Let’s start this thing quietly, shall we?
I’m Michael McKinney, a writer based in Minneapolis. I’ve spent much of the past decade digging into modern club music—one of those ideas that seems straight-ahead until you crack it open and realize just how expansive it can be. I’ve found a lot of excitement in chasing that dragon, and it’s led me down all sorts of paths I couldn’t have predicted when I started this. The uncertainty is the game; the spinbacks and surprises are the whole point.
At this point, I receive fistfuls of promotional emails, and it’s too much for me to reasonably cover it in a more conventional format, so here we are. I’m not wholly sure what format, tone, or style this newsletter will take, to be honest, but I’ve got a feeling that shape will reveal itself in due time.
It’s worth acknowledging my biases up front here. One of the first CDs I fell in love with was The Prodigy’s Experience Expanded, and I have fond memories of listening to Kingdom’s XLR8R podcast alongside NGUZUNGUZU’s The Perfect Lullaby. I’ve been dipping my toes in various incarnations of electronic music for much of my life, in other words, and that’s unlikely to stop any time soon. That said, it’s by no means the only style I keep my eyes on. I expect this space to follow a similar cadence.
So: welcome to No BPM. This may billow or contract in the future; it may stay precisely the same. For now, though, consider this a loose survey of what’s moving me right now. Let’s get into it.
Annie A - The Wind That Had Not Touched Land
Ambient music isn't exactly predisposed to supergroups, but Annie A—a one-off collaboration between electroacoustic experimentalist Félicia Atkinson, longtime NTS residents and ambient-music curators Time Is Away, soft-spoken singer-songwriter Maxine Funke, spoken-word artist and poet Christina Petrie—might come close. The Wind That Had Not Touched Land, recently released on A Colourful Storm, is a thing of quiet disorientation: centuries-old folk-music traditions and modern-classical idioms locked in a hushed conversation, droning and whispering and circling each other with no clear end or beginning.
Throughout the record, Petrie anchors the clouds with spoken-word passages about the land underfoot, drawing on old nostalgias and immediate senses, lending even the most mundane ideas a kind of quiet gravity. Midway through, in a recitation about the processes that go into weaving, she refers to repurposing an old bed frame as a loom, and that idea—discarded ideas made anew by virtue of careful threading—could work as the guiding thread for the rest of the record, too. It is beautiful, serene, and a bit uncanny. (In case you’re keen to learn more about the ethos behind the group, I recently spoke with both members of Time Is Away for Passion of the Weiss.)
Darkness Darkness - Animation
If club music had a dominating narrative in 2024, it was pretty straightforward: dub techno is back. (Right?) Maybe, maybe not. The more interesting question for dub techno—a genre rooted in a million histories and bound up within pretty tight aesthetic boundaries—is where it might go next.
Enter: Darkness Darkness's Animation, which uses dub techno as a launching point towards all sorts of bleary-eyed abstractions, recasting it as a deeply psychedelic thing, with clicks and whirrs ceding some of their space to a dense fog. If pressed, I’d point towards Ghettoville, Actress’s scorched-earth sort-of-techno LP from 2014. (It’s also one of my favorite albums, full stop.) This is techno for after the storm has passed, for soundtracking a landscape that's barely recognizable.
I can hear all sorts of other ideas, too—Basic Channel looms large over this, of course, and one track is built off of weirdo choral-MIDI blocks that remind me of early Orange Milk releases. These beats suggest infinities in a manner not unlike, I don't know, Prince of Denmark's 8, and the ambience feels like Stars of the Lid tuned for an emptier Earth. This one’s for the baggy-eyed crowd.
Elmoe - Battle Zone
My favorite footwork has always had a touch of stardust. To pull a few recent favorites, there’s Heavee’s Unleash, a remarkable LP of retrofuturist video-game dance-battle music; Ripatti’s RA.785, a car-crash of bit-crushed samples and pitter-patter drum programming of which one commenter perhaps-derisively described as a “psychoacoustic weapon”; and Jlin’s Akoma, which saw the producer reaching into a small warehouse and pulling out a mountain of bells, drums, and whistles. (I profiled Heavee for RA and spoke with Jlin for Passion of the Weiss, respectively, if either of those sound like they’d be up your street.)
It ought to come as little surprise, then, that Elmoe’s Battle Zone hits so hard. Elmoe’s clearly a lifer of the stuff—he’s been producing footwork tracks for the past twenty years, and he started dancing earlier still. Battle Zone, a compilation which pulls from the past ten-odd years of his productions, shows Elmoe zeroing in on a highly specific vision of footwork, one that’s equally tilted towards dancers and headphone purists alike. I’ve not checked the BPMs on this thing, but many of the beats feel a fair bit slower than the 160 that footwork typically rides at; in either case, it’s packed with drums landing askew of when you’d expect, samples stretched out in unexpected ways, and bleary-eyed synthesizers. It’s not a ChopNotSlop footwork LP, but it isn’t not that, either.
Logic1000 - DJ-Kicks
DJing, as I’ve written a million times, can be anything. That’s half the fun! That anything-goes spirit is part of why I keep my eye on the bigger mix-series institutions, as few as there are nowadays—what visions of the format get institutional support, and what gets left behind in the process? If I’m being honest, I find more bang for my buck in my SoundCloud feed than official mix CDs, but there’s beauty in both. (For my money, the strongest mix CD of the ‘20s is still Mr. Scruff’s DJ-Kicks entry—a hurled gauntlet for million-genre blending if there ever was one, all delivered with a wink.)
Especially in a dance-music moment where maximalism seems to be the norm, then, Logic1000’s DJ-Kicks entry lands like a balm. It’s also a bit of a left turn: Logic1000 is best known for her house and breakbeat chops, not her ambient-music crates, and she’s more likely to land a 2 a.m. club-night slot than an 8 p.m. opener.
So, I’m thrilled to report that DJ-Kicks is, by and large, quite good. It feels like a survey of contemporary “listening music,” the kind of stuff every club-music producer started making when clubs briefly shut down a few years back: sludgy trip-hop, house music with drums that land like heartbeats, turgid synth-pop, keyboard workouts that move like the shifting tides. I’m reminded of the notes on a recent Dj Wiggles set: “There were only a few people left floating around the dance floor, everyone with their heads down and eyes closed, just swaying their bodies. My favourite time of night.”
Los Thuthanaka - Los Thuthanaka
In a statement to Pitchfork, Chuquimamani-Condori—one half of Los Thuthanaka—wrote: “This record is a milestone for me & my brother, bringing prayers for rain & gratitude. The music is part of our ayni to the relatives & our queer guardian, Chuqi Chinchay.”
There’s something about Los Thuthanaka, the duo’s debut record, that feels holy. Maybe it’s the blend of busted electronics, wild-eyed folk musics, and DJ-tool blasts; maybe it’s the ways its synthesizers seem to scrape the stars; maybe it’s way you can practically smell the sweat on these instrumentals. Los Thuthanaka follows Chuquimamani-Condori’s DJ E, a real mind-melter of an LP that smashed Andean folk-music traditions into new-school electronics. This is even more audacious still, a collage of rough-and-tumble dance music that sculpts blisteringly immediate forms out of all manner of ancient traditions.
The annals of dance-music writing are packed with pieces comparing packed dancefloors to particularly rowdy church services: joyful noise, barely contained delirium, and a communal push towards something greater. Maybe that’s trite, but there’s something real in it, too: aren’t we all searching for transcendence? Crank the volume on Los Thuthanaka and you might just find it.
Megabasse - Flamenca
The first thing that drew me to Flamenca was its artwork—and can you blame me? The piece is surreal and immediate at once, crumpling the distance between Medieval histories and freshly inked sketchbooks; it depicts some kind of tumult, but in a manner that’s undeniably playful. It’s a funny thing, then, hearing the music inside, which pulls off a similar trick through a wildly different medium.
Here, Pierre Bujeau, a Brussels-based sort-of-folk musician whom I had never heard of before last week, bends his guitar into a Möbius strip, creating a slow-motion tidal wave where the sheer muchness of it all seems to be the point. It’s not maximalism, exactly—the record moves too slowly for that—but it’s definitely a record where individual moments matter far less than the affect of the whole. It’s no coincidence that the first track (which, it should be noted, eclipses the twenty-minute mark) is my favorite: a stretched-out exploration of just a few chords, Bujeau chasing each note towards infinity.
As for the actual sound of the thing: A few days ago, I was visiting this while doing some work in the kitchen, and my partner walked in and told me a story about running past a grandfather clock as a kid. I’m not sure I can come up with a more apt description than that.
Memotone - Pruning
Memotone—a.k.a. Bristol-based experimentalist William Yates and O.G. Jigg—has been in my orbit for a few years at this point, but, regretfully, I didn’t get hip to his music until I tuned into his remarkable inis:eto session last April, which burrowed into the intersection of drone, noise, and folk music. It’s bone-chilling, austere, and plainly beautiful, and I’ve still not heard much like it.
Pruning, though, comes close. The LP, as you might infer from the name, sees Yates looking towards his own cutting room floor, building a Tower of Babel out of scraps. On paper, this thing is pretty inconsistent—to pick three, “Jim Starling and the Inverse Church” is some kind of dub-kraut jam session, “Risidual Scum” is an ambient-techno lullaby for sepia-tinged synthesizers, and “Batty” pairs a slo-mo sci-fi undercurrent with a topline that sounds like a theremin gone haywire. But it’s all bound by approach rather than sonic specifics; everything on Pruning contains a shared half-lucidity, sounding like the kind of material that might soundtrack a particularly memorable daydream.
MOBBS & Susu Laroche - ZERO
MEZZANINE, the SoundCloud account for a “trip hop and downtempo lounge” in Melbourne, doesn’t even have a dozen uploads yet, but they’ve built an entire world. A typical MEZZANINE set is a fever dream of curdled trip-hop and 4-a.m. ambience; it’s equal parts Romantically awe-inducing and disorienting. This is hardly a new thing for trip-hop, of course, but who cares when it’s this specific and skin-crawling? (Also of note, on the other end of the world: Accidental Meetings, a critical Bristol label working at the intersection of 100-BPM sludge and industrial music.)
ZERO, a recent smoke-bomb from London-based post-industrialists MOBBS and Susu Laroche, lands in similar territories to both aforementioned institutions, each track sounding like a dive straight into a cement mixer. Here, the drums feel less like percussion and more like distant explosions; the vocals are both deadpan and a bit narcotized; and the whole thing moves at a delightfully slow pace. It’s the kind of stuff I could imagine particularly daring DJs reaching for—”Roam” wouldn’t be out of place in an OKO DJ mix—but these are far from club tools. ZERO is dimly lit, bleary, and essential. Consider pulling this one out for your next back-alley excursion.
Soba Boba - That Moment
The liner notes for That Moment, a lights-out collaboration between experimental-rock mavens Pavel Tchikov, G.W. Sok (of The Ex fame), and a string quartet (two violins, one viola, one cello), double as a hurled gauntlet: "a so-called Oratorio from the present age." It’s That idea, at least to me, evokes all sorts of wild-eyed images: Old-Testament furies, "modern classical" at its most dissonant, damnation and discord. It's to its credit that That Moment, which dives into a chasm between contemporary hardcore and ancient classical music, bears out that imagery.
Here, three key elements—bleary-eyed classical music, scorched-earth hardcore, and street-corner preacher spoken word—come together to make something that is both delirious and strangely beautiful. Most classical-meets-hardcore records are, to be blunt, kind of gimmicky, but this one dodges those traps by leaning into their shared cacophony, finding a hard-earned kind of elation through popped veins, bass-blasted kicks, and storytelling that makes the everyday seem downright apocalyptic. Think an even-more-acidic Vessel and you're on the right track.
I don’t think everything on this works, necessarily, but I’ve not been able to stop thinking about this thing for weeks. It’s haunted and blistering and immediate, a real Gordian knot of a record that understands real awe is worth a bit of sweat.
Miscellanea
Back in January, MoMA Ready—a critical figure in contemporary house and techno, the head behind HAUS of ALTR, and a one-of-one DJ and producer—headlined at ACME’s PARADOX, an art showcase and club night I frequent. He was generous enough to meet up with me for a conversation beforehand; you can find that documented over at DJ Mag. (He recorded a mix for the feature, too, and it’s all gas.)
Barker, a Berlin-based electronic-music explorer, has spent years deep in left field, cooking up vertiginous techno, brain-bending sort-of-ambient music, and plenty other flavors of head-spinners. I spoke with him for Tone Glow; he’s a great hang and awfully sharp. You can find our conversation here. (His latest LP, Stochastic Drift, is out now.)
That’s all this time around—thank you for reading No BPM. Feel free to get in touch with me on Twitter, Instagram, or email if you’d like to chat.
A pretty good first one :-)