The accolades don’t stop there. A variety of blogs and newsletters—including First Floor—have loudly sung Hammerschlag’s praises, and even the notoriously picky curators at Boomkat have proven susceptible to the artist’s charms. The online retailer touted fake girl as “a beautiful set of abstracted folk diversions,” and more recently gave Psycho Summer its own glowing write-up, saying the record sits “somewhere between lo-fi folk artists like Diane Cluck, fusion-minded experimentalists CocoRosie and laptop-brained contemporary innovators such as ML Buch.”

The most frequent comparison, however, is Grouper, and Hammerschlag has repeatedly been described as a Gen Z version of the famed singer-songwriter. That age-related distinction is crucial, and not accidental, as visual representations of Hammerschlag are deeply Zoomer-coded. Scanning through release artwork and the artist’s carefully curated Instagram account, it quickly becomes clear that a number of different women are being depicted; yet those women are uniformly young, and often exude a sort of beautiful ennui, whether they’re marinating in the haze of a messy bedroom or dejectedly smoking in Mother Nature. Regardless of whether those images are “real” or authentic, they’re loaded with femme signifiers. Add in the whimsical captions—which are heavy on purple heart and butterfly emojis and light on capitalization—and the fact that Hammerschlag has always used she/her pronouns, and one naturally gets the impression that the artist is a stylish (and possibly quite introverted) young woman, or at the very least is someone who isn’t a straight cis man.

The labels who’ve released Hammerschlag’s music—including Drowned by Locals, blush, SPA, Collerette and Transatlantic—have all amplified that narrative, as has UK publicity firm 9PR, which has been leading the current campaign around the Psycho Summer album. And though the press has happily latched on to the mystery around Hammerschlag’s identity—one of the aforementioned Guardian pieces described the artist as an “enigmatic songwriter,” while The Quietus opted for the phrase “inscrutable internet-based enigma”—there’s been seemingly no attempt to look much deeper.

That’s not unusual. Most contemporary music publications are desperate to appear “artist friendly”—especially when securing artists for features and brand partnerships is a key component of their editorial strategy and business model—and in a time when preferred pronouns and fluid gender identities have become largely normalized (at least within the cultural sector), journalists and other industry professionals are generally loath to question any aspect of an artist’s stated identity. That goes double when it comes to younger artists, particularly those who seem to primarily exist and operate online, as a certain level of mystery has been baked into that corner of the music world.

Betty Hammerschlag resides squarely in that corner, and while the artist has been presented as a reclusive, lo-fi songwriter, that persona is an elaborate fiction, one that continues to be perpetrated by its creator, Tilman Hornig.

Hornig, of course, hasn’t publicly copped to any of this. A German mixed-media artist who also runs the New Scenario platform alongside creative partner and frequent collaborator Paul Barsch—the two also have a band together called DRONE OPERATØR—he’s at least 45 years old (different sites list his birth year as 1979 or 1980), and has long seen himself as something of a disruptive force in the art realm. In a 2020 interview with AQNB, he and Barsch stated, “The art world has never felt more boring,” and that same article highlighted the duo’s 2016 breakthrough, Body Holes, which was part of the DIS-commissioned Berlin Biennale and involved “the miniature work of 46 artists and collectives [being] inserted into one of seven human orifices, photographed and then displayed online.” Some of their other projects include Immer Müde und Scheiss Wetter in New York, for which the pair plastered sleepy photos of each other onto custom-made umbrellas, and Stalking Macaulay Culkin, a photo series that utilized paper cutouts of various paparazzi shots of the former child star.

When exactly Hornig began masquerading at Betty Hammerschlag isn’t clear, but it dates back to at least 2021, when the song “Siblings”—credited to a Betty Hammershlag—appeared on From Dawn Till Dusk, a compilation of rap- and trap-themed tracks from French imprint Dawn Records. In an interview with First Floor, label founder Hajj admitted that he knew all along that Hornig was behind the music. Already a fan of the German artist’s work under his own name, Hajj had reached out to Hornig directly, asking if he’d like to contribute a track. It wasn’t until “Siblings” landed in his inbox that he encountered the Betty Hammershlag moniker, and when he asked for an explanation, the only response he received was “new year new name lol.”

On subsequent releases, Hammershlag became Hammerschlag, but Hornig’s relationship with the labels issuing that material is difficult to parse, primarily because the people heading up these outposts have largely refused to speak on the record. SPA Recordings co-founder Philip Jondo, for instance, responded to First Floor’s inquiries by saying, “Regarding Betty I would suggest you reach out to the artist directly as we are not representatives.” That dodge, however, doesn’t obscure the fact that the Cologne label was home to this year’s TYPE SHIT, which was playfully presented on Bandcamp with the following, very Gen Z description:

a coLLecTion of unmastered BettY audio material♬: ',,
looops, collages & edits created in the conteXt of guest mixes,
semi random DAW misc + other fuN ݁⊹..˚✧⋆.˚ *

Back in 2023, SPA also issued a “reboot” of Hammerschlag’s ISCP EP, a release that was “originally recorded at the International Studio & Curatorial Program, Brooklyn, in 2018.” When contacted by First Floor, an ISCP representative confirmed that while the EP’s artwork does in fact depict a room in their facility, the organization has no record of working with a Betty Hammerschlag. Hornig, on the other hand, is a previous ISCP resident and returned in 2018 on a fellowship from the Kulturstiftung des Freistaates Sachsen.

French label Collerette released Hammerschlag’s Forever Young last year, and though founder Yannis Arnouil initially responded positively to First Floor’s request for an interview, saying he’d be “happy to help,” he changed his tune after speaking to the artist, communicating that he “had to consult with Betty and the artist’s decision is to keep any info private.” When pressed, Arnouil declined to state exactly how much he knew about Hammerschlag’s identity, but other people who’ve done business with the artist proved more willing to talk—and several of them made clear that not everyone is being kept in the loop about the project’s true nature.

Chicago-based artist Baby, whose heavily Auto-Tuned vocals appear on TYPE SHIT, first linked up with Hammerschlag online, developing a “casual internet friendship” based on “how [they] rock with each other’s music.” The two have never met in person or even spoken on a video call, but Baby—who is still under the impression that Hammerschlag is a young woman—told First Floor that she was thrilled with the experience, stating. “It was awesome to see TYPE SHIT. I was like damn you just cook like crazy.”

tibslc, an ambient / experimental artist from Leipzig who earlier this year became aware that Hammerschlag is actually the work of Hornig, has been left with a far less positive impression. While the two have never worked together, they have interacted online (mostly in German), and at one point tibslc invited Hammerschlag to perform at a show she was organizing in the summer of 2025. That invitation was declined with the following message, which has been translated into English:

oh hi tibslc, thank you so much for the request!!!! that sounds really great. currently and in August, however, I hardly have any time, I have to study for several exams and hardly have the energy for music and live shows ❤️

Even before that exchange, tibslc had taken notice of Hammerschlag’s youthful, femme-coded online presence, and believed it to be genuine, observing that “it seemed obvious the artworks were some kind of collage of some internet picture, the way many people do it on SoundCloud and elsewhere, but the account seemed to signal non-cis male from all aspects.” Receiving a message in which Hammerschlag cited the need to “study for several exams” only strengthened that impression. As a non-cis male herself, tibslc felt safe conversing with Hammerschlag and inviting the artist to perform, but that feeling was shattered when she later discovered the truth about who was behind the project. “When I eventually learned about the fact that Tilman Hornig, a 47(?) year old guy, was running it the whole time, it was really quite a shock, like one of those moments when your reality is shaking to the core because someone tricked you,” she says. “I was emotionally unwell and affected by it a lot. I felt like I was played, especially because of the private chat.”

Note: Shortly after this piece was published, blush label founder Tim Dalzell, who declined to speak to First Floor on the record during the course of my initial reporting, published a couple of Instagram stories regarding Betty Hammerschlag. They read in part:

Given some of the wording in Shawn’s article I just want to clarify that I had no idea who was behind the project when I released it.

The whole time we worked together he messaged me in the style and dialect of a young girl, creating elaborate lies to cover his tracks.. at one point he asked for royalties to be paid earlier so he could buy paints for art school.

I was under the impression the artist wanted privacy and respected that. When I found out the deal (earlier this year) - I expressed my concerns to him about how he was running the project. I didn’t like how he responded and so I decided to stop selling the music.

Don’t wanna make a scene about all this, I’m already exhausted by how much energy it’s taken up, but just want to highlight that a lot of us involved were scammed as well.

When Shawn says the labels that released the music ‘amplified the narrative’ that the artist was creating - this may be the case, but certainly for me, it was without any consent for being involved in this madness

For the record I think using a fem alias/disguise to give clout to your music is pathetic. Would never have been involved in it if I knew the deal.

Hornig must know that he’s actively tricking people, yet he’s continued to expand the scope of his play-acting, particularly when it comes to live shows. Hammerschlag has been booked for a smattering of performances over the past few years, and rather than coming clean, Hornig has instead gone to elaborate lengths to further the illusion. In March of this year, Belgian event series Lise teamed up with the STROOM label, putting on a night at Brussels venue Les Ateliers Claus that included Felicity J Lord, TLF Trio and Betty Hammerschlag. During the run-up to the gig, Lise founder Tobin Verdonck communicated extensively with “Betty” via email, and as part of the deal, wound up booking a train ticket from Frankfurt, Germany. The name on that ticket was not Betty Hammerschlag or Tilman Hornig, but one Lucia Kremer, who was supposedly born in 2004. At the time, Verdonck didn’t think much of it, and the idea that he was negotiating with a plucky young artist was further amplified by Hammerschlag’s decidedly cutesy tech rider:

When the day of the concert rolled around, someone claiming to be Betty Hammerschlag did turn up, but as STROOM founder Ziggy Devriendt (a.k.a. Nosedrip) confirmed to First Floor, “I said three sentences to her and [it] was quite clear it was not the Betty from online.” Verdonck had a similarly odd experience, noting that a musician friend attempted to ask “Betty” about her experience working with a particular label, and realized that she had no idea whatsoever what he was referring to.

The show itself was also quite bizarre, as the artist sat on the floor with little more than a portable walkman and a selection of tapes, which she periodically swapped in and out of the player. (As far as Verdonck could tell, the music being played sounded like Betty Hammerschlag material, though he wasn’t completely sure.) Otherwise, she spent the entire 30 minutes silently smoking, save for a brief moment at the beginning of the performance when she sternly announced that she wanted no cis white males in the front row.

A similar scene recently unfolded at London’s Cafe OTO, where Hammerschlag was booked as part of a July 30 event curated by the Jolly Discs label. According to one artist on the bill, who asked to remain unnamed, a young woman claiming to be Betty Hammerschlag arrived at the venue, accompanied by a man who didn’t introduce himself, but nonetheless seemed to be “very involved” in making sure her show ran smoothly. Jolly Discs founder Guy Gormley organized and advanced the show, and told First Floor that “in correspondence it’s as if you are speaking directly with Betty.” He never learned the actual names of the performer or her male companion—though he believes she responded to “Betty”—and when he asked where they’d come from, she deflected, saying only that they’d caught the Eurostar in Belgium.

Gormley didn’t hate the show, noting that it was “surprising that someone sitting still playing tapes could be engaging,” and added that the performer at one point ate a pear, “which seemed like she was making a conscious gesture.” In the days before the concert, he’d actually heard rumors that Betty Hammerschlag was in truth the work of a man, but he found it too awkward to come right out and ask the performer about it at Cafe OTO. Even now, he seems not completely sure what to believe, as both the concert and his in-person interactions with “Betty” left him thinking that “she really felt like she could be the author of the online content and music.”

Hornig, it seems, has crafted a rather convincing ruse, working hard to cover his tracks as he goes. When requesting payment for the shows at Les Ateliers Claus and Cafe OTO, he sent both Verdonck and Gormley the same Paypal address, which linked to an account with the name Lila Schmetterln—which is just a few letters away from the German term for “purple butterfly,” one of Hammerschlag’s go-to emojis. (A message sent by First Floor to the same Paypal account received no response.) The subterfuge also extends across Bandcamp and various streaming platforms, where the name Betty Hammerschlag always appears in the small-print songwriting and production credits. His track record, however, is just shy of perfect: on Apple Music, the 2024 single “Cream” lists Tilman Hornig as the lone songwriter:

When it comes to the visual component of Hammerschlag, Hornig has historically been much more cavalier. The blonde woman in the above screenshot, for instance, looks a whole lot like a Pinterest user named Shyatesa, who has the exact same picture on her profile. A different woman—one with a gothier look and two middle fingers in the air—graced the cover of 2023’s Me & You, and she too appears to be a Pinterest find. Sourcing pictures of young women from the internet seems to have been Hornig’s m.o., and when it came to release artwork, he appears to have applied a similar technique, seeking out feminine-coded images that these women would presumably like. The cover of 2023’s Unfinished Love Songs, for instance, utilizes a photo of a heart-shaped chain and lock that’s been circulating online for quite some time—among other places, I found it in a 2021 Facebook post—and the cover of last year’s Forever Young is an altered version of an image of young people doing drugs in a bedroom that’s all over TikTok, Pinterest, SoundCloud and pretty much every other online platform.

In recent months, Hornig does seem to have tightened up his visual approach, particularly in relation to upcoming Psycho Summer album, which is being promoted with a new young woman as the project’s primary avatar:

The identity of this woman is unknown, as is her relationship to Hornig, but according to Jolly Discs’ Gormley, this is the same person who showed up to perform at Cafe OTO. (His claim is bolstered by live footage captured at the event.)

Considering the increased press and industry attention that Betty Hammerschlag has attracted over the past year, it’s feasible that Hornig is now attempting to formalize the project and expand its profile. At the same time, he also seems determined to maintain the fiction he’s created. According to press mailouts from 9PR and the Drowned by Locals label—who are jointly waging a promotional campaign in advance of the Psycho Summer album—Betty Hammerschlag is currently available for interviews, but only via email. First Floor made repeated requests to speak with the artist in a format that involved an actual conversation (e.g. phone call, video meeting, etc.)—and in those requests, the Betty Hammerschlag email account was on cc—but they were all either rejected or ignored. Drowned by Locals did at one point propose a “postcard interview,” where Hammerschlag would respond to written questions with “handwritten responses on a series of physical postcards.” Uninterested in playing along with Hornig’s ongoing game of make believe, I declined the offer.

(In the lead-up to this article being published, First Floor did also individually reach out to both Drowned by Locals and 9PR for comment; the former failed to respond, while the latter indicated that all further inquiries about Betty Hammerschlag should be directed to the label. A separate request sent directly to the Betty Hammerschlag email account went unanswered, as did messages sent to Hornig via email and Instagram.)

With both Hornig and “Betty” either staying silent or refusing to have a live conversation, and so many of those who’ve been involved with Betty Hammerschlag releases also declining to share what they know, multiple questions remain about the nature of the project and what’s motivating it. First Floor, however, has developed several theories about going on, and I have has dedicated the rest of this article to laying them out and sharing my own opinions about what I’ve observed.

Given the irreverent—some might say shit-stirring—nature of the art Hornig has made under his own name over the years, one might assume that he sees the Betty Hammerschlag project as some sort of critical endeavor, holding up a mirror to the shallowness and absurdity of contemporary youth culture and the experimental music realm. Those things are absolutely ripe for all kinds of critique, but rather than making that critique under his own name, he’s chosen to hide behind a character—one he’s intentionally designed to deceive people.

That deception, by the way, most likely involves the use of AI. First Floor ran the promotional text for Psycho Summer through multiple AI detectors, and while those tools are admittedly unreliable, almost all of them came back with a “high probability of AI” finding. As for the actual music, it’s impossible to know the exact role of AI, but considering that Hornig has previously produced a substantial volume of music through his involvement in DRONE OPERATØR and other projects, it seems unlikely that the Hammerschlag material is completely AI-generated. The biggest question mark revolves around the vocals; they convincingly sound like a young woman, but unless he’s enlisted an unnamed party to be the voice of Betty Hammerschlag, it’s not unreasonable to think that some sort of AI tool is involved.

A fellow journalist, who asked to remain unnamed, informed First Floor that when they recently questioned Drowned by Locals about the involvement of AI in the Betty Hammerschlag project, the label went silent and neglected to respond. And earlier this week, when several AI-related accusations surfaced in the comments section of an Instagram post touting Hammerschlag’s recent Guardian coverage, the label became even more protective, deleting those comments and blocking the users who’d made them.

Even if the AI issue is set aside entirely—and given the current cultural climate, that’s a very big ask—the far more troubling aspect of the Betty Hammerschlag project is that the whole thing revolves around a well connected, middle-aged German man cosplaying as some sort of melancholy Zoomer e-girl. It’s creepy, especially when so many of the people that Hornig is interacting with—including people that he has directly sought out online—are unwitting participants in an art project they didn’t ask to join.

Though he’s admittedly left several clues about that project’s true nature hiding in plain sight (e.g. titling an album fake girl, using the phrase “emo fiction” on the bio line of the Betty Hammerschlag Bandcamp page), Hornig’s actions still raise huge questions of consent—or, more specifically, the seeming lack thereof—as he appears to be catfishing fans, promoters, fellow artists and possibly even some of the labels he’s working with. There’s also the issue of the photos he’s using to create Betty Hammerschlag’s image. Who took them? Who are the women that they depict? Is anyone being compensated? It’s one thing for a twentysomething bedroom artist to pilfer images online and use them without crediting anyone, but when the person doing it is an established artist who’s approaching 50, the ethics of the act look a whole lot uglier.

Side projects, mystery and identity plays have long been a part of art and music culture, even in recent years. When Dean Blunt won the Philip Hall Radar Award at the 2015 NME Awards, he famously sent a random lookalike to give a speech and accept the statue in his place. Two Shell have made the idea of subverting identity central to nearly everything they do, and when they were booked to play on Boiler Room at the Primavera Sound festival in 2022, they hired a couple of guys to put on masks and pantomime an on-camera DJ set while a prerecorded mix played.

While the artistic value of these kinds of antics is very much up for debate, the people involved usually aren’t punching down, or cynically appropriating the identity of marginalized groups to accomplish their creative goals. Can Hornig say the same? Betty Hammerschlag isn’t satire; it’s an exercise in smug self-satisfaction, one in which the main targets appear to be A) young and / or queer artists and B) anyone who takes what those artists do seriously. It’s often said that imitation is the highest form of flattery, but in the context of the Betty Hammerschlag project, it feels more like a dismissive insult, one which effectively broadcasts the message, “Look how easy it is for me to copy this young femme aesthetic and fool everyone into thinking it’s authentic.” What Hornig is doing smacks of the edgelord behavior that ran through the culture during the ’80s and ’90s. Back then, this routine might have seemed cool and provocative, but it now reads like the same sort of lazy anti-wokeism that far too many aging straight white men have made their calling card.

On some level, it feels like Hornig probably wants to be caught, and might even derive some kind of perverse pleasure from the fact that a journalist would spend this much time and effort dissecting his work. Guys like this often long to be told how smart they are, and once the truth about Betty Hammerschlag is out there, Hornig can also rest assured that an entire cadre of similarly aggrieved dudes will have his back. (Even now, by maintaining the code of silence around the project and Hornig’s identity, the people running the various labels that he’s worked with have already demonstrated where their loyalties reside. As much as the independent music realm is often characterized as an overzealous bastion of progressivism, the truth is that those who stay quiet about ethically thorny issues are far more likely to be rewarded, particularly in industry circles.)

In the course of researching this article, First Floor found that several Hammerschlag collaborators were already justifying the project and excusing the actions of its creator, even when they refused to disclose who that creator actually is. Collerette label founder Yannis Arnouil never mentioned the name Tilman Hornig, but he was still adamant in saying that “it was never some kind of secret that the Betty Hammerschlag project is a fictional project. Betty herself points to that. There are hints all over the internet, and if you take the time to listen to the music, it all makes sense.”

Another former Hammerschlag collaborator that First Floor spoke with—and who tellingly asked that his name be withheld—was similarly disturbed that anyone would dare to question Hornig’s intentions, stating:

This is an artist, who is creating art. Artists perform. This is a performance. It is shocking to me that anyone invested in art and expression would draw the line here… I suspect this would be seen for the non-issue it is if the artist explicitly identified as trans or otherwise non-binary.

Hornig, for the record, has given no public indication of being trans or non-binary, though the unprompted raising of that issue does say a lot about the current state of male grievance. (And even if the artist was closeted, and Betty Hammerschlag represented some sort of exploration of his sexual orientation and / or gender identity, that wouldn’t explain the age-related cosplay, or justify the repeated and ongoing deception of both his peers and the listening public.) Nevertheless, this former Hornig collaborator then continued:

I struggle to believe that any “outrage” isn’t just poorly suppressed bloodlust. [Hornig’s] music career is already likely to be significantly hampered, if not outright snuffed, as a result of this. And that’s exactly what anyone pretending to moralize about cases like these gets off on. Whole thing reeks of Woke 1.0 in a way I thought we’d moved past culturally.

“He’s an artist.” “This is cancel culture.” “You don’t get it.” “You’re being too sensitive.” Lines like these are sure be trotted out in defense of Hornig, and may very well leave him feeling righteous about what he’s done. The fact that Betty Hammerschlag has already received far more acclaim than any of his other musical endeavors can easily be spun as both a proof of concept and an indictment of the creative industries, with the takeaway message that the musical sphere is too stupid, too beholden to social media discourse and too cowed by political correctness to recognize what good art really is. If that’s Hornig’s take, he’s not necessarily wrong, but the way he’s chosen to make the argument—tricking people while purposely taking up space and opportunities that might otherwise have gone to artists that are actually young, female and / or queer—smacks of the worst kind of arrogance. Hornig unquestionably has the right to conduct himself in this way, but that doesn’t negate the fact that he’s acting like an entitled asshole, and the more he doubles down on what ultimately looks like a mean-spirited cry for attention, the more pathetic he becomes.

First Floor is published and overseen by Shawn Reynaldo, a freelance writer, editor, presenter and project manager. Find him on LinkedIn and Instagram—and make sure to follow First Floor on Instagram as well—or you can just drop Shawn an email to get in touch about projects, collaborations or other potential opportunities.

Erik M.
Shell Songs
Kora

The music of Erik M. carries a profound sense of patience and clarity, and considering that he makes his home in Oslo, the context of life in Norway feels especially pertinent to his aesthetic. Aside from being home to a wide array of breathtaking landscapes and natural wonders, the country is also known to have some of the highest standards of living on the planet, ranking near the very top of the World Happiness Report (yes, that’s a real thing). And while I won’t make any assumptions about Erik’s personal life, there is something about his music that feels utterly unencumbered by the weight of the outside world, as though it’s found a way to exist in perfect harmony with its surroundings.

Drifting along the often convergent lines of ambient, field recording and dub, his latest work, Shell Songs, reflects a deep connection to the natural world, its sound evoking the smell of the forest after a rainfall or the feeling of moss on bare hands. Ironically enough, very little of the album’s source material was actually taken from nature—or even Norway for that matter. Much of the album, in fact, relies upon samples pulled from old vinyl that Erik either found at thrift shops or plucked from his grandfather’s record collection. Shell Songs, in other words, consists of sounds from all over, but those sounds coalesce into something unified and distinct, reflecting the chilly majesty of the fjords, waterfalls and glaciers that make up Norway’s incomparable scenery.

LP standout “alter” conjures visions of Nordic forest spirits, its hollow, earthen chimes swimming through soft, ghostly textures, while the interweaving loops of “let alone” mirror the intricate inner workings of a complex ecological system. Songs like “never” and “slip” are more rhythmic, but even there, the kick drums—which remain relatively rare across the album—feel less like a nod toward the club and more like an element of the natural environment, sparking thoughts of a large stone crumbling from a river bank into the water or a distant tree crashing to the forest floor. Every now and then, a more easily recognizable element will make an appearance—the pianos on “touch” and “oh,” for example, or, the vocal sample on “to those who try”—offering a gentle reminder of the human residing at the center of Shell Songs’ pristine and otherwise untouched wilderness.

Lost Few & Dino Sabatini
Light Before the Haze
Southern Lights

Split releases occupy a curious space on the spectrum of musical formats. Logically speaking, they probably made more sense back when physical releases were the only option, serving a functional purpose by bundling together loose tracks that might not have made sense elsewhere. In the digital era, however, tracks can now easily be released in any number of configurations; for a split release to stand out, it has to be curated with a real sense of intention. Australian outpost Southern Lights has clearly put some thought into the pairing of Lost Few with Dino Sabatini, as Light Before the Haze brings out the best in both artists.

Lost Few (a.k.a. David Thomson) hails from Naarm and already has a previous album for Southern Lights under his belt. His acerbic bassweight abstractions set the tone for this EP, steering the record away from obvious dance tropes and towards the fringe of rhythmic body music. “Broken Dawn” is a rattling, rumbling meditation; swathed in dissonant overtones and spectral whispers, it’s not too concerned with narrative flow, as the track is ensconced in a whirlpool of pressure. “Light Before The Haze” rolls on steadier rails, but Thomson remains steadfast in his avoidance of conventional rhythms. Aside from a submerged kick, the rest of the percussive cycle is made up of flickers and strokes, which carry the song’s undulating tapestry of strings and vocals. A constant low frequency also hums beneath the whole construction, and though it’s only just perceptible, it casts a powerful shroud over the music.

On the flip, Thomson’s angular growl gives way to Dino Sabatini’s more neatly sculpted sound. The Italian stalwart is as instructive to the deep techno scene as Donato Dozzy et al, and his capacity for immersive, introspective dance music is a strong match for the mantra-like movement of the original “Light Before the Haze.” That said, his remix of the track follows a different course than the source material, as Sabatini responds to Thomson’s swirling soundscape with an expansive suite of ambience and an elegant, crisply rendered murmur of modular sequences and drum pulses. His own production, “Subsurface Light,” meets the mood of the EP perfectly, allowing harmonically rich tones to stretch out across the arrangement with a gridless lilt, keeping the momentum of the music predominantly in the lower register.

Thomson and Sabatini are two artists whose individual productions give very different impressions, but it’s remarkable how complementary their music is when paired and interwoven on this release. Kudos to Southern Lights for recognizing that, and demonstrating the creative value that can still be found within the confines of a humble split EP.

Sarah Davachi
The Will of Tongues
Late Music

“Canto Duo,” the second song on composer Sarah Davachi’s latest album, is a case study in minimalism. For over nine minutes, Davachi plays chords on a slightly detuned organ that gradually changes in texture and timbre—and the effect is heartbreaking. The slow undulation of the organ becomes more and more melancholic as the song progresses, playing out like the imaginary soundtrack of a montage scene from a profoundly sad movie.

What is striking about the song, and The Will of Tongues in general, is just how immersive it is. These are long and dense compositions (the shortest is just shy of the five-minute mark, while the longest clocks in at more than 23) and the record as a whole is more than two hours long. Though we’re living in a time when music on the whole seems to be getting shorter and shorter, Davachi offers an antidote to the attention economy. Her new full-length is populated with complex and layered songs that demand attention and never fade into the background, even in those moments when the music is at its most minimal.

“The Second Tuning” is a perfect example. True to its title, the song—which stretches across nearly 14 minutes—almost feels like a recording of Davachi tuning an organ. Opening with single notes being held to their breaking point, it might initially prompt you to think something more is needed, but the song’s simplicity belies its beauty; as the minutes tick by, it gradually builds into a crystalline wall of sound.

This technique comes to a head on “The Rose Dialogues.” With its 46-minute runtime, this two-part composition could constitute a record on its own. It also finds Davachi stepping up the instrumentation, enlisting strings alongside the organ, but the underlying formula remains the same: slow-moving melodic changes that never climax nor rest so much as they pulse. In a world of cheap thrills, Davachi has written a(nother) record that underlines the majesty of patience.

Last week, it was reported that Apple Music apparently sent an email to its industry partners announcing that it would soon be adding a new “Made with AI” tag to AI-generated songs on its platform. The company is actually late to the game on this, as this year has already seen similar announcements from Bandcamp, Deezer, Tidal and Spotify. The problem, of course, is that most of the new policies that have been rolled out sit somewhere between being moderately to completely useless, as they A) rely heavily on artists and labels to voluntarily disclose that their music is AI-generated and B) are backed up by AI detection software that is unproven, and even if it does work, will likely struggle to keep up with technological developments in AI music production.

It’s often suggested that these corporations secretly love the explosion of AI-generated music on their platforms. I don’t know if I completely buy that, but there’s certainly something to be said for the idea that the normalization of AI music will significantly reduce the bargaining power of artists, strengthening the streamers’ hand and potentially clearing up some ongoing headaches—especially for Spotify, which is constantly (and, I’d argue, rightfully) being raked over the coals by critics. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that a day will come when the streaming giants welcome AI-generated music with open arms, but as of right now, their platforms are being absolutely inundated with slop, much of it coming from amoral actors looking to game the system, one fraction of a penny at a time.

Just last month, Deezer announced that more than 50% of all new music uploads to its platform were AI-generated, while also stating that AI-generated music only generates between 1-3% of total streams. That math is likely to get worse in the months and years ahead, but it already makes clear that the listening public, at least as of right now, simply doesn’t want this stuff. The AI tag has become utterly toxic to most people, so much so that the streamers now feel compelled to demonstrate that they’re “doing something” to address the situation.

Even if these companies truly want to stop, or just significantly slow down, the tidal wave of AI-generated music—and, again, it’s far from clear that they do—they simply don’t have the capacity to do so. They surely know that, but in an effort to placate their customers—many of whom are furious about an AI “revolution” that they feel is being shoved down their throat—the corporate streamers are putting on a little show. And what’s funny—or, depending how you look at it, depressing—is that the media, in its own fervor to capitalize on anti-AI sentiment, happily amplifies the charade, gobbling up every single press release about new AI policies and presenting the information as “news,” usually without any kind of significant scrutiny or analysis. In doing so, they’re essentially being suckered into doing free marketing and PR work for the streaming industry, but as long as it results in some content that generates engagement, they don’t really seem to mind.

And on that uplifting note, let’s get into today’s First Floor digest.

Truth be told, I try to keep the AI-related content to a relative minimum around here, partially because I find the associated discourse pretty exhausting, but also because I’d rather talk about other things—including artists whose work I truly admire. Carmen Villain is one of those artists, and earlier this week I published a wide-ranging interview with the Mexican-Norwegian artist, one in which we not surprisingly discussed her upcoming album Memoria, but also touched on topics like motherhood, Latin identity, dub music, lazy journalism and the challenges that ambient and experimental artists face when it comes to putting together a compelling live show.

You can find a link to that interview below—and yes, the paywall is (temporarily) down—and beyond that, you’ll find the rest of today’s digest, which attempts to round up all of the most important recent happenings from the world of electronic music. Included are a bunch of news items and suggested reading links, and anyone looking to freshen up their listening diet should probably head straight to the Recommended Releases. That section contains all of the newly issued records we’re most excited about, and if you’re looking for a music tip from someone who’s not part of the First Floor team, we’ve also recruited multi-talented Lebanese artist Yara Asmar to contribute a special guest recommendation.

Let’s get started.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:

Every week, First Floor publishes a long-form piece that’s initially made available to paid subscribers only. But if you’re not part of the paid tier, now’s your chance to see what you missed! The latest piece is now open to everyone, and it’s an interview with Carmen Villain, who details the genesis of her chilly, dub-inflected new album, but also reflects back on the arc of her career, detailing her move away from singing and guitars, how she balances electronic and organic sounds and much more.

WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING

A round-up of the most interesting electronic music news from the past week, plus links to interviews, articles and other things I think are worth sharing.

• After years of working to establish itself as a proper streaming outlet, SoundCloud this week announced that it would soon enable artists to sell their music directly via the platform. The new feature is apparently in beta—just 200 US-based artists are currently testing it out—and though a timeline for a wider rollout has not yet been revealed, SoundCloud did mention that it would be taking no commission on these direct sales, allowing artists to keep 100% of revenues, “less applicable fees and taxes.” Moving into digital music sales in 2026 may seem like a puzzling move, but the press release noted that “each year SoundCloud sends more than half a million users to external parties to purchase music,” so it makes sense that the company would prefer for at least some of that activity to be happening on its own platform.

• With her new album The Will of Tongues due to arrive on August 28 (i.e. tomorrow), Sarah Davachi has sat down for an interview with Bandcamp Daily. In it, the Canadian composer talks to writer Jon Buckland about what drew her to the organ in the first place, why she doesn’t like when her music is described as ambient, her love of the Butthole Surfers and more.

• Yves Tumor has been accused of sexual assault and abusive behavior by several women. The allegations first surfaced on social media and Reddit—this FADER article provides a summary of how they came to light—and Yves Tumor has since posted a couple of (now expired) statements on social media, claiming that the allegations are “false,” “completely disgusting” and “100 percent untrue,” and asserting that although he’d been advised to say nothing by his attorney and publicist, he would be responding to his accusers with “extreme legal action.”

OBLIGATORY BOOK MENTION

My first book is out now. It’s called First Floor Vol. 1: Reflections on Electronic Music Culture, and you can order it from my publisher Velocity Press. However, if you’re outside of the UK, I recommend that you either inquire at your favorite local bookshop or try one of the online sales links that have been compiled here.

JUST ANNOUNCED

A round-up of noteworthy new and upcoming releases announced during the past week.

• As if the Short Span roster wasn’t already impressive enough, this week the UK outpost announced that it would soon be releasing a new record from Miles (a.k.a. Miles Whittaker, one half of Demdike Stare). Entitled Vault, it’s actually rooted in one of the veteran producer’s studio rituals—namely, that he creates a dub-inspired jam before every single solo recording session. Having recorded hundreds of these jams over the past 30 years, he’s now compiled six of them onto this upcoming release, which is scheduled to land on September 11. In the meantime though, two songs from the record, “Birth of a Friend” and “Tractive,” have already been shared here.

• Back in June, Octo Octa briefly mentioned in an interview that she and Eris Drew had a new collaborative record on the way under the name Alchemical Sisters, and the details of that record have now been made public. Born out of a process in which the duo claim that they “emptied the master bedroom of their forest cabin and sealed it as an alchemical retort—a hermetic vessel in which a higher form could emerge,” the self-titled album is going be issued via Interdimensional Transmissions. The Detroit label’s co-founder, BMG, apparently played a key role in bringing the LP to life, “using transformers and tubes and the special properties of many machines to create a solid visceral sound out of a dream.” October 18 is the official release date, but some preview clips can already be heard here.

• After releasing a couple of tracks from Daniel Pineda (a.k.a. NA DJ, one half of Nguzunguzu) earlier this month, the Club Romantico label upped the ante last week, offering up a full, six-song EP from Pineda called Landlocked. Influenced by the birth of his son, the anxieties of “an increasingly uncertain world” and a shift to a more MPC-centric workflow, the record is out now.

• When J. Albert was interviewed by First Floor last October, a significant chunk of the conversation focused on the sheer volume of music he’d released in the preceding decade. Of course, once that interview was published, the shapeshifting, NYC-based producer pretty much immediately went quiet on the release front—until this week, that is. He’s returned with just one song, “w/o pl,” which he self-released on Bandcamp with no additional context or information. That said, it will likely be joined by more new material soon, as J. Albert this week mentioned on Instagram that he’s in a “drop a few singles phase.”

YARA ASMAR HAS BETTER TASTE THAN I DO

First Floor is in many ways a one-person operation, but each week, the newsletter cedes the spotlight to an artist, writer or other figure from the music world, inviting them to recommend a piece of music.

Today’s recommendation comes from Yara Asmar, a Lebanese musician, composer, video artist and (not kidding) puppeteer whose body of work defies easy categorization. Though her music is often described as ambient or experimental, it’s perhaps better understood in emotional terms, maintaining a delicate balance between whimsy and melancholy—and doing so without getting mired in nostalgia. Growing up in Beirut against a backdrop of war and civil strife, Asmar is keenly aware of the weight of history, but rather than allowing that weight to drag her down, she’s used it as a kind of creative fuel—sometimes quite literally, such as when she got hold of her late grandmother’s old accordion… [READ MORE ABOUT YARA ASMAR + CHECK OUT HER GUEST RECOMMENDATION]

RECOMMENDED RELEASES

The following is a summary of First Floor’s favorite new releases that came out during the past week or so. The blurbs below are only brief excerpts of the full write-ups; to read the complete recommendation (and hear the actual music) for an individual release, click the “Listen to the Music + Read the Full Write-Up” link, or you can also just head over to this convenient Buy Music Club list if you prefer to listen to all of the selections in one place.

Various Artists – American Dub Electronics (Kino Disk)

… Considering the sheer volume of dub-adjacent music that’s been released during the past few years, one might worry that the well is running dry, especially given the relatively minimal nature of the genre. Kino Disk, however, has managed to repeatedly unearth fresh variations, and that continues on American Dub Electronics, where a dozen artists (across 11 songs) map out different corners of the same aquatic landscape. [LISTEN TO THE MUSIC + READ THE FULL WRITE-UP]

Palms Trax – Keys to Printed Garden (fabric)

… The drums and the walking bassline embody the swagger of Italo, while the melody borrows from the euphoric end of the progressive continuum. To spice things up, Donaldson also adds a hint of acid, along with a slightly crunchy breakdown that nods to the robotic groove of electro. It’s a big tune, for sure, and one that’s likely already sent hundreds of ID hunters into a tailspin. [LISTEN TO THE MUSIC + READ THE FULL WRITE-UP]

Regina Collage – Horizont (do you have peace?)

… The mix is still smudged, subliminal and coated with the unmistakable patina of DIY bedroom studio craft, but the song’s sharp attack provides a welcome contrast to Horizont’s more fragile passages; it also makes the album far more engaging than so much of today’s shoegaze offerings, which tend to listlessly breeze past without leaving much of an impression. [LISTEN TO THE MUSIC + READ THE FULL WRITE-UP]

Lusine – Melting Days (Ghostly International)

… Lusine has always excelled at making the austere slightly beautiful. Melting Days does that and more, returning to the templates that made his early albums great while also employing the same ear for subtle hooks that have made his more recent, poppier records still sound weird and fun. [LISTEN TO THE MUSIC + READ THE FULL WRITE-UP]

Sleep D and Mosam Howieson – Syphon Filter (Butter Sessions)

… The kick that starts the track is about as friendly as Berghain’s Sven turning away a bachelor party, and the tune itself would honestly sound right at home inside that former power station. It’s an absolute techno barnstormer, and with slight layers of corrosion eating at the drums before razor-sharp arpeggios drip down across the track, it puts a slightly terrifying spin on peak time. [LISTEN TO THE MUSIC + READ THE FULL WRITE-UP]

Ondness – I Can Only Put So Much into a Song (Sucata Tapes)

… As much as Ondness may have seen this album as a trip down memory lane, its contents never come across as an attempt to recapture some youthful glory. Yes, he’s looking backwards, and yes, guitars are involved, and given the record’s deliberate pace, he’s clearly marinating on something. But listening to I Can Only Put So Much into a Song, that something mostly seems to be the more abstract corners of ’90s and 2000s indie and lo-fi, and, more specifically, Silva’s half-forgotten relationship with those sounds. [LISTEN TO THE MUSIC + READ THE FULL WRITE-UP]

Zunfo – El Poder Brutal (6/8)

… Zunfo obviously isn’t the first Latin artist who’s experimented with this sort of hybridization, but El Poder Brutal nonetheless stands out, precisely because its creator was willing to engage with not just the ruder corners of the hardcore continuum, but some of the gut-rumbling filth of EDM. Ecuador will forever be flowing through his veins, but Denver has unquestionably left its mark on the man—and his music. [LISTEN TO THE MUSIC + READ THE FULL WRITE-UP]

That brings us to the end of today’s First Floor digest. Thank you so much for reading the newsletter, and remember, you can find all of this week’s recommended releases on this handy Buy Music Club list. (If you like them, please buy them.)

Until next time,

Shawn

First Floor is published and overseen by Shawn Reynaldo, a freelance writer, editor, presenter and project manager. Find him on LinkedIn and Instagram—and make sure to follow First Floor on Instagram as well—or you can just drop Shawn an email to get in touch about projects, collaborations or other potential opportunities.

Zunfo
El Poder Brutal
6/8

Zunfo was born and raised in Ecuador, and is now based in Denver. In a strange way, that’s all you need to know about his debut album, El Poder Brutal. While the capital of Colorado has never really been known as a hotbed of Latin rhythms, it has for decades been the unofficial epicenter of heavy bass worship in the US. That fact rarely gets mentioned in the press—probably because Denver isn’t considered to be a particularly fashionable locale, and as such isn’t really a place that jetsetting urbanites make a point to visit—but the city fell hard for dubstep in the 2000s (both the good and the bad kind), and has maintained its fervent passion for low-end thump ever since.

Zunfo didn’t come of age in that environment, but his years in Denver have clearly colored El Poder Brutal. Though the album plays with the same sort of mutant Latin rhythms one would expect to hear on a typical TraTraTrax or N.A.A.F.I release—as it happens, the latter label actually released a collaborative single from Zunfo and fellow Ecuadorian Entrañas last year—it also pushes those rhythms toward the wook zone, mostly via the application of skull-splitting bass sounds. “IX,” for instance, is a serrated slice of deconstructed drum & bass that employs the same sort of of scorched-earth sonics one might expect from The Bug, and “Calambre”—one of two Entrañas collabs on the LP—is an imposing stepper, wielding its wobbles like a weapon as it stalks the dancefloor like an apex predator.

The title El Poder Brutal (translation: Brutal Power) may seem like a reference to Zunfo’s low-end dynamics, but it’s actually something from his homeland: an inscription that sits below a 20-meter-tall carving of the devil that’s been etched into the side of a mountain outside of Quito. It was in Ecuador that he first began making music, and the country’s influence looms large throughout the album, most notably via his use of various Afro-Ecuadorian rhythms. The fact that those rhythms veer strongly away from linear, four-on-the-floor patterns may befuddle some Westerners, but Zunfo’s creative—and, for the most part, distinctly Latin—drum programming is a big part of what makes El Poder Brutal such a vibrant release.

Vibrant, however, shouldn’t be mistaken for cheery. When it comes to mood, Zunfo prefers to dwell in darkness, whether he’s gloomily galloping on “Descenso,” exploring an oddly hypnotic strain of stuttering dubstep on “Dunas” or outfitting the clattering rhythms of “Pedregal” with all sorts of psychedelia-tinged wubs. More aggressive is “Flamma,” which bolsters its weaving drum attack with wobbly, lazer-like basslines, and the wobbles get even more intense on “Poder Brutal,” a confidently slow-brewing number that appears to take cues from guaracha and the DMZ catalog alike. Zunfo obviously isn’t the first Latin artist who’s experimented with this sort of hybridization, but El Poder Brutal nonetheless stands out, precisely because its creator was willing to engage with not just the ruder corners of the hardcore continuum, but some of the gut-rumbling filth of EDM. Ecuador will forever be flowing through his veins, but Denver has unquestionably left its mark on the man—and his music.

Ondness
I Can Only Put So Much into a Song
Sucata Tapes

Guitars are so back. That shouldn’t be news to anyone at this point. We’re living in a moment when even Charli xcx is describing her latest album as a rock record, and the shoegaze “revival” that’s been happening in recent years is increasingly feeling less like a fad and more like a permanent fixture of the music landscape. That renewed interest in fuzz and distortion has even trickled down through the electronic music realm, and it now seems to have triggered something in Ondness (a.k.a Bruno Silva), as the Portuguese producer—who also engages in outsider beat science under the name Serpente—has filled out his new album I Can Only Put So Much into a Song with moody drones and jagged guitar squall.

There’s definitely some nostalgia at work here—the label bills the record as an “homage, a reference map and a temporal slippage back to a transformative period of Bruno Silva’s life”—but while I Can Only Put So Much into a Song does have some shoegaze in its DNA, it shouldn’t be mistaken for an exercise in Slowdive worship. Ondness specifically cites The Microphones, Fennesz and Iran (the early 2000s’ noise-pop band, not the country) as influences, along with black metal and the psychedelic folk of the New Weird America movement. And sure, standout cuts like “Tevens” and “Tevais”—which open and close the album, respectively—revolve around bellowing guitar tones and ethereal walls of sound, but their underlying darkness and reverb-drenched vocals skew closer to The Jesus and Mary Chain than anything in the My Bloody Valentine catalog.

I Can Only Put So Much into a Song is a meditative effort, and though none of its songs linger too long—only one cracks the four-minute mark—it’s clear that Ondness would rather ruminate than rush. The weighty “Vento Gelo Valentine” pairs its hardy, echo-laden guitar chords with yowling vocals that evoke some sort of pagan ritual. Intelligibility doesn’t appear to be Silva’s biggest priority, and though he spends much of the record delivering what seem to be actual words—usually via some form of relatively muted talk-singing—they tend to be slathered in a cloudy (albeit soothingly hypnotic) soup. In lesser hands, all that soup could make the record feel like a slog, but Silva smartly cuts through the haze from time to time. On “Blisser,” he employs a blippy, IDM-ish synth pulse, and anyone who digs through the celestial murk of “Megadawn II” will find the song’s fidgety drum pattern, which wouldn’t be out of place on a Jlin production.

As much as Ondness may have seen this album as a trip down memory lane, its contents never come across as an attempt to recapture some youthful glory. Yes, he’s looking backwards, and yes, guitars are involved, and given the record’s deliberate pace, he’s clearly marinating on something. But listening to I Can Only Put So Much into a Song, that something mostly seems to be the more abstract corners of ’90s and 2000s indie and lo-fi, and, more specifically, Silva’s half-forgotten relationship with those sounds. It’s an excavation of his own mind, and while what he’s dug out is often quite blurry, that lack of definition also fuels the record’s dreamlike appeal.

Today’s recommendation comes from Yara Asmar, a Lebanese musician, composer, video artist and (not kidding) puppeteer whose body of work defies easy categorization. Though her music is often described as ambient or experimental, it’s perhaps better understood in emotional terms, maintaining a delicate balance between whimsy and melancholy—and doing so without getting mired in nostalgia. Growing up in Beirut against a backdrop of war and civil strife, Asmar is keenly aware of the weight of history, but rather than allowing that weight to drag her down, she’s used it as a kind of creative fuel—sometimes quite literally, such as when she got hold of her late grandmother’s old accordion and created 2023’s synth waltzes and accordion laments.

Synths and field recordings—many of them capturing conversations with her family—are also key elements of her music, and many of her releases are decidedly (and enticingly) lo-fi, but if there’s one defining constant, it’s the sound of metal. The accordion—which relies on metal reeds—is part of that, but Asmar has also disassembled toy pianos, explored the acoustic possibilities of the metallophone and experimented with a myriad of old music boxes, including the symphonion, a variant that plays perforated metal discs. In the promo text for last year’s beguiling everyone I love is sleeping and I love them so so much LP, Asmar actually spoke of building a symphonion with a box so large that she herself could enter and “sit inside the sound.”

Coming from other artists, that sort of conceptually driven work can sometimes feel a bit sterile, but Yasmar’s compositions are teeming with warmth and humanity, even when they’re tinged with sadness. Honoring the past while reveling in the possibilities of the present, her experimentation reflects a genuine sense of wonder, and as demonstrated by her guest recommendation below—which highlights a record that’s been drifting in and out of her life for several years now—that wonder also seems to extend to the music being made by others.

naran ratan – trees etc. (tasty morsel, 2015)

This is probably one of the records I’ve listened to the most over the past few years, alongside Virginia Astley’s From Gardens Where We Feel Secure and M. Sage with the Spinnaker Ensemble’s the wind of things. Luminous is a word that I think connects this constellation of music. Big, small, beautiful, glorious, luminous. I’ve listened to it foraging for mushrooms, traveling on the train, reading, cooking, sleeping… This record has been a friend to me, and a warm presence. It has dragged me out of many listless episodes of quotidian despair.

trees etc. begins with the track “forevertime journeys, pt.1,” and I remember my first listen, nearing the end of the album and being greeted with “forevertime journeys, pt.2,” a reprise that I can only describe as someone holding my hand across space-time. There are a few times in one’s life where one comes across a piece of music that halts time for any duration it chooses to. This is the feeling I get when I reach this point in the album. It’s the same feeling that emanates from Astley’s “Out on the lawn I lie in bed,” a piece that starts with the recording of a swing set, which is then joined by a piano melody that carries the listener through.

A few years ago, I stumbled upon h hunt’s piano recording “journeys,” a rendition of the melody from “forevertime journeys,” and was transported back by that very same hand that had reached for me earlier, back into the loop of that album. A big cosmic wink. It was almost as if this entire time, all the years that had passed since that first listen, and all the relistens and the sounds I’d heard up until that moment, were all part of trees etc. It’s a big radiant album that stretches across time.

Carmen Villain doesn’t claim to have found an answer, but on her new album Memoria, which drops early next month via Smalltown Supersound, the Mexican-Norwegian artist does wrestle with the question, albeit indirectly. Taking cues from the writings of Pauline Oliveros and a 2021 film (also called Memoria) by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, along with incidents and experiences that impacted her own life, she used sound to examine—in an admittedly abstract fashion—ideas of memory and time, and did so while also taking her music in a decidedly chillier, more introspective direction.

Memoria is Villain’s first full-length since 2022’s Only Love from Now On, a warm and richly melodic record that was not only met with widespread critical acclaim, but also represented something of a breakthrough after a decade spent developing her sound. (For those who missed records like 2013’s Sleeper and 2017’s Infinite Avenue, she was once a guitar-toting singer-songwriter whose voice was front and center.) There’s little question that Villain’s standing within the ambient / experimental sphere has grown significantly over the past few years, and though her new LP does ditch some of the melodic elements that defined Only Love from Now On, its minimalist approach and focus on low-end experimentation dovetails perfectly with a moment when electronic music’s headier corners are once again obsessed with hazy textures and dubby abstraction.

Curious to know more about what led Villain in this direction, I asked if she’d be up for an interview, and at the end of last week, we had a long call in which we not surprisingly talked a lot about her latest album, but also discussed the entire arc of her career. Considering the important role that memory plays in the new LP, it felt right to cast a wider net, and during the course of the conversation, we touched upon a myriad of weighty topics, including: the often patronizing nature of her early press coverage; how she navigated the transition away from singing and playing guitar; her longstanding love of dub music; motherhood (she has a 20-year-old daughter); her Mexican heritage and how it fits into her identity; and why she sees empathy and community as the primary antidote to a culture that feels increasingly self-absorbed. Villain has learned a lot over the years—about life, about music, about people and about herself—and while she freely concedes that her learning process is far from complete, she’s nonetheless willing to share what she knows.

Read more

Sleep D and Mosam Howieson
Syphon Filter
Butter Sessions

It’s hard to talk about Sleep D or their Butter Sessions imprint without diving deep into their cuter-than-cute backstory. (For those curious, I recounted the tale earlier this year when I reviewed the three-disc victory lap the label released to celebrate its 15th anniversary.) But at this point in the game, we can probably set aside their suburban childhood and refrain from mentioning the duo’s early forays into disco and house. Sleep D have proven their bona fides as some of dance music’s most committed hardware heads, and are now just as comfortable turning out fried dub jams as peak-time electro.

Even by those standards, however, the title track of their new record with fellow Australian Mosam Howieson is a bit of a surprise. The kick that starts the track is about as friendly as Berghain’s Sven turning away a bachelor party, and the tune itself would honestly sound right at home inside that former power station. It’s an absolute techno barnstormer, and with slight layers of corrosion eating at the drums before razor-sharp arpeggios drip down across the track, it puts a slightly terrifying spin on peak time.

The EP’s two other originals are more in line with the Butter Sessions back catalog. “Mirror Pool” is a sleek piece of dub techno where hi-fi polish has been applied to the melody, and while “Inertia” is bolstered by an industrial-strength kick, the tune’s fluttering arpeggio adds some levity to the proceedings. Rounding out the release is an excellent remix from Nous’klaer Audio regular Konduku, who turns “Mirror Pool” inside out, creating a gravity chamber of sub pressure, scattershot drums and cavernous echo.

It’s unlikely that Sleep D will be invited to bring their hardware set to Tomorrowland’s main stage next year, but Syphon Filter is a quality record—and its title track is one of the most intricate and banging pieces of big-room techno I’ve heard all year.

Lusine
Melting Days
Ghostly International

Sometime towards the end of the 2000s, Jeff McIlwain’s Lusine project changed tack. Having already established himself as a master of subtle minimal and IDM that still had the afterglow of techno—imagine a melancholic Perlon record being passed through a sieve—he released A Certain Distance in 2009, and while it retained many of his experimental tendencies, it also hewed closer to pop and traditional song structures. He largely continued down that path in the years that followed, charting a course that came to a head on 2023’s Long Light. An LP that saw him working with a number of collaborators, it was a stunning almost-pop record, and one that was closer to the contemporary ambient being turned out by labels like 3XL than it was to Basic Channel.

Melting Days is the Seattle-based producer’s 10th full-length, and it’s something of a return to Lusine’s earlier iterations. Ghostly International suggests his 2007 ambient opus Language Barrier as a point of comparison, and the new album is definitely quite minimal. The melodies on “Bird’s Eye,” for instance, are so faint that they threaten to drift off into entropy as their arpeggios squiggle across the stereo. “These Walls” is like listening to a photo negative of a symphony; the chords are euphoric yet quiet as McIlwain’s’s brushed snare drums tease a release that never arrives. The glitchy guitar on “All Clear” would be right at home on a Somewhere Press release, its softly chugging drum line—made hazy with filters—slipping right underneath the track’s slanted highs and mids.

Elsewhere on the record, McIlwain burrows into the dustiest corners of dub techno. The smudges of reverb on the undulating pads on “Overlook” have a real groove to them, even if the song’s twinkling synth is more Tangerine Dream than Deepchord. “Intruder” and “Overlook” might seem sedate, but if you pitch them up a few notches (and crank the volume into the red), either one could work at the end of a warm-up set. And “Pendulum” sports an actual kick drum—albeit one that sounds like it’s been coated in more dust than a first edition of Proust at a rare book store.

Lusine has always excelled at making the austere slightly beautiful. Melting Days does that and more, returning to the templates that made his early albums great while also employing the same ear for subtle hooks that have made his more recent, poppier records still sound weird and fun.

Regina Collage
Horizont
do you have peace?

The scope of Jabu’s do you have peace? label has stayed relatively close to home over its five years of activity, though it has evolved. The balance between sad-eyed dubbiness and blown-out shoegaze has progressively tipped more towards the latter, and Jabu themselves have become a more tangible band, offering a gentle presence on the festival circuit that’s less tethered to their origins in the Bristol underground. Regina Collage comes into this fold as one of the first artists from outside Jabu’s immediate circle of friends and frequent collaborators, yet her sound is rooted in the same soupy wash of guitars and broken-biscuit electronics that’s come to define the do you have peace? catalog.

Collage’s personal context, however, is wholly distinct from that of her labelmates, and it charges her music with a meaning that can’t be contrived. As a Ukrainian relocated from Kharkiv to Bristol, her reality is steeped in Russia’s ongoing assault on her country, and her hometown in particular. Against that backdrop, building a new life is no easy task, and by titling her album Horizont—the Ukrainian word for “horizon”—she speaks to the difficulty of imagining a future while living under such painful conditions. There’s plenty of room for her to process those emotions via languid, reflective songs like “Tremolo” and “I Hope,” but the LP also includes numerous moments with a fiercer bite, veering away from the heads-down introspection one usually expects from the Jabu sphere.

“First New Place,” for instance, has a grungy immediacy, all bloated bass guitar and a jackhammer drum machine ticking away in the middle distance. The mix is still smudged, subliminal and coated with the unmistakable patina of DIY bedroom studio craft, but the song’s sharp attack provides a welcome contrast to Horizont’s more fragile passages; it also makes the album far more engaging than so much of today’s shoegaze offerings, which tend to listlessly breeze past without leaving much of an impression.

There’s maturity and variety in Collage’s songwriting, from the raw, Young Marble Giants-esque “Svitlo” to the boxy, grubby beat and bass of “Vzhe.” Populated with hidden charms and surprising swerves that reveal themselves over time, Horizont is an album that grows more intriguing with each listen. The tweaked slide guitar hook on “Firestation” or the charming poppy lilt of “Vpiznavaty” might become your favorite moment on any given week. Collage’s talent is unmistakable, and though her individual circumstances may limit her own ability to see what lies ahead, she’s undoubtedly broadened the horizons of do you have peace? and the extended Jabu universe, expanding their sound and storytelling with this spectacular album.

Palms Trax
Keys to a Printed Garden
fabric

Though he’s released only a handful of EPs during his decade-plus-long career, Palms Trax is an artist whose sound is surprisingly identifiable. Jay Donaldson makes bright and buoyant house that pulls equally from Italo and electro, filling out his tunes with bubbling pockets of funk and soaring synth lines. If you’ve downed too many Aperols when you’re DJing a boat party and not sure what to reach for, you can rest assured that anything with his name on it will go down a treat.

For his first release in five years, Donaldson returns with Keys to a Printed Garden, a two-tracker that’s also his fabric debut. “Soft Trance Hard Gossip” is a crash course in the Palms Trax aesthetic. The drums and the walking bassline embody the swagger of Italo, while the melody borrows from the euphoric end of the progressive continuum. To spice things up, Donaldson also adds a hint of acid, along with a slightly crunchy breakdown that nods to the robotic groove of electro. It’s a big tune, for sure, and one that’s likely already sent hundreds of ID hunters into a tailspin.

The record’s title track is a bit more restrained. During the first two minutes, the drums stutter along with the pizzicato momentum of vintage tech house. But then a wistful horn line comes in, as does a charging bassline that sounds like it was ripped from some forgotten UK rave B-side. Keys to a Printed Garden offers quite the smorgasbord of references, and while the end result may not please the genre purists out there, its contents are rich in Vitamin D—and are sure to spritz up just about any set.

Various Artists
American Dub Electronics
Kino Disk

With so many modern compilations feeling like narrative-deficient, various-artist grab bags, it’s sometimes tempting to write off the format entirely—that is, until you come across something like American Dub Electronics. Having dropped more than 20 releases in less than two years—most of them limited-edition dubplates that sold out pretty much immediately—Kino Disk has quietly carved out a unique niche within the hazy (and increasingly crowded) ecosystem currently dominated by labels like Short Span and Peak Oil. But with this new compilation, the Chicago-based label seems determined to turn up the (metaphorical) volume, dropping a statement of intent that not only showcases producers from the American side of the Atlantic, but will likely also solidify Kino Disk’s standing as a prime dealer of contemporary ambient dub sounds.

Considering the sheer volume of dub-adjacent music that’s been released during the past few years, one might worry that the well is running dry, especially given the relatively minimal nature of the genre. Kino Disk, however, has managed to repeatedly unearth fresh variations, and that continues on American Dub Electronics, where a dozen artists (across 11 songs) map out different corners of the same aquatic landscape. Many of those artists have previously appeared on the label, but the compilation does make room for several newcomers, including some projects that appear to be making their official debut. (Considering Kino Disk’s generally low-key m.o., not to mention its tendency to provide little in the way of contextual information, it’s possible that some of those projects are simply new aliases from more experienced figures; there’s definitely nothing amateurish about the music on offer.) But regardless of who made them, the resulting tunes are marked by familiar characteristics (e.g. unhurried, spaced-out rhythms and smudgy low-end frequencies). The compilation’s variance has more to do with mood and texture, as the songs have been blanketed in atmospheres that range from shimmering dreamspace to dark and foreboding ambience.

Psalm Star Electric opens the record on a strong note with “S-Block,” a moody and meditative number where shards of crystalline synths blend with blissful ambient noise. More ominous is Infant’s “Floodplain,” which feels charged with tension and unease, as though some unseen threat is lingering just below the surface of its static energy and crackling textures. Atonist’s sparkly “34 Papyri Boats,” on the other hand, charts a more inviting course. Coming toward the end of the compilation, its sparse arrangements of chiming keys resonate warmly, feeding echoes off of each other and taking the listener’s mind into a higher state just before the proceedings come to a close. That’s the thing about American Dub Electronics; its sound palette may be familiar, but for careful listeners, it presents new possibilities at every turn.

A lot of those feelings are imaginary, of course. It’s not like injustices and atrocities weren’t happening in the ’90s—they just weren’t being beamed directly into our hands by monolithic tech platforms whose business model depends on the cultivation of mass dopamine addiction. Even in the independent music realm, things didn’t feel “better” back in the day because the industry was being run by benevolent overlords; it’s more that those overlords decided that many scenes and sounds existing outside the mainstream were simply too insignificant to bother with.

Recognizing that, however, would spoil the illusion—and the relief that an overly idealized past provides. The infinite scroll offers free escapism, 24 hours a day, and while it’s also hollowed out traditional media, eviscerated our attention spans and flattened decades of history into an intentionally triggering, context-deficient slurry, we continue to greedily drink that slurry down. When media outlets—or, increasingly, content creators—post retro clips of Björk or David Bowie interviews or grainy footage massive outdoor raves in the ’90s, we smile and tell ourselves that they’re unearthing and sharing lost nuggets of wisdom and brilliance, when what they’re really doing is just smashing a big red “sentimentality” button, knowing that’s one of the only things that our dulled senses will actually respond to.

Looking at the past can be useful, and in certain contexts, is absolutely necessary. (Hell, I do it all the time here at First Floor—does anyone write about 2010s post-dubstep and bass music as much as I do?) But what’s frustrating is how much our collective backward gaze has come at the expense of not just talking about the present, but engaging with its challenges in any sort of substantive way. The music press has largely given up on that, which is why the “news” sections—yes, the scare quotes are intentional—of most major outlets look more like repositories for warmed-over industry press releases than bastions of actual reporting.

Perhaps that’s why there’s been almost no coverage of the PPWR, a new set of environmental regulations in the EU that, as currently written, could paralyze small and independent sellers of not just music, but products of any kind. The media is happy to regurgitate industry narratives about the resurgence of vinyl, and just a few months ago, the press was loudly amplifying the voices of trend forecasters who proclaimed that consumers were longing for the return of physical media. Yet when something happens that could legitimately foul up platforms like Bandcamp, Discogs and even Etsy, they’ve gone silent. Why? Because they didn’t get a press release about it? Because they might have to do some actual research? Because the resulting story won’t generate as many likes on Instagram? It’s maddening.

If you’re someone who does care about a story like that, perhaps you saw the PPWR-focused article that First Floor published earlier this week. (Given the particularly newsworthy nature of the subject matter, I even published it without a paywall.) It’s generated something of a stir online, at least by First Floor standards, so if you haven’t had a chance to give it a read already, you can find a link below.

Beyond that, you’ll also find the rest of today’s First Floor digest. And no, it doesn’t include links to either of those aforementioned electroclash guides, but it does include a round-up of what’s been happening in electronic music during the past week. In other words, it’s focused on the present, with an assortment of news items and suggested reading links, along with a healthy batch of new music recommendations—including a special guest recommendation from UK polymath and Wisdom Teeth co-founder K-LONE.

Let’s get started.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:

Every week, First Floor publishes a long-form piece that’s initially made available in full to paid subscribers only. This week’s piece, however, went live without a paywall, and if you haven’t read it already, it offers a detailed look at the PPWR, a new set of EU regulations that are designed to reduce packaging waste, but could end up making online mailorder financially and logistically impossible for all but the biggest sellers.

WHAT’S BEEN HAPPENING

A round-up of the most interesting electronic music news from the past week, plus links to interviews, articles and other things I think are worth sharing.

• Following in the footsteps of companies like Bandcamp, Deezer and even Spotify, Beatport has publicly signaled its intention to do something about the explosion of AI-generated music on its platform. In an announcement last week, the online retailer said that as part of an expanded partnership with Beatdapp—a “music fraud detection specialist” that claims it can identify the “digital watermark” of AI—it would be “introducing new technology designed to identify AI-generated music across its catalogue.” Beatport has apparently also updated its content guidelines so that “fully or majority AI-generated tracks will not be permitted on the platform,” with the caveat that “music created with AI assistance will still be accepted, provided the finished track remains majority human-made.”

• Electronic music has been awash in new books during the past few years, and while that’s great news for anyone with an appetite for reading something more in-depth than an Instagram caption, these titles do come with one major drawback—while they often talk about all sorts of incredible artists and songs, it’s on the reader to then go and track down the actual music. With that in mind, Darren Hemmings—a UK music marketer who also pens the excellent, industry-focused Network Notes newsletter—has created a new online tool called Soundtrack the Page. A self-described “pet project,” it’s essentially a hub where Hemmings has posted a series of companion guides that not only list every song mentioned in a book, but also provide easy YouTube listening links. Though he’s still building out the catalog, he’s already posted guides for seminal books like Matthew Colin’s Altered State, Simon Reynolds’ Energy Flash, David Toop’s Ocean of Sound, Dan Sicko’s Techno Rebels, Tim Lawrence’s Love Saves the Day and several other key titles.

OBLIGATORY BOOK MENTION

My first book is out now. It’s called First Floor Vol. 1: Reflections on Electronic Music Culture, and you can order it from my publisher Velocity Press. However, if you’re outside of the UK, I recommend that you either inquire at your favorite local bookshop or try one of the online sales links that have been compiled here.

JUST ANNOUNCED

A round-up of noteworthy new and upcoming releases announced during the past week.

• At some point, Ploy’s pivot into house music will stop feeling novel, right? After all, that pivot—which the UK producer discussed at length in a 2025 First Floor interview—began several years ago, and it’s now set to continue with a new EP that’s set for release on Dekmantel. Entitled Glizzy, it’s billed as “straight-up, no-frills house music that oozes quality by doing the simple things well,” and though the record won’t be available in full until September 11, its title track has already been shared.

• Carrier—another artist that First Floor interviewed last year—has a new EP called Thresholds on the way. Announcing the record via an Instagram post, the UK-born, Belgium-based artist hasn’t yet shared much in the way of details (or any of the actual music), but the official release date is September 4, and some vinyl copies will apparently become available via Boomkat at some point today.

• More than three years have passed since the death of Ryuichi Sakamoto, but around the time that the legendary Japanese composer was putting together his final solo album, 12, he was also exchanging musical ideas with his longtime collaborator Alva Noto. Those exchanges have now been compiled onto a new full-length, 12 Conversations, which the Noton label will be issuing on September 18. In the meantime, LP cut “Conversation 3” has been shared.

• One of experimental music’s most prolific figures, more eaze will soon be returning to Thrill Jockey with a new album, her second of 2026. The upcoming valley and structure is said to be less pop oriented than the sentence structure in the country LP that dropped back in March, and is in fact described as an exercise in repetition and minimalism that “stretches simple ideas to their logical extremes through small bits of connective tissue.” Ahead of the record’s October 9 release date, the song “what’s wrong with the structure?” has already been made available.

• As part of his “ongoing inquiry into the relationship between sound and text,” ambient / experimental artist Lamin Fofana has completed a new album, Corps Perdu, which takes inspiration from a 1950 poetry collection by Afro-Martinican writer and politician Aimé Césaire. The LP is also Fofana’s debut on the Shelter Press label, and before it officially lands on October 16, opening track “To Become Liquid” has already been shared.

• Earlier this year, L-Vis 1990—who was interviewed by First Floor back in 2024—began posting a series of somewhat apocalyptic messages online, all of which A) condemned the platforms and systems that define our everyday lives, B) called for resistance and C) ended with the phrase, “THE PARTY IS OVER.” He’s now released an album under that banner, one set in a “scorched” future world where AI has become sentient. Each of the record’s eight tracks—which he actually calls “sonic warnings”—imagines “the sound of machines at work in a landscape where culture has outlived its creators,” and The Party Is Over also includes a “reconstruction kit” with “92 audio fragments, digital artifacts and tools for reconstruction.” The whole thing is out now, and is available exclusively via independent online sales platform Subvert.fm.

• Although water sounds have long been a staple of electronic music, they’re usually relegated to the background, providing ambiance while artists work their magic with synths, drum machines or whatever other instruments they’re using. On the new Synthetic Water Music compilation, however, water sounds are given a starring role, as the mappa label has assembled a collection of 51 water-related tracks from artists like perila, Visible Cloaks, Pauline Anna Strom, HMOT, Adam Badí Donoval, Adela Mede, Jules Reidy, Memotone and many, many others. The digital version is out now, and a double cassette will follow on September 10.

K-LONE HAS BETTER TASTE THAN I DO

First Floor is in many ways a one-person operation, but each week, the newsletter cedes the spotlight to an artist, writer or other figure from the music world, inviting them to recommend a piece of music.

This week’s recommendation comes from K-LONE, who over the course of the past decade has quietly established himself as one of the UK’s brightest electronic talents. Though he’s often saddled with the “bass music” tag, his work long ago transcended genre boundaries, to a point where a K-LONE record might reasonably dip into various strains of house, techno, garage, minimal, ambient, IDM or something else entirely. If there’s one current that runs through all of K-LONE’s music, it’s his clear affinity for light and color, which lends his productions a certain effervescence, regardless of the tempo or drum patterns he’s employing at any given moment… [READ MORE ABOUT K-LONE + CHECK OUT HIS GUEST RECOMMENDATION]

RECOMMENDED RELEASES

The following is a summary of First Floor’s favorite new releases that came out during the past week or so. The blurbs below are only brief excerpts of the full write-ups; to read the complete recommendation (and hear the actual music) for an individual release, click the “Listen to the Music + Read the Full Write-Up” link, or you can also just head over to this convenient Buy Music Club list if you prefer to listen to all of the selections in one place.

Cold Light – Coldtron2 (FO)

… Drifting along the hazy throughlines between hip-hop, dub, and trip-hop, Cold Light pull from a list of influences that could likely fill an entire notepad. The blueprint of formative UK boundary-pushers such as Tricky, Kode9 and The Spaceape can be felt, as can that of conscious hip-hop outposts like anticon and Definitive Jux, but the aquatic glow of modern dub techno echoes through Cold Light’s sound just as prevalently. [LISTEN TO THE MUSIC + READ THE FULL WRITE-UP]

Djrum – I Wander (Houndstooth)

… A sense of wandering courses through the electronics, with each track moving like a fiery mythical creature that’s slithering through an icy, mist-soaked and totally uncharted rainforest. All the while, digital syncopated bleeps dance alongside shockwaves of electrifying synths; ever-mutating gabber-footwork rhythms bounce off infectious, warehouse-ready sirens, as antique-sounding acoustics gently cascade through the chaos. [LISTEN TO THE MUSIC + READ THE FULL WRITE-UP]

J.TRIPP – TELL (SINK)

… It’s probably closing number “Translation (Moving Relics)” that best embodies the spirit of TELL; built atop static-encrusted beats that squelch like boots trodding through a muddy field, it also finds room for disembodied diva refrains, jittery new age melodies and trap-style snare rolls. Like the album itself, it’s all over the place and, at times, a bit of a mess, but it’s also a testament to the notion that under the right circumstances, a little chaos can lead to moments of real brilliance. [LISTEN TO THE MUSIC + READ THE FULL WRITE-UP]

Various Artists – Curation 03: Verraco (The Third Room)

… Considering that the Colombian producer is part of the TraTraTrax braintrust, his curatorial chops come as no surprise, but Curation 03 does take a confident step away from the so-called “Latin club” sphere with which he’s often affiliated. Though Verraco will likely never stop waving the flag for talented artists from Latin America and the Global South, his tastes transcend his identity, and he’s long made clear that he’s just as well versed in house, techno and the hardcore continuum as his European and North American peers. [LISTEN TO THE MUSIC + READ THE FULL WRITE-UP]

Various Artists – Curation 06: GiGi FM (The Third Room)

… Funnily enough, that level of quality can mostly be attributed to—you guessed it—curation. Not in the sense that The Third Room picked the songs on offer (they didn’t), but because they enlisted a compelling cross section of modern techno artists to do the picking for them. GiGi FM is one of those artists, and on Curation 06, her selections reflect a taste for heady, hypnotic and somewhat tracky sounds. [LISTEN TO THE MUSIC + READ THE FULL WRITE-UP]

That brings us to the end of today’s First Floor digest. Thank you so much for reading the newsletter, and remember, you can find all of this week’s recommended releases on this handy Buy Music Club list. (If you like them, please buy them.)

Until next time,

Shawn

First Floor is published and overseen by Shawn Reynaldo, a freelance writer, editor, presenter and project manager. Find him on LinkedIn and Instagram—and make sure to follow First Floor on Instagram as well—or you can just drop Shawn an email to get in touch about projects, collaborations or other potential opportunities.

Various Artists
Curation 06: GiGi FM
The Third Room

Given that First Floor already explained the backstory behind The Third Room’s new Curation series of compilation EPs in the write-up of Curation 03: Verraco that was published earlier today, there’s no point in rehashing it again here. And no, we won’t be giving all six volumes an official recommendation either, though it’s worth noting that there isn’t a genuinely bad record in the bunch.

Funnily enough, that level of quality can mostly be attributed to—you guessed it—curation. Not in the sense that The Third Room picked the songs on offer (they didn’t), but because they enlisted a compelling cross section of modern techno artists to do the picking for them. GiGi FM is one of those artists, and on Curation 06, her selections reflect a taste for heady, hypnotic and somewhat tracky sounds. Opening number “The Half Bearded Man”—a song by London-based Australian Fergus Sweetland—plunges straight down the rabbit hole, its kick steadily pounding its way toward the Earth’s core, flanked by scuttling bits of sound design and a scary-sexy vocal that sounds like it’s communing with the underworld.

D-Leria lightens things up a bit with “Shark Attak,” a tune whose animated drum patterns give the subtlest of nods to carnival—the Caribbean kind, not the sketchy, unsafe rides kind. GiGi FM herself then pops up, working alongside German techno veteran Efdemin on “Anukari.” A bright and bubbly production, it’s got something of a ’90s Detroit vibe—maybe its the sustained string tones, or the sci-fi-ish bleeps, bloops and chimes—but it’s clear highlight of the EP, and one of the strongest cuts in the entire Curation series. That said, the record’s fourth and final track, “Even,” is no slouch. Crafted by Italian duo Fireground, it cranks up both the melody and the ethereal haze, swaddling its clattering rhythm in gauzy pads and the same sense of weightless bliss that comes with spending an hour or two inside a floatation tank. As the closer of both Curation 06 and the Curation series, it wraps things up on a rather euphoric note, and it’s hard to argue with that.

Various Artists
Curation 03: Verraco
The Third Room

Most electronic compilations aren’t that great. Not only are they are often stuffed with second-rate material1, but these releases also tend to feel more like marketing exercises than coherent artistic statements.

“We’re launching a new label! Here’s a collection of tunes by 27 different artists who have little connection to us or each other, but we’re hoping to get a promotional boost when they all post about the record on social media.”

That’s obviously an exaggeration, but with people throughout the electronic music world now routinely employing somewhat more palatable versions of that compilation-related playbook, it’s not hard to understand why so many of these releases are so damn forgettable.

Curation 03: Verraco, however, is anything but forgettable. It’s excellent, and it’s actually just one installment of a six-part series from German collective / label / event promoter The Third Room. Where most people in their position would have selected the tunes themselves, The Third Room intriguingly decided to lean back a bit, drafting six different curators—aside from Verraco, they also signed up Oscar Mulero, D.Dan, Freddy K, Alarico and GiGi FM—and asking them all to assemble their own compilation EP. It was an unorthodox approach, and with each artist effectively presenting their own curatorial “take” on techno, the whole thing could have easily devolved into a messy, “too many cooks in the kitchen” scenario.

But that didn’t happen. Yes, the various Curation EPs are all different, but taken as a whole, the series presents something close to a snapshot of modern techno. And while some corners of that snapshot are more rewarding than others, the space carved out by Verraco is genuinely thrilling. Considering that the Colombian producer is part of the TraTraTrax braintrust, his curatorial chops come as no surprise, but Curation 03 does take a confident step away from the so-called “Latin club” sphere with which he’s often affiliated. Though Verraco will likely never stop waving the flag for talented artists from Latin America and the Global South, his tastes transcend his identity, and he’s long made clear that he’s just as well versed in house, techno and the hardcore continuum as his European and North American peers.

That knowledge is immediately apparent on Curation 03, as the compilation opens with dub techno icons Substance and Vainqueur, who provide a driving and rather sleek (albeit still static-coated) rework of their 2007 cut “Libration.” Next up is Skee Mask, and while his mere presence on a record is enough to get people’s attention, his “Clear Sky 909” delivers, combining an upfront techno pulse while adorning its dreamily billowing atmospheres with a satisfying dose of digital crunch. 1morning’s “Untitled,” on the other hand, clears out the haze, bounding along atop a funky bassline and a shimmying, Latin-tinged groove, and Mexican artist Regal86 keeps that groove going with the percussion-heavy “PatumPa.”

All four of those tunes are a testament to Verraco’s ear, and they alone would have made for a perfectly good EP, but what truly ups the ante is the inclusion of his own “Untitled (Teamgeist Mix).” A collaboration with Berlin-based producer Tils, it’s an electric, rave-infused techno cut, one in which Verraco’s signature mammoth basslines cut across the dancefloor like a warm knife moving through butter. Though the song technically sits in the middle of Curation 03, it honestly feels like an exclamation point. At the very least, it’s a show of strength; Verraco may be sharing this EP with some of techno’s most formidable talents, but it’s no accident that he’s the one who got top billing.

J.TRIPP
TELL
SINK

Plenty of artists have monthly radio shows, but not many of them make a point to fill each episode with original music that they’ve created especially for the broadcast. GEORGIA, however, have been doing that for more than 10 years now, inviting listeners to tune in to their All Kind Music show on NTS for an “hour of oddball electronics; whether ambient or fit for the floor…”

Maintaining that sort of regimen comes with all sorts of challenges, but it does mean that the duo of Brian Close and Justin Tripp (a.k.a. J.TRIPP) have amassed quite the collection of unreleased material. And on his new TELL LP, Tripp—whose previous solo output includes albums for labels like Sagome and Haunter—has plucked tunes straight from that archive, revisiting his personal contributions to All Kind Music and assembling a record that’s meant to celebrate the “first thought, best thought” approach that spawned the music in the first place.

With its contents spanning the course of more than a decade, TELL is not surprisingly a somewhat disjointed record, but there’s a lot of charm in its stylistic promiscuity. “Wheels Within Wheels” opens the proceedings with a whacked-out blend of busted piano chords and a lurching, not-quite-hip-hop beat, and just a few tracks later, Tripp drops “Upwelling,” a patient assortment of plucked melodies that sounds something like a deconstructed Mary Lattimore song. With its devotional choirs and spectral textures, “Nowhere Dense”—which also happens to be one of the most arresting tunes on the record—sounds more like a cathedral than the club, but “Vorlage” goes in a completely different direction, its quirky growls evoking both the wobblier corners of dubstep and Luke Vibert-style IDM.

Tripp is American, but he has a clear affinity for British murk. The weightless, bass-heavy churn of “Midden” takes cues from The Bug (and maybe even DMZ), and “Engram” is another steppy, low-end excursion, albeit one that’s decidedly moodier in orientation. “Trace,” meanwhile, harkens back to the haunted heyday of witch house, its ghostly, pitch-shifted vocal fragments recalling the work of Holy Other in particular. Yet it’s probably closing number “Translation (Moving Relics)” that best embodies the spirit of TELL; built atop static-encrusted beats that squelch like boots trodding through a muddy field, it also finds room for disembodied diva refrains, jittery new age melodies and trap-style snare rolls. Like the album itself, it’s all over the place and, at times, a bit of a mess, but it’s also a testament to the notion that under the right circumstances, a little chaos can lead to moments of real brilliance.

Today’s recommendation comes from K-LONE, who over the course of the past decade has quietly established himself as one of the UK’s brightest electronic talents. Though he’s often saddled with the “bass music” tag, his work long ago transcended genre boundaries, to a point where a K-LONE record might reasonably dip into various strains of house, techno, garage, minimal, ambient, IDM or something else entirely. His upcoming Have a few days off EP promises “vivid, 4K club music that seeks out precious moments of release in an increasingly restless world,” but his catalog also includes standouts like sorry i thought you were someone else—a gentle techno excursion he made in the aftermath of his father’s death—and Cape Cira, a bubbly trek full of FM synths and fourth-world sonics. If there’s one current that runs through all of K-LONE’s music, it’s his clear affinity for light and color, which lends his productions a certain effervescence, regardless of the tempo or drum patterns he’s employing at any given moment.

Alongside his pal Facta, K-LONE also spends a good chunk of his time steering Wisdom Teeth, a label that not only consistently puts out incredible music, but has built on the legacy of outposts like Hessle Audio and Timedance, broadening the sphere of UK dance music beyond the often dreary confines of the hardcore continuum. That exploratory spirit can be felt in Wisdom Teeth releases from the likes of like Salamanda, Yushh, Tristan Arp, Will Hofbauer, Piezo and a litany of other boundary-blurring artists, but it’s even more evident in the label’s absolutely crucial compilations, such as 2024’s minimal-minded Pattern Gardening and this year’s nagoyaka na kaze / 和やかな風 (quiet wind), which put a spotlight on the diverse offerings coming out of the Japanese city of Nagoya.

Running a busy label like Wisdom Teeth would be more than enough for most artists, but K-LONE also oversees two other imprints on his own: Wych, which was conceived an outpost for sounds that hover and 140 bpm, and Sweet N Tasty, which is currently dormant but has previously issued a good amount of candy-colored UK garage and carefree club edits. Add in a busy touring schedule and K-LONE is clearly a busy guy, but he’s carved out some time to share one of his recent favorites, an album that not only connects to his love of the Nagoya scene, but shares some thematic similarities with his own work.

foodman – HIKARIGASASHIKOMU (Hyperdub, 2026)

I’ve picked something that only recently came out and potentially doesn’t reflect my usual listening habits, which generally sway more toward somber indie / electronic and more functional dance music.

The main reason for picking HIKATIGASASHIKOMU is that it captures a feeling I’ve been trying to experiment with on my next record, Have a few days off. I was quite taken aback, but probably not surprised, that another record just came out that was also trying to express the disorienting feelings of modern times.

As Kode9 described the album on his Instagram: “somehow captures something of my own inner experience of total distraction, 500 plates spinning simultaneously, trying to stop them all from crashing and smashing, constantly interrupted thought processes”

HIKATIGASASHIKOMU feels like a stream of consciousness, both completely random but at the same time meticulously put together. These days it’s rare that you find something that feels “new,” but apparently for me it’s an album that sounds like the someone having a fight with their MIDI keyboard.

There is still balance to the record, with moments of comparative serenity in “Omoi” and the end of “Kabe” and “Kokizami.” The rhythmic elements and sound palette still have that Hyperdub swagger to them, while the vocals, despite their constantly out-of-tune shifting, feel like the glue that holds everything together; it’s like a strange R&B vocal over a cartoonish, deconstructed Timbaland beat.

Modern life often feels like a barrage of information, and this record handles it in an amazing, upfront way. While this is probably not an album I’ll be popping on at a dinner party anytime soon, it’s amazing to have music that so effectively represents that feeling.

These claims might seem hyperbolic, especially since there’s been nearly zero coverage of PPWR in either the music press or the mainstream media, but the potential consequences of the new regulation are very real. Noncompliance can lead to massive fines, and even those who wish to follow the rules and continue selling in the EU are now required—at least on paper—to take on thousands of euros in new expenses, and do so while navigating a dauntingly complex new bureaucratic regime.

What Is the PPWR?

Although the PPWR only went into effect on August 12, it’s actually been in the works for several years, and was designed to replace the EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive, which was enacted in 1994. Given the large-scale economic changes that have taken place since then—namely, the rise of platforms like Amazon and the general explosion of online shopping—it’s no surprise that the EU sought to update its regulatory approach, and do so in a way that would significantly reduce the amount of waste being created by mailorder sales. Approved by the European Parliament in April 2024 and formally adopted by the European Council in December of that same year, the PPWR most directly targets packaging producers, implementing new obligations and targets that include:

• All packaging materials must be designed for recycling.

• All plastic packaging must include a set percentage of post-consumer recycled (PCR) material. (The percentage varies depending on the packaging type.)

• A ban on certain types of single-use plastic packaging types.

Those items represent just a small fraction of what’s inside the PPWR, but it’s important to note that many of these new criteria won’t become fully binding until January 1, 2030.1 That said, the regulation has already officially entered into force, and its laundry list of new rules and responsibilities will affect not just packaging producers, but any business that puts packaging waste into the market.

PPWR and Online Sellers

Do you sell goods online, and do you then use packaging materials to ship those goods to people in the European Union? If so, the PPWR almost certainly applies to your business—even if that business is not based in the EU, and even if the business is being conducted by an individual. (Full disclosure: I am not a lawyer, nor am I a regulatory expert, so absolutely nothing in this article should be taken as legal advice. If you’re selling goods within the EU, or conducting any sort of activity that involves packaging and might be construed as a business, contacting experts and / or professionals who are better versed in these matters is probably a good idea.)

For sellers, the most basic PPWR-related responsibilities have to do with things like using recyclable materials and ensuring that the empty space in e-commerce packaging does not exceed 50%, but full compliance does not stop there. It also includes something called Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR); this designates online sellers as the “producers” of the packaging waste that they put into the market, and holds them directly responsible for ensuring that packaging-related regulations are followed. (Think of it as a “polluter pays” framework.)

Within a seller’s own country—or any country where their business has a physical presence—they can represent themselves when it comes to PPWR-related matters, as their actions are accountable to the governments of where they’re operating. Where things get tricky, however, is when a seller who’s based in one EU country sells and ships goods to customers in a different EU country. In that case, compliance now requires the seller to designate an Authorized Representative—a locally based entity in that country who acts as a legal proxy, filing the necessary paperwork and also serving as an official point of contact to government inspectors.

Unfortunately, an option to designate a single Authorized Representative for the entire European Union does not exist. There is no one-stop shop for EPR compliance, and under current rules, sellers must contract the services of an Authorized Representative in every single EU market where they wish to sell goods. Complicating matters further, all 27 EU member countries have their own seller registries and their own specific approaches to EPR, which means that any seller who wishes to operate legally across the entire bloc must navigate a staggeringly complex bureaucratic web, one with a myriad of different languages, procedures and costs.

That’s the other issue: Authorized Representatives don’t work for free. Most are private individuals and businesses, and at this point their fees vary wildly. A German company called EcoComply, for instance, charges a fixed, all-in price of €1,000 per country per year, while AuthoriseMe—another German operation—offers different tiers of service that vary from one country to the next; for Slovakia, annual prices range between €184 and €529, while the cost for Austria and Spain starts at €274 and goes up to €974, and the Czech Republic ranges between €139 and €1299. (Just FYI, none of those prices include VAT, so the actual costs are even higher.)

Estonian firm Eldris2 also varies its rates by country, and might be the most illustrative example of just how financially burdensome these new compliance requirements can be; packaging EPR in Germany, at €360 per year, is the cheapest country on their list, while the annual rates for Denmark, Hungary, Portugal, Latvia and Slovenia all run more than €1000 each. The price for Slovenia, in fact, is just shy of €1500, and if someone wanted to register with Eldris for all 27 EU member countries, the total cost for just the first year would be nearly €16,000.

No Exceptions, No Matter How Small the Business

These new requirements might make sense for Amazon and corporate retailers, but they can’t possibly apply to everyone, right?

Wrong. When drafting the PPWR, the EU included some very small regulatory carveouts that apply to Micro-, Small- and Medium-Sized business—those are official designations that correspond to a recommendation that was adopted by the European Commission back in 2003. But when it comes to EPR compliance, for instance, there is no minimum threshold, which means that corporations and the smallest of businesses—whether they’re fledging record labels hawking tapes on Bandcamp or hobbyists selling handicrafts on Etsy—are essentially subject to the exact same regulatory regime.

The problem is, while large businesses and high-volume sellers can theoretically absorb the added burden of complying with the PPWR, the imposition of thousands of euros in new annual compliance costs is going to be devastating for smaller sellers doing cross-market business in the EU. Add in the time and effort required to maintain compliance across 27 different countries, and many businesses may be forced to question whether continuing to operate is even financially possible.

Let’s do a little thought experiment:

Imagine a small record label, anywhere in the world, that sells 20 records per year to Germany. If that same label wants to be EPR compliant and finds an Authorized Representative that charges €300 per year, that brings an additional cost of €15 for each record sold. That’s completely unsustainable, and even if the label in question sells 100 records in a year to Germany, it’s important to remember that most releases already have razor-thin margins; an additional cost of €3 per record is enough to drive most successful projects into the red. And that’s just for Germany! If this exercise is extrapolated across all 27 EU member states—many of which have significantly smaller music markets—the math starts to get ugly very quickly.

Some of these compliance costs can potentially—and most likely will—be passed along to consumers, but with shipping costs already high and continuing to rise, further price increases are bound to stifle sales. And when it comes to smaller EU countries, where the sales figures are lower and the compliance costs are often higher, the idea of trying to offset the financial burden of PPWR by tacking on an additional €10, €20 or €50 to every item sold simply doesn’t make sense. What’s more likely is that small sellers will begin to pull out of these markets altogether; some might even decide that trying to sell things anywhere in the EU simply isn’t worth the hassle.

The Risks of Noncompliance

Considering the sheer volume of packages that are already being processed by postal services around the world, small sellers—many of whom already skirt official rules and regulations, doing things like marking all of their mailouts as gifts—may be tempted to ignore the PPWR. After all, it’s not like postal services are asking for proof of EPR compliance every time a package is sent, so sellers, particularly if they’re in the EU, theoretically have a decent chance of avoiding detection, especially if they’re using PPWR-compliant shipping materials. (Sellers outside of the EU, on the other hand, face a different situation; while no widespread reports of PPWR-related procedural changes have surfaced yet, it’s not difficult to imagine customs officers folding EPR compliance checks into their routine screening process—and either flagging or outright rejecting shipments from noncompliant entities before they even reach the European market.)

Regardless of where a seller is located, conflating minimal enforcement levels and a low risk of being caught with an actual lack of legal responsibility is an exceedingly risky strategy. Although PPWR enforcement methods vary from one country to the next, the penalties for non-compliance can be severe. In Germany, for example, violators can legally be fined up to €200,000 for the most severe offenses, and even more routine infractions, such as failing to sign up for the country’s centralized packaging registry, can incur fines of up to €100,000. Many other EU members have implemented similarly imposing penalty schemes, and also reserve the right to A) ban noncompliant entities from selling in their countries altogether and B) audit those entities’ shipping histories, assessing additional fines and requiring the backpayment of uncollected fees—plus interest.

Where This Could Lead

As intimidating as those fines and penalties are clearly meant to be, sellers are also starting to be pressured by the very platforms that they rely upon to sell their wares. Amazon, for instance, has already begun requiring all sellers to provide proof of EPR compliance in every country where they wish to sell goods. Other large-scale platforms are likely to follow suit, although music-focused hubs such as Discogs and Bandcamp have yet to do so, or even comment publicly about the PPWR.3 (The “Legal & Compliance” section of Bandcamp’s help page, however, does include a post addressing a different EU regulation, the General Product Safety Regulation, where the company specifically states that it cannot be listed as a seller’s Responsible Person.4 The PPWR is clearly another matter, but barring some sort of unexpected sea change, it’s hard to imagine the platform displaying a sudden willingness to assume the compliance responsibilities currently being shouldered by its users.)

At least for now, sellers are more or less on their own, and though PPWR-related Reddit threads aren’t exactly a reliable source of information, they do reflect a serious level of concern. Some online sellers—including a handful of artists and labels on Bandcamp—have already suspended sales within the EU, and given the general lack of clarity about how best to move forward, more will likely follow suit in the weeks and months ahead. For sellers that are already in the EU, one of the only ways to significantly reduce the impact of PPWR compliance is to limit sales to only the country in which they are based. This, of course, goes against the spirit of the single market, but for anyone running a small business, giving up on one of the EU’s defining economic characteristics might prove to be a more reasonable course of action than contending with EPR requirements.

In a very real way, the PPWR endangers the future viability of any online ecosystem in which direct-to-consumer sales to the EU play a major role. Oddly enough, this could prove to be a boon for music distributors and online stores. One quirk about the PPWR is that when artists and labels send their releases and merch in bulk to any sort of middleman (i.e. engage in a business-to-business transaction), the packaging used is classified as transport packaging, which eliminates most, if not all, of the aforementioned compliance responsibilities related to that shipment.

To be clear, the responsibility for compliance doesn’t simply vanish in this scenario; it’s merely passed on, and ultimately falls on whatever entity eventually sells the items in question to members of the public. Contending with the PPWR will likely prove to be challenging for almost any business, but record shops—whether they exist as physical stores or solely as online hubs—are theoretically taking in so much revenue and processing such a large volume of orders that they can more realistically fold the increased costs and workload of EPR compliance into their existing business models. This is a situation where size truly matters, and while the prospect of absorbing a new annual cost of €16,000—and that’s just to have Authorized Representatives in every EU member country—is still going to be a dealbreaker for many smaller record shops, there’s little question that retailers are generally going to be better positioned to navigate the PPWR than the individual artists and labels whose music sits on their shelves.

Almost anytime a new law or regulation comes into effect, there are economic winners and losers. In the case of the PPWR, it’s nice to think that some record shops and distributors might wind up on the winners list—after all, many of those businesses have been visibly struggling throughout the digital and streaming era. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s the largest retailers and online sales platforms that will come out ahead, simply because their scale will blunt the impact of the PPWR’s new regulatory burden. There’s a depressing irony in the fact that a new set of environmental rules, which were ostensibly designed to rein in the wasteful practices of corporate actors, may ultimately wind up bolstering the economic position of those very same actors, at least within the EU.

What Can Be Done?

As of right now, the answer is unfortunately “not much.” The PPWR is already in effect, and there is no grace period allowing those affected to gradually adjust to the new rules. It took years to craft and approve these regulations in the first place, and any effort to amend them is likely to be a similarly slow endeavor. What’s more, the stated intent of the PPWR—that is, the reduction of packaging waste—is something that the majority of the public, especially in the EU, would likely support. Pretty much everyone has at some point seen an oversized Amazon package in which a tiny item is surrounded by dozens of plastic air pillows. The wastefulness of that is obvious, and in a time when the impact of climate change is becoming harder and harder to ignore, any effort to eliminate environmentally reckless business practices will seem not just necessary, but righteous.

Against that backdrop, turning the tide of public opinion isn’t going to be easy. The streaming era has already demonstrated that addressing the plight of independent artists and labels isn’t much of a priority for most people, and given that most modern consumers are primarily interacting with music via platforms like Spotify, YouTube and TikTok, the loss of direct-to-consumer sales of tapes, vinyl and other merch is unlikely to register as an urgent crisis. For any movement to amend the PPWR to succeed, it’s going to have to go well beyond the music world—activating the Etsy masses would probably be a good place to start—and on a more basic level, it’s going to require a multi-pronged approach.

One of those prongs involves simply speaking up. Getting a handle on the PPWR isn’t easy—there’s obviously a lot of jargon involved, and conversations about not just packaging waste, but the regulation of packaging waste, aren’t exactly sexy or algorithm-friendly—but unless people start talking about this topic and actively pressuring others to do the same, it’s doubtful that the EU will be motivated to make changes on their own. Press outlets, both in the music world and the mainstream media, should be encouraged to cover the PPWR and dig deeper into its potential impact. (From an editorial standpoint, any story about poorly designed government regulation endangering small business seems like a no-brainer, both in terms of being newsworthy and something that will get audiences fired up and stoke engagement online.)

For those looking to take more formal action, there’s also the option of reaching out directly to politicians. That can of course be done on an individual basis, but earlier this month, the EU Commission initiated a five-week window in which the public—including people outside of Europe—can share their thoughts on the PPWR. That window will remain open until September 10, but more than 5000 comments have already been made, and most of them seem to be calling for the new regulations to be reformed. Some of the most common suggestions include:

• The establishment of a minimum threshold, one that would effectively exempt all businesses below a certain size and / or revenue level from at least some of the PPWR, particularly when it comes to EPR compliance.

• In lieu of total exemption, the creation of a separate tier for small businesses in which the ongoing costs and bureaucratic burden of the PPWR are significantly reduced.

• The adoption of uniform EPR rules and procedures across the entire EU.

• The establishment of an option for sellers to sign up for a single, PPWR-related registration that covers the entire bloc, and also designate a sole Authorized Representative who’s responsible for EPR compliance throughout the EU. (For sellers who are already located in the EU, especially those whose size and / or revenues sit below a certain threshold, the Authorized Representative requirement could also be eliminated altogether.)

Long story short, most people affected by the PPWR aren’t looking to completely scrap it. They do, however, want these new regulations to be applied in a way that isn’t disproportionately burdensome to small sellers. In the music world, many independent artists and small labels are already operating at a loss, or barely scraping by, and it seems ludicrous that a DIY operator who’s doing limited runs of 100 cassettes or 50 t-shirts is now being slapped with the same packaging-related rules and compliance requirements as Amazon and other corporate giants.

Obviously there’s a middle ground between those two extremes, and debates can be had about exactly who should and shouldn’t be exempted from certain provisions of the PPWR. But as things stand now, a huge swath of sellers—many of whom don’t even know what the PPWR is yet—are in a position where they might wind up deciding that doing business in the EU is no longer worth it. Even worse, some of those sellers might decide to shut their doors altogether. Being forced to use recycled and less wasteful packaging materials is one thing, but not many artists and labels got into the music game so they could contend with an expensive bureaucratic quagmire.

First Floor is published and overseen by Shawn Reynaldo, a freelance writer, editor, presenter and project manager. Find him on LinkedIn and Instagram—and make sure to follow First Floor on Instagram as well—or you can just drop Shawn an email to get in touch about projects, collaborations or other potential opportunities.