YUKU (Official Release Playlist) - 2

Een selectie opvallende releases die afgelopen maand ons pad kruisten.

WH —  #MAANDINMUZIEK: juni 2025

The Rain In Endless Fall

Sleep Eternal

Anmon - Danse Macabre

Anmon - BassFatigue

Anmon - Dune

Anmon - Quadrilogy

In The Sun

Dr. Rubinstein - Take This Pill - UPPR 004

"This feels like my most complete body of work to date. Showcasing my true feelings & emotions was the prime factor in the early process and weighed heavily in the development of each sound. With most of my production now, I like to inject a layer of emotion. Throughout the EP you’ll hear sprinkles of metallic pads, airy vocals and meandering baselines that invoke nostalgia — this is a really important emotion for me when I’m writing music and my most valued tool. It’s my deepest connection and allows me to really explore my creativity. To be teaming up with YUKU is a real pleasure – this is the perfect home for Thermal Blue and I’m thrilled to be working with such a prestigious label."

– Debba

Thermal Blue

Make It

"It feels like at the moment, we're lost in the long dark tunnel. Plenty of dance music seems to operate in a revivalist form, within a regression cycle, it's hard to pinpoint the exact sound of "now" without it referencing other points in history.

"We're trapped in 20th century culture on higher definition screens", poses Mark Fisher in a seminal lecture, and thus, exposes Berardi's concept of the Slow Cancellation of the Future. "Nothing ever really dies, but that's not good". In 1992 it was impossible to imagine the shape of music 6 months into the future, so why are we now constantly going back to these genres?

My aim with this release was to try and participate in the legacy of the Hardcore Continuum within the sonic context of the current world. A hyper-online, overstimulated landscape where our attention is constantly invaded by notification after notification, stimulus after stimulus. I try to materialise this by reshaping sharp noise into pulse, genre staples like the breakbeat get torn apart and forced into a brand new skeleton, and riot-invoking grime chants are repurposed into music set for a bleak now. Jungle, Dub, Grime, Garage, they are all present here, but the heavy gravitational pull of their legacies presents to me as a black hole I've tried to encapsulate in this EP.

Why is the future vanishing?"
—Pépe

Grane Drum [YUKU]

When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be

Leah

Leah (Hassan Abou Alam Remix)

MindsEye

Encounter

Having delivered one of 2024's best debut albums, Nandakke?, Belgium-Japanese duo Aili have spent much of the past 12 months bringing their kaleidoscopic collision of electro-pop, electronica, house music and more to clubs and festivals throughout Europe, Mexico and Japan. Not wanting to leave us hanging though Aili Maruyama and Orson Wouters are back with two new club ready tracks, Damewadame and Shindara, the vibe of which will be very familiar to anyone who's caught the band's live show and experienced the moment their neon hued electronic pop gives way to a calorie burning blast of beats, bass and strobe lights.  

Whilst these new tracks have already made themselves very much at home in Aili's lives sets, their origins lie in the soundtrack to an upcoming Belgium TV series, Drift, that the band were invited to score. The series follows a group of 20-something Brussels friends, navigating the shifting sands of sex and love in the 21st century, and Aili's music provides a perfect backdrop as they explore the increasingly relevant issues such non-monogamous relationships, trust and consent that young people are dealing with today.  

The first track here, Damewadame, was originally created for one of Drift's party scenes. When it came to turning the original 30 second or so snippet into a complete song Aili wanted it to reflect not just some of the themes of the show but the band's own concerns with what's happening in clubs in Belgium, and indeed around the world, today. The result is one of Aili's harder tracks, that veers more towards industrial edged techno and where rattling percussion and overdriven bass underscore the urgency of Maruyama's vocals.  

“Here I’m literally singing 'Yes is yes. No is no,' as the song is about consent in clubs," she explains, a hot button topic in Belgium in the wake of several high-profile incidents of spiking and sexual assaults. "It's an important subject, especially in clubbing environments where people take drugs, or they're intoxicated, and it can become a blur and people use that as an excuse. There's been a few cases in the news recently and it's good it's finally being taken seriously as all my female friends have a bad story, and some of my male friends too. So this is just a simple but clear message, a yes is a yes, a no is a no. Even if you're intoxicated you know what that means.”  

With many of the scenes set in Brussels' vibrant clubland Aili needed to provide an appropriately up-tempo accompaniment and for inspiration looked back to a track written for their very first live show when they needed something explosive to end the gig with. Never properly recorded until now, that intense end of set workout has been vastly overhauled. Now retitled Shindara, the track eases us in with a soaring, almost meditative intro, that sees Maruyama's vocals, glitch, echo and misfire over a bed of numinous ambient textures, before the drums and acidic synths kick in and drag us back to the dark of the dancefloor. Fitting for a song that, as Maruyama explains, ended up entering some fairly philosophical pastures.  

"The lyrics [in Japanese] are essentially about 'when I die, where do I go?' And I just don't know because I don't really have a religion to fall back on, but still it's something I often think about. So Shindara has this very long intro which is very light and uplifting, and you feel it's taking you somewhere peaceful but then it was fun to play with that idea, to have this big existential question and then turn it into a huge club track. It's a fun puzzle."

Aili - Shindara

Lucika (they/them) is an artist based in Brussels, Belgium. After years of composing music for others in theaters, they finally did something for themselves : a first solo release with Yuku. Coming from live sound design on & off stage, their field work consistently combines both a reflexive and an experimental practice with a variety of colours, from acoustic to electronic, introspective to adventurous, always focused on a precise rhythmic work. The outcome of this research is often a constructed deconstruction which slides aesthetically between the genres of bass, postclub and breaks.

Earth Memory Colander is a four-track tense and fragmented project that combines organic sounds, sharp rhythms and swarming noises to shape the backdrop of a peculiar story : the tale of Fruglub : a termite who has been chased away from home by their Queen, the termite Queen. Fruglub’s internal journey of confusion, introspection, and potential revenge mirrors the chaotic yet cohesive nature of the compositions.

“From above, all exists yet elsewhere persists,
Impact nails and luck saps
Beyond drought.
Will later exist
A mechanical solution
A fold of memory colander where my wince swarm
An Earth plunge
Fruglub incorporates.” 


All tracks produced and mixed by Lucika
Mastered by Sam at Precise
Artwork by Queenie F. Charles
Set free into the wild by YUKU

Mechanical Pterostigma

As dez faixas do álbum Stash Bag Vol 5 do Raja Ram mixadas por Pepe Higgs.

Raja Ram Stash Bag Vol 5 Mixed By Dj Pepe Higgs

World University of Prayer and Fasting Session for those in the Prayer Ministry (3 Year Course): June/July 2019. Visit https://wupf.ztfministry.org for more