Ransom Note

Cult classic given the Allison magic…

There was a Young Fellow called James Allison, who said, “All this dancing has something quite wrong with it! I’ll edit three classics and turn them about, And make all the rockers get up and go out!”

So he rummaged through cult cuts and album-shelf things, and polished them up till they jangled like strings, Said Ivan Smagghe. “Goodness!” said Sean Johnston, “My word!” Said Chris Stoker, “Remarkable!” James Holroyd concurred.

“Make Dance Rock Again!” cried the Fellow with glee, “It’s Series the First but there’s more, you shall see!” And the dancefloor said “Blimey!” and the rock crowd said “Right!” And everyone edited long into the night.

Make Dance Rock Again 001 is the first instalment in an ongoing series from James Allison, and it arrives as a statement of intent. The EP finds Allison doing what only the most quietly confident selectors pull off: taking three records – cult classics and possibly overlooked album cuts alike – and editing them into something that reveals exactly who he is when the dancefloor isn’t looking. A clear, unguarded window into a taste that exists well outside Allison’s dance music world, and the results are, as billed, certified head turners.

Early support from Ivan Smagghe, Sean Johnston, James Holroyd and the late Chris Stoker (Not An Animal) suggests the series has arrived fully formed. A strong opening missive – and the first entry in something worth watching closely.

Buy Here: https://jamesallison-mdra.bandcamp.com/album/make-dance-rock-again-vol-1

Your favourite DJ’s favourite punk band are back, and they’ve brought the sweat with them.

There was a Young Band from the Paradise Palms, Who played with such fury it rattled your arms, They grooved like the ESG, bit like The Slits, And drove Windmill Brixton completely to bits!

“O come to our Party!” cried Bikini Body, “It’s perfectly sweaty and pleasantly shoddy! The bassline is punching, the drumming is tight, And everyone’s dancing till quarter to light!”

So they packed up the Palms and they played BBC, And KEXP and Radio 6 and NTS and free, And the dancefloor said “Goodness!” and the basement said “More!” And nobody quite knew what a party was for.

Bikini Body return with the Weirdest Party EP, their first release on Paradise Palms Records following two records on Optimo Music – a pairing that did a lot to define both their trajectory and their restless, hybrid sound. This new set pushes further into the territory they’ve made their own: the charged, uneasy space where dancefloor pressure and punk confrontation refuse to separate.

Percussive, physical and wired with attitude, the tracks draw a lineage that runs from ESG and Liquid Liquid through Bush Tetras, The Slits and X-Ray Spex, with the remixes opening things out for club systems without sanding off a single rough edge. It’s music that works equally hard in a sweaty basement and on a packed dancefloor – which, given a 13-date UK co-headline tour ending in a sold-out London show, a packed Windmill Brixton headline, and airplay across BBC Radio 1, 6 Music, KEXP and NTS, appears to be exactly where people are putting it.

Weirdest Party EP is out on Paradise Palms Records on 22nd May 2026.

Catch them live on our stage at Another Thought on 13th June.

Safiye has been quietly doing the work.

And we mean that in every sense. Anyone who's crossed paths with her at Love International - or anywhere else, for that matter - will know there's a version of Safiye most people never fully clock. The one making sure everything runs smoothly, checking in on people, holding the energy of a room without ever needing to shout about it. Calm, kind, and completely unflappable in the way that only someone truly on top of things can afford to be.

Years spent on dancefloors across the globe and through a bi-weekly show on SWU.FM have sharpened her instinct for the room, one that's taken her from Bristol's underground to the fields of Glastonbury and to the aforementioned Love International - last few tix left for that those at the back. Since 2024, she has been part of Bristol's disco powerhouse Paradisco, a permanent fixture on dancefloors in the city and beyond.

As she puts it herself, it's not just showing up to a gig and pressing play - the coordination, the planning, the endless behind-the-scenes effort that nobody really sees. That's the work. And she does it with the same ease she brings to everything else.

The through line in all of it is a sound that's slippery by design. House, electro, disco and acid all chosen carefully, sequenced with intention.

Let’s have a chat and get it on, shall we?

https://www.theransomnote.com/music/mixes/safiye-the-shine-a-light-on-mix/

“Everyone needs a moment of silence every once in a while,” Basil seems to know this, too. Salamanda create a bed for Basil’s germination.

Watching something small grow in your kitchen makes you pay close attention. The Seoul-based duo Salamanda and the next artist stepping up for Seeds understand this. Uman (Sala) and Yejin (Manda) spent a day watching a single basil plant on a windowsill, noticing how the light shifted across its leaves, water gathered at its roots, and time slipped by. What started as a simple observation turned into a meditation on the inner life of a plant and what it means to really listen to something living.

Sala(Uman)_s salad

Basil droops in the cold, grows too fast in the heat, and can wilt from too much attention; it needs a moment, too. Salamanda noticed that this silence is a pause for space, where the real growth happens. For them, music fills that space…

Manda talks about understanding her own feelings by looking at her plants. When she feels down, the plants seem to react. They reflect something back: being present, paying attention, and giving and receiving care. This mix comes from that kind of language, asking you to keep coming back to care for the same small plant. If basil could think, what would it think of you?

Get your headphones on. Listen to the way a plant listens to light…

https://soundcloud.com/8salamanda8

A longstanding, driving force within the Italian underground and the wider world of contemporary psychedelic music, Lay Llamas celebrates the release of the project's new album 'Time, Islands and Thresholds' with a mesmerizing mix for our main series.

Nicola Giunta has been leading the psych brigade under the Lay Llamas banner for well over a decade. Formed in 2012, the project has since released an entrancing, ever-evolving body of work across indispensable labels including Rocket Recordings and Black Sweat Records, collaborating with the likes of Goat, Clinic, Damo Suzuki (Can), and Mark Stewart (The Pop Group) along the way.

With new album ‘Time, Islands and Thresholds‘, Lay Llamas heads out on a spellbinding, synapse-fried voyage that evokes hallucinatory visions in mysterious, exotic lands. Across ten tracks, hypnagogic psychedelia is masterfully laced with cosmic dub, space rock, and the kind of music you might hear on records by Eden Ahbez and Martin Denny. Describing the imagery and existential trajectory that underpins the record, Giunta references “surfers on acid, mysterious rites on deserted islands, worshippers of solar deities, night flights, animal skins, will-o’-the-wisps on hilltops, liminal spaces, passages into the underworld, psychic inner journeys; life, death and rebirth.”

‘Time, Islands and Thresholds‘ then, is a record of heady, retrofuturist iconography and into-the-void introspection. Drawing parallels with Spacemen 3, Peaking Lights and Sun Araw, it’s an album that nevertheless finds Lay Llamas plotting the project’s own psychotropic course. The album finale ‘I Was Blind (Now It’s Over)‘ is also one of the most beautifully strung out songs we’ve heard this year.

To accompany the release of the album, Giunta has put together a suitably potent mix of hypnotic drum trances, heavyweight dub, snarling noir-punk and rarefied psych to liven up, expand and soothe your soul. Settle in for a special one.

Interview: https://www.theransomnote.com/music/lay-llamas-the-ransom-note-mix/

Tracklist

1 - Cheval Fou - La fin de la vie, le début de la survivance

2 - Cloud Management, Vivien Goldman - Judge Judge

3 - The Serfs - Cold Hand In Mine

4 - Laika - Spooky Rhodes

5 - Geologist - Oracle Road

6 - Death and Vanilla - Intro

7 - Orange Car Crash - Straight Star

8 - Coma World - Western

9 - Des Demonas - There Are No Vampires in Africa

10 - Dave Harrington (ft. Chris Forsyth - Ryan Jewell - Spencer Zahn) - REDUX Dub 8

11 - Deradoorian - Weed Jam

12 - Montel Palmer - Mermaid Wolf Whistle

Wonky organic grooves from ALF CHAMPION and MDHNTR via Calypso records new compilation

There once was a Shape who could dance, With pockets of electronica trance, It wobbled its form through the Definition, And questioned each note and condition, While singing quite badly about circumstance.

“What is,” asked the Shape, “this peculiar sound? That bounces and bobs all around and around? Is it liquid or solid or something between? The strangest device I have ever seen!” Said a very confused polka-dotted hound.

The Definition replied with a riddled refrain: “I am what you hear when you listen again, A thing that is not, yet somehow it is, A shape-shifting, drift-curious quiz, That dances through corridors, valleys, and rain.”

And they walttzed through the Calypso till dawn broke its spell, Those two nonsensical friends, who got on quite well, For a Shape needs Definition as much as it’s true, That Definition needs Shape to be something brand new, And that, my dear reader, concludes this strange tale to tell.

“What Is Your Definition” sits in that liminal space between organic groove and electronic. It’s the sound of something taking shape… which leads rather nicely onto Calypso Vol. II, a nine-year endeavour where Iñigo Vontier and Thomass Jackson assemble 16 voices across the spectrum of the experimental electronic

Press play and find out what you’re listening to. Or better yet: ask what your own voice is.

@calypsorecs

@alf_champion

@mdhntr000

From the coastline to the dance-floor.

Daichi's ear was formed early. Weekends spent at Oppa-La in Enoshima absorbing whatever the room had to offer, left a mark that still runs through everything he does. From there the path naturally progressed, co-founding Vinyl Youth, a collective whose energy has carried through Korea and onto the stage at Rainbow Disco Club.

His productions tell a similar story. Edits and originals landing on MM Discos, Crue-L and Not an Animal, each release finding ears far beyond Japan.

This is music with a sense of place.

Read more: https://www.theransomnote.com/music/mixes/daichi-the-shine-a-light-on-mix/

akarta’s Strange Fruit with the last track from their Drips EP is something super special. Pouvoi Moteur – French for “motoric power,” since you asked – is exactly what that sounds like: locked-groove krautrock discipline shot through with kosmische shimmer, the kind of track that makes the road ahead feel endless and the destination irrelevant.

The ghost of Can’s engine room is all over it, that locked hypnosis that somehow never quite repeats itself, while Cluster’s smeared electronics hover at the periphery. Aryadiaz, who conceived it partly out of an obsession with factory machinery and, apparently, partly with German beer, describes the 4/4 pattern as feeling like “breaking through space and time.” We’re inclined to agree.

Out now via Gentle Tuesday Recordings, with a vinyl release to follow through Loide and TipTop Records. Stunning stuff.

https://strangefruit.bandcamp.com/album/drips

Adispatch from the holy island, via Alabama.

Two guys from Muscle Shoals, Alabama -0 the city that quietly wrote half the soul records you’ve ever loved — making shoegaze concept albums about a tidal island off the coast of Northumberland. On paper, it shouldn’t work. In practice, Holy Island, the debut from Adam Morrow and Jamie Sego’s Sister Ray Davies, is one of the more beautifully stunning records to land this year: motorik folk, walls of fuzz, delay pedal disco, and genuine literary heft, released via the always excellent Sonic Cathedral and drawing comparisons to mid-period Flying Saucer Attack, Souvlaki-era Slowdive and a long-lost Spacemen 3 outtake.

They are, by their own admission, complete beginners as DJs. We handed them the airwaves anyway.

What came back is exactly what you’d expect from two people who learned to hear music through Nuggets compilations and Delia Derbyshire records, who want biblical noise and dream of piloting the Grateful Dead’s Wall of Sound. It’s a mix that’s charming and oddly coherent: dub basslines, psych and proto-electronic tangents, the kind of selection that could only have been assembled by people who think in pedals and reverb tails rather than BPMs. A journey with a clear first step, even if the destination remains gloriously unclear.

Not a DJ mix in any conventional sense, just an excellently varied record collection let loose.

Owain K is a stalwart of the Bristol underground.

For many years he has cut his teeth running parties, curating labels and producing music. A bit of an unsung hero of sorts in our eyes - his musical knowledge is vast and in this day and age he represents exactly the sort of character and dedication a DJ should have.

For years he has been on a quest to explore new music, digging for hidden gems and helping to push the sound forward without gimmicks or the sort of delusional grandeur we've become accustomed to from a DJ in the social media era.

His blog and record label Innate is widely acclaimed amongst those in the know and its rare we'd kindly say as such about another site. Only kidding...

This mix is a serious addition to the series and showcases a deep understanding of nuance and sound as he weaves and winds between house, electro and the eclectic spaces in between.