If you want to trace the bloodline of UK bass culture, from blues dances and sound clashes to jungle, dubstep and the 2010s warehouse revival, follow the Channel One Sound System story. Run by selector Michael “Mikey Dread” Letts, this London institution stands as both keeper of the roots and a ritual for the community.

Summerhills is a counter-proposal far from the main circuit’s corporate choreography. Instead of a fenced-off field ringed with logos, you get four days on a ridge above the Maramureș village of Durușa, where the main stage is a reclaimed barn and the sky is dark enough to count satellites. The festival’s own page keeps the message spare—August 21–24, 2025, #11 edition; camping, cinema, yoga, a kids’ area, food and drinks, “good coffee,” even a “panorama shower”—and that editorial restraint is the thesis.

Purelink’s sophomore album, Faith, is ambient music as a ritual of quiet radicalism, reshaping both emotional and sonic terrain through collective intimacy and orchestrated subtlety. Comprising Tommy Paslaski (Concave Reflection), Ben Paulson (kindtree), and Akeem Asani (Millia), the trio relocated mid-process from Chicago to New York—a geographic shift that is vividly imprinted in the album’s textures and moods.

In All The Quiet (Part II), Joe Armon-Jones crafts a speculative narrative rooted in dub, jazz, and the urgency of improvisation. As the second installment in a two-part opus, released on his Aquarii imprint, the album concludes a dystopian allegory in which music has been all but extinguished, surviving only through the "paladins of sound"—a scattered few who resist algorithmic cultural flattening.

Across five albums and a bookshelf full of poetry, Kae Tempest has been a narrator, oracle, and a witness, carrying the weight of the city on their back, narrating sleepless hours at 4:18 am, mythologizing the council estate into a Greek chorus. That breadth isn't incidental. Tempest has been as prolific on the page as on record—winning the Ted Hughes Award for Brand New Ancients, earning two Mercury Prize shortlistings, and publishing a body of poetry that has made them one of Britain’s most important working poets.

As a three-LP gatefold (and cassette) release, Dettmann’s latest contribution to Running Back Records' Mastermix series arrives as the continual motion of a DJ-producer's mind honed by thirty-odd years of subterranean Berlin techno. This Mastermix is not a gathering of club sounds, like past volumes from Wild Pitch Club or Front Classics, but a personal index of dancefloor weapons Dettmann has long been known for, where each tweak or shift delivers a moment of near-violent euphoria.

As a storied label emerging from hibernation, Ostgut Ton faces the dilemma of honoring its famed past while proving necessary in the present. In many ways, this compilation is a careful balancing act. It leans into the label’s history of curating both techno darkness and house light, which will delight those who long for a return of that Ostgut feeling. At the same time, more globally diverse and stylistically varied contributors acknowledge a subtle nudge, at least laterally, beyond the Berlin core.

Little Simz has continuously operated at a slight remove from the UK rap mainstream. Never quite grime, never fully soul, never easily boxed in. She's more akin to polymathic artists like Dev Hynes, whose genre fluidity is matched by their instinct for conceptual coherence.

The thirty-year trajectory of Planet Mu reads like the slow accumulation of a deviant archive; an ongoing catalogue of sonic extremophiles, genre miscreants, and rhythmic heretics. Founded in 1995 by Mike Paradinas, nominally as an outlet for his µ-Ziq productions, the label has long operated as a vector for electronic music's most stubborn nonconformists. Planet Mu 30, a sprawling 25-track compilation of new and previously unreleased material, neither eulogises nor summarises the label's prolific past.

The storied history of trance has long been Eurocentric. While the 1990s trance boom was dominated by European hits, DJ superstars, and megaclubs, a parallel movement was flourishing across the United States.

Felix Manuel, known as Djrum, returns after a six-year hiatus with Under Tangled Silence, a sprawling album of creative reconsitution inspired by a Patti Smith quote: “We go through life.

O.B.F and Sr. Wilson's two linked EPs, 'Heavy & Loud' and 'Firm & Strong', released on Dubquake Records, are built precisely for the session moment when the bass ceases to be heard and starts to be felt.

Unlike here in Romania, he root of American horror is not Dracula. It the plantation. The original site of blood-draining, of bodies used up and discarded, of spirituals wailed into the fields. America is not the theatrical kind of vampire. It is something much cruder and bloodier, a shape-shifting organism that gorges on Black labor, culture, and spirit, leaving the bones to rot in shallow graves.

The second full-length album from aya, hexed!, is a dense and formally disorienting release that resists conventional critical framing. It can't be categorised by genre or affect; instead, it presents as an unstable system that attempts to function but is continually undermined by the conditions it has created.

On a sunny April Saturday afternoon in the park, Andreea Lăcătuș sat with me for a revealing conversation on the stakes, strategies, and struggles behind Romania’s most politically attuned documentary film festival.

These days, music should not be made for times of peace. It needs to be made for grinding down your molars, cackling maniacally in new media solitude, and what's playing in your head when your phone lights up with its endless scroll of bad news

Jungle music was born from breakbeat hardcore fusing with Jamaican sound system culture on UK soil. Defined by rapid breakbeats, cut-and-paste samples, and chest-rattling bass, it carried the rebel spirit of reggae soundclashes into the European rave era.

Gorgon Sound is the collaborative alchemy of Joe McGann (Kahn) and Sam Barrett (Neek) dedicated solely to reggae-dub investigations.

On a spring night in Bucharest, Control Club vibrates before a single word is spoken. Gathered at the city's sound system faithful for the eighteenth installment of the Black Rhino Residency.

By the time End Beginnings landed last week, the myth of Sandwell District was already half fossil, half flare. This is not a mere return but the reanimation of a fractured, aged, yet unmistakably alive sonic body. And if that body walks with a limp, it's one earned through a decade of silence, estrangement, and, most recently, grief.

Canadian composer Tim Hecker has meticulously arranged static storms into intricate cathedrals from digital decay for two decades. His albums like Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again (2001), Harmony in Ultraviolet (2006), and Ravedeath, 1972 (2011) established him as a formidable presence at the intersection of noise, melody, and melancholy.

A Westside Gunn release is a rotating gallery of luxury, violence, and divine intervention. If Pray for Paris was an ornate medieval fresco, then 12 is a faded Renaissance sketch scrawled in blood, where its beauty is worn into the fabric of its imperfections.

Hardcore thrives in the margins, basements, and back rooms where bodies collide. Through the various manifestations of late-stage capitalism, California's Bay Area knows this better than most.

When you talk about UK sound system culture, one name echoes through the streets: Aba Shanti-I. From his early days as Jasmine Joe, an MC for Jah Tubbys, to commanding his own legendary sound system, Aba Shanti-I has spent over three decades shaping the vibrations that move both body and mind.

The poetics of reclamation have long been Anthony Joseph’s artistic lodestar. His corpus eschews fixity, expanding at the volatile juncture where history and futurity, oral tradition and avant-garde formalism, Caribbean epistemologies and radical ecologies intersect.

Traxman, a battle-hardened architect of Chicago’s percussive underworld, commands footwork’s volatile pulse. With his first major album release in over a decade, Da Mind of Traxman Vol. 3 isn’t just a comeback.

Few names carry the weight of bass music like Mala. His uncompromising and raw sound isn’t just about shaking the mind as much as it is about shaking walls. He’s the architect of weighty frequencies, a producer who turned bass into a spiritual experience.

Showbiz! doesn't rush or beg for attention. Like its creator, MIKE, it moves through space, always between cities, thoughts, and eras. The Brooklyn-based, London-raised wanderer has built a career on steady pacing while the world around him spins out of control.

Killing Time's meticulous production and thoughtful collaborations create an experience that resonates on multiple levels. Numa Crew’s production is the glue, while Killa P adapts effortlessly to each style.

A Field Guide to the Void invites us to lose ourselves in a world where nostalgia and futurism coexist, humor and darkness intertwine, and the cosmos feels both vast and strangely intimate.