The Space In-Between // EP01
Six tracks from the edges of electronica, ambient, breaks and leftfield club music that I’ve had on repeat this month.
It’s not that the underground has disappeared, it’s that it’s stopped behaving like a singular place. There isn’t one centre of gravity anymore, no dominant movement pulling everything into its orbit. What you have instead are smaller constellations - clusters of artists, labels, DJs and listeners drawn together by a shared sensibility rather than a shared genre. You don’t enter a scene so much as find your way into one of these pockets through taste, and once you start looking at it that way, what initially feels disparate and fragmented begins to make a different kind of sense.
What I’ve found is that certain sound worlds are no longer defined by genre, but by tone. Sometimes that lives within an individual artist, sometimes it emerges across loose collectives who share a similar emotional and sonic language, shaped by overlapping influences and experiences. That shift away from rigid, gate-kept genre boundaries feels genuinely refreshing, and it made me realise that my own album ‘reverie’ (out later this year), which I’ve been wrestling to define, doesn’t really belong inside any one category. It orbits something more consistent than that - an emotional centre of gravity that sits outside those constraints.
But there’s another layer to it as well. It’s not just about sitting between genres, it’s about sitting between worlds. On one side you have the deeply underground - textural, exploratory, sometimes deliberately difficult. On the other, the highly optimised surface layer - functional, immediate, and increasingly shaped by algorithmic pressure, and somewhere between those two is a space that feels harder to define, but much more compelling. Music that isn’t willfully obscure, but also isn’t reduced to content - something that holds together emotionally, but still has the capacity to move a room.
That’s the theory, at least. The question is what that actually looks like in practice - because once you start listening with that in mind, you begin to notice certain records that don’t sit cleanly anywhere, but still feel completely coherent in themselves. They’re not defined by genre so much as by mood, texture, or a kind of internal logic that holds everything together.
Here are a few that have been doing that for me recently - and I should stress that I’m not one to obsess about how recent music is. If it’s new to me, I consider it to be ‘new’.
Tomora - I Drink The Light [Universal]
This eight-minute long psychedelic masterpiece from Tom Rowlands and AURORA launches us into orbit at escape velocity. It’s a perfectly disorientating blend of resonant synth textures, broken beats, and AURORA’s mesmerising vocals. The entire ensemble sounds like an explosion of organic, synthetic studio joy with a constant push and pull between cadence and texture. It’s the sound of two artists cutting loose, losing themselves in sound and at almost 8 minutes long it’s a good 12 minutes too short!
Just Mustard - Endless Deathless (Daniel Avery Mix) [Partisan]
The combination of Daniel Avery’s grasp of multi-layered wall of sound tapestry and the delicious shoegaze of Dundalk’s Just Mustard is the definition of symbiosis. If the original sounds fuzzy, distant and Bloody Valentine-esque, Avery brings punch and definition to the table, corralling the filth into a kinetic, full-body groove, while Katie Ball’s ethereal vocals float dreamily on top of the cavernous, brilliantly controlled distortion and seismic downbeats.
Max Cooper - Ebb + Flow [Mesh]
There’s no one out there who’s better than Max Cooper at conveying rich emotive concepts through his trademark blend of intricacy, ambient and experimental techno. Despite the often bewildering complexity of his musical language, there’s a liquidity and aching fragility to his musical voice, merging science, art and immersive technology to further amplify his deep thinking. Ebb + Flow is one of his less dense works, leaning away from dissonance into euphoric warmth, cementing his already lauded position as one of the best storytellers in the business.
Forbes Barclay Jr. - Let’s Pop (Fuko 87 Mix) [Hey Boy Music]
If the original sounds like a rough & ready throw down, the Fuko 87 remix flips it into a tight, crisp, minimal UKG breakbeat gem, twisting the toasted vocals into off-kilter rhythmic loops and skittering reverberant texture. A two note resonant bass percolates through the track, and occasional spot reverbs draw you deeper into the oceans of space that exist between the percussive hits. A salutary lesson to producers in less-is-more and how groove exists in the space in-between.
Tri/xon - WORK/OUT [Innervisions]
A brilliantly militant and riotous racket from power-combo Trikk and Dixon. Jackhammer beats fuse with trilling metallic resonances and off-leash space invaders hopped up on too much caffeine and youthful enthusiasm. This is the sound of jackin’ techno/house at peak time in one of those legendary dark rooms that comes equipped with nothing but strobes, red uplighters, and a thousand sweaty ravers skanking as one. Uncompromising.
Tellus - In Transit [The Moth Club Records]
These days, I find it way easier to categorise music according to tone and texture rather than jamming it into the outmoded tramlines of traditional ‘genres’ and ‘In Transit’ is a great example of that. It exists in a world of cavernous, post-dystopian chords, wrapped around insistent, repetitious rolling drums, where reverberation does the talking and the emotional feel is bleak but ambiguous. It’s both hypnotic and mildly disorientating and feels like you’ve been scrambling through its kinetic, blurry sonic universe for years.