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Full Article → https://www.onthewax.com/sounds/exclusive-mikal-returns-to-metalheadz-with-the-incredible-metalwork-lp-featuring-the-genius-rave-infused-breaks-and-pads-otw-premiere

As one of the most lauded and celebrated figures in Drum & Bass, the Swedish-born, now Bristol-hailing beatsmith Mikal has always pushed boundaries and preset, defined norms, never once being held down by the genres and concepts that are set in stone for so many. With a gritty, succinct production aesthetic and a real ear for the what’s what and who’s who of the subterranean underground, Metalheadz’s ‘silent assassin’ (coined by Goldie) retains one of the most impressive, multi-faceted back catalogues in the scene, breaking new ground with each passing release. Over the years, we’ve seen him excel on long-time collaborator Mako’s stellar Utopia imprint, Break’s distinguished Symmetry Recordings, Ant TC1’s legendary Dispatch Recordings, Horizons Music and plenty more alongside a surefire selection of previous drops delivered through that phenomenal, iconic Metalheadz membrane.

Introduced via Headz’s Genesis series, the Immaterial EP and Wilderness, his debut full-length offering on the historical imprint, Mikal’s emphasis on tight, squared-off, no-nonsense Drum & Bass has led to a large following of fans who just love this sound and approach, and this is evidenced in full by this new masterful album, which just oozes immaculate, refined taste and fully delivers on every single level, with each and every track primed straight for the jugular.

Taking the form of an unapologetic ode of sharp, cascading breakbeats and rave-ridden, eardrum-rupturing bassweight, Mikal returns to Metalheadz with the simply staggering Metalwork LP, a barbaric 16-track tsunami that continuously ups the momentum and heart rate from the first track, all the way through to its mesmerising closing stages. Featuring collaborations with in-demand mic man Visionobi, RIOT and DJ Thor, as well as 13 jaw-dropping solo productions, Mikal asserts his dominance in full here, presenting a mind-bending polymerisation of that quintessential Mikal flow and the sleek, hard-hitting Headz throttle that we all love and cherish.

Realistically, we knew we needed to pen a separate full piece to cover the LP in its magnificent entirety, which will be available to read very soon, but for now we’re humbled to host, premiere and exclusively present one of our favourite cuts from the project: ‘Breaks and Pads’. Here, we’re treated to a bruising, melodic, hard-hitting uppercut of vicious, seething breaks and percs, scything background aesthetics and ragga-etched vox, all perfectly drawn and tied together; the defined mark of an wholly experienced electronic titan. Described by the Headz crew as an ‘instant Metalheadz hit and a linchpin to the whole project’, Breaks and Pads cements its place as one of the most essential licks on the LP. Out to Mikal and Metalheadz on yet another awe-inspiring drop, this might just be the finest album you hear this year. 

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→ @mikal
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OTW Premiere: Mikal - Breaks And Pads [Metalheadz]

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.            “It’s not like I’m using,” Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. “It’s like my body’s developed this massive drug deficiency.” It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke. The Chatsubo was a bar for professional expatriates; you could drink there for a week and never hear two words in Japanese.            Ratz was tending bar, h is prosthetic arm jerking monotonously as he filled a tray of glasses with draft Kirin. He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork of East European steel and brown decay. Case found a place at the bar, between the unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone’s whores and the crisp naval uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with precise rows of tribal scars. “Wage was in her early, with two joeboys,” Ratz said, shoving a draft across the bar with his good hand. “Maybe some business with you, Case?”            Case shrugged. The girl to his right giggled and nudged him.            The bartender’s smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of legend. In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. The antique arm whined as he reached for another mug. It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic. “You are too much the artiste, Herr Case.” Ratz grunted; the sound served him as laughter. He scratched his overhang of white-shirted belly with the pink claw. “You are the artiste of the slightly funny deal.”            “Sure,” Case said, and sipped his beer. “Somebody’s gotta be funny around here. Sure the fuck isn’t you.”            The whore’s giggle went up an octave.            “Isn’t you either, sister. So you vanish, okay? Zone, he’s a close personal friend of mine.”            She looked Case in the eye and made the softest possible spitting sound, her lips barely moving. But she left.            “Jesus,” Case said, “what kinda creepjoint you running here? Man can’t have a drink?”            “Ha,” Ratz said, swabbing the scarred wood with a rag, “Zone shows a percentage. You I let work here for entertainment value.”            As Case was picking up his beer, one of those strange instants of silence descended, as though a hundred unrelated conversations had simultaneously arrived at the same pause. Then the whore’s giggle rang out, tinged with certain hysteria.            Ratz grunted. “An angel has passed.”            “The Chinese,” bellowed a drunken Australian, “Chinese bloody invented nerve-splicing. Give me the mainland for a nerve job any day. Fix you right, mate…;”            “Now that,” Case said to his glass, all his bitterness suddenly rising in him like bile, “that is so much bullshit.”             The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn’t repair the damage he’d suffered in that Memphis hotel.            A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void…;The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he’d cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn’t there.             “I saw your girl last night,” Ratz said, passing Case his second Kirin.            “I don’t have one,” he said, and drank.            “Miss Linda Lee.”            Case shook his head.            “No girl? Nothing? Only biz, friend artiste? Dedication to commerce?” The bartender’s small brown eyes were nested deep in wrinkled flesh. “I think I liked you better, with her. You laughed more. Now, some night, you get maybe too artistic; you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts.”            “You’re breaking my heart, Ratz.” He finished his beer, paid and left, high narrow shoulders hunched beneath the rainstained khaki nylon of his windbreaker. Threading his way through the Ninsei crowds, he could smell his own stale sweat.             Case was twenty-four. At twenty-two, he’d been a cowboy, a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He’d been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz. He’d operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck hat projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. A their, he’d worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data.            He’s made the classic mistake, the one he’s sworn he’d never make. He stole from his employers. He kept something for himself and tried to move it through a fence in Amsterdam. He still wasn’t sure how he’d been discovered, not that it mattered now. He’d expected to die, then but they only smiled. Of course he was welcome, they told him, welcome to the money. And he was going to need it. Because––still smiling––they were going to make sure he never worked again.            They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin.            Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.            The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective.            For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh.             His total assets were quickly converted to New Yen, a fat sheaf of the old paper currency that circulated endlessly through the closed circuit of the world’s black markets like the seashells of the Trobriand islanders. It was difficult to transact legitimate business with cash in the Sprawl; in Japan, it was already illegal.            In Japan, he’d known with a clenched and absolute certainty, he’d find his cure. In Chiba. Either in a registered clinic or in the shadowland of black medicine. Synonymous with implants, nerve-splicing, and microbionics, Chiba was a magnet for the Sprawl’s techno-criminal subcultures.            In Chiba, he’d watched his New Yen vanish in a two-month round of examinations and consultations. The men in the black clinics, his last hope, had admired the expertise with which he’d been maimed, and then slowly shaken their heads.            Now he slept in the cheapest coffins, the ones nearest the port, beneath the quartz-halogen floods that lit the docks all night like vast stages; where you couldn’t see the lights of Tokyo for the glare of the television sky, not even the towering hologram logo of the Fuji Electric Company, and the Tokyo Bay was a black expanse where gulls wheeled above drifting shoals of white styrofoam. Behind the port lay the city, factory domes dominated by the vast cubes of corporate arcologies. Port and city were divided by a narrow borderland of older streets, an area with no official name. Night City, with Ninsei its heart. By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky. --Reprinted from Neuromancer by William Gibson by permission of Berkley, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright © 1984, William Gibson. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. 
Hooked on the rush from each time i play in front of magical people.
Deep minimalist.

booking : jakubxbooking@gmail.com

IG : https://www.instagram.com/jakubpaksi/

member of Organic Beatz crew 

IG : https://www.instagram.com/organic.beatz/

"Niemand ist mehr Sklave, als der sich für frei hält, ohne es zu sein."

J.W. Goethe

SteppA is a producer from Dublin with a passion for making dance music of all kinds. He started out making dubstep and house/techno/garage but but has moved onto Drum & Bass more recently.His tunes have been played on national radio in Ireland and the UK. as well as currently on a russian label called Trilobit records and also releases with e.p releases here in Ireland,Uk & America.Steppa has been producing for over 14 years now and has tunes range from 100 bpm too 175 bpm.
He is also alongside another talented producer https://soundcloud.com/b-origin-dublin

Releases :
*Trilobit Records - (Russia) 2013 - Dubstep
*Disassemble and Rebuild/FutureGarage.net (US) 2014 - Garage
*Hyde Electronic - (Australia) 2016 - House
*Alaya Audio - (UK) 2017/2018 - D&B
*Inhabit Recordings - (Ireland) 2018 - D&B
*Mor Records - (US) 2018 - Chillstep
*DnbbRecords - (Brazil) 2018 - D&B

Forthcoming Release's 
- Mental Disorder Recorings 2019 (Bulgaria)

junglist, dnb, gabba, wavey, hip hop, deep bassy connoisseur

Bookings and contact trafiq@hotmail.co.uk

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