Planet Mu Records

Ben Cardew interviewed Chicago's finest, Jana Rush, at Primavera Sound 2023 to talk footwork, depression, jazz and so much more.

Line Noise Episode 132 (Jana Rush at Primavera Sound 2023)

Ready To Go.

Tune into Ghost Notes Worldwide for that post-twilight sound. Night time music of all strains, with blunted R&B and hip hop instrumentals, neo-downtempo productions, slow jams, and hazy dancefloor sounds. 
https://www.nts.live/shows/impey/episodes/impey-24th-august-2023

Ghost Notes Worldwide w/ billdifferen: Funk Special 240823

For the past few years, RA cover star Jlin has been churning out complex percussion compositions that sit at the intersection of IDM, trap, mutant techno and sound art. Her tracks are tactile and structurally complex, stacked drums interlocking with glistening melodies and heaving basslines on groundbreaking albums like Dark Origami. Her rhythms gracefully crosscut over one another like towering blocks in an architecture sketch for a truly cerebral experience.

Growing up in Gary, Indiana, the former steel factory worker wears many hats. She produces mind-bending club music—usually for Mike Paradinas's label Planet Mu—scores modern dance performances and arranges for instrumental ensembles. Her process of collaboration is deeply symbiotic, as shown on her new EP, Perspective The acoustic version of the record, written for and performed with Chicago's Third Coast Percussion, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize this year, an unprecedented honour for a dance music artist.

Jlin's style is sometimes described as avant-garde, but modernist is a better word. She originally started out making footwork and despite moving away from the genre in recent years, footwork's jittery energy still flows through her productions, a testament to her ability to experiment across styles. Being a math whiz only adds to the angular, carefully calculated feel of her production.
 
In celebration of Jlin's career, Mike Paradinas serves up a 40 minute mix that shows off her range and most importantly, her passion for this music.

@mikep @jlinnarlei

Read more at https://ra.co/podcast/903

RA podcast

RA.903 Mike Paradinas (ft. Jlin)

The Precision Of Infinity (ft. Philip Glass)

µ-Ziq - HYPER DADDY (SLIKBACK REMIX)

Gastro

Remix of Goodbye, Goodbye by µ-Ziq. As endorsed by the man himself: https://youtu.be/qlaQpymmVu8?t=5102

μ-Ziq - Goodbye, Goodbye (New City 16 remix)

Welcome to Line Noise. My guest this week is Catherine Backhouse aka DJ Bunnyhausen aka Xylitol, aka the winner of the first ever Line Noise album of the year for her absolutely divine Anemones, released by Planet Mu. And a very worthy winner she is too. We talk about “Gutter Kosmische”, prog jungle, Gesamtkunstwerk, Yugoslav pop culture, the Belgrade Bananarama and everything in between. I hope you enjoy the interview. And do give Anemones a spin. Line Noise is with the support of Cupra.

Line Noise Episode 193  (Album of the year 2024 with Xylitol)

REPAIR AUTHORIZATION REQUEST |

this sopped up hymnal eats birds |

Authorize Repairs?

Jlin returns with the first fruits of her new work since last years ‘Free Fall’ EP. ’Dark Lotus’ is a transition between 'Dark Energy’, her debut album, and her forthcoming ‘Black Origami’ full-length. 

A-side ’The Escape of the Blvck Rxbbit (ft. Avril Stormy Unger)’ is the more traditional of the two tracks, starting off proceedings with a constantly switching rhythmic structure and a stop-start sweeping hoover stab panning between the speakers, descending bleeps and Avril's vocals cut into shapes and pushed through effects.

B-side ‘Nyakinyua Rise’ races headlong into uncharted territory, with a fierce barrage of djembe drums over pounding bass, punchy war cries and jubilant uluations that paint a tension between hot aggression and weightless ecstasy.

Nyakinyua Rise

https://planetmu.bleepstores.com/release/85964-antwood-sponsored-content

@margaret-antwood

Antwood (a.k.a. Canada's Tristan Douglas) returns to Planet Mu with his second album 'Sponsored Content'. The album is more reflective than his debut, last year's 'Virtuous.scr'. The relentless mood of the first album has given way to a more melodic, stripped out sound. It still shakes with speed and energy, but with more space, more moments of delicate sadness and strange cyborg pop. What comes to the fore in 'Sponsored Content' is Tristan's gift for melody, coupled with the uncanny feeling that somehow his strange music is an entire ecosystem of it’s own. It's best explained by Tristan himself:

"This record was made during a very challenging year. Some of these challenges were for the best, some were not, most were both, others were neither. The music is inextricably tied to these events, whether I like it or not, and I’ve begun peeking out from behind my self-imposed veil of heavy conceptualization; revealing things about myself that my previous album Virtuous.scr didn’t."   "In the past year, I found that ASMR, which I had previously used as a source of foley in my music, was a fairly effective sleep aid. I’d been using the videos in this way for a few months, when I noticed a popular ASMR YouTuber announced a plan to incorporate ads into her videos; quiet, subtle ads, woven into the content. What bothered me about this was that these ads would target viewers, such as myself, during times of semi lucid vulnerability. This disturbed me, and I unsubscribed."

"Sponsored Content explores this idea of subversive advertisement, at least superficially. It’s obviously about the ubiquity of ads and the commodification of online content. The unlikely placement of ads in the music aims to force the listener to become hyper-aware of being advertised to rather than passively internalizing it. But after the record was finished, it became undeniable that really it wasn’t so much a “concept record” about advertisement; it’s as much about intentionally devaluing the things I’ve invested myself into, and over-complicating my work. When I realized this, I considered taking the ads out, and playing the music straight. But I left the record as it is: honest, flawed, with a little humour, and slightly up its own ass."

"I collaborated with El Popo Sangre (a.k.a. Paulin Rogues) for the visuals after he showed me his short film “Fantasy” which used several tracks from Virtuous.scr. He and his team at UNICORN added a depth to the project I could never have done on my own."

Antwood - Wait For Yengi

Taken from Ziúr's debut of the same name, released 6th October 2017 on Planet Mu / Objects Ltd.

Buy: https://planetmu.bleepstores.com/release/87000-zir-u-feel-anything

Ziúr - U Feel Anything? Released - 6th October 2017

Planet Mu are releasing two special limited edition cassette tapes for Christmas 2017, one by Claude Speeed and this one by Ekoplekz. As the title suggests, Cassettera assembles a further 10 tracks from the same sessions as Ekoplekz's recent Bioprodukt album, to be released as a cassette & also digitally. 

The beats are still to the fore, even incorporating elements of techno and house, but the mood is darker, with a heavier emphasis on noise and drone textures resulting in a more uneasy listen. This greyscale outlook is reflected in the monochrome variation on Bioprodukt's sleeve art. 'Bass 2 Dank' and 'Jacktrak' apply solid kicks and grooves for moody dancefloors, whilst 'Formative' and 'The Imperitive' combine convoluted percussion and cloying sub-bass with eerie atmospherics. 'Tactile' and 'Nitrate Abuse' offer minimal user-unfriendly experimental textures and the set ends with the extended grinding dread of 'The Outlook Is Bleak'.

Cassettera

Ekoplekz - Jacktrak

Claude Speeed’s ‘Other Infinities’ is a diverse companion release to the well-received ‘Infinity Ultra’ LP from earlier this year.

Speeed says "I see this mainly as an alternative take on how the album could've turned out, one of the many paths it might’ve gone down. But it also serves as a neat ending, closing off that period by releasing the other material that's been kicking about my mind and harddrives for the last 5 years."

The material on ‘Other Infinities’ reaches into the darker corners of the world portrayed in ‘Infinity Ultra’, the uncanny valleys of the near future. Obliterated rave sits alongside twisted computer-generated prog rock; cathartic noise is pitted against submersed piano and dreamy, night-time synthscapes. New age meditation and lonely autumnal sadness compete with the intense drumming of a neo-tokyo cult.

Other Infinities

Claude Speeed - Spectral Trance

East Man is a new project from Anthoney Hart and its material predates his previous work as Basic Rhythm. His unique take on grime reduces the sound to its steely fundamentals, bringing in influences from dancehall, drum and bass and techno to gird the voices of the MCs he works with. His own name for this hardcore continuum mongrel is 'Hi Tek'.

Anthoney struck a friendship with the academic and theorist Paul Gilroy, who wrote the album introduction below, after starting personal research on representations of working class and mixed race families. He asked Paul for some help after coming across his work via Stuart Hall, Paul's mentor. Their discussions and friendship developed, and it dawned on Anthoney that his research and the East Man album had some synergy, so he asked Paul to write a piece conveying that. 

 - - -

London’s young people have been seen as a problem by governments for many generations now. Their distinctive street cultures stretch back into the nineteenth century when, just like today, a stylish public presence signified danger to respectable people. At that time, Britain’s class conflicts were being re-made amidst all the glorious fruits of a global empire. Divisions like class and sex had different shapes and tempos that hardly resemble the machinery of our increasingly networked and unequal world. Religion, racism and nationalism were all important, but work, exploitation and poverty supplied the fiery core of politricks.

These days, Britain’s imperial wealth and prestige are long gone. Today’s young people are excluded and marginalized, confined and criminalized, yet they remain at the heart of the vital, energetic best of our city. Their energy and imagination drive London’s convivial culture. They duck and dive just like their predecessors. They hustle, they suffer and they survive. Even where knives are common, most of the problems that come up get resolved without murderous violence. The defining experience of their precarious situation is more likely to be fear or anxiety than warfare between gangs. Their violence is more likely to turn inwards on to their loved ones and family members. There are many forms of self harm and self medication.

Yet the space in which those youthful lives unfold has contracted. The scale on which life is lived has shrunk. Moving around can be expensive. Surveillance is constant. Dignity and certainty are difficult to find and hold on to. It can be hard to feel comfortable outside the spaces and places you know best. Those familiar circuits are marked out by the roadside shrines of dead flowers that show just how vulnerable you can quickly become.

We have been losing London to Babylon but we are busy making a new place. The edges of the city have become fertile. The weeds grow up explosively between palisaded concrete boxes and the litter-strewn greenery. This is not zones 1 and 2 where houses and flats are capital rather than buildings to live in. The music that comes out of that edgy world isn’t what it was a generation ago, but it’s still fundamental--necessary for life.

These shocking sounds can be a part of healing and repair while staying faithful to the pressures that forged them. Musicians can’t make a living from their creativity, but their listeners can’t understand this historical moment unless they get to grips with its local rules, meanings and poetry. This is not America. Even without words, this music speaks for itself and tells a story. It calls out to be understood while seeking ways to escape interpretation.

We are always more than either this or that. We are more than either black or white. 

Paul Gilroy 2017.

Ekoplekz - Jacktrak

Planet Mu Records

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