Ransom Note

James Allison and Tia Cousins finally make good on years of talk, turning a Planes, Trains and Automobiles sample into a fuzzed-out, bass-heavy dancefloor rush.

There once was a fellow who boarded a plane,

And a fellow who boarded a train,

And a fellow who honked down a wrong-numbered lane –

And nobody knew which was which, it was plain.

“I’m the Wrong Guy!” cried one, with a wobble of hips,

While a guitar came loose at the seams of his lips,

And a bassline rolled thundering up through his ribs,

Till the whole rattling carriage dissolved into blips.

They danced through the tollbooths, they jived through the fog,

Half rock and half rhythm, half man and half dog,

With a Cure-shaped shadow and a Fall-tinted frog

Keeping time on the tarmac in 4/4 log.

So – plane, train, or car, friend, it hardly matters who,

When the bassline turns hazy and the guitars cut through –

For deep in the static, both wrong guys and true

Get messed with entirely, and dance the night through.

Long-time friends James Allison and Tia Cousins finally get round to a collaboration years in the talking, built off a sample Tia spotted lurking in the theme song of Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Two studio sessions later, ‘Messin’ With The Wrong Guy’ strips out the “annoying” bits of the original and rebuilds it as a hazy, bass-driven track laced with fuzzed-out guitar – James continuing the rockier lane he opened with his ‘Make Dance Rock Again’ edits, Tia bringing the ear for a curveball that’s shaped her Noods Radio show from day one.

Already road-tested at Convenanza 2026, where Rosie Ama dropped it late in her set and brought the house down.

Free download: here: https://jamesallison-mdra.bandcamp.com/

clay. presents Surface 01, a VA compilation bringing together 15 artists, established and emerging, making what the label considers some of the most exciting electronic music right now - a testament to the countless forms of leftfield dance music coming out of the UK and beyond, and a small taste of what’s to come. “Ammonite – So” is the atmospheric conclusion to the 13-track record, brimming with emotive textures and crystalline vocals.

Surface 01 is out 25th September via clay., mastered by Lurka (Dave N.A. handling “Pancake Parade” himself), with cover artwork by Selina Landis - a 3D print with pewter inlay, hand-finished and digitally edited.

Amélie Ravalec is a London-based Parisian film director, photographer and DJ, known for her documentaries on avant-garde and underground music and art, including Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers (2025), Art & Mind (2019), Industrial Soundtrack for the Urban Decay (2015) and Paris/Berlin: 20 Years of Underground Techno (2012). The first episode of her series Solstice, Sumarsólstöður, won 25 awards and 15 nominations in 2025.

She is also the author and designer of Japan Art Revolution: The Japanese Avant-Garde from Angura to Provoke, published by Thames & Hudson in 2025. She began her career in electronic music, co-founding record label and events platform Fondation Sonore in 2011, and has since released DJ mixes for The Quietus, The Brvtalist, XLR8R and others.

Her latest DJ set, A Realm of Impossible Intensity, moves through cinematic soundscapes and heavy electronics, from ritual chanting to martial industrial, dark ambient textures and modern classical strings, weaving soundtrack extracts from her own films alongside tracks by Nick Cave, David Lynch, ANOHNI, Hildur Guðnadóttir and Kangding Ray.

“I loved the naivety of it, and it’s about trying to bottle that feeling.”

Toby Tobias has never really stopped. Since 1992, when he first got his hands on a sampler, some amen breaks and a stack of horror film samples, he’s operated under a run of aliases and studios, but Alphonse was always the one closest to the bone – a direct line back to hearing it all for the first time on Kiss FM and in the raves, before he knew what any of it was called. He’s put records out on Klasse Wrecks, Hypercolour, Emotional Especial and Kalahari Oyster Cult, run a label of his own in Voice Notes, and built a career propping up the counter in Croydon before anyone was paying him to be there.

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His latest, ‘Spirit of the Night’ with Seraphina Simone, is the kind of record that took its time. Written in a single session at Glastonbury in 2017, it sat through lockdown, a new baby and a handful of other projects before it finally clicked as a late-night acid house record, built around a snaking 303 line and Seraphina’s vocal, and spun out into four mixes pulling in four different directions. It’s out now on our our very own Ransom Note Recs.

We locked him in for a mix and a chat. Check it out below.

https://www.theransomnote.com/music/premieres/alphonse-see-me-in-3d-ransom-note-mix/

Berlin-based DJ and producer Anna Kost has carved out a distinctive space between techno, bass music and experimental electronics.

She has released material on the likes of Soma, Faux Poly, ÆX and more having established herself as a DJ in the German capital appearing at the likes of Tresor and RSO.

As a producer, she draws upon an array of influences, tending to focus on deeper, emotionally lead material which dances atop club based sounds and sensibilities.

This mix is made up entirely of her own unreleased material and demonstrates an unrivalled potential as she plots her next steps.

We're premiering Kerobokan, the title track off Rocco Universal's new EP - out 18 September on Cosmic Tiger, CT004, vinyl and digital.

Rocco Universal is the alias of Patrizio Cavaliere, who also happens to run Cosmic Tiger itself - started as a blog in 2019, gone quiet for a while, now back as what he calls a slow-moving but trusted archive of interviews, conversations and dancefloor oddities. He writes for Juno and Mixmag Asia, holds down a residency at Potato Head Bali, and has previously landed productions on Leng and Soul Clap.

The EP is four cuts of cosmic machine funk, recorded on analogue synths with feeling put well ahead of control - saturated drums, thick bass, melodies that take their time getting anywhere. Shaped patiently around that Bali residency, the tracks move through cosmic disco, proto-house, electro-funk and psychedelic chug, each one finding its place beneath evolving twilight skies. Whoever's naming the tracklist deserves a mention too - Mutiny On The Sex Raft opens things, Floating Free closes them.

Kerobokan sits third, named for the stretch of Bali it was shaped in - slow-burning, intuitive, built for the point in the night where nobody's watching the clock.

Kerobokan, below. The EP's out 18 September on Cosmic Tiger.

Buenos Aires bassline, Guadalajara hypnosis – we’re premiering Pinto’s deep, stripped-back take on Javier Ferreira’s Mercury…

Javier Ferreira built a bassline from mercury and light,

Multi-instrument magic from Buenos Aires to the night;

He broke the rhythm loose and let it drive,

Through peak-time thunder, after-hours haze,

A groove gone liquid in a silver blaze,

Deep and functional, and somehow still alive.

Then Pinto came along, all sampler and swing,

Stripped the groove right back till the silence could sing;

Guadalajara hands on a Mexican night,

He hypnotised Mercury, slowed down the spark,

Turned peak-time to prayer in the after-hours dark,

On Playground Records, ten September: liftoff flight.

Ferreira’s Argentinian – Buenos Aires born, Barcelona based – and has been at this fifteen-odd years: DJ, producer, mixing engineer running his own studio, Soundsfera. He co-runs NINEFONT with his brother Gabriel, a hundred-plus releases deep, and has put tracks out everywhere from Suara to Rotten City. DJ Mag LA called him one of Argentina’s top five techno DJs back in 2017; these days he’s as likely to be found teaching, having co-founded academies in Buenos Aires (Insound) and Barcelona (BesideSchool).

Deeper is three originals where deep basslines, broken rhythms and driving house grooves collide – detailed but functional, working just as well at peak time as three hours past it. The remixes pull in two directions: Pinto takes Mercury deeper and darker, stripping the groove back till tension carries the track instead of rhythm; François Del Mundo & Rem’s Martinez go the other way on a separate cut, adding a soaring arpeggio and turning it into a straight-up club weapon.

Pinto’s from Guadalajara – a Bar Américas resident since 2007, founder of the Localafiesta night, part of the Vatos Locos crew, known for running a sampler as an extra mixer channel back when nobody else was bothering. His read on Mercury fits: strip it back, let it hypnotise rather than hit.

Mercury (Pinto Remix), below. Deeper is out 10 September on Playground Records, mastered by Submarea Estudio.

GRAB THE FULL EP HERE: https://javier-ferreira.bandcamp.com/album/deeper-inc-pinto-fran-ois-del-mundo-rems-martinez-remixes

The most excellent Nandele Maguni steps up with the cHai EP on his own label. the ace-ly name Awesomakossamusic - four tracks, written, recorded, produced and mixed solo at Empty House Studios. We're premiering VIOLA, today.

Not a new name round these parts, Nandele opened Rosie Ama's Human Endeavour with Incomati on the label's Trains of Thought comp back in 2022, then returned with an extended solo EP of his own, Maputo, in 2024.

Maguni has been dragging Mozambique's underground into rooms that didn't know they even needed it till they found it ever since: Cotch International, a spot on Tresor's roster, records built from psychedelia, hip-hop and rhythm that defies any real categorisation or genre box. cHai goes further back. Chai's an administrative post in Cabo Delgado's Macomia District - the place where the armed struggle against Portuguese colonial rule began on 25 September 1964. No history lesson though: Maguni runs it through analogue machines and raw, unpolished textures until it sounds like it's arriving from the future, not the past.

VIOLA is rhythm first, textures close behind - the same push-pull between ancestral and synthetic that runs through the record. 

Get it on, let's go:

CHLOÉ is a serious DJ. She always has been and we say that with the utmost respect. 

For many years CHLOÉ has been a key operator amidst electronic music, steadily releasing her own material, running record labels and pushing the underground forward.

Her own imprint Lumière Noire remains pivotal in the evolution of a darker, more rugged side of things drawing upon influences from Post Punk, House, Electroclash and beyond. Her own sets are packed of similar sounds, often weaving and wandering between the spaces which sit on the periphery of the genres, pairing the similarities from each.  

Over the years CHLOÉ has performed at just about every trendy 'nightclub' out there. But that's never really been the point. For her it always has been and always will be about the music, the scenes which surround it are simply the accessory to the crime.

“Plants don’t suddenly transform from one state to another; growth is gradual, and a lot of it happens unseen.”

Having spent an album taking the passion flower through birth, bloom, and death, KiF Productions turns a plant’s year into a single day. The Seeds Mix is two hours made for doing nothing in particular – garden, common land, park bench, wherever there’s room to potter, stare, and let time pass without checking it. No lifecycle to hang it on this time, just a day. Dawn eases into focus for the first hour, dusk pulls everything inward and quiet for the second.

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Sound-wise, it’s the same juxtaposition that ran through Passiflora – birdsong, wind, bells and found nature sitting right up against synthetic tone, warmer where it can be. KiF have form for throwing in fake, synthesised birdsong purely to mess with the spotters, so don’t take anything chirping out of the speakers entirely at face value. As the mix moves from day to night, the sound follows: brighter and busier in the early stretch, sliding towards darker, slower and more dreamlike as the light drops, the shift gradual rather than a hard cut.

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It’s not made in a vacuum either. Simon Armstrong from Errant slipped them a couple of tracks that ended up soundtracking dusk. Rob at Be With handed over a Hatchback cut before it even hit his own label. Gardens In The Sky drifted in via a mix from our very own Tia Cousins for Test Pressing. It is less a finished object, more the latest exchange in an ongoing conversation between friends who keep sending each other music.

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Our old friend Keith McIvor haunts this one too, gently. His lockdown-era Tranquillity Mixes are where KiF first heard Inoyama Land, who show up in the dawn section, and a Saturday morning set at Watching Trees’ Bush of Ghosts this year fed straight into the whole thing taking shape.

Asked what plant they’d be, Will and Tom eventually landed on a coppiced hazel in a holloway – practical, long-lived, on good terms with humans, and sat under centuries of falling leaves (“plenty of samples,” as they point out) – two hours of KiF thinking like that particular tree.

Sit down, shut up, watch the light move.

Full interview here: https://www.theransomnote.com/music/mixes/seeds-mix-12-kif-productions-dawn-to-dusk-mixtape/

Music To Watch Seeds Grow By 010: KiF Productions (Passiflora) here: https://kifproductions.bandcamp.com/album/010-kif-productions-passiflora

Tracklist:

(Dawn)

The Habbiyya – Two Shakuhachis

Iasos – Undulating Bell Harmonics

Harold Budd – It’s Steeper Near The Roses (For David Sylvian)

Raul Lovisoni & Francesco Messina – Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo

Laaraji – Essence (Excerpt)

Inoyami Land – Bananatron

Spacetime Continuum – Ping Pong

MDA Analog – Rainful Memories

Hatchback – And The Walls Became The World Around Us

M&M – Garden In The Sky

Dieter – Ecstasy

Roedelius – Tempera

(Dusk)

Bruce Haack – 17 Gifts For Free Children

Deux Filles – Birds

Old Jared – IV. Forest Pond

Priscilla Ermel – Gestos De Equilibrio (Excerpt)

Another Fine Day – Life Before Land

Paz Sounds – Trees & Birds

Hampshire & Foat – Lullaby

Jonny Nash – Smoke Rings

Green-House – Soft Coral

The Black Dog – Chesh

Ashra – Deep Distance

Underworld – To Heal

Virginia Astley – Out On The Lawn I Lie In Bed

Orchestra Of The Swan – An Ending (Ascent)[Arr. For Violin, Harp & Orchestra by David Le Page]

Brian Eno – Strange Quiet