For the 9th instalment in DBA's Dubs series Ikonika and Big Strick square off head to head, following the Hyperdub artist's genre-defying Distractions LP earlier this year. Oral Suspension is an instrumental which switches rough-shod between a UK halfstep crunch and a Hoop Dreams era Chicago bounce. On the flip Big Strick brings his characteristic smooth groove to the table for the remix, which, though laidback, is nevertheless bound to energise the dancers. Evading the ubiquitous pigeonholes, Ikonika has variously been known for her dubstep innovations, her uk funky experiments on Hum and Buzz and her post-urban sketches for Hyperdub. Meanwhile though an interest in techno and specifically the sounds of the Midwest have underpinned her work. More

Ikonika returns with the 'I Make Lists EP', the first full extended release since her 2010 debut album 'Contact, Love, Want, Have' (Hyperdub). Hum + Buzz present 6 incendiary club ready tracks, her most accomplished and anticipated work to date. Taking a dark approach with 'I Make Lists' and 'Cold Soaking', these dubplate anthems have been the highlight of recent Ikonika sets. They both fuse paranoid, intense and ominous basslines with sinister and eerie lead synths. 'Take Pictures' melds a languid drum machine strut with reflective but focused melodies. The playful side of Ikonika is present in the Latino Freestyle influenced track 'Catch Vibes' and 'With Your Mouth', a stripped backed procession. These two tracks employ driving drums, acidic basslines and mischievous melodies. Bringing us to the finale is the majestic 'PR812'. Referencing the hijacking of a passenger flight in 2000, Ikonika crafts an emotive dance floor anthem with centre stage given to her original approach to melody and arrangement. Support from Mary Anne Hobbs, Jackmaster, Bok Bok, GIRL UNIT, and Eclair Fifi among others. More

A selection of the coldest and most DJ-friendly cuts taken from the first of the 3-volume LP "Greatest Hits" by the Ron Hardy of Night Slugs, DJ Helix.
More

Four trax taken from Helix's Greatest Hits Vol 2 LP. Classic house, disco and ATL rap motifs reimagined as rough-and-ready nu skool Club trax. More

3 hard, loopy. rolling techno-ish club movers taken from Helix's Greatest Hits Vol 3. A-side "The Lyot Remix" comes with a show-stopping triplets rhythm and guitar riff over 7+ minutes of jack track. B-sides go grime-tech and funky Club respectively, all unmistakably Helix.



More

Following on from last year’s “Your Charizmatic Self” EP, Night Slugs executive producer Bok Bok teams up with composer and keyboardist Sweyn Jupiter on a romantic new double A-side single. “Papaya Lipgloss” is a song about young love, presented in two distinct but equally weighty versions. Both mixes share a common melodic motif, skeletal yet sincere. The “Club Mix” draws on tribal House energy: a sweltering rhythm built of Latin percussion, Linndrum funk and pumping subs, over which melody gradually unravels in bursts of stark, juicy colour. Synths form a sensual narrative, remaining ever poised even as their pulpy goo engulfs all surfaces. This is intimate club music that brings a new kind of intensity to dance floors. Meanwhile, the “Sour Mix” is saturated and dripping with bitter-sweet nectar. This version sees “Papaya” transformed into an opulent bedroom jam, complete with quaking kickdrums and purring Moog bassline. A halftime drum kit of dumpster-drive 808s keeps things gritty while melodic goo leaks from between all the cracks. More

Girl Unit's club-dwelling Hysterics alias makes his first appearance on the Night Slugs main series. His opening statement via Club Constructions Vol 5 introduced a dungeon world of hydraulic rhythm tracks driven by primal exertion. Hysterics EP offers a first glimpse of colour from the artist (mainly oxidised bronze!). "Club Life" is built of gated amp feedback and a pummelling beat like a hardcore re-edit that rewinds on itself every 8 bars. It approximates the effect of rave, 90s tribal bangers and MAW rhythm traxks, with an added 2015 aggression inspired by the Vogue scene (apparently reciprocated, with"Club Life" receiving regular plays from MikeQ). "HTRX9" is a stuttered bass rhythm that opens up into a delirious bright pads & noise. A filter house sports theme that submerges into deep tribal house before re-emerging for an elevated final round. "Eye Mask" is heroic 8-bar filter house, the constant organic movement of the filter over the resampled chords, like slow breathing, inducing a strange and disorientating euphoria. "Empty" - the comedown from "Club Life" -closes the EP on a moment of rare afterhours poise, beautiful pianos submerged and frozen in time, steam jets filling the air and Club kicks bumping.
More

NEANA makes his Night Slugs debut with two huge bootlegs. Both sides showcase the young producer's unique style, melding Grime, Ballroom beats and the NS Club Constructions manifesto into a new club sound of all his own.
More

An artefact from a perfect studio long abandoned, Bok Bok drops this alternative "Deleted" mix of his new single "Melba's Call". This version will be available on limited 10" vinyl only, as part of the Night Slugs White Label series. Both the original mix (released digitally March 31st) and this version feature Kelela, the powerful vocalist behind the smash Cut 4 Me mixtape, released last year on Fade To Mind. Bok's instrumental melted in the trash, mangled tape dragging his cyborg funk to an excruciating, ruined Memphis-like quarter-time. Meanwhile Kelela remains as immediate as ever, evoking R&B greats from a cannon she is clearly set to join. To be played loud and preferably in the dark.
More

Night Slugs' Whitelabel series continues with two new re-takes on tracks from L-Vis 1990's Ballads EP. Pairing a VIP mix from L-Vis 1990's personal crates and yet another vicious bootleg from Helix, these stark dystopian remixes allow both producers to follow their impulses towards the dark side. L-Vis 1990 applies the ‘Varied In Production’ treatment to his brutalist club jam “Ballad 4D”, restructuring and stripping away many of the original track’s layers to make room for chopped, shuffling jungle percussion and a startling stop-start motion. The result is a broken riddim designed for an entirely different dimension.? Helix reconstructs “Not Mad” into a skeletal, grimey predator, adding stealthy subdued moments that give way to a full on percussive assault. Helix has made a habit of re-forming his labelmate's tracks, working only with the original masters in his ongoing quest to bootleg club music into his own reality
More

Egyptrixx gives a glimpse into his forthcoming second album on Night Slugs with the vinyl-only cut "Water (Reduced)". The hi-definition crystalline world of his previous album "Bible Eyes" has sunken, submerged. "Water" takes place in some vast molten expanse, a subterranean electrical storm expressed as acid-tech. This 12" features the reduced dub, stripped of melody to for full hypnotic effect. The full version can be heard on the forthcoming album, titled "A/B til Infinity". On the flip: Helix keeps bootlegging our records. He cuts up the masters and edits them up like Fruity Loops lego, applying the same post-Timbaland stutter-logic that was amplified so dramatically in 03-06 grime. Here he puts his hand to Egyptrixx' blastbeats-heavy "Adult", also taken from the forthcoming "A/B til Infinity" LP. The results are extremely punishing but compelling listening.

More

Toronto's Egyptrixx (real name David Psutka) returns to Night Slugs with his immersive second album "A/B til Infinity". Since his 2011 debut LP "Bible Eyes", Psutka has been busy with various studio production projects as well as recording and touring with his side-project Hiawatha. His return as Egyptrixx takes the form of a multi-media collaboration with Berlin-based visual artist A.N.F. (Andreas Fischer). Together the pair focused on a process - a set of 'meaning-through-reduction' principles applied to both sound and video - with atmosphere, repetition and texture given priority over traditional ideas of narrative and song structure. Fisher's visuals began to take shape, depicting molten off-planet environments, strange underground realms and volcanic caves lined with arrays of fluorescent light tubes, and Psutka responded by soundtracking these new digital environments. The resulting nine tracks and their accompanying series of videos and images became "A/B til Infinity", a mesmeric environment rendered in the crystalline HD that has marked out Egyptrixx' work since his earliest productions. The music is by turns meditative, violent and evocative; glassy and earth-shattering. Here sound-design and song-writing are one and the same - Psutka stretches a DX7 to its limits, its shuddering hits deployed throughout. 808 and Simmons drum machines pound extreme-metal blastbeats, then disappear into gaseous SFX, a rockpool in a virtual cavern. Digital choirs intone and beautiful synths envelop everything. Necessary forays into club territory on lead 12" cut "Water" and the tribal locomotive "Alta Civilization" are seamless, their akinness to Techno or EBM feels incidental to this record's greater experience, though DJs may definitely disagree. Looking back, "Bible Eyes" now seems like a wide open expanse, while "A/B till Infinity" lets its listener hover with it in the eerie synthesised twilight depicted on its cover.
More

It's Jam City's turn to deliver a batch of sweaty, streamlined dancefloor weapons on the 6th installment of the Club Constructions series. The minimalism and intensity of Jersey Club music remains a huge influence on the whole Night Slugs camp, and while Jersey's impact can be felt across the CC series, Jam City channels those devastating ghostly kick drums like none other. Continuing on from where he left off with club favourites "The Courts" the "How We Relate To The Body", Jam drops 5 lean and intense drum workouts build from scrap metal and primed for warehouse use. They move between thudding midrange persistence and just-sub-and-air minimalism, framed by jammed drum machine rhythms and splashes of re-sampled colour. Jam decorates these sturdy and well-deployed undercarriages with silvery detail, percussion fragments, broken talkboxes, whispered vox and simple, beautiful chords.

More

With Volume 5 of the Club Constructions series we introduce Hysterics, a new project from Philip Gamble, better known as the breakout Night Slugs producer Girl Unit.
While G.U. continues to exist in a bright digital universe that stretches beyond the dancefloor, Hysterics lives in the club. Hysterics tracks are reductions of visceral percussion and bass that connect with our basic instincts. The three cuts on this volume are the result of an experimental production processes, incorporating tape feedback, raw drums punched in manually and percussive parts that are allowed to take unusual lead roles. The resulting recordings are intricate but highly robust rhythm trax - the oppressive EBM-tech of "Pleasuredrome" juxtaposed with a show-stopping DJ tool in "Code Switch". The tracks sound like heavy industry: pistons, valves and and exhausts pumping and hissing, hammers pounding. But as machines they are not self-powered - the sound of human exertion is ever present: heavy breathing and gasps as each track is operated manually, man intersecting with machine in a collision of steam and sweat. Club Constructions is a series focusing on rhythm tracks, wild DJ tools and stripped down music made directly for the dance floor.

More

Atlanta-based Helix expands on the techno/grime hybridity hinted at on his hit "Drum Track" 12" with the newest installment of Night Slugs' Club Constructions series. It's apt that some of the original material shortlisted for this release was lost to the digital tides, subsequently having to be restored or rebuilt in Night Slugs' London studio during a visit by Helix in late 2012. The chaotic nature of his movements is mirrored in Helix' productions. Taking a strong influence from the into-infinity a/b switch of 8 bar grime, "Whoosh Ice Dispenser" is a dense and turbulent drum workout, riding out on top of massive pitched 808 subs. Unexpected respite comes half way through in the way of a single but wholly transformative chord, a rare moment of human emotion for Club Constructions, but certainly restrained enough to fit the bill. "Track Titled 1" is a club tool of epic proportions - Jersey kicks patterns paired with one single chord stab are pretty much the only ingredients here, but Helix' flanger does all the work, driving ever upwards with G6 intensity. "Linn Jam" is the ultimate Club Construction, as pure as L-Vis' first installment, comprised entirely of pulverising Linndrum blastbeats (think metal drumming). In typically irreverent fashion Helix uses this as a skeleton for a trancey, submerged arpeggiator workout on "Linn Jam w/ Synth". First premiered in Bok Bok's NSMIX, "Damnson" closes the EP on a note of cavernous, hard, club-banging techno.
More

3 brand new vital club tracks from L-Vis 1990! In the 18 months after releasing his debut album "Neon Dreams" the NS label co-curator, DJ and maverick producer L-Vis 1990 has been firmly refocussed on club music. 2011's "Club Constructions Volume 1" on NS, and more recently his contribution to Clone's Jack For Daze series saw him explore sweat-drenched, jackin analog techno and classic hard-house flipped with a uniquely UK perspective. While the aim of these releases was explicitly to create functional club 'trax' that felt sweltering in the dance, in contrast "Ballads" is L-Vis' first true artist statement since "Neon Dreams" - a set of bizarre, show-stopping pieces designed to spiritually open up the club. With every release the Night Slugs landscape becomes more vivid, rezzing further into existence with each track. 2011 saw "Classical Curves" and "Club Rez EP" inject a previously wireframe environment with dense new texture. The "Ballads" EP continued that process, transposing the listener to the flooded underwater realm of its title track "Ballad 4d". Fans of the track's YouTube rip have dubbed it the 'submarine tune' for its obscene, living bass, like some mechanical whale cry. It's the sound of a '00's Sublow bass tone emerging from warm '80s analog oscillators, letting you up for air before sucking you down once again as drum fragments and debris float by through the murk. The track moves with a vast, sighing implication of a groove until suddenly propelling into decisive 4x4 as L-Vis lets the the drums take control again. "Not Mad" is demented, a guitar-pedal troika powered by an overdriven electric bass and Jersey kicks. It features a clapper with the giggles, a talking flanger and sawtooth stabs that beam across the track like strobes, all combining into another startling, endothermic groove. Like some of the best grime productions it echoes, "Signal" is an exercise in dancefloor shock and awe through reductionism, and is the surprise club bomb of the EP. Out of nothing but droning chords comes a massive arpeggio of Juno bass pulses framed only in silhouette by sonar bleeps, finger snaps and self-recycling industrial machinery. A loose ghostly beat start-stops to create vast chasms on the dancefloor until reinforcement from a stiff EBM snare flips the track into rigid functionality - like exploring a flooded world that is suddenly, briefly reanimated. More

Amens on Night Slugs? OG Grime producer P Jam serves up a curveball on the latest instalment of the White Label series. Known for seminal beats such as "Anger Management" and "Real", P Jam's old skool productions were right among the canon that influenced Night Slugs so much in the days before we were Night Slugs. Recently P Jam has been developing a unique production style that incorporates intricately edited hardcore breaks into an updated grime sensibility. A style that is ingeniously deployed on the A side of this 12" - a sub-heavy 2013 jungle 'cover' of a certain very famous Frankie Knuckles production - which is a concept that's just too perfect for the NSWL series. And it's built solid and razor sharp. Ecstasy guaranteed on this one! On the flip is a bonus cut, another 'cover' of the same track, but this time the breaks, rolling sub and conceptual rave domination are stripped away, creating a skeletal dub version. The icy 808 drums lets the Frankie's sweet melody breathe until a nasty squarewave bass cuts the track in half.

More

The newest installment in our NSWL series sees us borrow two brand new tracks from the forthcoming Night Slugs Allstars Volume 2 compilation, cut to glorious 12" vinyl (with love and care as always by Precise Mastering). Two highly melodic, colourful R&B/Hip Hop instrumentals dripping with Slugs flavour. On side A, the unstoppable GIRL UNIT expands on his gloopy, warehouse-sized rap beat "Double Take". Teasingly previewed in the outro of "Double Take Part 1" from his "Club Rez" EP earlier this year, now Girl Unit finally lets us have "Part 2" in all its bittersweet glory. The drums and FX of the original are deployed this time over deep analog bass, gorgeous layers of synth melody, DX7 bells and flanged toms borrowed straight from Prince. Few others could pull it off with such charisma. On the flip, new NS signing, Kansas-based MORRI$ gives us "White Hood". Already sounding super confident, the young producer has cultivated a style that mixes subtle but powerful influences from Southern rap with highly melodic layered instrumentation and organic percussion. "White Hood" is driven by an irresistible accordion hook, framed by skittering hi hats, snare rolls and a massive 808 undercarriage. Having mixed both sides of this release, NS executive producer BOK BOK takes the opportunity to strip down "White Hood" and pass its bare essentials through some lovely analog gear on the bonus cut, his "Accordian Dub". Listen to that chorus sing! More

Following the release of his exceptional debut LP "Classical Curves" earlier this year, Night Slugs present Jam City’s second single from the project, and arguably his boldest statement yet. “How We Relate to the Body” marries Jersey Club’s gravity-defying kicks with jubilant, funk-inflected, dance hall-reverbed stabs that are both euphoric and giddying, narrowing the divide between the anthemic and the intimate. It’s both a mission statement and a demonstration that on Earth, this is how we relate to the body. A timely reminder of the visceral thrills of humans dancing next to humans, and a dancefloor anthem in the making. Chasing the tail of side A, side B turns said floor upside-down. A snapshot of club ecstacy slowly turns into a meditation, a mantra, a prayer, suspended in infinity until the grooves run out. It’s Chez N Trent on infinite loop, Daft Punk with the pause button, a hymn to The Loop. It’s also a goodbye to the world of Classical Curves, but, in classic Jam City-style it leaving more questions than answers. Support from Ben UFO, Oneman, Kode9, Martyn.

More

For the third installment of our Club Construction series we proudly re-issue a modern classic straight out of Baltimore, USA. Now "Bring In The Katz" isn't an old track, so why are we re-releasing it so soon? Because it's been the biggest dancefloor bomb in our sets for months and we feel it deserves attention far beyond its native Baltimore Club scene. A few words about the track itself - a "Think" break and big 808 kicks are a staple of the genre and they're deployed here with precision. MC PORK CHOP commentates on the track's structure, calling on KW GRIFF to "Bring In The Katz", referring to a quintessential scat sample from the proto-Ballroom classic "Din Da Da" by Kevin Aviance. "Katz" is the epitome of an endothermic club track - once those "katz" drop get ready for the walls to cave in. A Club Construction through and through. On the flip L-VIS 1990 gives us his dub mix. Stripping out the break and most of the vocals and focussing in on the hyper-rhythmic scat stab pattern of the original, L-Vis beefs up the bass and adds a cowbell to the equation. A simple process but a dramatic transformation that results in the most streamlined and effective pieces of club music we've heard in forever.

More