Ransom Note

A cosmic transmission from Manchester-based musician and artist Ana K Miller, just shy of 2 and a half hours, weaving together psychedelia, acid, kraut, dub and techno.

Full interview here: https://www.theransomnote.com/music/mixes/ana-k-miller-shine-a-light-on-mix/

Tracklist:

Nathan Dawidowicz - Deep Fluff (feat. Leo Börger)

Sula Bassana & The Nasoni Pop Art Experimental Band - Emmerting Spring

銀色の波 - Whispers Of Chikurin

Nidiot – World of Nids

Jimi Tenor Band - Shine All Night (feat. Florence Adooni)

TINA – Vacation

Minami Deutsch - Can't Get There (Jamie Paton Remix)

Teledubgnosis – Echolocation

Hawkwind - Electric Tepee

Kris Baha - You Told Yourself This Would Get Worse

Anatolian Weapons - Process (Original)

Coil - Protection III

Maart – Noma

Sinusoidal – Half Closed Eyes

Sula Bassana – Stella Star

U-Ziq – Melancho

Mr TC & Lo Kindre – The Waving Bridge

The Soft Moon – Black

Davy Kehoe – The Pilot (Part 1)

Mr TC – Zeuglodon

Pancho Piedra – Servio

Dr. Strange - Tripode de Diode (Pt1 & Pt2)

Blurred Boy - No Time For Tears

Moody Boyz - Destination Africa (Electric Forest Version)

Khidja - Never Seen The Dunes

Identified Patient & Sophie du Palais - Peaceful Panic

Autumns - Cruising (Black Bones & Autumns)

Cabaret Nocturne - Voodoo Spunk (Original Mix)

KOB 101 - Beat Depressed

Zaliva-D - Long Journey

O Yuki Conjugate - The Chasmic

Abdulla Rashim - Path Inwards

Azu Tiwaline - Ethereal Tribes

Hawkwind - Death of War

Black Merlin - Stalky Tarkovsky

Von Grall - Vanquish the Disparities

Acronym - River Red Gum

Azu Tiwaline & Al Wootton - Nine Points

Tres Demented - Demented (Or Just Crazy) (Original Version)

Tres Demented – Brainfreeze (Carl Craig 'Sessions' Mix)

Death in Vegas – Arise

Dalo – Woodpecker

Von Deyen / Schütz - Valley Of The Monsters

Deep in the Yorkshire woods, multi-disciplinary artist and producer Jamie House – aka Hamie Jouse – has been quietly splitting light into a thousand tiny rainbows.

Best known for his hypnotic visual installations and art direction across DIY music spaces from Old Red Bus Station to Resonance, House found himself at last year’s Watching Trees festival doing something beautifully meta: filming daytime trees to project back onto their evening counterparts through a cascade of prisms.

The “arty bullshit” behind it, as he puts it, was about bridging gaps of time and space and memory – creating past tense ghosts of daylight. But really, “it just looked pretty, and the trees and sun had it all covered.”

Whilst setting up his spectral light show on the Bush of Ghosts stage, Tia and Wil (that’s us) caught wind of the music he was playing. What unfolded in those early morning hours was something special – patient, ambient-soundscapes with a deep understanding of the fractal nature of the forest, where every process is made up of countless sub-processes doing their best impression of one solid bit.

This mix captures that philosophy; energised yet gently held, pulsing yet ambient. Mirroring both the slow, steady rhythm of plant growth and the constant, quick reactions within the cells. There are rarely right angles in the forest, just lots of individual leaves doing their thing- a benevolent collusion with the kodama, those forest sprites that House channelled through his psychogeographic, hauntological light work.

From the Rhubarb Triangle of West Yorkshire, where he dabbles in ambient matters with his long time friend Aaron during hazy Sunday afternoon straggler zones, overlooking different vistas, House has created something that feels like plugging into the mainframe with beings deep in the woods, under a very full moon.

Always bring a memory stick, indeed.

Interview here: https://www.theransomnote.com/music/mixes/hamie-jouses-mixtape-for-benevolent-collusion-kodama/

Tracklist -

Ironic Hill - Chorus

Kuzich - Morning Sun

John Haycock ft Rob Dunford - Dapple Shade

Palta - Tabt optagelse

ssssoftpatch - Bowling for Loops

Agron - Should I feel bad for doing This

Wizold Sage - Comfort Heater

Christian Kleine - Beyond Repair (Version)

Golden Bug & In Fields - Blind

Ex-Terrestrial - Everybody Dreams

Takao - Bird Ensemble

David Versace - Heart to Heart

Barker - Fluid Mechanics

Shhhhh - Pond Natter

420 aka Galcher Lustwerk - Untitled 6

Motoko & Myers - Plover

Zammuto - It Can Feel So Good

@hamie_23

FUCK!LACRÈME are back with the second part of their unhinged trilogy. The Italian five-piece have been making a mess of Beat Machine Records in the best way possible, and Welcome To My Crib keeps that energy going.

We’re premiering “Slam It” today. It’s big beat, sharp percussion, layered textures, the works. The title cut goes deep into jungle rhythms and acid breakbeats, built for dark dancefloors.

Out on 20th February on Beat Machine.

https://www.theransomnote.com/music/premieres/premiere-fucklacreme-slam-it-beat-machine-records/

@beatmachinerecords

Cornelius Doctor & Tushen Raï held no punches with a hard hitting acid driven EP released on their homestay record label Hard Fist at the tail end of last year.

It was a nod to the Goa inspired days of old, excellent rave fodder with beeps and glitches galore.

The pair are based in Lyon and have been a familiar presence amidst the underground music community in the city for a long time now, we at Ransom Note find them to be pretty great too.

Anyway, this mix spans two hours and is a wild ride through fast paced leftfield dance music which pays homage to the roots of the genre in the best way possible.

Stranded's new EP 'The Dead' arrives at that hour when the city finally shuts up - all sub-bass rumble and skeletal beats, the kind of thing that sounds best through headphones on the last bus home. It's got that Bristol thing in its bones: dub's cavernous space, post-punk's wire-tight nerves, hip-hop's head-nod.

Opening track "Arch Groves" sets the tone for the whole record - vocal samples drift like smoke through low-end weight and slow-burning unease, swelling and receding without ever fully resolving. The guitars don't lead so much as lurk at the edges, scraping and hovering.

It's the sound of something haunted, patient, built for dark rooms and quiet contemplation.

Stream it here and pre order the EP: https://www.theransomnote.com/music/premiere-stranded-arch-groves/

Deep in the woods at our very own Bush of Ghosts stage at Watching Trees, Scottish producer Brian d’Souza, aka Auntie Flo, brought his ‘Plants Can Dance’ project to life in a five-hour ambient set beneath a canopy of trees.

Drawing from the playlists he’s been curating for Imperial College’s psychedelic therapy trials, d’Souza transformed the clearing into what he describes as “a sanctuary away from the main stage,” where human – and non-human – audiences alike could experience music designed to mirror the quiet intelligence of the natural world.

This 90 min excerpt captures the heart of that nocturnal performance, guiding listeners through the Ascent, Peak, and Descent phases – a journey filtered from the vast database of ambient music d’Souza has amassed over five years of running Ambient Flo radio. The setting itself became integral to the experience: darkness creating a natural sensory deprivation that, as d’Souza notes, allows listeners to become “more absorbed in their other senses, including the sounds they hear.”

At the core of d’Souza’s ‘Sunflowers’ next instalment for our Music To Watch Seeds series: auntieflo.bandcamp.com/album/music-to-watch-seeds-grow-by-007-brian-d-souza-sunflowers

lies a profound botanical truth: sunflowers practice cooperation over competition. Recent research reveals that when these plants encounter nutrient-rich soil between neighbours, they deliberately root elsewhere to avoid conflict – a form of underground etiquette that challenges our traditional understanding of survival of the fittest. D’Souza’s album captures this behaviour sonically, using biodata from his son’s sunflower in their London garden, converted into sound through his modular synthesiser via Instruo’s Scion module.

This live performance extends that concept into the forest, where ambient music fulfils its original definition – having enough space to mix with environmental sounds, creating a novel soundscape at all times. As d’Souza reflects on Peter Wohlleben’s ‘Hidden Life Of Trees’ and its description of forests as interconnected social networks, the Bush of Ghosts set becomes a meditation on what he calls “the More Than Human world” – a space where silence represents the fragility of life, and where trees, unlike festival-goers, “aren’t going to leave the dancefloor if they don’t like a track.”

The result is an invitation to forge a deeper connection with the natural world, to witness how plants can indeed dance.

Full interview here: https://www.theransomnote.com/music/mixes/seeds-mix-8-brian-dsouza-live-bush-of-ghosts/

@auntie-flo

@watching-trees

Italian London-based producer Dario Picchi aka Soreab follows up his collaborative EP alongside Om Unit with an unremitting, hi-spec vision of techno, grime, dub, and industrial on new album 'CU' [short for 'Completely Unstable']. Pure digital age angst, scintillating torque and radical soundsystem minimalism.

On album highlight 'CU3', which we're serving up as a premiere, Soreab hurtles into surgical, adrenalized, tunnel vision techno with a sound design depth. Proper concussive machine funk futurism for journeys to the void and back.

The beautifully unhinged "Kraut Cheap Tune" is like stumbling into a broken arcade in some lysergic hinterland where the machines have learned to improvise. A-Tweed strips away the usual constraints here, letting the tracks breathe and mutate across odd terrains, somewhere between krautrock's hypnotic sprawl and chiptune's glitchy nostalgia.

The Rome-based producer, known for his elastic approach to tempo and texture, opens up new space on this EP for Sketchy Lines Records.  Toulouse Low Trax delivers two takes on "Junk Foot," each one pulling the original into different orbits, while Kamoun's rework of "Dixan Cheap Tuning" offers another dimension entirely. Fresh dimensions indeed – this is A-Tweed at his most exploratory, and the results are properly compelling.

Out February 24th on Sketchy Lines Records: https://sketchylinesrecords.bandcamp.com/album/kraut-cheap-tune

Thomass Jackson has built a sound through bands, traditional instruments and massive raves held in Buenos Aires.

From releases born in friends’ studios, world tours as a bassist for Capri on Gigolo Records, and a steady run of releases on Gomma, Correspondant, Multi Culti, La Dame Noir and Viscera Transmissions - Thomass clearly knows what he’s doing.

By the late 2000s his sound blended to more psychedelic and percussive rhythms, which developed into playing across countries that include China, Lithuania, Serbia, Bolivia, Mexico and Germany to name a few - along with sharing booths with the likes of Manfredas, Jennifer Cardini, Tiger & Woods, In Flagranti, Blond:ish, Horse Meat Disco and Mike Simonetti.

Based in Mexico City, Thomass Jackson delivers  a mix that contains bass-first selections, weird corners and slow hypnosis into full-body motion. Music that doesn’t chase drops and trusts the listener to stay.

For The Ransom Note Mix, it felt right to hand him the controls. Press play.

https://www.theransomnote.com/music/mixes/thomass-jackson-the-ransom-note-mix/

When two generations of Lisbon’s underground collide, the result is visceral, raw, and uncompromising.

Scam Dust is Tiago and Shcuro – two artists channelling decades of experience into something that sounds like Detroit techno filtered through Sheffield’s industrial grit with a distinctly Lisbon sensibility.

Tiago, Lux Frágil resident and ‘DJ’s DJ’, returns from a seven-year hiatus from music. Shcuro, Paraíso co-founder of the excellent and scene documenter, breaks free from solo frustration. Living in neighbouring beach towns outside the capital – Parede and Carcavelos – they’ve made Gastric Pulse: saturated acid, industrial-tinged techno, and sonic dirt of the highest order. This is music built for systems, big systems. Music designed to make you move and break shit. Pure punk in electronic form. The title’s a joke about acid music taken literally (see also: “Enzyme Breaks,” “Pepsin Drive”), but the music isn’t playing.

Felt right to ask em for a mix right?

This mix captures their first session together – Bileebob, Conrad Schnitzler via Marcel Dettmann, Plastikman, Jamal Moss. Techno at the margins where things get uncomfortable.

Coffee grains and Pepper X.

@shcuro @simatudo