Vol. 2
First of all, thanks for all the nice feedback from everyone! I realize I might have established a bit of a reputation of hating compliments, but it's a lot easier when it's about the music. Also enough people told me it's incredibly fitting for the general Andrew experience that after everyone else writes about one thing that I take the shotgun approach that that's gonna stay for at least one more volume. The live gig writing will stay as well, since having some of my friends I go to shows with now read my write ups is a fun dynamic for me. Not really worried about "crashing the scene" when this is a bearblog and not a substack I am spamming instagram with (I recently saw one called Grimes Square, perhaps the most depressing Ouroboros of the year), and I'm only writing about stuff with RA links anyway. Now then, let's get to the music shall we.
Boo: Rustie - PSION
VOLUME. WARNING.
your goat's goat rustie has been back from the shadows and uploading absolute screamers for a fair deal now, which has been a tremendous relief for me, somebody who medically needs 800 ccs of Banger every four seconds on the dot or else i explode like quake 3 deathmatch. the new material's been pretty stellar all over, wading further into the drumless supersaw distortion that EVENIFUDONTBELIEVE dipped its toes into with the new addition of just fucking overloading the swag. these are rustie tracks submerged into alkahest, separated into the barest and most platonic elements, and then brought up and thrown at your dumbass idiot head at mach speed.
his new track psion is the best application of this formula yet, more a threat display than an actual song. it doesn't even give a shit about starting or finishing, literally it just fades in audacity style to the craziest fucking arp and wasps-in-a-can bass of all time for two minutes and then it just fucking fades-out like it didn't just saber-rattle your head off your body. like it was no big deal. fuck you buddy, you "wanted new rustie" okay here i uploaded a tutorial on how to build a bomb instead. step one put this track in a sound stack and point it anywhere you want a crater. fuck you i'm rustie. and then i go well thank you rustie i really appreciate that.
Max: Effie & Eurohead - D☆CT (Soccer Banger)
I’d love to say that with the World Cup finally reaching its conclusion this past weekend and seemingly more of you than ever getting swept up in the action, it feels only right to pay homage by talking about a deep cut football anthem released for this year’s edition. In reality though, I have a feeling someone else is writing about my favourite song of the past couple of weeks (you’ll have to guess which), so instead I’m taking the opportunity to write about one of my favourite artists of the past couple of years. Here at WYGAS we can have it both ways, why not?
It’s been a weird year for Korean pop music, with a huge embrace of EDM influences taking shape across the mainstream, primarily driven by HYBE. There have been occasions where it passes the smell test, but more often we’ve ended up in the garish territory of
With her stamp all over 3 of the best singles of 2025, anyone who has talked to me about pop in the past year will have heard her name come up more than any other, and I’m not about to stop now! Working closely with a pair of collaborators, initially kimj and now Swedish producer Eurohead, her music is mostly comprised of bouncy, colourful pop music stuffed with influence from a bunch of stuff I like: PC Music bubblegum bass; early underscores maximalism, Drain Gang at their most trancey, turn of the century eurodance, 2010 day-glo internet EDM. What pulls all of this together is a serious knack for melody and a truly wonderful, characterful vocal. After deciding I wanted to write about her work for the newsletter, I’ve spent the past few days trying to work out how to describe Effie’s voice and why I love it so much and I still haven’t really found the words. It’s youthful and refreshingly unpolished, able to flip on a dime between brash, coarse rapping and angelic toplines. The way she attacks songs is all personality-first, unafraid of falling a little bit off-key if it means you’re getting more of her in the process. The Bladee influence feels obvious but there is an urgency to her performances that sets it apart. Sometimes a great modern synth-pop song is truly made in the DAW, but I never feel that way listening to Effie’s work, even when the backdrops are fantastic everything so clearly orbits around her.
Now back to the football… In fact we have time for a digression. A few months back I had the extremely good fortune of being able to see legendary (and very dear to me) indie pop band Belle & Sebastian playing some of their best early records in full at a lovely venue in town. The shows rocked- big love-ins that saw both group and audience looking back 30 years and wondering how it turned out the way it did, with the classic tracks rendered beautifully. Towards the end, in what initially seemed to be a joke, the group revealed they were going to debut a new song, a World Cup Song™ no less, in honour of Scotland making it into the competition for the first time in years. What thus commenced was a slice of well-meaning but truly tepid dance-pop as we watched Stuart Murdoch breathlessly kick a ball around the stage accompanied by a child in full kit. What I am trying to say is whilst not every World Cup track is a depressing reminder of a band closing in on 20 years of wilderness since they put out good music (some of them are even good!), they are rarely the pedestal upon which a musician’s best work stands to face the world.
In Effie’s case, we have an ascendant artist on a true hot streak putting out something “a little bit worse than usual”, but hey at least it’s about football* and still scratches a sweet spot in my brain better than most of the pop we’ve heard this summer. The song is a trancey banger of the “feelin’ wistful in the rave” variety, the usual braggadocio of her lyrics dulled and mixed in amongst childlike rhyming non-sequiturs (“I need your hug, and wish you luck”) as the track is framed around gorgeous, downtempo piano à la Can’t Let Go that really sets the tone. Eurohead’s production mostly trades in typical (and effective) sounds from the turn-of-the-century dance music playbook but there are a couple of memorable touches- beyond the piano samples I love the thick tone of the wobbly synths that underpin the first verse’s rap, a great example of how he manages and modulates space in the mix across the track, giving a little extra rise to the soaring hook by virtue of the lightness with which it initially emerges.
Speaking of the hook, I’m in two minds about it. Effie is locked into the top of her register, and it certainly brings a vulnerability that feels fitting for the tune but at the cost of some dynamism. This absolutely isn’t a voice I want relegated to faceless dance music avatar status, and whilst this doesn’t push quite that far, I can’t help but listen to the relative energy of the opening stretch and wish they found a bit more room for it. Sometimes that’s just the World Cup Song™ tax, you can’t have it all.
Shortly after this release, I saw Effie and Eurohead perform at an event in town, her first UK show, on a lineup with one of her heroes in Thaiboy Digital. In many ways the show wasn’t quite what I expected, as she came out in a funny wide-brim hat and played the show as a silhouette in front of blinding backlights. She sang a remixed version of a Korean protest folk song from the 80s, played a bunch of unreleased material, and then finished out on a run of singles that had the whole room bouncing. To close it all out they turned to this tune, and as a final celebration for a rabid crowd it sounded incredible. More than anything else the whole performance felt confident, looking ahead to what might be next as much as celebrating the come-up. It reminded me how much fun it is to root for someone on the way up, and if her recent track record is anything to go by, now is the time to hop on before it leaves you behind. With that in mind, consider this song an invitation, a route in to one of the more fun stories happening in pop music right now. If any readers end up joining the team after giving it a listen, that’s more than worthy of the beautiful game to me.
*Having taken a deeper look, it actually isn’t even slightly about football, but it does have claps AND whistles AND the word “goal”; honestly I think that’s enough…
Jay: Yu Su & Moopie NTS set
I really was not expecting to become the blogs unc correspondent, even knowing who all flaked, but I can't be pigeonholed as the Jazz guy again, I have fun and like dance music! I'm hip! I put Andrew onto Moopie like a decade ago! Fuck!
I'm in the middle of a move so I'm a bit too scatterbrained to be picking out albums right now, especially after packing up all my vinyl, but the NTS autoplay feature brought me back to this set and it's just such a great groove. It's always a great time to hear b2b's genuinely bounce off each other and get their flex on, with this as a case study in that dynamic. I can't find the video highlights of it right now but maybe Andrew can, [Andrew Note: You sent this in at 2AM come on man] but seeing Yu bop around in her Dresden shirt plotting her next tune is one of those universal signs of a good time.
I think the 15-30 and 1:00-1:20 sections are the real highlights, and learning this is a practice wrap for a real club b2b only furthers the collaborative bounce powering this mix. I feel inadequate in writing about the specific song choices found throughout, partially because I am unfamiliar with more than half the artists of course, but mostly because I find myself listening to radio sets with a very different brain than albums, not a less critical or focused way but it becomes more about the transitions and cohesion, if the DJ(s) can find their pockets and roll than breaking down the individual tracks themselves. And here they do! It's fun downtempo and smooth techno, sophisticated but not in a way that gets in the way of shaking your ass. My internet radio/DJ set diet is often after dinner, and this hits that perfect "relaxed but not tired" vibe that just really helps you settle into a groove for the night.
Alexis: underscores - U
i have a friend Hi Alexis who wants to get into music production and asked me if i had a recommendation for a tutorial or course for ableton that i like. i panicked, because for as long as i have been staring at daws, and youtube tutorials about daws, there is no single reference source that i go to when i am struggling. talking to friends and picking up their advice has always been infinitely more rewarding and fun, and for some reason there is still a bitter taste in my mouth about the edm-tutorial-industrial-complex which seems, like most genre specific communities and models of training, to know what sounds and styles it is aiming for, and shows how you, yes even you, can recreate them. that freaks me out, i'm not here to make a noisia dupe, i’m trying to condense my entire emotional and sensory landscape into a singular form, but whatever floats your boat dude. the desire to make music in this crafted and personal way has undoubtedly slowed me down, and i am envious about the people who can throw together something technically excellent in limited time. either way i sent the friend ableton's own pretty comprehensive teaching resources and instead of working methodically through that, they started up a newsletter I feel like the newsletter started as an exercise in collaboration, and I am on Chapter 5 of the Ableton learning music guide. go figure.
underscores, one of the producers of all time out there right now, habitually does a long stream breaking down all of the Ableton files a few weeks after the release of all of her projects. the streams for U were done two months ago, and I pick through them every once in a while. watching them tends to give a sense of how the project has evolved. last record, that was from a set of finely detailed character and worldbuilding pieces that give the emotional shape to a rambling, sprawling portrait of a place. this record was crafted flippantly out of catchy ringtone snippets and pop homage loops, that were chiseled into their leanest and sparest form. the resultant tracks are utterly disinterested in wasted time or air, sucking out any reverb and barreling from hookup to heartbreak and back again.
those silences are what leap to the front of my mind when i listen as a producer, because they just make clear how intentional and laborious the production is: she has to know how much she hates the sound of stray reverb trails, and meticulously find every overheated channel with a dozen thunderous synth voices and resonant filters and unstable OTTs all threatening to explode and spill over the bar markers, and clamp them shut. listening in the mode of production is exhausting, because every transient marker and midi note is a situation where a choice could potentially be made, and what distinguishes underscores as a producer and this record in particular, is to not only make an active decision at each of these points, but to force the play every time.
this has its consequences for the record as a whole: it's so economical that it reads as terrified, of allowing something explosive or sloppy to sneak out the seams. i hear exactly what she says when she talks about this album as the one where she has figured out how to feel. wallsocket is an alexythymic playground for big ideas, letting the situation explode out because the thoughts, about the town and the people in it and their own little dramas, are inexhaustible. it is still an extraordinarily emotive record, because those ideas are fucking potent, but by necessity it's a dissociative, stomach churning mode of relating. you can't write ‘Johnny johnny johnny’ as a fizzing, noxious disco pop track without conjuring an awful dissonance for everyone involved.
U is full of tracks that only become possible once the self-expressive emotional voice comes to the surface, but from a deliberate call, not necessarily a spontaneous bubbling. ‘The Peace’ is raw and tentative, reflective about a relationship but concerned with its deliberate cataloguing and the step-wise progression of April's maturity through it. ‘Bodyfeeling’ is the most blatant, given it reads to me as if a therapy session at the start of a deeply anxiety-provoking relationship got set to a prince beat, or carly rae jepsen cribbing a prince beat. "how does that make you feel? and where do you feel it in your body? what do you want to do about that?".
i feel so sympathetic to it, but also i carry this patronising, belittling response as well, and i tag this feeling as one that really comes from an expectation of a mature pop language to smooth over all this emotional drama. this record is the same length as The Fame Monster, it's the same length as most of the one-every-18-month k-pop releases from the golden mid-10s i swoon over. those are similarly overcrafted records, but at no point do they pretend to be the result of someone going through a genuine emotional journey. if everyone's an adult in the room then they have no need for procedure and process, you can write songs about fucking and breaking up and the club and the afters and no one will blink. no one means it. the rawness in U is way too real for this slight and contained a format. i am not at all surprised that this inevitable blow-up is producing its own kind of dissociative miasma, everything is the wrong scale in mall-world. 'Hollywood Forever' is the kicker for me, it's the one track that allows the vocal part and synths to bloom and shimmer in the light. it's the one track that's really about the contradiction that the whole album is implicitly wrestling with.
i sometimes get teased when my criticism gets obsessive about specific sounds, about the ping of a particularly well-tuned snare or the scooped brittleness of a particularly gnarly guitar tone. i really do love listening in an analytic mode, because it unlocks new, intensely localised pleasures. i would love to teach the ability to listen like a producer, to hear balance and timbre and through it hear technique, before you hear the total composition. there isn't an ableton tutorial for that. but there also isn't a way to turn it off, or even to stop holding the whole accountable to each of those little moments. i don't mind that at all, 'Do It' is still the best pop cut i've heard in the last 12 months. 'Innuendo' is the most fuckin gross chaser anthem with twists and squiggles that make me snap to the sensation of struggling to wrestle yourself out of a desperately uncomfortable gaze or touch. they only work because of the microscopic scale each is working at, and if i tried to list all the individual sounds that i pop off for id double the word count. these tracks wear the manufacturing process on their sleeves. i will listen to this record for as long as making music fascinates me to try and understand how to get a synth part to slide under my skin, and hopefully the skin of anyone i dare let listen.
i don't know if it's a successful album. i want it to be, desperately, to match up to how much i love all of its component pieces. it might just be a fascinating record, which is fine in its own right. she set out to make the glossy, manicured, airtight, undeniable nine track pop record that stands like an iceberg or a monolith alongside the titans of 2007 she keeps referencing. she's just too fucking wrapped up in the details to leave it at that, though.
Liv: upsammy & Valentina Magaletti - Seismo
The worst thing to ever happen to models was being told we have good taste in music. I mean being trafficked by our own parents probably causes some issues but like, that's not why the girlies are listening to Frost Children. There's just a lot of internalized uncritically in our position, forgetting a lot of the pedestal for our "cultural taste making" comes from men (and women) who are mostly just intellectualizing the desire to fuck someone above 5'9". It's alienating caring about music when every sound in our professional life is prescribed and regimented, these aren't even my corporate bangers!
I did miss the last blog because I got dumped so take everything with a grain of salt sorry.
Have you heard the drums on this? Now play Collide again and come back. The first few listens of this makes the album feel a bit y2k in it's pacing and synths, but then you hear the vibraphone bring the polyrhythms and don't look back. It's a very vibrant album, having far too much jukey bleeps to risk an IDM tag very brave to say IDM tags can be avoided, but still clearly structured outside of the dance floor. I think some of the songs could definitely benefit from a little bit more length to breathe and add twists, but there is something hypnotic to ripping through all of this in under half an hour. FFO Foodman! Andrew you still haven't listened! Ok in editing this I have it's fun!
Emi: Regent vs. Chontane - Versus 001
I've been listening to a lot of techno recently, which seems to happen whenever I start craving more structure in my life. There is a kind of religious quality to techno. Not because it's spiritually transformative (although it's pretty good) or because it's a crucible for thousands of years of conflict across the globe (stay tuned for the Tblisi Bridge Incident of 2031) but it seems to imbue the mundane with a sense of purpose while you're listening to it. I think everyone should go grocery shopping while listening to techno at some point in their lives. If you've not done so before, Versus 001 by Regent and Chontane is a solid starting point. It's approachably melodic, but full of the weird clicks, percussive jittering and juddering pops assailing against the kick drum that I love so much in techno, and hypnotic enough to unhook your harness from whatever quotidian shit you're doing. Some of the more cavernous synths make me suspicious that Chontane and Regent did not intend for my cheap earbuds - in the World Foods aisle of big Tesco or at a desk generating surplus value for my employer - to be the primary sound system on which this record was played. But that's okay. I'm pretty sure God is everywhere, anyway
Andrew: Gas - November 89
One of the problems of being friends with Boo and Alexis is that I assume stuff like Wolfgang Voigt's many forms is well known enough to not be worthwhile recommending. The last two weeks has been big for reminding me that many people are still waiting to hear Pop for the first time. If you are one of those lucky people go turn it on right now. Then check out how much better Tal 90 sounds as the end of album track here than its previous Oktember rerelease home. The general miasmatic "forest music" ambient Voigt has come to be known for is here, but it's much more skeletal, imprecise, and unavoidably acid brained than something like Pop or Narkopop. But this rougher, melancholic form of Gas has been the perfect ride home from a night out album for me, a very centering way to lead the comedown and make sure I pass out fast once home.
I love how empty Nah Und Fern is, just 11 minutes of hanging dread that anyone into horror scores, the concept of dub techno, or even Drone can pull a ton from. It also pairs wonderfully with Max's Ángeles Rojas rec from last week, if you are trying to establish your own WYGAS playlist. The lightness that powers a lot of Voigt's best work is missing here, but you can just go listen to those other albums after seeping in the bit crushed moodiness of Das Moor. My main complaint with 89 is that it's a little too lean compared to most Gas releases, clocking in at 53 minutes, which means it just can't feel as fully enveloping as Voigt's other releases.
It's very magnanimous of me to have gone an entire volume without bringing up Short Span, the dance music label of the moment, but we all knew this was coming, partially because I told more than a few of the people reading this my thoughts after my first few spins. This new album from Natal Zaks might not have the same impact on me as the Yu Su/K Wata/Mr. YT releases, but still some very fun minimal techno to be had here, especially in an incredibly busy week for me. There's a bit of the Atobe precision of moving parts to the Picture releases, but as with Eeeeeeee, his previous release for Short Span, the soundscape means instead of working as an energizing pick me up in the way Heat or Love of Plastic are, your hypnosis just hits faster. So hypnotic to the point I had forgotten to even take any notes on specific tracks, just been ripping it all in one go each time, though in general I would say the back half is the more interesting portion to me, and I am hoping to hear some of these tunes at some of the different weekday tech house gigs I will be going to in the next few weeks.
Well well well, not so mainstream now are we. I was originally against writing about this album since it does not appear to be streaming outside of the Boomkat site, but one joke about the Ricky V shout being my big tent pivot and here we are. I don't know a ton about Michael J. Blood or that general Manchester self consciously anonymizing scene really, but I do know I keep sending these MP3's to people unprompted to my friends so, if you haven't pressed play yet let me pitch it.
Opening track Ithaca is massive, not just because it's nearly a third of the albums runtime. Built around a towering sax that constantly progresses off of a beautifully mutating soundscape, you feel like you are in for a fun free jazz album, not entirely dissimilar to what's coming out of Scandinavia. Immediately as the second track Unseem kicks off with glitched out vocals and brittle synths though, you realize this work is a bit more difficult to pin down. The capsizing cruise ship that is Vetiver is my personal favorite track, but generally the transitions between the songs are my favorite part, especially as you realize specific sounds and rhythms are reoriented across the different tracks. This easily the least consistent sonic landscape of anything I've recommended in the newsletter, but the kaleidoscopic nature makes it that much more effectively with what I've been into recently. If you want a copy of your own you know where to find me if you don't have Boomkat money.
akii & Mistr Dean - Dub Sessions Room 303 Set
Ok, we got Short Span out of the way so definitely need to bring up the girls as well. As someone else who lost their shit when they found Basic Channel, I just love all of akii's sets, even if I was too shroomed out to tell her and Alice that when I saw them in Tokyo ha. Look if you are reading this newsletter you are gonna like akii's sets, and as the girls try to make plans for rest of the world trips you should go see them if you get a chance. I've fallen behind on a lot of the general Room 303 sets in the last few weeks as there's been so many new albums I've loved/I'm outside again, but always make time to akii/Alice/MIO.
MERGE / Future Terror - DJ Nobu
Ok so going to a techno rave with two friends who tell you the day of that they don't like techno is, fascinating. To be fair to Naomi and Oyster bad techno is pretty inessential, and unfortunately the first DJ we showed up for was, anonymous. I can't be too mad at them, their first gig in the states and an early rave set is a pretty standard recipe for distress, when you don't know the crowd it can can be hard to find your pocket and how to flip tracks. To be unfair to Naomi and Oyster, they did not want to pull an all nighter for DJ Nobu to appear so they couldn't learn the true appeal of hard techno.
It was really nice that I had already gotten to see Nobu earlier this year in Tokyo with friend of the newsletter Kanni, as these two sets really showcased two different aspects of Nobu. In Tokyo he was the Millsian technician, effortlessly cutting between tracks, dropping out parts of songs only to bring them back minutes or hours later. A truly acrobatic feat and a lot of fun, but one that requires a relatively compressed set of sounds to make work. This set was the Hosono/Dilla "time to show of just how much music I listen to" set, even before he started using the guitars off Suicide to flip between tracks. Jazz, Baile Funk, Tim Reaper's latest and a bunch of other sounds I was too high to parse accented the first few hours of his set, showcasing what it would be like if college radio shows were actually good.
The secret ingredient for making them good turns out to be blisteringly hard techno of course, all the other genres were just there to further empower the Nobu noise until the last hour or so of the set just became all red techno (the light show was also truly wonderful for his set) as he thundered us through the floods of the weekend. What makes Hard Techno so appealing in live environments to me is the balancing act of it's tension and release over the course of hours, it is kind of like durational DnB if I can say something to piss off Alexis. The sort of structure techno can provide Emi remarked upon is also not an understatement; oftentimes my thoughts and general brain space feel like one single flooding churn, and good trekkers helps spread things out, to the point where at every DJ Nobu set I've been to I have had the half an hour to just reflect on my life at large, even at the sober sets! Like every other set of his I've seen the conclusion was my favorite part, a steam engine of sound struggling to keep going until it all just collapses. Was ready to call it my favorite set of the summer until roughly 12 hours had passed and I was at Dripping.
Dripping All Night @ Nowadays - Foodman & Doula
God I have written way too much for this already so sorry to Cry, DJ Plead, and everyone else at Dripping, but gotta end this newsletter at some point. The thing about Nowadays is sometimes you see DJ's that know how to party, but end up playing a sort of downtempo trance set (no offense to Boo), thankfully Dripping did not have that problem until the final set from Mark Ernestus, which felt more geared to the people pulling up to the rave at 11AM anyway. The baseline level of the rave was so dancey that my friend Kat quipped that Foodman's set was "just ass shaking music" for her taste, which made everyone else crack up.
Love Foodman though, third time I've seen him this year and been wonderful each time, from the empty Nagoya dance floor to both packed floors here, his live drum machine juke free for all is the movement. If you want to preview the next newsletter check out his new album tomorrow, and his Lot/NTS sets. There's just such an unabashed exuberance to him, still in his blue ballcap and workwear, gleefully dancing to his own decisions. Without getting too grandiose about it his live performances really carry forth just how much of an appetite for sound he has, always adding in little new tweaks to stay current while still distinctly Foodman. Also was just nice to see him hang around in the booth for the next few hours vibing to the next sets.
So then Doula, who I had only learned about at a gig she had with Eden Aurelias the week before, came on and hit us with some of the wooziest, downright apocalyptic dance tunes I've ever heard in the club, and she tore it all down. Incredibly distorted bass and vocals echoed out the foggiest floor I've ever seen at Nowies, with her doubled up decks adding to the ominous sense of control she provided. My favorite (and most dangerous for my post peaking self) part of her set was how she would occasionally kill her own momentum to play stuff like literal number station recordings and other disorienting recordings, a truly memorable way to have sunrise at the rave. It was also wonderful to realize just how many people in the front of the crowd were her friends and collaborators, one of those great local scene moments that stays with you.
Thanks for taking the time to read Volume 2! We will be back in another two weeks, hopefully with even more new faces, and with slightly less me!