Planet Mu

Planet Mu

Planet Mu

Following her acclaimed 2023 release Flood City Trax, a dreamy, lo-fi take on footwork inspired by the crumbling rust-belt city she calls home, Nondi returns to Planet Mu with her second self-titled album, Nondi… While Nondi… retains some of the hazy, nostalgic atmosphere of Flood City Trax, it pushes her sound in bold new directions. I made this album to capture the sense of freedom I used to get from music when I was first discovering it all, Nondi says. Its meant to be cute, fun, kinda weird and emotional — but most of all, its a presentation of some of the prettiest tracks Ive made. Though she hasnt really experienced club culture where she lives, her impressionistic productions evoke the surreal, lingering sounds of a night out — the melodic haze that hums in your ears as you drift off to sleep. Lo-fi and melodic, yet fluid and free, her music carries a sense of flight and intuitive logic. Nondis influences range widely — Actress, Aphex Twin, footwork, and the stranger edges of dub techno are all felt, yet she hallucinates them through her own weathered, dreamlike lens. Her tracks often build from clashing loops that evolve and transform organically, or from familiar genre elements reshaped by her instinct for misty, heart-wrenching melody. Some moments stay closer to genre, like Broken Future 175, a drum-and-bass tear-out that dissolves into lush, blurred chords, or Just Hanging Out, a bruised and beautiful take on 2-step. Lead single Tree Festival feels like a blown-out fusion of rave energy and sped-up new-age bliss, while Death Juke drifts through off-beat vocal samples, pulsing drums and 8-bit FX, reminiscent of early Steve Reich reimagined through a Game Boy. Nondi… is a uniquely moving and exploratory album that expands her sonic world even further. Lo-fi yet luminous, playful yet profound.

Rian Treanor returns to Planet Mu for his second album File Under UK Metaplasm. In 2018, Treanor left his home of Rotherham, a working class town in the North of England not far from rave nexus Sheffield, and headed to Uganda. Hed been invited to perform at Nyege Nyege festival, a mythical event that takes place on the shores of Lake Victoria in Jinja once a year. After nearly a week of almost non-stop syncopated bass, Treanor drove to the countrys capital city Kampala to produce music for a month at the Nyege Nyeges Boutique Studio - an incubator that serves as a central hub for the record label and its many harmonic ventures. A week later, while he was performing at Hollywood, the tiny dive bar that housed the Nyege Nyege crews first events, Treanor began to think differently about the sound hed been developing since 2015s acclaimed A Rational Tangle. Everyone was still beaming after the festival, full of energy and wanting it raw and fast, he explains. Treanor had been collaborating with Acholi fiddle player Ocen James, and absorbing sounds from the other producers at the studio like Tanzanias Jay Mitta and Sisso and Glasgow experimental duo The Modern Institute. The result was a jerky blend of hybridized footwork and singeli (Tanzanias own lightning-fast dance sound) that clocked in at a rapid 200bpm. I played a Jlin track at the wrong speed and it was about 225bpm, he admits. But it sounded really good so I went with it. People were going mental, it was so much fun. Arriving home, inspired by the singeli production process, he focused on energy, building tracks and exploring urgency as the guiding method. Over the course of the year Treanor refined these ideas, building from raw components and eventually focusing on engineering the physicality of the sound. And at the end of 2019 he had the opportunity to tour Japan, where he was able to work out the finishing touches performing on some of the worlds best soundsystems. This polarity - the enigmatic, sweaty energy of singeli juxtaposed with slick, high-def bass weight - sits at the centre of File Under UK Metaplasm, Treanors second full-length. Opening track Hypnic Jerks is maybe the perfect example of this, with crinkled percussive loops cut through by machine-gun kicks and acidic wobbles. Elsewhere, Vacuum Angle takes Sheffields Warp-ed legacy and brings it crashing into the future, with rhythms collapsing into static and noise but never deconstructing or losing the flow. Debouncing meanwhile folds gliding square synths into rattling dancehall kicks, joining the dots between SND, Equiknoxx, Wiley and MCZO & Duke with a neon Sharpie. Its using all those formulaic dance structures but just slightly mangled or messed up, he says. Im still focused on making functioning dance music for clubs, but Im really interested in how far you push that before its just like - no.

Rian Treanor will release his anticipated debut album ATAXIA on Planet Mu this March. The striking full-length follows singles for The Death Of Rave and Warps Arcola imprint as well as live sets at Boilerroom x Genelec, Nyege Nyege festival, tours in India and various high profile EU shows. The title ATAXIA means the loss of full control of bodily movements and relates to Rians music which is intended to make peoples bodies move in unpredictable ways. He adds the angles in the letters, the phonetics seem to mirror the geometry and idiosyncratic patterns in the music. Rian explains that components of the tracks were made by generating a series of irregular events and re-structuring them, or by destabilising a pattern that is constant. When asked how the album compares with his previous releases, he says My earlier EPs share a similar interest in angular and asymmetrical rhythms that are designed for club sound systems, adding they were more improvised, focusing on sequencing and pattern modulation, using standard drum sounds and synthesiser patches. ATAXIA is more focused and stricter, its more co-ordinated in terms of the track selection and the rhythmic structures. I spent more time refining the synthesis and sound design, pushing it further than the previous releases. He expresses an interest in exploring opposites in his music: fluidity and syncopation, systematic and unpredictability, reduction and extremity, irregular symmetry, easy listening and brutal. Theres clear a conceptual backdrop, but the music itself is not overthought. Theres an immediate joy to much of the album – check out ATAXIA_D3 with its wonderful cut-ups and modulations of the phrase people dont understand people. The roots of Rians playful sound are directly linked to his love of the music he grew up with. Coming from Sheffield, you can hear elements of industrial, synth-pop, bleep, extreme computer music and speed garage at play. From Cabaret Voltaire to Warp and beyond; the sound of his city has been, and is, an integral part of his musical development and is still a direct influence. Last year, he noted in an interview that Im not a computer programmer, Im not an articulate person in that kind of way. Im a visual artist. Now he elaborates I meant more that Im a visual thinker. Drawing and visual art have been a fundamental part of his life since I was a child. I got really into graffiti as a teenager and around the same time I got into mixing and these both developed together. You can sense the mind of a visual artist at work in his music which is also reflected in the artwork he created for this project. As well as his visual art, installations and multichannel sound works he is involved in numerous collaborations such as with composer Nakul Krishnamurthy exploring the common ground between Indian classical music and electronic music and his work with improv saxophonist Karl DSilva, plus his time studying with Lupo at Dubplates and Mastering in Berlin (who taught him the importance of reduction) have all helped shape and push his sound into other unique and adventurous zones. Treanor is developing on different levels and in different forms all at the same time, re-imagining the intersection of club culture, experimental art and computer music, presenting an insightful and compelling musical world of fractured and interlocking components. upcoming dates: 18th Jan - Centro de Creacion Contemporanea de Andalucia, Spain 26th Jan - About Blank, Berlin, Germany 15th Mar - Hope Works, Sheffield, UK 10th Apr - w/ Nakul Krishnamurthy - Auditorium Fausto Melotti, Rovereto, Italy

Planet Mu

Planet Mu

Planet Mu

Planet Mu

Planet Mu

Planet Mu Ambient / Experimental

Anyone with a passing interest in footwork and juke will know of Traxman. Corky Strong has a long history of deep involvement in Chicago house, first releasing on the legendary Dance Mania label in the mid nineties, and since then splitting his productions between ghetto house, juke and footwork, releasing alongside Steve Poindexter and Fast Eddie and the late DJ Deeon and DJ Rashad, including an seemingly endless supply of self-released juke edits of whatever direction his deep knowledge of Black American music takes him. The third volume of Da Mind Of Traxman is his first since 2014. In the intervening years hes kept things rolling, DJing regularly, releasing lots of music, becoming a grandfather and being a mentor for younger artists coming up in the scene. This new album was crafted with the help of fellow Planet Mu artist Sinjin Hawke, who took on A&R duties to collate the best from hundreds of tracks dating back to 2005. Sinjin holds Traxmans status in high regard; This album series is important and holds real documentarian value—working on it feels like the modern equivalent of curating a piece of Miles Daviss catalog in the 60s and 70s. Volume 3 showcases Traxmans uncanny ability to take old music into the future without losing the feeling and energy of his samples and influences. He knows how to add a hi-definition modern chassis with the skill of someone who deeply and intuitively understands the craft of dance music. These are some of the purest, most innovative ideations of Chicago footwork.

Planet Mu Ambient / Experimental

Planet Mu Ambient / Experimental

Planet Mu Ambient / Experimental

Planet Mu welcomes new signing Rev also known as 26 year old Raymond Hu from Chongqing in South West China, a city best known musically for its thriving rap scene. This scene initially inspired Raymond to produce music, but unable to find a satisfactory vocalist/songwriter to complete his sound, he started to build his own by cutting up, reordering and editing mostly feminine pop vocals instead of working with a rapper. Its a process with an element of chance, a proxy that balances the familiar and the uncanny. In turn, these characteristics carry across to Revs artist name too. He says Among my friends Im often called Lai Fu (来福), which is the direct phonetic rendering of Rev into Mandarin, and in Chinese it literally means Get Lucky. But also, Rev is short for Reverse, playing something backwards, an editing technique he uses, where the sound of the familiar and uncanny mix. Revs six track Planet Mu debut Stay, Nomad is sparse and deeply felt, composed with a graceful sense of weightlessness and space. Rhythms crack and bounce around melody, effects and reverb which suck air in and out of the sound design, while vocals thread through this mix like eerie holograms. Opener Mind Game which was on the Planet Mu 30 compilation and also appears here with a mind-bending remix from Chewlie, starts with a naked piano, opening up into something that glows with disembodied vocals yearning over dub-like phrases, that lift and dissipate like fireworks. In contrast, first single Stutter builds up slithers of choir-like and chipmunked vocals into strange shapes over fuzzy piano, until saw-like drums cut in half way through giving the serene mood a fearful, nervous edge. We hope you enjoy this new EP as much as we do.

Planet Mu welcomes new signing Rev also known as 26 year old Raymond Hu from Chongqing in South West China, a city best known musically for its thriving rap scene. This scene initially inspired Raymond to produce music, but unable to find a satisfactory vocalist/songwriter to complete his sound, he started to build his own by cutting up, reordering and editing mostly feminine pop vocals instead of working with a rapper. Its a process with an element of chance, a proxy that balances the familiar and the uncanny. In turn, these characteristics carry across to Revs artist name too. He says Among my friends Im often called Lai Fu (来福), which is the direct phonetic rendering of Rev into Mandarin, and in Chinese it literally means Get Lucky. But also, Rev is short for Reverse, playing something backwards, an editing technique he uses, where the sound of the familiar and uncanny mix. Revs six track Planet Mu debut Stay, Nomad is sparse and deeply felt, composed with a graceful sense of weightlessness and space. Rhythms crack and bounce around melody, effects and reverb which suck air in and out of the sound design, while vocals thread through this mix like eerie holograms. Opener Mind Game which was on the Planet Mu 30 compilation and also appears here with a mind-bending remix from Chewlie, starts with a naked piano, opening up into something that glows with disembodied vocals yearning over dub-like phrases, that lift and dissipate like fireworks. In contrast, first single Stutter builds up slithers of choir-like and chipmunked vocals into strange shapes over fuzzy piano, until saw-like drums cut in half way through giving the serene mood a fearful, nervous edge. We hope you enjoy this new EP as much as we do.