Well that was a heavy weekend, gonna’ call it practice for Christmas. If like me you need your head sonically soothed today, get on these beautiful synth workouts and Alan Parsons Project cover by Justus Kohncke. Ouch!

Interesting reissue label compiling tracks from the underground. You can tell that they are releasing music they feel needs another airing rather than what is necessarily on trend.

I remember suggesting and booking this guy as a guest for a club I was resident for in Belfast, the fee was only a few hundred €€€ at the time. Most of my guest suggestions around this period, came from a quick flick through my record bag and seeing whose name kept repeatedly popping up.

Essentially the booking happened because of the tracks below, sadly he’s not done a huge amount on the production side focussing more on social media promotion instead.

Sometimes the best material is right on your doorstep (Ards to be exact) but you are often more concerned with what’s happening in foreign or more exotic territories that you don’t put enough attention on the home team. Gary Irwin has been entwined in the fabric of quality electronics in Northern Ireland since the mid nineties, cutting his teeth as the in-house engineer at David Holmes’ Exploding Plastic studio in Belfast, recording dancefloor bangers as CPU and more recently came out of hiding with the incredibly dubby and easy on the ears project, The Vendetta Suite.

Here are five great examples of TVS in action and a beautiful library music mix, oh we’ve also heard the new stuff that is coming and it’s amazing too!

A lesson in how less is more. Daniel Bell (DBX) is a master at taking a few elements and making it work. Pure minimal (in a good sense) club music. Made to make you sweat. His tracks really need to be heard on a good system in a sweaty club to make sense.

5 below that bang.

Been listening to some early breakbeat and ‘rave-y’ stuff lately. Not sure why this appeals to me more as I get older, but it just does. I suppose it’s the sheer simplistic naive joy of these types of tracks that I love. A lot haven’t dated that well – but the ones that have still sound amazing.

I just wish more producers were making this sort of raw music now, rather than polishing their tracks to polite pointlessness.

One of the best things about horror films is they often have the best scores.

So if you are gonna’ go concept on the music front, better make em count!

5 belters below…

Thank god for new blood such as Yak!

His amazing programming and solid understanding of percussion and rhythm is very refreshing in the current beigeness of coffee table synth house.

Here are five that ignite…

The Sex Tags crew can turn their hand to all sorts. I love the care free attitude of this label, they obviously know their stuff but it’s always done with a smile. Hefty and suitably odd back catalogue to go digging through for those that way inclined.

5 below as per usual.