M.E.S.H.

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For her Crack Mix, upsammy’s architectural and shape-shifting approach to sound is in full force. “This mix is more on the percussive and clubby side of my sound,” she tells us, “focussing on a flow between adventurous rhythms with playful high frequencies, eccentric kicks and ambiguous tones”.

Check out the tracklist on crackaud.io: crackm.ag/45wnzX3
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Crack Mix 499: upsammy

upsammy at Polifonic Festival Puglia 2024 - Stone Stage

NTS 18.11.24 — buttechno invites Observer

The Dekmantel favourite kicks off 2025 in an exploratory mood.

Since her breakout in 2017, Thessa Thorsing has built an enviable CV: a debut release on Nous'klaer Audio, an album on Dekmantel and a residency at former Amsterdam clubbing institution De School. Over these years, she's honed a singular sound, navigating wild variations in tempo and mood that dance along the edges of techno, IDM and drum & bass (we could list many more, but you know the drill).

Her creative arc has seen her delve into ever more abstract concepts, such as 2024's ambient-leaning album, Strange Meridians, exploring the interplay between synthetic and natural textures through drumless experimentations. As she explained in her 2018 RA Breaking Through profile, "I just want to hear the weirdness in the music."

Thorsing's RA Podcast showcases exactly why she's one of the most  consistently adventurous names in dance music. Describing it as "a mix with a narrative," the former landscape architecture student flexes her ability to build sonic environments, beginning in a landscape more akin to a swamp than a club.

Across 90 minutes, she moves through numerous layered terrains, exploring everything from Skee Mask's lucid, beatless techno to the piercing acid of Mike Parker. Unfolding with a restless sense of curiosity, RA.970 captures an artist challenging the boundaries of electronic music, ever upward.

@upsammy

Read more at ra.co/podcast/970

RA.970 upsammy

JASSS (Silvia Jiménez Alvarez) is a Berlin-based DJ, producer, and sound artist from Asturias, Spain. A former resident at OHM and Berghain's Säule, her 2017 debut Weightless on iDEAL propelled her onto the global stage, with performances at Sónar, MUTEK, and beyond. She has held residencies at EMS Stockholm, Galeria Zé dos Bois, and Villa Massimo. In 2020, she released Turbo Olé / We Solve This Talking on Whities, further cementing her avant-garde approach.



Bota by Night w/ JASSS @ Kiosk Radio 14.03.2025

NPLGNN @ Lost Music Festival 2024

I am using a midi controller again to make stuff.

- Made with Fl Studio.

- Made with Fun.

- Made with Online VSTs/Sound packs.

Data Phazer - Tom Blazasary

Back in 2016, Skee Mask and Zenker Brothers spontaneously attempted to play together at an afterparty in Prague, but after ten minutes the electricity failed. Two years later they finally had the opportunity to play a joint extended set for the first time - at Unsound Kraków 2018. The three DJs closed Saturday night in Hotel Forum with an expansive set building on adventurous forms of techno, jungle and broken beat, combining the collective interests of Ilian Tape. The set kicked off at 4am in the Ball Room.

Unsound Podcast 39: Skee Mask b2b Zenker Brothers

A master of kinetic percussion and low end bass weight, Hemlock, Timedance and Hessle Audio producer Ploy (@deejayploy) has long been a techno favourite. On his most recent album, Unlit Signals on L.I.E.S., however, he mixes it up much more across nomadic tracks filled with visceral energy. In fact, the record chews up and spits out influences taken from "decades of UK dance" as well as plenty of harder, more raw and noisy industrial scenes. It features eight tracks all with a darker overriding mood, as well as "dishevelled closing hours delirium applied across a spectrum of bpm." 

That is of course the case on this week's podcast, which is a slippery selection of weighty rhythmic propulsions. As they pull you up, down, forwards and back, fractured percussion peppers the groove and twisted synths weave their way in and out of the cavernous spaces left behind. Whether playing slow and sludgy bass or hard and fast techno, Ploy seems somehow able to warp space and time, and often your mind and body are left just as bent out of shape.

Dekmantel Podcast

Dekmantel Podcast 302 - Ploy

Bristol's @giantswan came to dance music after formative years as guitarists in the band The Naturals. This lends them a genuinely outsider perspective which means their music breaks rules the pair of Robin Stewart and Harry Wright didn't even know existed. Coming on labels like Keck, Timedance and Whities, it is caustic and twisted, textured and dense with layers of abrasive sonic fuzz. Add in harsh vocals and unrelenting beats and you have a duo that sits in their own unique world somewhere between noise, techno, experimental and rock.

There is no concession to your lockdown life in the mix they serve up for us this week. It is a banging and thrilling collision of hi NRG techno, juke, hardcore and bass that bristles with confrontational energy and raw texture while making improbable leaps from Dizzee Rascal to DJ EARL, Kangding Ray to SOPHIE, SOPHIE to Theo Parrish.

Tracklist

Dekmantel Podcast 321 - Giant Swan

∄ is a cultural institution in Kyiv, established in 2019 on the territory of a former brewery, located at 41 Kyrylivska Street. It serves as a multifunctional space for club events like ∄ Community Events, Curated By, Enareї, for experimental music concerts like Miasma of the Real and other cultural events.

∄ also manages the in-house music label Standard Deviation. Established in September 2020, Standard Deviation is a multidisciplinary label for music, art and publishing, cultivating creative exchange between an aspiring Ukrainian scene and a global community.

K41 is the community-born name of the institution embraced and widely used by the public.

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∄ (K41) / Standard Deviation