Ransom Note

We have your nightclub. We have your DJ box. We have thirty-six tracks, and most of them have no names because names are for records that want to be found.

This is Decius Trax – the loose, sweaty, pressure-relief side of a band that otherwise runs on pure discipline. The album project blends Lias’s voice into something unique; this is the other thing, the vehicle, the late-night chop shop where old cassettes get squeezed through the Decius filter until they come out the other side as someone else’s record wearing a new coat. Live jams, minimal tinkering, heads banging on the assumption that yours will too.

Most of what’s here you’ve never heard, because most of it was never meant to leave the DJ box. Untitled. Unreleased. Numbered like ransom demands instead of songs, because the numbering is the point – roman numerals climbing toward a second vinyl mini-album, a whole Pantone chart still to get through, no plan to stop until it tips into ridiculousness.

Don’t remix it with AI. Don’t expect liner notes on the next one either. Just make them, play them.

Track list and read the room – it’ll come with you eventually. It always does.

FULL INTERVIEW HERE: https://www.theransomnote.com/music/mixes/decius-trax-the-ransom-note-mix/

Psychedelia is at the core of Zillas on Acid's musical manoeuvres. The Philadelphian duo, made up of Thomas Roland and James Weissinger, have been DJing together for almost two decades, and you can tell. 

There's an intuitiveness to their sets; one that comes from an extended period spent building and evolving together. Their strung out, trippy sound takes cues from post-punk and acid house approached through that psychedelic lens they've become known for.

It's no surprise then that they've been closely affiliated with Making Time, the Philadelphia institution helmed by Dave P, that treads similar transcendental terrain.

Over the years they've notched up releases for some of our favourite labels, including Optimo Music, Live at Robert Johnson, Les Disques de la Mort and Running Back, and now they're bringing this music to life with their live band, adding vocalist Ari Ratner and bassist Matt O’Hare into the mix.

Their latest offering, Rolling The Marble Wheel, comes via our sister label Human Endeavour and is Zillas at their best (not even biased...). Following the release, we asked them to contribute to our Ransom Note mix series. Dive into the Zillas world, it's a trip...

The clockwork planet was a man-made world the size of a small moon. There were oceans, forests, cities, and even weather systems created by climate-control satellites. It was constantly in orbit. 

Its energy came from an array of fusion reactors positioned around the habitat's central axis. Massive superconducting rings distributed power to every district, while millions of solar satellites collected energy from the nearby star and beamed it back using microwave transmitters. The habitat's atmosphere, temperature, and water cycle were all controlled by artificial intelligence system. 

It all worked seamlessly. Except until today, when the oceans stopped moving. 

Olsvangèr draws for the bass weight on a new EP which features a heady assortment of rave driven breaks, crunchy house and rugged sounds for Tofistock.

Long before The Ransom Note had a name. Long before Team Love had a manifesto. Dave was always there. Usually near the speakers.

Two festivals, one philosophy. When Love International made its pilgrimage to Rainbow Disco Club, it wasn’t simply a case of a Croatian institution touching down in Asia – it was two kindred spirits recognising themselves in each other. Born in Tokyo in 2010, Rainbow Disco Club has always operated under a single guiding concept: “Beyond Space and Time” – a commitment to authentic underground music that transcends genre, geography and trend. Alongside these club nights in Tokyo the annual event as you’ll likely know, takes place in the Japanese countryside of Shizuoka’s Izu Peninsula/ Love International, meanwhile, as many of you will also likely know, draws a loyal family of returning artists, crews and ravers to the shores of Tisno each summer for what amounts to a celebration of sun, music and community.

Different latitudes, identical heartbeats. And yes – before you ask – we did make him answer questions about rainbows…

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We’ve known Dave Harvey a long time. Long enough that neither of us is entirely sure when it started – somewhere in the blur of the 90s, in rooms that probably no longer exist, with people we’re still lucky enough to call friends. Long before The Ransom Note had a name. Long before Team Love had a manifesto. Back when it was just about getting to the right room on the right night and staying as long as humanly possible. Dave was always there. Usually near the speakers.

Watching what he’s built since then – and more importantly, how he’s built it, with the same unguarded enthusiasm he had at the very beginning – has been one of the genuine pleasures of growing up in and around this ‘scene’ together. Because the thread has always been consistent. Whether as a DJ, programmer, promoter, or raver, there are few dancefloors he hasn’t graced, and fewer still where he hasn’t left some kind of mark. Since cutting his teeth in those 90s rooms, he’s built an inimitable sound that moves freely between house, techno, breaks and electro, EBM, wonky chuggers and disco-infused oddities – often all within the same set.

Here he is, doing exactly that. Captured live at Rainbow Disco Club, in case you needed any further evidence. The rest, we’ll let the colours speak for themselves.

@loveintfestival

@rainbowdiscoclub

@futureboogie

Samson A.K. has been a heady presence amidst the underground for a long time now having cut his teeth in various guises.

However, more recently he has begun boldly making music under his own name, cementing himself with a new position having released material on the likes of Berceuse Heroique, MAL Recordings and via his own newly launched imprint Ideal State. 

From a musical perspective Sam tends to be drawn to the darker, more abstract fringes of electronic music. There's a lot of noise involved and at times things get tough. 

This mix reflects that ethos, powering its way through a heady assortment of jackin' house, techno, bass and the spaces which sit in between. Its rough as f**k. Just how we like it.

Patricia Wolf makes music from the inside of an ecosystem.

Her recent release on Music To Watch Seeds Grow By; Yarrow (the 9th edition in the series) emerged from weeks spent at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado, working alongside ecologists studying plants, pollinators, and the slow pressures of a changing climate.

Patricia Wolf Mock Up

The album maps a Yarrow’s life from root to seed: the conditions needed to grow, the quiet underground, the moment a flower opens to something that might carry it further. Field recordings from those Colorado summers are woven through the compositions, leaving room, as Wolf puts it, for the natural sounds to come through – her way of sharing an emotional inner life when thinking about these environments.

For this mix, Wolf turned her attention to morning. Imagining this year’s Watching Trees festival crowd coming down from a long night of dancing – we talked her through in the afterglow of this year’s edition. Wolf built A Wander in the Garden for that specific threshold hour – somewhere between nine and ten, when birdsong starts to reassert itself and the body wants something slow, expansive, and unhurried.

The anchor track arrived first: the Cosmic Tones Research Trio’s Photosynthesis, from which everything else grew. What follows is a walk through an imaginary garden with several climates – shade beneath a linden tree, open meadow thick with yarrow and field poppy, a pine grove smelling of warm sap, an orchard of cherries and mulberries just beginning to ripen.

If she had to name the plant that holds this hour best, Wolf chooses lavender: something with a direct line to the nervous system, a quiet insistence on calm.

FULL INTERVIEW HERE: https://www.theransomnote.com/music/mixes/seeds-mix-11-patricia-wolfs-wander-in-the-garden/

Wigs is part of a new school of dj's pushing faster tempo's and frequencies.

Releasing records and playing at some of the most interesting new parties on the circuit he has begun to make a name for himself for his euphoric, energetic sets which blur the lines between house, trance, tribal and beyond. 

His latest release comes on Kasra V's label, a record which makes sense in context with Kasra also holding a penchant for the progressive era of 2000's house music which helped push and inspire his own sound.

There's no punches held here. This is a fast and fiery assortment straight from the off - a promising entry to the series from a DJ popping up in all the right places.

We’re premiering the video for ‘Abiotic Factors’ – Patricia Wolf’s opening dispatch from Gothic, Colorado and the invisible forces that determine whether anything grows at all…

Tia and Wil’s Music To Watch Seeds Grow By series – the ambient/new-age/planty cassette label has in nine editions, tried to make a compelling case that the best way to understand ambient is to get your hands in some soil and think about it properly. Each artist chooses a plant that inspires their music and can be sown in the month of the release. Simple. Seasonal. You may have noticed it already.

For the ninth edition – the third of Season Two – they’ve brought in Portland, Oregon-based musician and field recordist Patricia Wolf, whose album Yarrow takes its name from Achillea millefolium, a flowering plant whose broad geographic range spans North America and Eurasia, which also happens to make it the perfect conceptual thread to connect Portland (where the music was written and recorded) to London (where the cassette was pressed and will land through your letterbox alongside a packet of yarrow seeds and a fact card about the plant). A transatlantic weed of the most beautiful kind.

Wolf is one of the most interesting people quietly operating at the edges of sound art. Her recent arc has taken her from grief (I’ll Look For You In Others, 2022) to a kind of luminous rebirth (See-Through, 2022), then to birds – literal birds, in Iceland, for a documentary score (Hrafnamynd, 2025) – and now, with this album, to plants. Specifically, to the invisible forces that determine whether plants live or die at all.

Yarrow was created in response to Wolf’s artist residency at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado, as part of the Art-Science Exchange Project in the summer of 2024. She worked closely with ecologists Dr Paul CaraDonna, Dr Amy Iler, Dr Jane Ogilvie, Dr Nickolas Waser, Dr Mary Price, and Dr Will Petry, spending weeks embedded in long-term research on plants, pollinators, and their interactions as the climate changes. This is not, in other words, an ambient album about plants in the vague, pastoral sense. It’s an album about plants in the way a botanist might describe them: as dynamic organisms in constant, often invisible negotiation with their environment.

Which brings us to ‘Abiotic Factors’, the album’s opening track and the subject of today’s premiere. Abiotic factors – for those of us who skipped that particular biology lesson – are the non-living environmental conditions that determine whether an organism can exist at all: light availability, temperature, rainfall, wind, soil composition. They are the infrastructure beneath the visible world, the silent set of forces that a plant cannot choose but must simply work with, adapt to, or perish. As a concept for an opening track, it’s contemplative and a perfect orientation into the album… which you’ll all hear in its entirety soon little seedlings.

The video was shot closer to home – in Wolf’s Portland neighbourhood - through the lens of Edward Pack Davee, the filmmaker behind the Hrafnamynd documentary Wolf scored last year.

Watch here: https://www.theransomnote.com/art-culture/video-premiere-patricia-wolf-abiotic-factors/

Manami is firing on all cylinders.

If you’ve spent any time on a UK dancefloor over the last decade, you’ve likely crossed paths with her. Born in Japan and raised on Bristol’s foundational dub, house and bass scenes, she’s built a fierce reputation for holding down a room with unmatched energy and a distinct sense of community.

From early days raving at Livity Sound, Futureboogie, Timedance and Deep Medi to co-founding Bristol's Better Days parties, her musical DNA has always balanced the deep and the progressive. Now, she’s channelling that background into a distinct sonic realignment. Her latest productions and fresh live set lean heavily into sub-heavy 140, breakbeat, jungle and footwork, all tied together with those familiar progressive sensibilities.

Beyond the booth, Manami is mentoring FLINTA talent with Saffron and connecting East and South East Asian creatives through the East & Most initiative.

With appearances spanning from Berlin’s Atonal to unforgettable sets at UNFOLD, DGTL, Junction 2 and Boiler Room, she remains one of the UK's most reliable, anything-goes selectors.

We locked her in for a mix. Check it out now.

Hercules and Love Affair is an electronic music project created in 2004 by DJ, producer and songwriter Andy Butler. Originally formed in New York City, the act became known for blending classic disco, Chicago house, techno and synth-pop into emotionally charged dance music with an art-pop sensibility.

Rather than functioning as a traditional band, Hercules and Love Affair operates as a rotating collective of vocalists, musicians and collaborators, with Butler remaining the project’s central creative force. 

The project remains at the forefront of queer dance music culture in the UK and beyond and in our own opinion, remains pivotal for the fact that there has been no bowing or amenity towards fads or trends. 

They returned at the tail end of 2025, now as we approach summer a new remix package has been announced which includes contributions from the likes of Ciel, Luke Solomon and Mystery Affair. However, as mentioned above, their connection to the underground and origins of the sound has afforded them the rare privilege of a remix from none other than Larry Heard under the Mr Fingers alias. 

In celebration of this, here is a rare mix from Hercules and Love Affair, a homage to house music and the direction of travel as we proceed.