Tempo Records sublabel TempoCore presents Pugilist & Tamen; with four True To The Core Jungle & Drum and Bass tracks. A diverse quality production with amens, drumfunk and heavy bass ingredients. This beautiful crafted LIMITED EDITION crystal clear vinyl 12? comes in a new designed Tempo Records "Logo" high quality "Kraft" outer sleeve + a white innersleeve. All tracks mastered by Stuart Hawkes of Metropolis Mastering, London. More

Hot on the heels of Dawn Razors “Blizzard EP” we are back with an EP from yet another hot new talent making their DEXT Debut “Mani Festo” has been on our radar for some time now releasing imprints such as Shall Not Fade , Sneaker Social Club , WNCL Recordings Lobster Theramin & Club Glow His tough & raw no nonsense sound which encompasses Techno , Electro , Breakbeat whilst paying tribute to UK underground sound system & Rave culture is exactly sort of heavy weight tackle that you would expect to see released on DEXT and this EP certainly doesn’t disappoint, expect speaker rattling subs , chest piercing distorted kick drums , mutated flanged breakbeats , dark and immersive textures and soundscapes not to mention a rerub of eyes open from fellow Club Glow comrade Denham Audio . More

Boasting a discography of over 18 releases, inclusive of composers such as Special Request and Mark Broom, through to Nightwave and Hodge, DEXT Recordings celebrate 5 years with a V/A compilation from label affiliates Commix (Endian), Appleblim, Otik, and Pugilist.

'eleVAte Vol. 1' explores the more profound and invigorating, sonic excursions that the label's artists have to offer.

Fresh from an EP on Midland's intergraded imprint, Otik returns for a disjointed offering with paranoid synth work and an arpeggio that fizzes through the tweeters.

Pugilist offers up dub stabs, analogue sirens with blips of space echo on 'Eclipse', with a garage swing and Rhodes, contrasting a ruff and ready sound palate of bass weight.

Metalheadz signee Commix, (AKA Endian), returns to DEXT for a tumbling UK bass track with swung percussion and side-chained textures of rising crackle.

Skull Disco, Applepips boss and dubstep icon Appleblim, returns from a recent album on Sneaker Social Club, offering 'Hydrothermal Vents', that sees him taint a 126bpm framework with his dubstep-tinged roots, providing room for the groove to move.
More

Jerome Hill, the man synonymous with the UK Underground for a couple of decades now arrives on DEXT with this 4 track EP and shows just why he is one of the country’s most underrated talents.
After his superb remix for Nightwave on our LTD label, we had to get him on board for an EP. The Super Rhythm Trax / Don’t Records boss really flexes his muscles on these heavyweight offerings – effortlessly blending super sharp drum programming with his signature “acidic bleeps and breaks” style, delivering 4 clever-yet-no-nonsense jams to make you move for a long time to come.
This is a man unquestionably at the top of his game both in the studio and behind the decks, and we couldn’t be happier to have him as part of the DEXT family.
More

Following on from the last DEXT Limited release by Otik & Dead Mans Chest we’re kicking off 2019 in fine style with another limited 10” Vinyl cut with the same ethos as the previous release’s , 1 rave banger with a killer remix on the flipside. This time we have invited Glasgow's party starter and long-time label supporter Nightwave to join the crew and it seems like she has been here all along. Psychic Tonic is exactly what we are all about rolling breakbeats and thunderous kick drums and is the perfect addition to the DEXT LTD series. And if that's not enough, another of our favourites Jerome Hill (Super Rhythm Trax) comes along for the ride, and flips it totally on its head on the Remix More

DEXT Recordings has reached it’s landmark 10th release, and we now enter our next phase with this very special 2 track EP from a vital part of our label: Bodyjack.
Aside from his collaboration with Special Request at the end of last year, this is Chris’s first new music under his Bodyjack alias since the Summer of 2016 (his “Cobra Effect EP” for us). His time away has helped him refocus, and its clearly paid off
“Nataraja” (Hindu for “Lord Of The Dance”) is one of those tracks we can’t actually describe, but it’sBodyjack on rare form. His signature quirky percussion & synthwork is stripped down more than on his previous work, but this is one works in so many situations, we can’t wait to hear what you think.
On the flip, “Tandava” (the name given to the dance of Nataraja!), is a peak-time Detroit Bass style workout with booming drops and razor sharp edits aimed right at the floor. More

With the 10th release milestone on the horizon for DEXT Recordings, a new LTD 10" vinyl sub-label kicks off with 2 heavyweights at the helm.
Special Request (aka Paul Woolford) and Bodyjack are 2 artists who completely embody the label's ethos, and they each provide something very special for the first instalment of the series. Say no more!!

More

Luca Lozano and Mr. Ho buckle up in the bucket seats and bring you a shiny new collaboration in the form of TWOCKERS. Club-ready and suped up Hard-House bangers with an injection of classic Rap lyrics that are sure to slay every dancefloor. This is not the sound of your favourite audiophile listening bar complete with gold plated Rotary mixer and wall of expensive unplayed vinyl, this is the sound of Southport's Manhattans nightclub in 1997. This is the sound of Vauxhall Corsa's driving down the M62 and Max Power compilation CDs with fresh hot rock burns in the casing. More

“‘A La Sala,’ I used to scream it around my house when I was a little girl, to get everybody in the living room; to get my family together. That’s kind of what recording the new album felt like. Emotionally there was a desire to get back to square-one between the three of us, to where we came from–in sonics and in feeling. Let’s get back there.” - Laura Lee Ochoa

The title makes it clear. A La Sala (“To the Room” in Spanish), the fourth studio album by Khruangbin, is an exercise in returning in order to go further, and do so on your own terms. It extends the air of mystery and sanctity that’s key to how bassist Laura Lee Ochoa, drummer Donald “DJ” Johnson, Jr. and guitarist Mark “Marko” Speer approach music. Yet if 2020’s Mordechai, the last studio album Khruangbin made without collaborators, was a party record whose ensuing post-lockdown tour enhanced the band’s musical reputation far and wide, A La Sala is the measured morning after. It’s a gorgeously airy album made only in the company of the group’s longtime engineer Steve Christensen, with minimal overdubs. It is a porthole onto the bounties powering Khruangbin’s vision, a reimagining and refueling for the long haul ahead. A La Sala scales Khruangbin down to scale up, a creative strategy with the future in mind.

It is also a response to the unique moment Khruangbin finds itself in now: following a decade spent cultivating extraordinary music paths, beginning a year when they'll perform for more people, in more iconic spaces, staging a live show that pushes a creative envelope peculiar to them alone. (Look for the band at major festivals and venues near you.) 2024 feels like both marker and pivot, cementing Khruangbin’s stature as a commercially and critically successful group that continues to be guided by creative possibilities.

Such crossroads are familiar for iconic artists throughout the rock era — your Dylans, Stevies and Bowies, up thru turn-of-the-century Radiohead, all have navigated these straits. On A La Sala, Khruangbin also pulls exploration inward, spurning the din of the crowd’s expectations, mapping a personal direction home. The trio’s collective musical DNA and the years spent constructing it in Houston’s local-meets-global cultural stew ensure the band carries on sounding like no one but itself. A La Sala may in fact be Khruangbin’s purest distillation. A cascade of crisp melodies still emanates from Marko’s reverb-heavy electric, dancing gently around Laura Lee’s minimalist almost-dub bass triangles, while DJ’s drums serve as the tightened-up pocket and unwavering dance-floor on which all this movement takes place.

Where prior album-by-album growth seemed to point the narratives towards music’s polyglot edges, such inquiries now sound like known intimacies. What once seemed like sonic invocations — spaghetti-western film scores, found-sounds, dancing moments more living room than rooftop disco — are ingrained characteristics. This is who they are! And there’s a freshness to the instrumental interactivity on A La Sala that’s less concerned with getting further out than going deeper in. That depth is not about therapeutic self-reflection, but a profound desire to celebrate the world’s external wonders.
A La Sala invites intimate intercontinental partying. The first single is, after all, called “A Love International.” “Pon Pón” holds the band’s table at the West African discotheque; yet the joy now moves to the corner left of the dancefloor, where the back-and-forth between Laura Lee’s bass, DJ’s hi-hat, and Marko’s tuneful rhythm scratches, is a marvel of knowing head-nods. There’s “Hold Me Up (Thank You),” a familial sweetness in its spare lyrics, feeding off the rhythm section’s sturdy funk shuffle, and a chorus on which Marko’s guitar evokes both sides of the Atlantic in confident unshowy rhythms. They’re on “Todavía Viva” too, next to DJ’s noir-soul rim-shots, synth strings and a pregnant pause that is Laura Lee’s favorite moment on the album, the mood kin to the band’s glorious live interpretations of G-funk fantasias. And the rocked-up miniature, “Juegos y Nubes,” demonstrates Khruangbin’s Houston-born superpower to culture-mix, a dancing mood less concerned with worldly glamor than communal grooving.

“I read something long ago, attributed to Miles Davis. He said, ‘When they play fast, you play slow. When they play slow, you play fast.’ And it's definitely how I've approached looking at music: Don't follow the trends. And if the trend is this, then do something else.” - Marko

From the get-go, Khruangbin’s journey has been emphatically its own: a sound and visual representation with few precedents, ignoring pop expectations, relying only on internal inspirations, and a multitude of visions. It’s a mindset of penetrating the self, connecting to the surrounding world, modeling your own life experiences. This ethos is threaded throughout A La Sala, audible in the album’s form and function. (It’s even visible in the vinyl version’s physical package, which will be released as a set of seven distinctive covers and color-sets — more on which in a sec.)

The building blocks for the album’s 12 songs were jigsaw pieces found in Khruangbin’s creative past. Having stockpiled ideas originally set down as off-the-cuff recordings (voice-memos made at sound-checks, on long voyages, as absentminded epiphanies), they began fitting those pieces together in the studio. Which parts were apt? Which could be massaged and stretched out? Which inspired new sections or rhythms or musical interactions? Once more, Khruangbin’s familial DNA kicked in. Layer-by-layer, the intimate work, rework and re-rework bore new fruit. They also brought back a strategy once foundational to their records: seeding an album with field recordings.

Some results fold directly into A La Sala’s down-home feel. “Three From Two” and “May Ninth” are wistful mid-tempo numbers, with guitar melodies that reside somewhere between Bakersfield and by-the-riverside, cues that, for all its borderless inclusivity, another core Khruangbin value is being steeped in American roots. And in the landscape that music comes from. Like all albums prior to Mordechai, Marko made sure environmental sounds — natural and man-made — appeared as textures. (At times philosophically: the group recorded while cricket chirps played in their headphones, presumably for terroir.) It’s how A La Sala achieves such interconnected set-and-setting-ness.

Other results are more metaphorical, especially in Khruangbin’s flirtation with ambient spaces. The dramatically beatless “Farolim de Felgueiras” and “Caja de la Sala” both feature only Marko’s unmistakable guitar dueting with Laura Lee’s Moog, lightly layered with sounds of shoes on stone steps, and cicadas in an open field. The closing “Les Petits Gris” more fully reduces and fleshes out the ambiance, with a piano and a simple single-note bass pattern, Marko’s plaintive spare guitar echoing the melody of a ballerina-turning music box. It feels an apt way of ending — as a passing of this particular moment, preparation for the next one, soon-come.

Even the seven different covers that adorn A La Sala’s various vinyl editions offer a throughline from the music into Khruangbin’s current frame. Designed by the band using Marko’s multitude of travelog photos, they are windows from the band’s living room onto a set of daydreams, scenes of impossible skies, external glances illuminating what is going on inside. These are also directly related to David Black’s images of DJ, Laura Lee and Marko which accompany A La Sala, and to Khruangbin’s live staging reinvention. It’s all about looking out and looking back, in order to better look ahead.

“All the little moments you capture. You don't see how impactful they are until you hear what eventually comes of them. A lot of those scraps end up being the thing — and you don't realize it until it's ‘The Thing.’” - DJ
credits
releases April 5, 2024

Produced by Mark Speer & Steve Christensen
Written, Arranged & Performed by Khruangbin
Art Direction: Tiny Frees
Mixing: Steve Christensen
Mastering: Chris Longwood More

Originally released on Studio !K7 Records in 1998, Peter Kruder and Richard Dorfmeister's groundbreaking release, 'The K&D Sessions' reset the bar for what could be achieved in a compilation. Across an array of original tracks, dubs and infamous K&D Session remixes, the DJ and producer duo took the listener on a smoke-filled blunted journey that flowed flawlessly. Often compared to DJ Shadow's 'Endtroducing' for it's similarly deft craft of rhythm and quoted by Allmusic as "the most blissfully blunted music the world has ever heard", the album has sold over 1,000,000 copies to date and was included in Spin s Top 20 albums of 1999 .

The album has long since been deleted on Vinyl with original 4LP sets changing hands for 300+ on the collectors market and even a bootleg vinyl copy will set a buyer back over 100. Sixteen years later, this legendary album will be available as a long overdue 5LP reissue remastered by Bernie Grundman Mastering in Hollywood. Finally back in print in 180g vinyl. More

From the French reggae band Dynamics' album 'Version Excursions' ('07), this cover by Roberta Flack and Gwen McCrae is now available on 7" with a Japanese imaginary jacket. More

Tracklisting:
A1 Soul Mass Transit System - Murderation (4 The Bristol Crew Mix)
A2 Soul Mass Transit System - 95 Selection
B1 Soul Mass Transit System - Gonna Be Alright
B2 Soul Mass Transit System - Listen

Sales Note
Time Is Now regular Soul Mass Transit System returns to DJ Mag's 'breakthrough label of the year' with an absolute monster speed garage cut. TIP! More

Tracklisting:
A1 Unknown - Midnight Owl
A2 Unknown - Violet
B1 Unknown - Forgotten
B2 Unknown - Tropical More