Planet Mu Records

'Night and Day' connects the dots between his musical tastes, from the 70's fusion and experimentation of Herbie Hancock and Stevie Wonder to the lush house of Theo Parrish, Larry Heard and Recloose, into drum and bass and dubstep, he rewires these influences into something that's totally exuberant and fresh, a soulful fantasy, indebted to older musical styles but still sounding bang up to date, surpassing any niggles you might have that this isn't just seriously good music.

The album opens with 'Joy FM', mixing moog melodies with warm early Detroit techno. The next track 'Spiral' builds vox chords against diva vocals and rich talk box harmonies, while 'Memories' works up a nervous melody with staccato chords. 'Jam' lets things roll out with a loose musicality, irresistible early 80's soul stylings and big moog synth. 'The Process' works broken beats under Philip Glass-like chords and funky keyboards, while 'Flux' crosses warm arpeggios with disco beats. 'Night And Day' captures the ambience of a party at sunrise at a Tropical destination, bittersweet and beautiful, followed by 'Fantasy for N' where beatless layers of electronics create a dreamy mood. 'LW' is a graceful mix of Jeff Mills techno energy and stringy disco, while '5 Bars' finishes the album with tough beats and chords mixing it up with ambient atmosphere.

Listening to 'Night And Day' is like being given an invite to an off-world utopia, and within time you'll be grinning from ear to ear, as this is serious fun.

2LP Includes 320 MP3 download card with Room(s) extended MP3's.

Travis Stewart is a producer who's always been admired by the electronic cognosenti, both as a solo producer in his project Machinedrum and also as one half of Sepalcure on Hotflush recordings. After a break from producing he started to resurface in a major way last year with the 'Many Faces E.P.' on Glasgow's LuckyMe label. However, for 'Room(s)', his latest album on Planet Mu, he's well ahead of the curve, approaching the album in a way he's never worked before.

The tracks on Room(s) were started on the spur of the moment, often whilst traveling and finished in the studio, with the notion in mind that great moments of inspiration are fleeting so it's best to grab on to that moment when it happens and squeeze it for all its worth.  Travis says of this process; "I feel like the energy of a song is lost the longer you spend working on it.  This experiment in becoming less attached to my work essentially lead to a lot of songs that are connected sonically and aesthetically."

On Room(s), this 'spur of the moment' energy meant that Travis' productions have turned the 160 bpm footwork conventions inside out. Here he fills the usually fierce, stripped down form with elegant sun kissed and impressionistic songs, built from r & b, autotune and dance music history's most exuberant stabs and kicks. Building on his background as a hip hop producer, he casually creates a beautiful new kind of high-speed detail-packed mutant pop that, like the early post-rave sounds of ambient jungle, is psychedelic, exhilarating and strangely relaxing in it's fast-paced washes of synths and drums.
 
The album opens with 'She Died There', building incomprehensible looping swirls of cut-up vocal over precise, cool synths and agile kicks and snares. 'Now U know Tha Deal..' builds a new romantic flavoured synth melody over flat, heavy bass, slowly adding tough diva vocals and layers of warm chords to create something that approximates uk garage in a different matrix. 'Sacred Frequency' marries organ stabs and a catchy psychedelic chorus to create a triumphant and completely unexpectedly dizzying anthem. On 'U Don't Survive' he mixes the dubbed out, autotuned lyrics 'Out on the street you don't survive, now is the time to realise' over garage stabs and half speed hip hop drums, creating an exhilarating, airy rush. 'Come1' approximates a linear piano rave tune, but morphs into a blissed out shoegaze anthem halfway, while 'Youuniverse' adds congos and swelling Detroit chords over cavernous bass swells.

The amazingly propulsive 'GBYE' cuts vocals up over sharp footwork-esque chord stabs like Todd Edwards on fast-forward, while 'The Statue' starts off minimal and dubbed out before building into a waterfall rush of needle-like snares and vocal loops. 'Lay Me Down' is sparser, leaving more space for dreaminess, building in woody, jungle-like drum breaks, while 'Doors' is more linear and subtle, adding in tiny details as it progresses, like a techno track. 'Where Did We Go Wrong?' finishes the album in an ambient style, with just the chords and vocals remaining, having omitting the rhythms, which by now might have been internalized by the listener to float away.

Last Step is an alias used by Aaron Funk, whom you may know as Venetian Snares. His new adventure is called 'Sleep' and - as the title suggests - it's a collection of compositions that Funk recorded quite literally as he was falling asleep. 

For those used to Funk's more abrasive recordings the slower, woozy tempos and soporific atmospheres may come as a surprise. Recorded using his own arsenal of analogue synths and sequencers, Aaron has exploited the wandering timing and pitch of these old beasts to produce uncanny and evocative detuning effects which add to the induced torpor. Even the track titles relate to the theme: 'Xyrem', a narcolepsy treatment; 'Cimicdae', a name for the bedbug family. So, while the atmosphere may be unsettling in places, the tempos and structures are those of an experimental house music album, with abstracted 303 acid lines and classic drum machines acting as a welcome familiarity as you navigate the odd time-signatures and plastic aural sensations of Last Step's hypnagogic world.  

In the words of the man himself:

"Sleep are tunes I recorded while falling asleep. These tracks are really different for me, really mellow and dreamy, that nice comfortable feeling when you're falling asleep. Feels pointless to describe it, that feeling, there really shouldn't be words for that state, so I describe the process a little instead. For awhile, when I was really tired and ready to go to bed instead of going to sleep I would make a tune. Get some stuff going on my sequencers, drum machines, patch up my modular and just jam it. Would fall asleep alot listening to the sequences, few seconds of sleep or a few minutes, wake up in it. This is what I sound like in my sleep."

You might be familiar with Konx-om-Pax previous work without already being aware of it. His real name is Tom Scholefield, he's from Glasgow and as a 3D film director and graphic artist he's made videos for locals Hudson Mohawke and Mogwai as well as Martyn, Jamie Lidell, Kuedo and Lone, sleeve artwork for Oneohtrix Point Never, Rustie, King Midas Sound and others plus he has toured with Mogwai as a DJ.

So how on earth does he find the time to make music, or the energy?

Tom explains that he makes music to chill out, a form of creative self medication. In contrast to his bright, synthetic and colourful artwork and videos, his music is more mossy and analogue. Often beatless, personal and located in a transporting surrealism, it's sometimes inspired by the idea of rescoring films and TV. 'Glacier Mountain Descent' for instance is a reimagining of the start of Werner Herzog's 'Aguirre'. Other times they're inspired by nostalgia for childhood feelings; watery immersion is a running theme and a sense of Scottish surrealism is another.

Tom started out making tracks as a teen, copying the synth lines he'd heard on prog house CDs, before graduating to a deep fascination with Jeff Mills and Drexciya's hermetic imagery and alien funk after hearing them on John Peel's show. This led him to creating lo-fi techno, then DJing and promoting events at artschool, which developed his knowledge, driving him to formulate an aesthetic of unpolished, textured and emotive music.

'Regional Surrealism' works largely like a film. Vignettes like 'Isotonic Pool' transition into larger more dramatic pieces like the deep 'At Home With Mum and Dad' which takes an early Aphex sounding ambient track and fills it with odd drama. 'Sura-Tura-Gnosi-Cosi' featuring mysterious US artist Steven Retchard is full of tape-hiss and unsettling spoken word, while 'Zang-Tumb' with guitar played by Mogwai's Stuart Braithwaite works in bruised and twisted Ash-Ra Tempel territory. Elsewhere 'Slootering' finds a sweet spot between Drexciya and Oneohtrix Point Never, while 'Lagoon Leisure' lets you get lost in musique concrete space and drops. Later on 'Hurt Face' rubs static and raw electronic textures together and 'Chambers' follows it up with a sunny glow. The album finishes on the water-themed 'Let's Go Swimming' which indulges in a slow-motion nostalgia, sending you away happy.

Brighton based producer Alan Myson's Ital Tek project returns to Planet Mu for a second long player.

Meeting dubstep and garage's matrix of sub bass and lurching 2-step rhythms half-way with electronica at its most melodic, 'Midnight Colour' is its name and it's epic. The mood has lightened since his debut 'Cyclical' plus the tempo has dropped to a more languorous 130 bpm creating more space to enfold the melody and texture.

Songs like 'Moonbow' or 'Subgiant' embody an optimistic nocturnal reverie that could count the Black Dog's 'Bytes' album as it's ancestor. In contrast, 'Satellite' has a darker feel with it's New Romantic style synth melodies set to a skeletal rhythm, and 'Black and White's surging, wordless vocals are carried by gentle synths and bass arrangements. 'Strangelove' has a more stepping feel, set to a tough 4/4 beat and 'Infinite' marries throbbing bass with marimba and echoing Timpani crashes. The album fittingly culminates with 'Restless Tundra', a song that features the vocals of Anneka, which feature in sampled slithers throughout many of the tracks, the piece summing up the reflective mood of the album.

The last few years have seen Chrissy working hard on the optimum formula for getting down and having non-stop fun. 'Women's Studies' is an album of party starting, populist mutations with vocal contributions from the Dancehall mcees MC ZULU, Rubi Dan and Warrior Queen, plus rappers Popeye, Coool Dundee and Johnny Moog. It's made with a brazen and unashamed love for dance music, mixing energetic tropes into a sticky tropical punch.

The influence of Ghetto House and Juke from his chosen home of Chicago hangs over the album. From the off, things get fleet-footed on 'Break You Off' with it's night-time atmosphere built from Rhodes chord progressions and sexy vocals over tight, subtle rolling footwork drums and bass; it's like a 160bpm musical massage. Later on 'Bussin Down' continues the footwork influence with a sped-up grooving funk sample, over which DJ Spinn gives the orders. Elsewhere 'Heavy Butt's' seesawing bassline and 8-bit melody gets the message across loud and clear, while the impressionist footwork of 'Jiggle' is probably the most jiggling piece of music ever recorded.

Other tracks such as 'New Juke Swing' mix crunchy drums of the kind you might find on a Teddy Riley production with a bassline of an early grime record while Rubi Dan acts as master of ceremonies¦ 'The Vibe Is So Right', featuring MC ZULU, pits chopped breakbeats against big basslines at funky house speed, which quickly intensify into sharp junglist patterns. On 'Bump Uglies' Chrissy mixes cute girl vocals chopped up over a flat dancehall beat while MC Popeye rides the rhythm making his intentions clear, while the album's poppiest moment 'Sweet Thang' features Coool Dundee and Johnny Moog in an inspired high speed mix of jungle and electro with soul vocals and mcing.

Things get decidedly early 90's with Warrior Queen on 'Under Dress' a strange amalgam of acid and (more) New Jack Swing, with Warrior Queen dropping some filthy lyrics. The 90's revival continues with the 'U Got Me Burnin Up (Club Cirque)' which mixes high speed ravey piano and diva samples with crackin 160bpm juke and hip house vocals from Coool Dundee.

On 'Women's Studies' Murderbot manages to twist underground music forms into a new kind of high quality pop music that's a joy to listen to.