Oli Warwick

It’s no stretch to call Matthew Hebert one of the most important British artists of his generation. From the upper echelons of cinematic scoring and avant-garde composition to the thump and pulse of leftfield house and techno, his accomplishments in music and sound are monolithic.

Over a career reaching back to the 90s, he’s progressively singled himself out as a relentlessly inventive and driven artist ready to grapple with big ideas and present them in relatable terms. Binding much of his work together is the idea that any sound can be turned into music - from the complete life a single pig to a bomb exploding in Libya, one person’s orgasm to a club full of people locked into the joyous unison of a party, his concepts drive many of his most famous projects, but this is just a snapshot of his myriad achievements.

Comfortably bedded into the world of orchestration and composition, he’s worked on countless award-winning projects across television, film, video games and theatre, and been commissioned by institutions such as the Royal Opera House, Manchester International Festival and Deutsche Grammophon to name just a few. Herbert’s engagement with the arts is extensive and many-sided, taking in commissions for art galleries and festivals as well as lecturing at universities such as Goldsmiths and Trinity,.

But it’s his electronic music output which has perhaps the widest reach, from the early days of off-kilter micro house through big band experimentation to production work with artists such as Mica Levi, Roisin Murphy, The Invisible and frequent collaboration with Björk. Accidental Records has long been his vehicle for platforming similarly spirited experimentation in dance and non-dance music, while he still regularly connects with the immediate energetic exchange of DJing in any venerated party spot you care to mention, from Ibiza to Berlin to Glastonbury and beyond.

Writing books about albums he’ll never make, producing and presenting shows for BBC Radio, directing the New BBC Radiophonic Workshop and establishing the Oram Awards to recognise female and gender minority artists, Herbert embodies the idea of the polymath with head-spinning prolificacy.

Jochem Paap’s first record as Speedy J landed on Plus 8 back in 1990, and yet he still engages with electronic music with the curiosity and productivity you’d expect of someone new to the game. His long and winding career has plenty of storied touchstones – seminal electronica LPs on Warp Records’ Artificial Intelligence series and Planet Mu, ambient epics on FAX +49-69/450464 Records, and a relentless wave of razor-sharp club 12”s across most of the iconic techno labels you’d care to think of.

For all these achievements, the here and now of Paap’s life in music is just as interesting. Via his Electric Deluxe label he champions some of the most daring techno variations in current circulation – artists such as AnD, Clouds and JK Flesh have trusted Paap with their most ambitious album projects.

In the live arena, Paap has long been a champion of hybridization – a philosophy embedded in the DNA of techno as progressive, experimental music. By embracing the open-ended possibilities of music technology, the lines between live performance and DJing have eroded for Paap as he glides between standalone tracks and hardware improvisation. This approach also defines his on-stage collaborations – the Collabs project with Chris Liebing, Zeitgeber with Lucy and Multiples with Surgeon. In all situations Paap and his kindred spirits employ their keen instinct for experimental techno and all-encompassing technical knowledge to deliver visceral experiences. His Electric Deluxe Presents events also serve as an extension to his own artistic vision and that of his label roster, gathering together high profile line-ups everywhere from Sonar to Berghain, Detroit to NYC, and of course all over the Netherlands.

Meanwhile, STOOR is a bold new venture that encompasses a Rotterdam-based studio and label, where Paap opens the doors to established artists and newcomers alike to immerse themselves in a high-spec environment for all manner of creative outcomes. Among the results from the sessions that take place are collaborative releases cut onto limited run vinyl on an in-house lathe. It’s a novel approach to creating and releasing music that celebrates the immediate moment – a present that Paap has consistently engaged with to take himself constantly forwards into intriguing new worlds of sound.

Under the Quantic banner, Will Holland’s endeavours as a songwriter, musician, producer and sound engineer run deep. From focused solo productions and intimate collaborations to expansive ensemble projects, his reputation is forged on how he engages with local scenes and cultures around the world. Across his 20-years-deep discography it might be honey-coated synths or the natural lilt of live instrumentation that catch your ear, maybe even the arresting performance of a vocalist, but whatever the style on any given record, the Quantic stamp stands for soul-enriching sounds.

As a lifelong musical explorer, Holland has dug for records, jammed with artists and developed projects on every continent while developing his own soul-charged sound. He’s presented unheard wonders from Ethiopia and diligently compiled the extensively researched The Original Sound Of Cumbia. Whether working to collaborate and tour the world with soul legend Spanky Wilson or coordinating Ondatrópica with Colombia’s Mario Galeano and up to 40 musicians, Holland’s approach to every project is one of total immersion and commitment.

The earliest Quantic releases, such as breakthrough debut LP The 5th Exotic, embody the downtempo boom of the early 00s – all fuzzy jazz licks and dusty hip-hop beats. Holland was quick to expand his horizons with The Quantic Soul Orchestra – a celebrated stage and studio project which brought a vibrant ensemble of players together to render his innately funky music in the vivid tones of live instrumentation. He started working closely with Alice Russell, a treasure of British soul with a formidable range, who has become an inseparable part of the Quantic story.

During his time living in Colombia, Holland created Flowering Inferno and dived into the fathomless pools of reggae and dub, as well as the cumbia and descarga of the region. Albums such as Magnetica found him working with electronica sound palettes driven by his considered investment in South American traditional music, while with The Western Transient he returned to a grassroots style of jazz alongside six other talented players (Holland himself was on guitar). 2019’s Atlantic Oscillations infused sparkling disco arrangements with swooning orchestrations and angular broken beats, and a run of albums with Pacific folklore singer Nidia Góngora have yielded two albums of unabashedly beautiful balladry shot through with languid surf guitar, pattering drums and tender vocals.

Signaling his resurgent passion for the immediacy of club music, he reunited with Alice Russell for ‘Heaven Or Hell’, a forthright deep house single for Aus Records recorded and mixed at Selva Studios, Holland’s studio in Bushwick, New York. This space, which also provided the launch pad for Atlantic Oscillations and other projects, opened a new chapter in Holland’s career and coincided with a bi-monthly residency at Good Room, a revered club space in contemporary NYC.

An artist always in conversation with his surroundings and prepared to change his circumstances at the behest of inspiration, Holland has already guided the Quantic narrative through more ventures and expressions than we could list in one text. With new chapters constantly being written, it’s a story which only deepens with time – a true reflection of global music’s eternally transient nature.

From obtuse angles to intense physicality, Peder Mannerfelt’s highly individual take on techno demands attention and consideration. While his many-sided body of work reaches back more than a decade, the Swedish producer’s current investigations in the field of experimental dance music are as prolific as they are unpredictable.

To date he has recorded an accomplished series of albums as Roll The Dice alongside Malcolm Pardon, explored a more direct strain of techno as The Subliminal Kid and also lent his production skills to Fever Ray’s acclaimed debut album and 2017’s Plunge.

It is under his own name that Mannerfelt’s sonic imprint can be most acutely felt at present. Alongside appearances on Hinge Finger, Numbers., Lazy Tapes and more, he established his own Peder Mannerfelt Produktions label to carry the bulk of his output, and that of kindred spirits like Klara Lewis, Machine Woman and Sissel Wincent. EPs such as Transmission From A Drainpipe and The 3D Printed Songbook and LPs Controlling Body and Daily Routine all feed into a distinctive abstraction of contemporary techno. It’s an approach at once engaging and challenging, rendered in even starker terms when Mannerfelt takes to the stage.

Employing subtle props and working with striking visual accompaniments, Peder Mannerfelt’s live shows bring the immediacy of his art front and centre in your cerebellum. It’s the perfect mutation of music still rooted in the kinetic energy of techno even as it seeks to break down the genre’s rigid, illusory formulae. By extension, as a DJ he spans the propulsive and the crooked, the classic and the unheard, the strange and the straight-up in a limber, instinctive fashion that complements (and is equally fuelled by) his own productions.

Zoë Mc Pherson embodies the unexpected. Their vibrant, nuanced music tests sonic extremes and musical pleasure, grapples with politics and raw emotion, shapes fantasy concepts and meditates on reality. Contrasts are hardwired into their projects, performances and collaborations, bringing bold forms into sharp relief — the constant in their art is evolution.

McPherson has developed an arc of accomplished albums and EPs which strike out into uncharted zones, moving from the acute percussive angles of earlier albums through to more melodious, vocal-charged exploration. The sonic elements shifting within their sound reach from the physicality of soundsystem music to the hyper-kinetic rhythms of singeli, avant-garde synthesis, textural experimentation and the unfiltered emotive impact of club-ready pop.

Alongside their releases, live shows, DJ sets and performances (which take in a reliably esteemed stream of festivals and events worldwide), Mc Pherson also participates in installations, commissions and collaborations. These include multi-channel and 4D spatial sound installations, leading workshops, designing sound and artistic direction for professional clients, educational initiatives and personal projects on a global level, tapping into the self-sustaining, DIY spirit of creative communities across continents.

Mc Pherson's own node within the global information exchange is SFX, a multimedia platform they founded in 2020. SFX serves as an outlet for most of Mc Pherson's musical releases and the ambitious audio-visual works that often accompany them. Being across all aspects of their creative output, from concept to production to distribution, affords Mc Pherson complete control to carve out their space on their own terms.

Freedom and self-reliance are intrinsic to understanding Zoë Mc Pherson as they stand right now. Possibility beats at the core of everything they do, responding acutely to the intensity of the modern experience and exploring new angles of expression in sharply sophisticated, compelling ways.

From deep pools of ambience to the brain-feeding mechanisms of electro and techno, Nadia Struiwigh’s gift is in expressing herself with conviction through her machines. As an accomplished live artist and producer, her affinity for synthesis and sequencing results in a spellbinding strain of electronica drawn from a richly personal sonic space she has marked out for herself.

Struiwigh’s recorded output has appeared on labels like Central Processing Unit, Nous’klaer Audio and Dekmantel - albums and EPs which reach from crunchy sequenced beats to vast swathes of pure, melodic tones. Her roots in Rotterdam and current location in Berlin equally speak to her affinity for techno - propulsive, dynamic machinations which manifest in DJ sets as well as live hardware performances.

As a teenager enthralled with the Warp school of electronica and leftfield downtempo, Struiwigh was set on a path of discovery where the intricacy of production met with her impassioned, intuitive approach to composition. Her exacting approach to the technical aspects of the craft has earned her the knowledge to extract her own voice from any medium, but more importantly her music emerges from a very human need to communicate and connect.

That connection is best manifested outside the studio. Struiwigh’s live sets range from patient, beatless immersions to kinetic peak-time rushes, sometimes straddling the divide in line with her omnivorous passion for ambient and techno alike. At times she’ll present her released works in a more patient, listening setting, while for the sensory overload of the dancefloor she tends towards a more improvised, open-ended approach to techno and electro. The exact make up of her live rig changes from gig to gig, keeping her inspired and ensuring no two performances are the same.

High-profile shows in concert halls sit alongside strobe lit club sessions - she’s since become a resident DJ for Tresor to indulge her love of driving, psychedelically-charged techno, while warm-up sets give her the chance to indulge the deeper dimensions of the music she loves. The range of her tastes can be heard across leading platforms such as RA, Phantasy, Bleep and Red Light Radio, who have all invited her to their esteemed mix series’.

Plugged into the moment and constantly exploring new dimensions of her sound, Struiwigh champions electronic music as a springboard for possibilities. With an exquisite clarity which comes from both technical skill and clear-eyed intention, her music thrives on heart and experimentation, powered by machines with as much character as the human at the controls.

James Ruskin is synonymous with the second wave of UK techno. At the helm of his label Blueprint, he helped define the tough, club-centric style that emerged from the mid ‘90s. London-centric acts like B12, Baby Ford, Stasis, Mark Broom and others had presented a melodious, Detroit-inspired back room sound, while in Birmingham Surgeon and Regis were incubating a particularly ferocious, industrial twist on the genre. What Ruskin, and peers like Richard Polson and Ben Sims tapped into was a sound that neatly balanced the two extremes. A kinetic, percussive dance music, but also with an emphasis on psychoactive synthesis and subtlety in the sequencing.

Like so many, the foundations for Ruskin’s love of techno were cast in hip hop and electro, before the spellbinding sounds transmitting from Detroit hit European shores and inspired him to take up DJing around 1991. By 1994 he was embarking on studio sessions with Polson, before the two of them launched Blueprint together in 1996. Their first joint releases as Void and then Outline spoke to the stark minimalism of Robert Hood and Jeff Mills, but soon the pair were finding their own unique voice at a time when the possibilities afforded by technology still left things tantalisingly open to interpretation.

Ruskin’s first solo releases came soon after, opening up a steady stream of productivity that saw him release debut album Further Design in 1998, collaborate with Surgeon on Dynamic Tension, remix Chris Liebing, Mark Broom and Paul Mac, and eventually partner up with the likes of Oliver Ho (who released his first 12”s on Blueprint). It was in 2000 that Ruskin also linked up with Tresor for his second album Point 2, which saw him distilling his dual sensibilities of atmospheric composition and unrelenting club focus into an especially potent combination. It was the first of three albums for Tresor, surrounded by a swathe of EPs on Blueprint and notable appearances over the years for respected labels like Ostgut Ton, Jealous God, and the acclaimed O/V/R project with Regis. More recently Ruskin has also explored a more experimental, electro-indebted sound alongside Mark Broom as The Fear Ratio, finding a natural home on Manchester’s Skam Records.

Alongside his many studio endeavours, Ruskin has remained a vital presence as a DJ. From Blueprint showcases to headline slots and festival billings, his continually busy schedule takes in a global network of major techno institutions. Since Ruskin started on his path techno has gone through plenty of waves of style and hype, but he’s remained unfalteringly focused on his own artistic vision. It’s a supple approach that can reach towards experimentation and unconventional modes of expression – his return to Tresor in 2019 with the Siklikal EP was testament to that – but it all remains connected in a lineage from the principles he set out on those first records in the mid ‘90s. It’s artists like Ruskin that hold fast to the role of techno as a platform for futuristic statements – an attitude he’s continuing to develop with each subsequent release and performance.

Peter Kremeier was right there when the machine age hit adolescence, pinging from a youthful diet of funk, soul, disco, synth-pop, and proto-electro into the anarchic progression of rave culture, where the boundaries were still deliciously undefined. As enamoured as he was with the new sounds he was hearing, he was a soul boy at heart, sensitive to the emotional sway of earlier RnB and soul he now found beating at the electronic heart of boogie, garage, and subsequently house music. Even as a whole generation fell under the seductive spell of sequencers and synthesis, Kremeier still felt the funk guiding his assured steps forward in this strange new realm.

From his initial alias Don Disco to his now firmly-established Losoul guise, Kremeier has remained dedicated to the musical roots behind the electronic music wave, both as a producer and on stage. The modest means of production at the dawn of the techno era encouraged a spirit of minimalism pioneered and elaborated on by various influential factions - the early Detroit pioneers Robert Hood, Jeff Mills and Daniel Bell, Basic Channel’s reductionist intensity on the edge of dub and techno, Wolfgang Voigt's architectural approach to the Studio 1 / Profan series. These paths of inspiration intertwined and moved Kremeier in the direction of his distinctive method.

As Losoul, he playfully works his groove in subtle shifts and musical ornaments that casually surface, along the way leaving space for soulful or occasionally disco-tinted vibrations. It’s a method which nods to the hypnotic, layering experiments of DJ Pierre's acid and Wild Pitch adventures, and likewise the conscious deep house of early Ron Trent and Chez Damier. The unique brew Kremeier ended up found a natural home on the iconic, unconventional Frankfurt label Playhouse, and made Losoul one of the label's key protagonists, alongside Roman Flügel, Isolée, and Ricardo Villalobos. It equally, and quickly, made Losoul a go-to remixer for artists as legendary as Blaze, Freaks and Eddie Matos – his versions often wound up as the DJ’s preferred choice thanks to their rigourous grooves and highly workable structures. More recently he’s turned in remixes for labels such as Mule Musiq and Giegling. Likewise, Losoul´s original tracks provided inspiration for reworks by artists like Matthew Herbert and Theo Parrish.

Seminal Losoul joints arrived on Playhouse in earnest from 1996 onwards, leading in with the neatly clipped samples of the near-mythical "Open Door". His breakthrough track is an apt manifesto for his approach – a finely balanced blend of thoughtfully selected ingredients modulated to the extreme, losing itself in pure, funky perfection and stretching out for extended pleasure. Kremeier was not the only one adopting this mantra, but in a tidal wave of also-rans he demonstrated an uncanny ability to elicit that sublime, off-centre feeling with the barest of elements. As music journalist Finn Johannsen wrote in a retrospective ‘classic album’ review of Losoul´s first long-player Belong – "...extended tracks that gradually introduced each element with patience, resulting in trips you felt should never stop... masterclasses in hypnotism". (Resident Advisor, Oct 2019)

Such is the nature of his hypnotic effect, you might easily lose yourself in one of these long-form jams, find yourself dancing away from the funk of the track in a dislocated fashion, only to come to and find yourself back in the groove anyway – in Losoul’s hands, the groove is never just one-dimensional. Equal parts an expressive dreamer and a studious preacher, Losoul has metabolized the funk in an inimitable style that is still unique, and that continues to bear new fruit to this day.

"Four beats, two claps – from there you can go everywhere." (Losoul, 1999)

A true product of the UK rave explosion, Keith Tenniswood and his best known alter-ego Radioactive Man are synonymous with the evolution of electro. After the NYC-rooted street sound got mixed up in the electronic melting pot with the creative sparks flying in Detroit and the acid house pandemic in Europe, electro became as creatively potent as house, techno, or jungle.

Tenniswood was actively engaged in music as the mid 90s hit, but it was alongside Andrew Weatherall in Two Lone Swordsmen his work reached a wider audience. Among the many lysergic directions their collaboration headed in, from dubbed-out downtempo to unconventional house via grubby garage punk, the syncopated heartbeat of electro was a strong guiding pulse most acutely realised on the seminal Tiny Reminders album.

These early adventures laid the groundwork for the rise of Radioactive Man, coinciding with the launch of Rotters Golf Club and Control Tower (alongside The Dexorcist) as new benchmarks in the evolution of UK electro. From his self-titled debut to the razor sharp follow-up Booby Trap, Tenniswood became a standard bearer for a sound that skirted mass appeal in favour of unflinching, stoutly underground electronic music dosed up on rave culture and in servitude to the machines.

Since then Radioactive Man has been a ubiquitous figure in the ebb and flow of modern electro, both on record and in the dance. His love of live performance reaches back as far as his first records, with an evolving arsenal of hardware to reflect his own creative developments, while his DJing draws on decades immersed in the culture with a record collection to match. From crowds of thousands at famed spots like Sonar and Fabric, to off-grid free parties organised by close allies, his approach has always maintained one foot in the grassroots spirit of the scene to match his recognition in the upper reaches of the global electronic music community.

Tenniswood’s list of collaborative projects remains prolific, from dBRm with dBridge to L-R with Monoak and Simon Lynch, Victor Valiant with Suade Bergemann, RadioNasty with Billy Nasty and much more besides. His 2017 album Luxury Sky Garden landed on his new label Asking For Trouble to widespread critical acclaim, while his archive of dubwise productions started to see the light of day via the Dub Vault series. This overview just scratches the surface of Tenniswood’s ongoing adventures in myriad pockets of electronic music subculture. Alongside his artistic endeavours, he’s equally forged a separate identity as a mastering engineer for respected cutting house Curve Pusher.

Wherever his electro adventures send him next, the past 20 years plus of service to the underground ensure Radioactive Man will keep fighting for the values we all hold dear; boot-shaking machine funk, warped synthesizer licks, earth-shaking bass and a healthy dose of irreverence where it counts. Of such ingredients are timeless bangers made.

As Romare, Archie Fairhurst’s working practice is rooted in collage, building vivid new forms out of existing material. Playful and immediate, but also deeply researched and compelling, his albums and performances reaching back to 2012 unfurl as a patchwork of inspirations and obsessive lines of enquiry made up of a global panoply of source material.

The clue is in the name – Fairhurst called himself Romare in tribute to Romare Bearden, the lauded American multi-disciplinary artist most renowned for his incisive collages. In Bearden’s process Fairhurst saw a way to approach the infinite pool of electronic music production, channeling his wealth of music knowledge into creating music from existing sonic material and bedding themes into his juxtapositions for a more considered approach to sampling.

No music lover sticks on one sound their whole lives, and so naturally Fairhurst’s areas of focus have evolved over time from the breakout impact of his 2012 debut on Black Acre, Meditations On Afrocentrism, through a run of albums on Ninja Tune reaching up to 2020’s reflection on place and belonging, Home. Projections is a direct homage to Bearden’s work, and the Love Songs releases draw on the rich seam of romantic music as a jump-off point. Having lived a nomadic life himself growing up, his source material has moved around over time, but increasingly the sampling becomes more opaque and enmeshed within other instrumentation which rounds out the Romare sound. 2022’s Fantasy expands on that idea with a more abstract approach, folding elements from 1970s fantasy cinema into his distinctive strain of rhythmic, off-centre electronica and heralding the start of his own label, You See.

For all the considered concepts and unusual arrangements, Romare’s music is dance music at heart, and it remains a natural transplant into the live and club environment. At times Fairhurst has pulled together a full line-up to render his music on stage – something of a call back to his roots playing guitar and drums in bands – but elsewhere he’s at home sequencing and arranging his music solo, re-moulding album material in the moment with the flexibility which dance music so often requires. Equally, he has DJ’d prolifically around the world with an omnivorous approach which serves as a logical extension of his studio craft, balancing hidden corners of historical investigation with the kinetic impulse of modern club music.