Reach 18.03.25 | SeekersInternational; Gnäw; Grüp Ses
Been a while! Three essential releases for your radar inside this especially International edition of Reach
Welcome back! Or, welcome! if this is your first time on Reach. I said March would be the actual start of the year, and we’re a little behind on strict deadlines but we said “Boooo” to those anyway.
I’m also behind on sharing a Radio Punctum mix with new and forthcoming music so that’s strapped in below the write-ups. Last month’s show took listeners through a couple of tracks from the spellbinding new bad lsd trips on enmossed, a couple from Eamon Ivri’s Mineral Stunting alias (very difficult to pick!), and a few select picks from fantastic (then-) upcoming LPs from 29Speedway, Annie A (Time is Away, Félicia Atkinson, Christina Petrie & Maxine Funke) and Emptyset’s upcoming release.
Stunning artwork and photography for Gnäw’s II, by Andrea Vacovská & Adriána Vančová
While I’ve been gone a fairly large amount of cool inspiring music has digitally landed on my metaphorical plate, but I’ve not had much time to sink into a huge deal of it. Mostly I’ve been completely hooked on the new SKRS. It’s unseasonally early in the year for my regular dip into the Canadian-Philipino collective/trio/uncountable shapeshifting entity’s discography, and I’m still keen to write up something bigger, deeper, about what exactly makes SeekersInternational just so great, but I don’t have time for that yet, so here’s some words on their latest tape/album/mix/spiritual offering to the enduring spirit of dub music in all its forms:
SeekersInternational - Delmonte Data Mining
Nocturnal Technology, 27th February 2025
New music from SeekersInternational (SKRS) is normally a pretty rare thing, but there’s actually been a couple of remixes from the group out lately which I was saving for a little more lasting warmer weather than a taste of Fool’s Spring (it’s not that you have to listen to dub music in the sunshine, not at all, but it does seem to help). Delmonte Data Mining seems willing to compromise a little on the sunshine optimism, when compared with the likes of Midnight Skanking or Black Mazda Soundclash, matching ruff and dancefloor ready beats with dub’s limitless inspiration, but while I could probably pen a one hour read of the styles and forms of music on show on DDM, the tape’s greatest strengths are in how SKRS take the concept of a humble DJ mix and turn it into something inescapably unique.
The first step is selection, of course, and the second is technique; nothing new there, but even if SKRS didn’t do both of these things to a standard better than most, this would still be the most original mix you’ll hear all year. The SKRS touch starts with samples, and on all their longform mixtapes such as this they patch together the Soundsystem Experience with commentary from disembodied MCs — “Ruff!” — that they developed with the UnityInnaDancehall199X tape. But this crew doesn’t sit still, and there’s always innovation at the heart of their work.
Delmonte Data Mining comes with homework: listen to Bristol Pirates on Death Is Not The End. Ever a crucial outpost for archival music, Bristol Pirates is a documentation of adverts played on the city’s illegal radiowaves from the 80’s to the early 2000’s, and the folding of Pirate Radio. SKRS do something similar with DDM, raking through a catalogue of 80’s Jamaican TV and radio adverts, resulting in utterly unheard-of mashups, like between Nivea body cream and rugged acid techno, blissed-out house and hurricane warnings, reportage of explosions in downtown Kingston and system-melting hip-hop.
You’re never sure where the SKRS touch truly starts and ends, and this is one aspect of the mastery of the collective: to come out with fresh innovation that is instantly identifiable as theirs, and you can’t find that experience from other music, but when you take a magnifier to the work you see it’s a composite thing significantly made with fragments of work by others. To work within this kind of way and still have the boldest, most inimitable fingerprint of any musical act I can think of, is just one of the reasons why SKRS always have me coming back, thirsty as a fish in hell. It only helps that their music seems, to me at least, to be able to bring the sun out from hiding.
Gnäw - II
Stoned to Death, Radio Khiyaban, Centripetal Force, Ramble, 7th March 2025
Of the many interesting live performances I’ve been to since moving to Czechia, few have held my attention so tightly as Gnäw: a project from proficient improvisational solo musicians Simo Hakalisto and Arash Ghasemi, the conjoining of their spheres of practice and musical investigation is an enduring highlight in the scene here. The pair’s second album capitalises on the ground broken by their debut, also released by Stoned To Death (which stands as one of Czechia’s finest houses for experimental music). Traditional instruments from Finland and Iran fuse as one with electric guitars and synthesisers, inducing a trance state through drone, woven melody, ambience, spirit.
Sound is the paramount experience of Gnäw, despite the arresting physical performances of the musicians: on the 15th, the pair played in a small venue in Prague. Watching master musicians at their work is fixating and arresting, but the final 7 minutes I spent lost in the fugue, eyes closed, flying. Post-gig discussion was on the visual inspiration of the music, typically desert landscapes, mesas and plateaus. It’s a mark of Hakalisto’s skill that the kantele (the strung lyre of the Finns) can be so comfortably subsumed into the alien territory and foreign landscapes, summoned foremost by Ghasemi’s instruments and technique, without discord, and it is a telling sign of the nature of collaborative musicianship that the harmony Ghasemi and Hakalisto attain when playing together hits notes unattainable by either alone.
Grup Ses & Gökalp K
Discrepant/Souk, 28th February 2025
12 years ago(!) Gantz did a “Sounds of Istanbul” mix that completely insurrected my music taste for many months. It featured a batch of music mostly released through the Istanbul-based Tektosag label, which has been sadly defunct for many years. It included artists like El Mahdy Jr, Ethnique Punch and Grup Ses Beats, and it was an essential explosion of inspiration for me, locked in dubstep purism as I was. Grup Ses’s track ‘Atardamar Operasyonu (DS2 Edit)’ features, and quickly it was on loop on my iPod, swiftly joined by Savai and Gökalp K’s collaborative tape once I found the Tektosag vaults.
Discrepant should be on your radar by now, if you like music (and they just released a new memotone album, so a perfect time to get to know if you didn’t). The sub-label, Souk, has tapped the Istanbul mineral vein a few times now: a retrospect of Grup Ses’ unreleased tracks, and an album with Ethnique Punch (and, for the resonance with Gantz’s introductory mix, the essential Ghost Dub’s LP by El Mahdy Jr came out on Discrepant). Thank fuck for that, because few other labels commonly shifting about in continental Europe are seemingly asleep on some of the roughest club gear around.
Grup Ses & Gökalp K’s self-titled album slides a knife in between hip hop and bass music, coming out with a slice of the best of both; brief tracks built for maximum impact, and all stuffed full of ideas. Gartlangabak sets the scene early, two-faced between murky dubstep-esque groanings and sampled Turkish traditional music, but Tieron comes through with a breakbeat blaster ideal for setting fires in speaker stacks, which Granul perfectly twists into a modern day UKG classic on his remix. While tracks like these definitely stare down a lot of “pure” club music I’ve heard lately, it’s the likes of Haymatlos, the hybrid club/hip hop pieces which are so evocative of hearing Gantz’s mix again, that have me itching to blast these tracks on a system. Tip!!
Did you like reading these reviews? You’d be surprised how much impact you can make by sharing a sentence that you like to social media. If you’re a free subscriber, why not help me find some more?
Radio Punctum 25th February 2025
Tracklist:
Mineral Stunting - Workshop01 (forthcoming Drift Ritual)
VIZ - Angel’s Throat (Forthcoming Danse des Larmes)
NVST - Exportation of Sound (Vocal Rework Edition) (Forthcoming Maloca Records)
Bad lsd trips - vacuum sacrifice (enmossed)
Annie A - Like A Sail or a Bed (Forthcoming A Colourful Storm)
Nick Klein - New Cut (enmossed)
Ben Shirken - Image / Player (Forthcoming 29Speedway)
Windu - Allegorya (Forthcoming tomo2)
Sopraterra - The Primal Regret (forthcoming Präsens Editionen & La Becque Editions)
Tibslc - tin talk (self released)
Mineral Stunting - Junk Repurpose (Forthcoming Drift Ritual)
Maude Vôs - 5th Generation Angel (Laced Remix) (Forthcoming YUKU)
Emptyset - Gloam (Forthcoming Thrill Jockey)
Huma Utku - Here Be Dragons (Forthcoming Editions Mego)
CEM - Bells Corrupt (Forthcoming Danse Noire)
NVST - Inthevoidofthem (Theendlessillusion Edition) (Forthcoming Maloca Records)
Young Echo - Red Dot, Green Light (Self Released)