instrumentation, Guy Blanken follows his own path to arrive at an album that embodies house music as a launchpad for experimentation. Blanken says himself he was determined to approach his first Makam productions in years from a place of total freedom Its not a single direction, but rather a landscape of sounds, moments, and textures. TARP feels like a new beginning, a free project that just had to happen naturally. The steady pulse of the club remains a guiding principle boldly manifested on heads down roller Static Shade, but even in the lilting organic loops and tumbling percussion of Forgive there is a funkiness thats beholden to continuous movement. At times the direct thump of 4/4 disco juts out as a call to dance, not least on Flying Birds and La Tuna, but elsewhere the rhythms are more slippery. Dub In Loen plots a delicate path through dub techno and Lummel Spirit casts off into pattering Balearic bliss. The pervasive dub mood of the record comes to the fore on expertly crafted stepper Diagonal Rain and crooked album opener Clear Skies. Jackie B lands as a love letter to quintessential deep house, and yet still theres a left-of-centre charm that gives the track a personality that is pure Makam. Exuding warmth and imagination at every turn, TARP is the perfect example of how to make a groove-oriented album a rich home listening experience. There are ample moments primed for the spectacle of the dancefloor, but the mellow hue and broad sweep of approaches make Makams welcome return utterly compelling from end to end.

Dekmantel Ten is a mirror of Dekmantel Festival. The 7x12 boxset includes seven records that mirror the seven stages to be found at the 2024 event, their 10th edition since 2013. The tracklisting isnt rigid some of the musicians gathered here have in fact played at most of the available stages but like a Mobius strip looping round, or a cat-and-mouse game, its not hard to discern a symbiotic relationship. Split seven ways, DKMNTL100 is a testament to the art of curation and the importance of quality control. At artist level, Dekmantel Ten finds room for several artists including Karenn, Jeff Mills and Marcel Dettmann who played at the very first Dekmantel Festival in 2013, and are by now impossible to detach. The Loops disc contains names whose stories have dovetailed alongside the festival, concluding in memorable headline moments: Young Marco, Palms Trax and Alchemical Sisters, aka Eris Drew and Octo Octa. Widen the lens and youll find history from across the landscape: the laboratories of professorial techno (Dasha Rush, Steve Rachmad, DJ Nobu) and gilded halls of house (Steffi, Luca Lozano, Bufiman); varied soundsystem icons (Kode9, Adrian Sherwood, DVS1) meeting limelights of contemporary Amsterdam (upsammy, Identified Patient, Zohar); as well as the modern conduits channelling decades of outernational vibrations (Nick Leon, BADSISTA, Animistic Beliefs, Veracco and a great many more). All 44 artists presenting exclusive material are indispensable into the Dekmantel story to date, and no doubt make up future developments over the horizon. That goes for the areas, too: Because while the seven stages found at Dekmantel Festival are individually resonant enough that they could become splinter festivals in their own right, its that union which lends the core festival its strength.

Dekmantel Ten is a mirror of Dekmantel Festival. The 7x12 boxset includes seven records that mirror the seven stages to be found at the 2024 event, their 10th edition since 2013. The tracklisting isnt rigid some of the musicians gathered here have in fact played at most of the available stages but like a Mobius strip looping round, or a cat-and-mouse game, its not hard to discern a symbiotic relationship. Split seven ways, DKMNTL100 is a testament to the art of curation and the importance of quality control. At artist level, Dekmantel Ten finds room for several artists including Karenn, Jeff Mills and Marcel Dettmann who played at the very first Dekmantel Festival in 2013, and are by now impossible to detach. The Loops disc contains names whose stories have dovetailed alongside the festival, concluding in memorable headline moments: Young Marco, Palms Trax and Alchemical Sisters, aka Eris Drew and Octo Octa. Widen the lens and youll find history from across the landscape: the laboratories of professorial techno (Dasha Rush, Steve Rachmad, DJ Nobu) and gilded halls of house (Steffi, Luca Lozano, Bufiman); varied soundsystem icons (Kode9, Adrian Sherwood, DVS1) meeting limelights of contemporary Amsterdam (upsammy, Identified Patient, Zohar); as well as the modern conduits channelling decades of outernational vibrations (Nick Leon, BADSISTA, Animistic Beliefs, Veracco and a great many more). All 44 artists presenting exclusive material are indispensable into the Dekmantel story to date, and no doubt make up future developments over the horizon. That goes for the areas, too: Because while the seven stages found at Dekmantel Festival are individually resonant enough that they could become splinter festivals in their own right, its that union which lends the core festival its strength.

With a glorious flourish of melodious club abstraction, cult producer Quirke makes a welcome return by delivering his most upfront tracks to date for Dekmantel. Josh Quirke first came through on Young Turks (Young) and Whities (AD93) through the 2010s, offering a distinctive, slanted take on hardcore and house music alike that came shrouded in dense atmospherics and shot through with wistful melancholia. Comparisons to artists like Burial and Skee Mask werent unfounded, but Quirke was very much operating on his own terms, as he has continued to ever since. The last we heard from the low-key producer was his debut album Steal A Golden Hail, released on Whities in 2019, and now he comes through with a strong update to his sound that finds a natural home on Dekmantel. Its clear from the structural shifts in lead track Underdetermined that Quirke is operating free from the so-called rules of dance music, veering from a pure synth intro straight into the full peak of the track without so much as a warm-up. Placing emotionality ahead of functionality, Underdetermined manages to be every inch an anthem. The OT3 deals in denser percussive textures and haunted pads, with ample room for wistful sentimentality and a steady trucking kick. On Worth Variation, the array of blown-out elements are glued together into a dub techno pulse, where every atmospheric impulse feels like part of the groove. Ten Times Over Crystal Fruit completes the record across a grand sweep of narrative arrangement, shifting through phases and heavy layers of joyful noise. Its intense and delicate in equal measure, absolutely ready to move a mass of bodies but without ever deferring to the familiar. Quirke happily avoids engagement with the wider scene while making his truly individual music, but he himself admits he struck upon a dimension of his sound that could explore immediacy and impact without losing the subtle, smudged-out beauty inherent in his musical DNA.

Dekmantel continues to shape out the return of its UFO series with an EP of mind-massaging techno-trance futurism from Wata Igarashi. Capturing the energy of the UFO stages which indulge Dekmantel Festivals darker, experimental tastes, Igarashi turns out four shapely serotonin injections in his inimitable style. Theres an immediacy to the Kaleidoscopic 12 which rushes into earshot the moment the EP fires up with the insistent acid throb of the title track. The eternal undulation of a 303 provides the bedrock for Igarashis fluttering brushstrokes, while a tough yet supple beat charges underneath. Cascading arps are a core element of the richly melodic sound on this release, reaching measured peaks of ecstasy on The Sailage without ever taking a cheap shortcut. Understated, emotionally-charged eloquence spills out of every sequence. Theres a softer, blurry-eyed sentiment to the synth work on Steaming, while Interweave tempers classic acid techno tropes with gaseous atmospherics. There are plenty of crisp edges in his tracks for the dancers to latch onto, but Igarashi specialises in a fluid motion that encourages less thinking and more feelinga lysergic techno flow to truly melt into.

Dekmantel Ten is a mirror of Dekmantel Festival. The 7x12 boxset includes seven records that mirror the seven stages to be found at the 2024 event, their 10th edition since 2013. The tracklisting isnt rigid some of the musicians gathered here have in fact played at most of the available stages but like a Mobius strip looping round, or a cat-and-mouse game, its not hard to discern a symbiotic relationship. Split seven ways, DKMNTL100 is a testament to the art of curation and the importance of quality control. At artist level, Dekmantel Ten finds room for several artists including Karenn, Jeff Mills and Marcel Dettmann who played at the very first Dekmantel Festival in 2013, and are by now impossible to detach. The Loops disc contains names whose stories have dovetailed alongside the festival, concluding in memorable headline moments: Young Marco, Palms Trax and Alchemical Sisters, aka Eris Drew and Octo Octa. Widen the lens and youll find history from across the landscape: the laboratories of professorial techno (Dasha Rush, Steve Rachmad, DJ Nobu) and gilded halls of house (Steffi, Luca Lozano, Bufiman); varied soundsystem icons (Kode9, Adrian Sherwood, DVS1) meeting limelights of contemporary Amsterdam (upsammy, Identified Patient, Zohar); as well as the modern conduits channelling decades of outernational vibrations (Nick Leon, BADSISTA, Animistic Beliefs, Veracco and a great many more). All 44 artists presenting exclusive material are indispensable into the Dekmantel story to date, and no doubt make up future developments over the horizon. That goes for the areas, too: Because while the seven stages found at Dekmantel Festival are individually resonant enough that they could become splinter festivals in their own right, its that union which lends the core festival its strength.

Dekmantel Ten is a mirror of Dekmantel Festival. The 7x12 boxset includes seven records that mirror the seven stages to be found at the 2024 event, their 10th edition since 2013. The tracklisting isnt rigid some of the musicians gathered here have in fact played at most of the available stages but like a Mobius strip looping round, or a cat-and-mouse game, its not hard to discern a symbiotic relationship. Split seven ways, DKMNTL100 is a testament to the art of curation and the importance of quality control. At artist level, Dekmantel Ten finds room for several artists including Karenn, Jeff Mills and Marcel Dettmann who played at the very first Dekmantel Festival in 2013, and are by now impossible to detach. The Loops disc contains names whose stories have dovetailed alongside the festival, concluding in memorable headline moments: Young Marco, Palms Trax and Alchemical Sisters, aka Eris Drew and Octo Octa. Widen the lens and youll find history from across the landscape: the laboratories of professorial techno (Dasha Rush, Steve Rachmad, DJ Nobu) and gilded halls of house (Steffi, Luca Lozano, Bufiman); varied soundsystem icons (Kode9, Adrian Sherwood, DVS1) meeting limelights of contemporary Amsterdam (upsammy, Identified Patient, Zohar); as well as the modern conduits channelling decades of outernational vibrations (Nick Leon, BADSISTA, Animistic Beliefs, Veracco and a great many more). All 44 artists presenting exclusive material are indispensable into the Dekmantel story to date, and no doubt make up future developments over the horizon. That goes for the areas, too: Because while the seven stages found at Dekmantel Festival are individually resonant enough that they could become splinter festivals in their own right, its that union which lends the core festival its strength.

Making a welcome return nine years on from his last outing on Dekmantel, Makam offers up a generous helping of wayward grooves that take his curious spirit even further into unmarked territory. With a strong dub sensibility grounding his rich tapestry of percussion and instrumentation, Guy Blanken follows his own path to arrive at an album that embodies house music as a launchpad for experimentation. Blanken says himself he was determined to approach his first Makam productions in years from a place of total freedom Its not a single direction, but rather a landscape of sounds, moments, and textures. TARP feels like a new beginning, a free project that just had to happen naturally. The steady pulse of the club remains a guiding principle boldly manifested on heads down roller Static Shade, but even in the lilting organic loops and tumbling percussion of Forgive there is a funkiness thats beholden to continuous movement. At times the direct thump of 4/4 disco juts out as a call to dance, not least on Flying Birds and La Tuna, but elsewhere the rhythms are more slippery. Dub In Loen plots a delicate path through dub techno and Lummel Spirit casts off into pattering Balearic bliss. The pervasive dub mood of the record comes to the fore on expertly crafted stepper Diagonal Rain and crooked album opener Clear Skies. Jackie B lands as a love letter to quintessential deep house, and yet still theres a left-of-centre charm that gives the track a personality that is pure Makam. Exuding warmth and imagination at every turn, TARP is the perfect example of how to make a groove-oriented album a rich home listening experience. There are ample moments primed for the spectacle of the dancefloor, but the mellow hue and broad sweep of approaches make Makams welcome return utterly compelling from end to end.

Making a welcome return nine years on from his last outing on Dekmantel, Makam offers up a generous helping of wayward grooves that take his curious spirit even further into unmarked territory. With a strong dub sensibility grounding his rich tapestry of percussion and instrumentation, Guy Blanken follows his own path to arrive at an album that embodies house music as a launchpad for experimentation. Blanken says himself he was determined to approach his first Makam productions in years from a place of total freedom Its not a single direction, but rather a landscape of sounds, moments, and textures. TARP feels like a new beginning, a free project that just had to happen naturally. The steady pulse of the club remains a guiding principle boldly manifested on heads down roller Static Shade, but even in the lilting organic loops and tumbling percussion of Forgive there is a funkiness thats beholden to continuous movement. At times the direct thump of 4/4 disco juts out as a call to dance, not least on Flying Birds and La Tuna, but elsewhere the rhythms are more slippery. Dub In Loen plots a delicate path through dub techno and Lummel Spirit casts off into pattering Balearic bliss. The pervasive dub mood of the record comes to the fore on expertly crafted stepper Diagonal Rain and crooked album opener Clear Skies. Jackie B lands as a love letter to quintessential deep house, and yet still theres a left-of-centre charm that gives the track a personality that is pure Makam. Exuding warmth and imagination at every turn, TARP is the perfect example of how to make a groove-oriented album a rich home listening experience. There are ample moments primed for the spectacle of the dancefloor, but the mellow hue and broad sweep of approaches make Makams welcome return utterly compelling from end to end.

Dekmantel Bass / Club

Dekmantel Trance (Raw / Deep / Hypnotic)