Back catalogue: Dirty Dubstep/Trap/Grime

Review: In a world saturated with easily digestible sounds, aya's music is a welcome jolt to the system and the debut album from this Huddersfield-raised, London-based artist is a bold and uncompromising album that challenges norms, questions truths and celebrates the spectrum of queer experiences. Through a tapestry of fragmented sounds, distorted vocals and experimental electronic textures, aya crafts a deeply personal narrative that resonates with both vulnerability and defiance. Tracks like 'Somewhere Between The 8th And 9th Floor' and 'What If I Should Fall Asleep And Slip Under' delve into the depths of self-discovery, their introspective lyrics and haunting melodies capturing the uncertainties and anxieties of navigating a world that often feels hostile. 'Dis Yacky' and 'OoBrosThesis' inject a playful energy, their distorted vocals and tongue-in-cheek humor offering a counterpoint to the album's more introspective moments. 'Emley Lights Us Moor', featuring Iceboy Violet, is a standout, its ethereal vocals creating a sense of otherworldly beauty. Aya's refusal to shy away from difficult topics and her willingness to experiment with sound and language make this album a powerful and thought-provoking work that pushes the boundaries of electronic music and challenges listeners to confront their own preconceptions. It's a challenge to the often-limiting tropes of queer art.

Review: Following mesmerising Marseilles mutations from the likes of Syqulone, Kabylie Minogue and Lisa More, Cain ? Muchi return to Gros:Oeuvre with their remarkable debut album. A heady tagine of grime, beats, techno, global bass and contemporary electronica with a title that either refers to famed Moroccan popstar or, far more likely, relates to meaning as 'universe', Dounia is a beguiling clash of western electronics and eastern bars, lyrics, and vocal harmonies. Fractured and macabre throughout from the distorted hardcore bass highs of 'J'wadi' to disarming vocal cries of 'Majdouba' this post grime, pre apocalypse opus is a trip from edge to edge.

Review: A vrooming new V/A comp from London's bass music bacchanals 1985 Music, following up a sellout show at the Roundhouse earlier in 2024. Helmed up by pensive liquid purveyor come bass musical all-rounder Alix Perez, the label now compile several star tracks from throughout the year, setting them side-by-side on wax for the first time. Including trax by Perez, Drone, Cesco, Visages, Hijinx and Onhell, the general movement is from sociopathic grimescape though to bear trap tricksiness, shortly tied up in an extended jungle and d&b coda on the B; Paige Julia's 'Indisputable' is as brazenly fearless as Flowdan's opening flows are, though a continual liquefaction occurs therefrom; the best element heard towards the end has to be the erratic bubblegum cutups heard on Visages' 'Dol Guldur'.

Review: Three years since this formidable French troupe turned lead to gold on their debut, Visages' alchemy continues to bubble over with this utterly exceptional sophomore. Spanning the whole rainbow of styles from neo soul to grime to dubstep and a pungent range of dnb strains, this really is a unique and beguiling universe of sounds, themes, brutalist moments and poignant motifs. Complete with lyrical guidance from the likes of Strategy, Verbz, Chimpo, Snowy and others, there's a powerful adventure to be had among these tracks from the furious futurism of the opener 'Transhuman Music' to the woozy jazzy echoes of the closer 'Kintsugi', this is nothing short of outstanding.

Review: Remarkably surreal club reconstructions from Uruguayan ur-producer Lechuga Zafiro. 'Desde los oidos de un sapo' ('From The Ears Of A Toad') is a truly elastic entanglement of designed sound refit for the floor, though we'd not be surprised if a private laboratory set aside for the safe containment and study of sonic bio-anomalies would hope to acquire this one too. Zafiro flexes his hylid hamstrings on this wriggling wet lurch through post-Baile sonics and field recorded club jamborees, emphasising the naturalistically percussive and fretfully textured. Basing his musical identity on field recordings of hard materials - metal, wood, rock, glass - as well as, somehow, animal tissue - from toads, birds, sea lions and pigs (let's hope they were at least taxidermied first) - these seven cochlear leapfrogs make for a highly exploratory sonic escape; Zafiro dares to define the next applicative generation of sound design for the dance.