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// Incoming transmission: Ece Özel

We head to Istanbul for our next mix, and it comes from Ece Özel. A key figure on her native scene thanks to her Ozel Zevkler party and residency at MiniMüzikhol, she is celebrated for her weird and wonderful take on electronic music. It’s won her the attention of Boiler Room, and encompasses experimental, lo-fi, ambient, acid and plenty of oddities in between, but all ties together thanks to the underlying sense of mood. Ece will be representing at Dekmantel Festival in August, so you can really get to grips with her sound.

Before that comes her podcast for our series, and it’s one that builds suspense slowly but surely with sparse, stripped back rhythms that always twist and turn. There’s wonky techno next to kaleidoscopic electronic house, crisp new wave joined to unhinged drum tracks and even hands in the air disco. Always tied together by an occult and unsettling sense of being on the edge, it’s a a set with Özel’s notably unhinged aesthetic stamped all over it.

// Gliese 3293 c > DF-18

// Incoming transmission: Broken English Club

roken English Club is a project by Oliver Ho that explores the “dark friction” between man and machine. It has spawned two albums, most recently June’s The English Beach on L.I.E.S., which soundtracked the desolate scenes of his surroundings with eerie experimental techno. Heavy on apocalyptic synths and doom laden drums, and occasionally run through with melodic optimism, it’s a brilliant testament to Ho’s evocative studio skills after ten years of making more straight up techno as Raudive.

Elements of EBM and industrial come into focus on the album, as they do in the mix he has put together for us. In just over an hour, plenty of angular grooves, slapping drums and cold, chilly metallic surfaces unfold in dystopian fashion. Starting off sparse and menacing with French vocals and synths which survey the landscape, eventually the machines take over and grow ever more wild so that you end up in a dehumanised world of reverb, manic pixelated melodies and whirring lines that have a life of their own.

Techno is Gunnar Haslam’s starting point, but the New Yorker often strays way off grid once he gets started. Mostly that happens when in album mode, where he weaves weird melodies into beatless tracks that are laden with drones. When turning out 12”s for the likes of L.I.E.S., Delsin and Argot, he favours a chilly, slithering sound, and as Romans with Tin Man he cooks up elegantly mournful techno that sends you deep into your own mind. The former psychiatrist also plays live with Mike Servito and Justin Cudmore as Hot Mix, so someone who is always evolving and exploring new territory.

It’s the same story on his mix for us, which wastes no time in dropping you straight into a bendy, supple techno groove that soon begins to change shape and sound. Along the course of 70 minutes, it becomes skeletal and stripped back, percussive and spaced out then hurried and funky. A pulsing drum line underpins everything while the real drama unfolds in a burrowing top line or mind melting acid squiggle up top. In condensing many different forms of techno into this one mix, Haslam masterfully showcases the breadth of his fascinating sound.

Montreal's Phoebé Guillemot plays records as DJ FATi and is an album specialist as RAMZi. Just this month her fifth full length, Pèze-Piton, dropped and was another beautifully unusual mix of tropical house, dub, future jazz and experimental grooves that are impossibly loose and inescapably infectious. Releasing on cult labels like Mood Hut, 1080p and Rvng Into., her leftfield sounds feel at once completely alien yet also wholly organic and earthy. They are jumbled collages of trippy vocal sounds, squelchy synths and tumbling drums that real new details with each listen.

Playing live but also DJing under the DJ Fati alias, when in selector mode her sound is just as fresh. This mix is a worldly hour of laid-back beats, jungle house and new age grooves that ooze exotic flavours and tropical vibes. It goes through blissed out and baeachy passages of instrumentals, jumbled drums and shimmering synths that paint a perfect picture of a some imaginary paradise where all there is to do is soak up the sun and dance.

Happy New Year one and all! We hope you’ll agree there could be no better way to start it off than with a second mix from the one and only Ben UFO. Think of this as side-b to last week’s side-a as, says Ben, “I went about this in the same way I would go about making a tape: two distinct but related ideas that I think work better on their own than if I'd tried to jam them together somehow.” It is another standout selection that showcases the Hessle Audio co-founder’s dual skills as both a tireless digger but also a technically skilled and accomplished DJ.

Where side-a was an often heady affair with plenty of open space for you to get lost in, side-b plots a more high pressure and intense trajectory. It’s the peak of the trip that really gets you on your toes as it hurries through slamming grooves and a whole history of electronic music. The kick drums come on thick and fast throughout. Some feel blissed-out and dreamy, others feel dark and menacing. There are nods to the funky dread of hardcore, slither of electro and swing of UK garage along the way, and every new drop helps colour the mix and ensure it is anything but a linear and predictable affair. Once again mixing crate-digging smarts with a rare dance floor dynamism, these two Dekmantel mixes are the sound of Ben UFO at his best.

Christmas is here! We hope you have a lovely one and, to help make it a musically memorable time, we’re playing Santa and will be delivering a couple of extra special mixes today and next week. Ben UFO is someone very close to everything we do here at Dekmantel. His taste is broad and well informed, and his rare skill in the DJ booth is matched only by his endless quest for exciting new sounds to play. In that regard he embodies our outlook perfectly: he is someone who unearths a previously unknown gem as often as he breaks a red hot new record. His sets have been a key feature of Dekmantel parties around the world and, for us, he is one of the very best DJs out there.

In basic terms, this is a deep mid-tempo house and techno mix. But the reality is that it unfolds with such an intriguing narrative that it feels like so much more. The mixing is so smooth you barely notice where one track ends and another starts. Instead, without realising, you find the atmosphere constantly changes, taking you from sci-fi machine grooves to muggy bumping techno, from celestial and hallucanogenic synth lines to creepy meandering riffs that encourage you to follow them into the unknown. It’s a mix that places you at the heart of a smoky dance floor, but is one that offers as much of a cerebral thrill as a visceral one. What’s more, it somehow feels like only half of the story.

Anthony Linell was formerly known as Abdulla Rashim, the centre piece of a Stockholm techno collective who have been at the sharp end of the scene for the last few years. Mixing up club grooves with exploratory experimental music, the intriguing and mysterious artist runs the Northern Electronics label and, at the same time, put out much of his own music on his Abdulla Rashim Records. A master of atmosphere and hypnotic grooves that cannot fail to suck you in, this year alone has seen him put out two albums and an EP under his real name. The sounds are just as absorbing as always, and mix up dark ambiance with dungeon synth and desolate sonic landscapes.

All this carries over into his DJ work, and the mix he has served up for us here is a beautifully bleak and lonely one. Underpinned by slick rubbery drums and detailed with everything from funeral to sci-fi to subliminal synths, it’s an intriguing musical rabbit hole that gets weirder and more unreal the further down it you go.

Not for the first time, our mix series now turns to a DJs who has earned himself a Europe-wide reputation thanks to his essential skills as a resident. He is Phillip Jondo and his musical playground is Salon des Amateurs in Dusseldorf, a place where he serves up mixes of minimal wave and mutant disco, leftfield house and industrial that also takes him on the road to plenty of key gigs. Next to this he holds down a monthly show, We R All Egyptians, on London’s NTS and it is another brooding affair filled with ceremonial rhythms. Next to this, he also works as Garland with Simon Weins. Their debut release Preludes lands on Lullabies for Insomniacs on January 1st and is a loosely rhythmic offering that echoes with wonder and channels plenty of otherworldly magic.

For us, though, he has put together an ‘uptempo and clubby’ selection that is beautiful weird and beguiling and is nothing like a regular mix of four to the floor styles. Instead it is a fizzing and restless brew of mystic drums and forest synths, of impish spirits and cinematic post-human landscapes that make for an intriguing listen. Ending up with a flurry of future electro, it’s a mix that shows Jondo’s musical world is truly unique and offers you a sneak preview of what to expect when he plays Dekmantel Selectors for the first time in 2018.

Swede Peder Mannerfelt makes music that is hard to categorise. And whether producing for Fever Ray and Blonde Redhead or serving up albums and EPs on Archives Intérieures and Hinge Finger, he is fiercely inventive. From experimental tribal concept music like his The Swedish Congo Record to the disassembled and goth-tinged techno rhythms of his latest, Controlling Body, he always pushes boundaries in bold new ways. He is an artist who likes to forget what he knows and go with his instincts, and it has resulted in a body or work that is truly beguiling.

His mix for our series is just as esoteric. It is a two hour collage that starts of as a voodooistic brew of shamanistic rituals, abstract noise and kinked techno that takes you to a dark foreign world. From there there are some more traditional passages of drum rhythms and wild machine-made sounds as well as diversions into plenty more uncategorizable sonic spheres thanks to tracks from the likes of Pinch, Errorsmith, Vatican Shadow, Machine Woman, Umfang and tens more. It’s music as warfare, as cinema, as experimentation, and it sounds like nothing else out there.

Alexander Nut is an expert curator. He first proved that as the only experimental hip hop DJ on London’s Rinse FM with a show that was a cornerstone of the station’s early years. Alongside that, he has made his own Eglo Records into a future facing outlet that puts out soul, jazz, house, techno and everything in between, and core artists like Fatima, Floating Points and Funkineven have emerged and remained loyal to it as a result. His own DJing now takes him across the world on an ever busier schedule, and on his travels he never stops digging.

This podcast is proof of that as it freewheels through myriad different musical spheres. From breezy afro to photo house via spangled bass tracks and summery groovers, it is full of twists and turns and mixes and blends that few other DJs would even attempt. A lot is crammed into a busy hour, and along the way you will go up, down and round and round. It’s the sort of selection that is infused with the same sense of subtle spirituality that colours all that Nut does, and for that reason leaves a truly lasting impression.