Back catalogue: Breakbeat

Review:  Billus is a new name to be emerging from the Melbourne scene and here he shows his mastery of groove and percussion. There is a real lightness of touch to the breakbeats of the opener 'Cubic'. They mean you instantly take flight and drift through the skies next to pillow melodic clouds that cast your mind adrift. It's deliciously deep and colourful stuff. 'Shifting Sands' is another mix of suspensory chords that pan all around and bubbling, percussive drums that are hard to define. 'Splay' sinks into a watery world of dubby chords and skeletal but compelling beats and 'Under The Canopy is melodic minimalism of the highest order.

Review: Aquasky's massive rework of the classic Booka Shade tune "Mandarine Girl" finally gets laid down on wax. Already seeing huge support from all the key jocks including Stanton Warriors, Vigi & many more.

Review: Brako continues to go it alone with self-titled releases on a self-titled label, and why not? When the tunes are this good you don't need the extra boost of a big name label. There are just two of them on this punchy EP, the first being 'Bandit' which has a snaky bassline and loose-limbed groove. It is run through with spaced out pads, gurgling cosmic lines and silky hooks that are finished to perfection with a great neo-soul vocals. On the flip, 'Police' is a more dubbed-out and stripped-back tune with elastic rhythms and heady pads. Great work.

Review: "Breakbeat" means many different things to many different people; perhaps among Juno's customers, the term signifies hard-edged apocalpytic bangouts against judderingly dark soundscapes, completely missing the trick of the fact that its earliest form was a kind of hip-hop that simply emphasised the funk backbeat as a central part. The Breakbeat Junkie are more than worthy reps of the latter category; they here bring the whopping 14th instalment of their Toxic Funk series to the fore, with two funky cuts from the beat master The Breakbeat Junkie himself.

Review: Dance music is rife with megalomaniacal personalities eager to carve their names in, well, whatever the techno equivalence of blue-plaque posterity is. Here, however, the producer Brother Nebula (Lance DeSardi), from Texas, flips the desire to delusively status-climb for such trifles on its head, inverting the idiom "delusions of grandeur" in naming their EP 'The Grandeur Of Delusion'. Informed by delusion or not, this is a grand EP, rendering the problematic of grandiosity somewhat moot: from dark future garage faceoffs ('Ice Giant', 'God's Green Earth') to brooding halftime ice floes ('The Grandeur...'), Nebula has thoroughly honed his craft since relocating to London, not failing to blur genre categories across borders, nor to compel with huge, still technical broken beats.

Review: ***B-STOCK: Slight surface marks, record slightly warped***


In the summer of 2023, Upgrade Records launched via a nostalgic, party-starting EP from the previously unheard artist In 5 D (likely an alias for someone a bit better known, but don't quote us on that). For the label's return, long-serving DJ/producer Buckley Boland (best known for his releases on Made To Play, Black Riot and One Records) is the man at the controls. What he's delivered is a nostalgic, sample-rich affair that combines the angular wonkiness and mind-mangling noises of early-to-mid-2000s tech-house with nods towards vintage acid house, electro-house and the hard-to-pigeonhole house filth of the (long gone) Music For Freaks label. Basically, it's all fun-time, party-starting fare, with the bump-and-squelch of 'Daft Sandwich', the bustling brilliance of 'Nude Night' and the break-sporting hustle of 'S/A/M Real Man' standing out.

Review: Bobby Byrd's classic 'I Know You Got Soul' was originally recorded with James Brown's band The J.B.'s back in 1971 and soon became a club staple. It has endured in original form ever since but now it gets subtly reimagined by Mister Mushi. He offers a fresh, funky remix that's perfect for both crate diggers and DJ sets with the standout feature being the open drum break, which is a percussion lover's dream and has been designed to be sampled and looped for fun. Mister Mushi's impeccable mix stays true to the original funk spirit and the whole thing has been pressed on high-quality vinyl so it sounds superb.

Review: FOXBAM INC is back to build on the momentum of their first EP with a second one that packs a mighty punch. This one kicks off with EBY, who this year has been cooking up acid for 40 years and here offers the warped low ends and garage-techno power of 'Goldtooth'. Foxtrot vs Ma Bla then mashes up old school samples with earth-shattering bass on 'Deep Down Inside' and bRz vs Stije is a double-time hard techno stomper with warped synths and twisted bass that is inspired by and named after ISCO, a concept from Einstein's general theory of relativity that makes predictions about the dynamics of black holes.