claire rousay / Shackleton

Sam Shackleton was there when UK bass music took off in the early 2000s. He was one of the earliest dubstep producers, but from the outset he worked outside the genre’s rapidly hardening clichés. And hardly anyone else from this scene has strayed so far musically from their beginnings. In recent years, he has released collaborative albums with musicians such as Anika, Holy Tongue (Valentina Magaletti’s experimental dub project), Scotch Rolex and Six Organs Of Admittance. But as diverse as these partnerships are, Shackleton’s music is always recognisable from the first note, always very percussive, often seemingly outside Eurocentric tonal systems, polyrhythmic, psychedelic. His newly released album Euphoria Bound is a trip between dream state and dystopian dance floor.

claire rousay lives in Los Angeles and her sound assemblages are both a diary-like portal into her creator’s life and an exercise in dressing and undressing the audio field with compositional threads that feel loosely entangled yet carefully woven. With a series of recordings since 2020, rousay has come closer aesthetically to the temperament of an inward-looking world than many of today’s sound artists. claire rousay’s music focuses on personal emotions and the small details of everyday life – voice messages, field recordings – and decodes their meaning.

The process of composing a little death felt like a homecoming for rousay after the more pop-oriented song forms of 2024’s sentiment. «This record is a return to what I see as my core solo practice, a re-dedication to those methods of working which I’ve found most align with what I envision my music or sound to be.» Her work as both archivist and adept arranger and orchestrator merge sublimely into deeply honest and engrossing music.

alys am is an interdisciplinary sound artist and experimental composer. Implementing the same approach whether DJing or writing music, she uses collage to create an immersive, para-rhytmic journey between silence and saturation, gentleness and intensity. Expect everything from folk, electroacoustic emotional noise to leftfield pop and something else entirely.