Breaks | Breakbeat 346 Items

REZ18eighteen coming up soon on our home label Rezpektiva, with a release from Quaid (Ben Naylor) with his Cascade/Fusbares EP. Originally recorded for UK label Seraphim Records back in '98 but made available as 'promo only' so never fully released, it's two tracks of top level work. This release comes as a prelude to two albums from Quaid that will also appear on Rezpektiva in the near future.

Multidisciplinary artists Lex Rütten and Jana Kerima Stolzer alias A2iCE & BO3 are the faces behind Paryìa records’ fourth release – further manifesting Paryìa's role as a genre-bending entity while also expanding the artist’s respective portfolio. The debut EP Extracted Soil unites four enthralling tracks with broken beats and evocative percussions as the common denominator, including a remix by Mor Elian. With this release Paryìa brings together sound, art and physical elements, conceptually working around the artist's exhibitions, combining different formats and creating space to break out of conventions and experiment freely.

Tongue-in-cheek as usual, belleter Niklas Wandt melts up pianos, acid lines and bass heavy breaks as raw material for Die Glocke (The Bell). When the hunchback pours the lead of three decades of rave culture onto your lost souls, it’s too late for shelter. Fantastic Twins evaporates not just the bell but the whole bell tower into particles of peak time madness for the mental cases.

On the flip Bodyzeit heats up on an even more old schoolish tip with breaks that definitely win the bumper car dancefloor. Very sorry for the spilt drinks, thrown fags, popped pills, ripped shirts and funny faces trying to sing along these german vocoder phrases. Borusiade doing some serious bodywork, shifting gears down in her lowrider manner, modding this burner into a dreamish but deep wee-hour masterride.

Zach Murray is a fast-rising London producer who makes a great impression here with an ambitious and ultimately accomplished double pack on Oscuro. The title track 'Pieces Of The Puzzle' opens with sweeping ambient before 'Chill Pill' explores as glistening melodic world of futuristic tech and 'Can't Stop The Rain' has an old-school energy to its marching drums and rave stabs. There are also forays into acidic electro like on 'Keep Chasin'' and rugged breaks on 'Phase Me', elastic house sounds on 'Dubmotions' and cosmic turbulence in the trippy 'Dreams,' all of which show off this producer's versatility in style.

Dedicated 21st Century polymath Kay Logan continues to expand her soundworld in every direction at once with her Helena Celle alias. A maximalist internal landscape of broken Jungle patterns, distorted synths and heavily warped instrumentation bent out of cognisance, »If You Can’t Handle You At Your Worst, Then I Don’t Deserve Me At My Best« is Logan’s most danceable, most fun and most gloriously congealed record to date.

Conceived in part as a response to her 2016 debut release »If I Can’t Handle Me At My Best, You Don’t Deserve You At Your Worst,« 2023’s update employs similar principles (degrading technology, the joy of chance, an outsider’s gaze onto the dance floor, an embracing of the occult) to delirious effect. If »I Can’t Handle« was lo fi and fragile in its technoid recasting of dance music, here Logan’s confidence allows a frantic playfulness that retains the spontaneity of all her output. It’s the work of a creative spirit revelling in the possibilities of sound, rhythm, texture and pattern.

Helena Celle’s music opens up psychic space in front of the listener and invites them in. In this world, sounds and tropes once recognisable are rendered fractal, spectral and continually melting in and out of recognition. Simply put, Helena Celle might be detouring Drum & Bass, Techno and Breakbeat with a prankster’s grin but the result is pure ecstasy crushed into a part of the listener’s consciousness hitherto untroubled.

Since her 2016 debut, Logan has released music as Time Binding Ensemble, Otherworld, in groups Anxiety and Herbert Powell and myriad variations on the Helena Celle moniker. This album is a riposte to her debut and updates its principles. Joyful, degraded Jungle breaks, Cyberpunk synth meltdown, noise solos, true head music, like the furthest Aphex Twin being deep friend in a Glasgow backwater.

Gab002 sees Gimme A Break Records keep things local with a rowdy EP from Leeds-based DJ and producer Beerus. Over the last six months, Beerus has demonstrated his production power through two bodacious releases on Gunfinger Food’s new sub-label, Booty Frooty Records. Fusing UK styles including hardcore, acid and jungle with US staples such as electro, juke and footwork, Beerus has established a playful sound primed for the dancefloor.

Beerus’s “9000” EP opens with a hardcore weapon which combines rave stabs with Dragon Ball samples and an acid line threatening to spiral out of control at any given moment. “Play This Shit” sees the EP take a sensual turn as Beerus channels the sounds of Chicago with an enticing juke number. “Booty Acid” follows suit, offering up a particularly self-explanatory track title: luscious electro meets 303s. “Love4U” is Beerus’s love letter to the happy hardcore scene as a thumping 4x4 bassline collides with melancholic vocals and piano lunacy. Finally, Beerus rounds off Gab002 in style with the junglist mediation “DO U Want ME”.