Collection: Techno/Minimal/Tech-House

intriguingly named Kalahari Oyster Cult deals in music that is just as interesting and this new album from OK EG is no exception to that. Rivulets manages to be both perfectly designed for an indelible impact in the club, but is also nuanced and detailed enough to work in headphones in a range of other settings. It's minimal in design but never cold and abstract - the synths are warm, the drums rubbery, the rhythms lovely and compelling. 'Circular Arc' for example is bumpy and bouncy with a killer bassline, 'Matched Grip' is melon-twisting halftime brilliance and 'Endless River' is a super deep and silky jungle workout drenched in soulful vocal swirls.

NYC experimental producer Neud Photo is up next on EYA's Lonewolf series with a killer five-tracker, 'Echoes'. The EP brilliantly oscillates between various inspirations with a strong machine sound, making for an incredible and haunting journey into electro, new beat, minimal and techno. Beginning with a bang on the compellingly haunting, riveting 'Replica', we hear myriad cowbells, FM "ow"s, and future-gothic vocal samples abound; the track harks deeper dancefloor explorations to come, from the entrancing call-and-response, push-pull structure of 'Lotus Eaters' to the brittler, rippling, more skeletal coldwave closer 'Flash Pressure'.

Tofistock roster member Myki delivers a hat-trick of heaters on their latest and greatest EP yet, 'Eamu'. Whipping up a rave-thunderstorm on the A-sider, 'EEE' is filled with juggling rhythms, crunchy stabs, and silkily sneaky basslines. The elegantly rude B-side, 'AAA', meanwhile, hears samples from the timeless 'UFO' by ESG, not to mention the artist's own masterful trademarks. This boutique toolpack is an essential firestarter and the first in Tofistock's new "sense-floor" dance series.

The superb Craigie Knowles label is often a place to check out some mad fresh electro but for this one, it welcomes Primitive Needs who head off down a progressive techno trip that will remind you of the 90s even if you didn't experience them the first time around. On opener 'Mesomorph' the drum programming is fresh and slick and the synths are searching, as they spray about the mix with a hint of old-school video game charm. 'Rhizome' rides on high-speed tech drums that are coloured by the warped lines and stabs that peel off them constantly. There is a kinetic bounce to 'Hypha Dose' that will make any floor step things up a notch and 'Desert Power' closes with real soulful urgency and hints of trance magic.

Qnete’s back in the building for a third X-Kalay release and it’s an anticipated return for the prominent purveyor of prog. Four diverse but coherently related tracks with pit stops in deep house and electro territory. We open proceedings with a dose of the lysergic sound that has become his trademark since debuting on the label in 2021. Evoking ritual and ceremony, ‘Going Short‘ commences with choral pads that beckon to the altar. A slo-mo exercise in dancefloor hypnosis with trace echoes of bleep. Where ‘Wrapped’ takes a turn toward mellow, ‘Stepperals’, like its A1 counterpart, recalibrates trance tropes into something more chugging and restrained. Another example of Qnete smudging his third eye on a tunnelling, wormhole flex. And finally, the Leipzig native signs off with a nod to the American Midwest. Opening cerebral gates in a way that recalls classic Detroit In Effect, closing track ‘Circuit Friends’ taps into the futurist utopia imagined by Detroit electro’s pioneers.

Bell Curve’s kaleidoscopic music pushes from the club out into the cosmos. As a co-founder of New York label and promoter Worst Behavior, she has fast become a pillar of the city’s underground music community, championing future-seeking sounds from the ever-expanding ecosphere of soundsystem culture and bass music. Her own productions and DJ sets draw from an equally eclectic pool of sonics, reconfiguring familiar club sounds into tracks that defiantly evade easy categorisation. Following collaborations with Deep Medi / Young Echo MC Rider Shafique and critical acclaim from the likes of DJ Mag and Resident Advisor, new EP Obelisk for Berlin’s SSPB provides a daring evolution of Bell Curve’s soundworld, channeling the bristling intensity of her previous work into a more expansive headspace. Alongside six mesmerising new tracks from Bell Curve, the EP features a remix from Hessle Audio rising star Toumba. Obelisk was conceived as a deep dive into a specific aspect of Bell Curve’s soundworld, focusing on more minimalist, psychedelic sonics. While much of the material was written over the course of several years - sketches developed alongside Bell Curve’s recent hyper-kinetic releases, the EP finally coalesced during a particularly prolific 6 months in the last year. Stripping pieces back to skeletal rhythmic architectures and exploring slower BPMs, Bell Curve opened up space for transcendence, avoiding the allure of breakdowns and drops to instead use subtle gestures to guide pieces to ecstatic peaks. Club sonics are here plucked from their original contexts and expanded outwards - icy rave stabs on “Staircase” ascending into the heavens or the astral breaks and springy bass of “Hope It Gets Better”. Subtle shifts in tone and texture guide the listener through the trip, reverb tails slowly extending into lysergic drift or rippling grain and feedback rising from pulsing bass tones. Jordanian producer Toumba amps up the tempo on his remix of “Staircase” while maintaining the original’s emotional core, bolstering the track’s dextrous rhythms with distinctive Levantine timbres. Throughout, Bell Curve demonstrates her masterful command of tension and release, locking listeners into hypnotic rhythmic coils that build to feverish pitch before opening out into celestial expanses. Obelisk captures a constant push and pull between emotional states - from anxiety and melancholy to joy and euphoria, working through turmoil to find transcendence. Tracks like “Dance Skeleton Dance” particularly invoke this duality, drawing catharsis from darker sonics, reconfiguring bass pressure and anxious percussion into a humid dancehall stepper. “Without U” contains emotional struggle as part of the very circumstances of its making - written while working through heartbreak, its delicate repetitions and searching tone reflecting the process of reconnecting with oneself. Title track “Obelisk” forms the emotional core of the EP, coalescing from weightless vapors into dramatic synthesizer motifs, evoking euphoric memories of complete immersion on the dancefloor and our ability to find ecstatic experience even in the contemporary hellscape. The EP and track name were inspired by sci-fi series The Broken Earth Trilogy by NK Jemisin, a work that explores contemporary power dynamics and ecological issues through the lens of dystopia and magical realism, featuring giant floating obelisks as remnants of an ancient technologically advanced civilisation. Bell Curve’s own Obelisk provides a perfect analog - processing human struggle through futuristic sonics and capturing the human experience while also providing an escape from it. Obelisk compiles Bell Curve’s most compelling and enthralling work to date. Reveling in dazzling repetition and delicate sonic nuance, it is a cathartic and defiant statement in an industry that increasingly demands hollow immediacy and caters to short attention spans - an homage to struggles and affirmation of strength and self-belief, while equally offering euphoric escape for those willing to spend time inside its mystic whorl.