Back catalogue: Deep House

Review: Billy Lo keeps it high-class on this expansive new 12" from the French folks at Cosmocities. It is house music that is couched in the traditional US style but with plenty of his own unique embellishments. Importantly, the melodies are meaningful and fresh and add everything from bittersweetness to joy to the dusty, paired back and nicely undercooked grooves. 'Let Ur Body Werk' is the sort of steamy sound that will get close-knit backroom crowds all in a sweat and up close and personal and 'Sho Me Ur Luv' brings a little US garage skip to the analogue drums. Spoken words elevate each tune to work on mind, body and soul in equal measure.

Review: Chilean-born, Bristol-based Shanti Celeste has always brought a unique colour and emotion to her often bass-heavy sounds. She's a party-starting DJ, too, but delves into whole new realms with her wonderful sophomore full-length. Romance sees her exploring themes of love and friendship through shimmering pop textures and emotionally resonant songwriting. Her vocals take centre stage for the first time and lead single 'Thinking About You' is a heartfelt tribute to a late friend with a glowing groove and airy falsetto. Crafted between Bristol and London, the album features collaborations with Batu and harpist Miriam Adefris, whose delicate touch enhances its celestial tone and following last summer's acclaimed 'Ice Cream Dream Boy,' Romance is a luminous return and smart evolution.

Review: Over his long and illustrious career, Dennis 'Dego' McFarlane has made music in many complimentary styles, but it's been broken beat with which he's been associated with for the least two decades. Alongside his friend and regular studio partner Kaidi Tatham, he's developed a particular strain of "bruk" that incorporates elements of jazz, electrofunk, soul, boogie, jazz-funk and, more occasionally, hip-hop. It's this fluid, attractive, synth-heavy sound that's at the heart of The Negative Positive, his first solo full-length for two years. It's as well-made, soulful, slick and musically rich as you'd expect, with a series of stellar vocal numbers joining a swathe of similarly impressive instrumentals.

Review: The glorious Dobro label gets to double figures in fine style here with a new album that finds Iner both going solo and collaborating with Oiuna on four new cuts which then get remixed. The originals are summery, airy, organic worlds of gentle deep house rhythms, feathery synth melodies and gentle hooks that have a subtle future feel. The remixes rework the tunes for more direct vibes in the club with Frank Music label head Johannes Albert going first and then Crowd Control also stepping up. Great artwork, too.

Review: Red Ember Records main man Ewan Jansen may have been serving up dusty deep house and tactile dancefloor workouts since the late 1990s, but he's not released many full-length excursions. In fact, this outing Butter Sessions is his first longform release for nearly 16 years. It's a proper album, too, with the Perth-based producer using the opportunity to experiment with different rhythms, tempos and sounds whilst retaining his usual melodiousness and keen sense of atmosphere. Highlights include, but are in no way limited to, off-kilter opener 'Mussel Hustle', the acid-flecked, early morning dancefloor fever dream 'Kooka', the melodious electro sea breeze of 'Watertable' and the mid-80s Japanese synth-pop/electrofunk eccentricity of 'Proteus vs Yoshimitsu'.

Review: California's Joe Babylon has been steering his own Roundabout Sounds through some lovely deep house waters over the last few years. Now the producer makes a big statement with his own debut album. He is something of a veteran having co-founded Plug Research back in 1994 and hosted underground events in Los Angeles during the mid '90s. Following on from outings alongside the likes of Rick Wilhite and Rondenion he now brings his own dusty, carefully disheveled house sounds to the fore. They have been crafted using an MPC which gives them their rough-edged appeal and they go from heads down back room joints to dubbed-out minimalism via dream late-night reveries. It makes for a fresh take on a tried and tested house template.

Review: Ruth Koleva hails from Sofia, Bulgaria, and has been a TV star and singing out concert halls for years. She has also long been singing on some superb broken beat and nu-jazz records while working with top-level production talent and having her tunes remixed by Zed Bias, Kaidi Tatham, Mark de Clive-Lowe and Eric Lau. The neo-soul star's Ruth album gets a special anniversary edition release here with four heart-melting and textbook neo-soul tunes on the A-side then some super remixes on the flip. This is timeless stuff that works on the heart and the heel in equal measure.

Review: RECOMMENDED
The DJ Kicks series has managed to outlast the vast majority of other DJ mixes we can think of - the good, the bad, the populist, and the plain cash cow. Even the mighty fabric compilations have rebranded and rethought, bringing the original legacy, FABRICLIVE included, to a respectful end at 200 outings. Strange, then, to think, that !K7's mighty offering to the world of "What should we listen to at the afters?" has arguably managed to become more relevant as the years have flown by.

There was a time when the series existed at the lighter end of club fare, with some examples barely even matching that description. These days, though, there's often a dance floor heaviness central to the selections, with Jessy Lanza's broken, bass-driven set a case in point. Pointless attempts to describe the music, and lazy track list namedropping aside, this is energy-packed, heads down, futurist stuff packed with infectious percussion.

Review: Berlin via L.A. based Acid Test has a new one out this week on their Avenue 66 sub-label, which is focused more on leftfield electronics. It comes from esteemed German producer Jens Kuhn aka Lowtec, known for his releases on Out To Lunch, United States Of Mars and Playhouse who presents some rare and unreleased cuts from the vaults on Easy To Heal Cuts. As expected, there's dusty and understated fare aplenty on this one; from the contemplative night moves of 'Going Nowhere', or the low-slung mood music of 'Red Sparrow' (another alias of Kuhn's) to the bittersweet minimalism of 'Nature Thinks For You' and the sun coming through the blinds on Monday morning vibe of closing cut 'From Moment To Moment' - we're sure glad these tunes saw the light of day.

Review: Zoltan Nagy AKA P60 has spent the last four years slowly building up his Midnight Fashion label and its dedicated downtempo offshoot, Midnight Fashion Chill. Following a handful of solo EPs on the latter imprint, Nagy has now decided to offer up a first imprint compilation - one that not only showcases his work, but also that of Marcel (AKA sometime Cookin' Records artist Marcell Dudas) and Plastic City regular Forteba (AKA Hungarian stalwart Krisztian Dobrocsi). Musically, the set lives up to its' title, offering an enticing and undeniably blazed mix of DJ Calm style trip-hop, warming 1990s style downtempo grooves, slow-burn Baleric soundscapes, Onra-esque neo-boogie beats and warm, deep and languid, jazz-flecked mid-tempo house.

Review: Moon B takes it back to the old school that is PPU! Atlanta-based analogue funkateer Wes Gray made his debut proper as Moon B back in 2012 on People's Potential Unlimited, and has since found further acclaim with a killer EP for London label Going Good and releases as Vaib-R and Sean Sanders for Nous and Hot Mix. Andrew Morgan's PPU has always been something of a home base for Moon B material however, with several other cross format releases in recent times. The suitably titled II is the second Moon B long player and pulls eight tracks from the home studio recordings of Wes Gray made over the past few years with that signature "slank rhythms and cutting basslines you've grown accustomed to" present and correct!

Review: The rhythms of this new LP from Musta are so loose and jangly their likely to shake your bones free from your own skeleton. They are part disco, part house, part tribal in make-up but the results are entirely new - ritualistic dances for late night sermons. The opener might be the best of the lot as 'Tamburi Parlanti' pairs lumpy drums and rugged guitar riffs with rising synth magic a la Theo Parrish. 'Timido' is another steamy bit of body music from deep in a humid jungle and that continues with 'Where Is Juanito'. The flipside is every bit as joyful, with spiritual Afro sounds and beatdown making for a vibrant and varied EP.

Review: Ceramics is the second album by Saine on Omena Records, which reflects the Finnish personal journey as an artist and a human being, and expresses his feelings and thoughts through music. It showcases his versatile and emotive style, blending house, electronica and downtempo influences. Highlights include the title track 'Ceramics' opens the album with a warm and organic sound, featuring lush pads, piano chords and subtle percussion, while 'Etude' is a beatless interlude with a mesmerizing arpeggio motif and ambient textures. Elsewhere, 'Hardships' is a melancholic and introspective number, with a moody piano chord progression, deep bass and vocal samples. and the ethereal deep house groove of 'First Snow' is as understated as you like it.

Review: New Interplanetary Melodies is a great name for a label and it also sums up the sounds of this new album from Sindaco. It's a beautiful mix of exploratory soundscapes, organic percussion and lush melody that unfolds in charming and captivating ways. Found sounds add more real world details to these tracks which range from lazy downbeat jaunts on a wide open savanna to more dynamic deep house trips through the cosmos. Worldly percussion, exotic melodies and unique instruments are all deployed to mark for multi-layered tracks that work equally on brain and body. It makes for a triumph of a record that is experimental yet aborsbing and packed with great detail.

Review: As one of the leading lights in Norwegian techno with guts, heart and soul, Skatebard has long skirted scene recognition to simply focus on slipping out his own strain of wayward machine matter. Given his track record with Sex Tags Mania, it's no surprise he'd trust DJ Sotofett with access to his archives, and so Spektral has come together as an exploration of long-buried recordings from the early 00s, edited by Sotofett and wrestled into a digestible form for this record. Capturing the best aspects of freeform jamming while cutting everything into shape, there's an inherent dirtiness to these recordings which instantly tells you it comes from an honest place.

Review: Space Ghost has most recently been spotted dropping excellent albums "Aquarium Nightclub" and "Endless Light" on Tartelet, but now he's made a swerve for Funkineven's Apron Records to drop this sultry collection of jams that match bittersweet keys with rubbery bass and plenty of crooked funk that calls to mind broken beat and boogie as much as house music. From the swanging funk of "Prayer For U" to the slow jam New Jack Swing of "Mystery Angel", this is an album that champions some great eras of black music very much in the vein of Apron overall, but still says its own thing. Soulful at every turn and finished with an '80s digital veneer so slick you could trip on it.

Review: Set your phasers to chug - Multi Culti are back with a new compilation which follows their astrologically charged series from 2021's Multi Culti Solstice II. As ever, the Canadian label deals a strong line in globally-informed dance music with cheekiness in its bones and an inherent spirituality, faithfully upheld by their assembled disciples. Across the eight tracks there are many highlights, but a few for us include Jamie Paton's sinewy 90s dub house workout 'Sub Ritual' and Kunturi's rhythmically-elevated ritualistic acid joint, 'Eclosion'. Strap in for another wild ride far and wide with the most adventurous label in town.

Review: HOTMIX Records main man Nick Anthony Simoncino is branching out with a new sub-label here, Hot Street. It will deal in plenty of dusty house as is the case of this first release, a bumper new record from Shin Watanabe. It taps into dreamy synth worlds, lo-fi deep house grooves and subtle soul samples that are designed for cosy floors, back rooms and real heads only.