One Route Through 2024
Oli Warwick draws a line through a loosely connected tangle of standout, predominantly dub-minded music released over the past 12 months.
What’s been good this year then? Well, a lot of things I haven’t even listened to, no doubt, so I’m not going to present some definitive list of the hottest / biggest / baddest music etc. of 2024. Instead I’m going to whip through a load of stuff I wanted to cover but didn’t get round to, with plentiful links so you can have a listen and snaffle up anything you think is decent. Support the music you love directly–fuck Spotify.
Starting on the fringes and working my way in, it was great to see John T. Gast maintaining the Web 1.0 vibe on his 5 Gate Temple site, where you can buy all the releases cheaper than on Bandcamp. The Junior Loves 12″ Redraft / Piper 32 was a standout slice of high-pressure steppas spliced with haunted hardcore in the early AFX vein. Nova Varnrable unfurled a staggering piece of post-punk electronica on her EP pulling awaythat have or just couldn’t’ do it love u. Peering into 5TG feels like stumbling across a secret society cloistered from the world, and that was a trend that kept manifesting when hunting down sincere sounds outside the mainstream. Twin System continued to grow as a label with the third instalment of their compilation series (featuring the likes of DJ ojo, Angel Hunt and Notte Infinita) and rounding off the year with Lamina’s excellent aqueous ambient album Olas Curativas.
On the London tip, somewhere between the semi-mythical portal of the Bermondsey Triangle, clubs like Spanners, radio stations like Kindred and friendly outside gatherings like Three Wheel Drive, a fascinating network of crews and labels like Twin System and Oneiric (carrying CD-only releases from IZM and ML) are emerging. The sound is a curious one, absolutely shapeshifting between ambience and danceable rhythms and hard to pin down, but frequently dub informed, often embracing live percussion and instrumentation, fed on a diet of all tempos, able to tread the line between serious experimentation and humorous flippancy. The thread runs westward from the big smoke to Bristol, where Accidental Meetings spend at least half their time organising gut-busting line-ups and running their own misfit label. The recently dropped second appearance from B.Rupp, Pop Music, is a knockout blend of dank grunge, thrumming industrial and half-time thunk, while the many highlights of the label’s prolific year include Dijit’s majestic neo-trip-hop LP Wisswass, YOKEL’s grubby beat EP 4 A.M and FKA Boursin’s gossamer, none-deeper house meditations.
The free-spirited, open-hearted experimentation circulating amongst these constellations of artists seems to spool out across the world. Amman-based Drowned By Locals continued to carve out an imposing, impossible to ignore route through genuine outsider sonics ranging from Saint Abdullah and Eomac’s abrasive beatdowns on Light meteors crashing around you will not confuse you to the wild mixtape ride of Memphis-referencing Jordanian-Palestinian hip-hop courtesy of DJ Gawad on VOLUME 1. Over in Beirut, the unflinching experimentation of the scene orbiting Tunefork Studios and Ruptured Records continued to press on even as Lebanon was relentlessly shelled by Israel’s brutal forces. Under the circumstances, albums such as Snakeskin’s achingly beautiful, cracked dream pop opus They Kept Our Photographs took on a profound significance, while SANAM members Sandy Chamoun and Anthony Sahyoun linked up with Jad Atoui for the visceral, many-layered Ghadr – غدر.
Accidental Meetings forged a connection with Nyege Nyege in Uganda this Autumn, inviting three separate project from different parts of Africa to Bristol for collaborative residencies and live performances with a sharply curated swathe of UK artists, including Arsenal Mikebe with Valentina Magaletti, Ossia and Dal De Saint Paul. Arsenal Mikebe’s album, Drum Machine, was a brilliant blizzard of percussive intensity on another standout year for Nyege Nyege. Need we even point out how goddammed omnipresent and consistently brilliant Valentina Magaletti has been this year?
Elsewhere, Accidental Meetings also linked up with Meakusma Festival in Eupen this year, an event and label which has been nurturing this kind of endlessly curious, misfit music for a long time now. The label continues to be a source of surprise, from Viola Klein’s off-kilter house variations to the stunning DIY beat downs and dreamscapes of Pieter Koch’s Bright Bars From The Stars.
There’s an insular, wistful quality to a lot of the music which draws parallels with the 3XL extended network, a similarly sprawling collection of chillers tweaking at the edges of ambient, downtempo, techno and dub. mu tate stood out this year with the sumptuous subtlety of his album wanting less on Slovakian label Warm Winters Ltd. Ulla & Perila’s linked up for the fractured, whispered but almost-grooving Jazz Plates on Paralaxe Editions.
Equally occupying their own zone were Montreal’s Doo crew, headed up by SnP500, who linked with DJ Frog and PLO Man for rugged techno excursions that bring to mind the old-skool minimal techno you’d likely hear on Baby Ford’s Trelik label back in the day. Sentena and DJ Spence’s Smoke Barometer 12″ was a more slippery affair with a tangled array of collaborations from inside this seemingly insular pocket of East Canadian electronics. A special mention to the Patcool drop, which locked into a dense, smudgy groove for late-night rollers. While we’re talking about kinked variations on the house n’ techno template, we should give a special mention to Funn Bobby’s Quest Item, which found Bristol’s wayward son DJ October creating a sticky amalgam of dream house, lysergic Balearic and all-round boxy freak sonics across an essential long-player. The new Bristol label Bellyache followed up that joint with another exquisite album of tripped-out percussion and psychedelic synthscapes from Deep Nalstrom.
It seems a lot of labels were content to keep all options on the table as they grappled with the treacherous terrain of releasing music this year — those with the sharpest curation managed to make it seem like a chill process (I’m sure it wasn’t). Peak Oil seemed to broaden its palette without losing that micro-dub flicker which set the label apart at its inception. Just recently they delivered a knockout offering of skittering jazz-not-jazz from Max D and Matt Papich as Lifted, while Appleblim and Wedge’s Wrecked Lightship project made a standout contribution with Antiposition before Low End Activist made a surprise appearance with Airdrop (out to the mythical ancient gary on the cover).
The Activist also dropped Municipal Dreams on Sneaker Social Club, running a social commentary on council estate life in the UK through the prism of edged-out weightless and shapeshifting bass vignettes. That label found itself embracing less rote forms of breakbeat and soundsystem music, whether carrying Christoph De Babalon’s punk-seared snarls or Luke J Murray (Stonecirclesampler) getting twisted over gutter-dwelling garage as Liquid DnB – like Ambient Grime 2. Don’t sleep on the stark and deadly grime-adjacent pressure cookers from T5UMUT5UMU either.
Overall the bigger dance music labels in the leftfield of the scene continued to bring forth freshness, whether flipping the script or simply perfecting the formula. Ilian Tape remains a brilliantly curated fortress of bassy techno hybrids, with a stuffed 2024 schedule that took in scores of highlights from Atrice nailing the smart and detailed 140+ vibe on Multiplex to Djrum alias Struction bringing twitchy braindance sensibilities to dub techno and Mantra shelling down some roots-licked dubstep for real heads. Her Burn & Heal 12″ pairs so well with her Schemes & Dreams drop on V.I.V.E.K’s System Music, proving her to be one of the most on-point dubstep producers despite her widely recognised role driving the vibrant jungle movement at the helm of Rupture.
It feels obvious to say it, but Livity Sound feels consistently invigorating in the ill-defined zone where dubstep and techno once crossed over. The Azu Tiwaline and Forest Drive West collaborative 12″ was a mesmerising meditation that truly seemed to bring the best out of both artists while delivering something absolutely club ready, at least in dances where there’s space for subtlety. Albeit much more upfront than that outlier 12″, Peverelist’s two Pulse EPs were incandescent beams of rave joy without even a hint of saccharine. Perhaps the mirror image can be found with the kind of springy, tweaked techno favoured by the Fever Am camp. Rhyw’s live sets and Mor Elian’s DJing brought bright, weird playfulness to the upper echelons of the global gig circuit, manifested in Rhyw’s charmingly spannered, unabashedly big workouts on Melt In Unison.
Al Wootton has become an incredibly prolific, consistent source of misfit techno with a dubby emphasis, delivering sterling 12″s on Trule from the taut invocations on River Songs and Albacete Knife and dipping his toe into chugging acid territory as Committee while also releasing percussion-rich minimal from Richard Wolfhouse. To cap it all off, he also quietly put out a whole tape of incredible, eerie minimal and ambient on Berceuse Heroique. The man has been busy.
There’s actually something of Seefeel’s haunted, post-punk tinted dub experimentation about Wootton’s sound, and that band made a welcome return with a new EP on Warp. They also played alongside early shoegaze-dub pioneers A.R. Kane for a sizeable showcase put on by Jabu in Bristol. The influence of shoegaze was noticeably felt in leftfield music this year, with Jabu in particular evolving their sound further away from dub and into suspended, blissed out slowcore on A Soft And Gatherable Star. Jabu’s VMO$ also brought his sad-eyed sentimentality to some perfect, dusty miniatures with Boofy.
That’s just a tiny snapshot of the relentless torrent of music that passed by our eyes and ears this year, but hopefully it points to the rude health of creativity and resourcefulness in more ‘underground’ circles. Wider socio-political forces seem diametrically opposed to flourishing music cultures, and yet even in places where bombs are literally falling from the sky there is a brilliant, defiant spark of creativity that refuses to be dimmed. The game can feel rigged more than ever these days, but through the pockets of scenes described above there’s a fragile support network keeping the wheels turning. Artists and organisers seem more determined than ever to make things happen — maybe the fraught economics of a music career in a cost of living crisis demand it, and perhaps that’s at least a silver lining to harder times.
Full respect and gratitude goes out to everyone making the music happen against all odds, and to anyone who has kept up with International Orange’s scattershot output over the past 12 months. It’s not easy for most right now, everyone’s skint, but whatever happens the music keeps coming. We’ll sift through and shout about exciting outsider bits and pieces as best we can — there’s already plenty in the pipeline for the coming year.
Much love,
Team IO x
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