#17: March 2025 Standouts
Admittedly much delayed, but more than worthwhile
Time slips by — more music, more work, more incredible writing flooding Substack. Somehow, this transmission is two months late, but I’m catching up.
Festival season is almost here. I’m gutted to be missing Dripping in New Jersey (June 12-15) and Nono Gigsta’s rare US performances along with many other incredible artists and vibes. Her set at Freerotation last year, The House of Crocodiles Part 2, was my pick for mix of the 2024 — a masterclass in tension, release, and fearless genre alchemy. It’s a shame to miss her likely one-time US visit.
I’m working on a summer concert highlights list to help you catch the best live music in the coming months in NYC. You’ll find a partial list at the end of this newsletter — best viewed in the app or browser but a full post is coming soon.
Looking ahead, Eris Drew and Octo Octa’s System Activate Fest (August) in Vermont promises something special that I hope to partake in — 450 souls dancing under the trees to 42,000 watts of T4TLUVNRG.
I’ve updated the playlist featuring picks from this month that you’ll find below
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Albums
Ohyung: You Are Always on My Mind [NNA Tapes]
A luminous, shape-shifting diary of gender and memory — OHYUNG fuses trip-hop, shoegaze, and plasticky string loops into a downtempo dialogue between selves. Beats shimmer, pianos ascend and the production pushes into oblivion on what immediately felt like an AOTY contender. It’s heartfelt, hazy, and incredibly fresh and essential listening for fans of dean blunt, yves tumor, tirzah, and avant garde pop music.
Shinetiac - Infiltrating Roku City (West Mineral Ltd)
Born as a live set for a 29 Speedway x Conditioner’s show, Infiltrating Roku City sees Pontiac Streator, Ben Bondy, and Shiner twisting ambient-dub into a fractured, algorithmic dreamscape. AI whispers, glitched pianos, and digital detritus spiral through pixelated noise, capturing the beauty and chaos of our digital world.
Raisa K - Affectionately
Lo-fi guitars, clattering beats, and quietly piercing vocals — Affectionately is a claustrophobic, deeply personal breakup diary and solo debut that hums with everyday psychedelia and dubby domestic tension. Tirzah / ML Buch / Copenhagen scene fans, take note.
HTRK – Live at Cafe OTO
HTRK bring their twilight country noir to life in this stripped-down, spellbinding set. Sparse guitars, ghostly vocals, and flickers of ambient haze conjure a quiet storm,
ECHT! – Boilerism
Boilerism is pure sub-pressure chaos — SOPHIE’s hyperpop shine collides with Simo Cell’s bass weight and Sully’s rhythmic wizardry, all funneled through ECHT!’s explosive live jazz chemistry. It’s club music played like a rock band on the brink.
Dean Blunt x Elias Rønnenfelt – Lucre
Slacker rock haunted by heartbreak and beauty in decay — Lucre is a quietly devastating collage of lo-fi folk, post-punk shadows, and dream pop haze produced by Dean Blunt and Vegyn, with Elias drifting through it all like smoke in a sunbeam. Lush, haunting, and quietly unforgettable.
Om Unit - Acid Dub Studies III
Swampy 303 squelch meets smoked-out sound system science — Om Unit’s latest Acid Dub Studies entry blends rave nostalgia and dub futurism into something deeply hypnotic and endlessly tweakable.
YHWH Nailgun: 45 Pounds [AD 93]
A 21-minute typhoon of twisted guitars, guttural screams, and polyrhythmic chaos — 45 Pounds is experimental rock balancing chaos and control with all the finesse of a crashing helicopter. Definitely an NYC band to watch.
Bambinodj - Silent Dispatch
Imagine Aphex Twin ghost-producing for a sunlit Berlin dembow set — Silent Dispatch bends African rhythms, vaporwave nostalgia, and slick 80s textures into something tender, strange, and totally new.
Saffron Bloom – Saffron Bloom
Sepehr’s trip-hop alias dives into illbient swamps and ghosted breakbeats, conjuring a raw, eerie beauty that lingers like perfume in a dark room.
MK Velsorf & Aase Nielsen - Opening Night
A sun-soaked hallucination of ambient jazz and muzak — Opening Night drifts through LA’s gallery glow with eerie calm, evoking Satie, Arthur Russell, and Michael Mann in equal measure.
Nels Cline: Consentrik Quartet [Blue Note]
Avant-jazz with teeth and tenderness. Cline’s latest swings, grooves, and hypnotizes with a dream team of improvisers in a set that channels Brooklyn’s restless spirit.
EPs
Conna Harroway - Spatial Fix
Conna builds a sonic river of slippery, tumbling beats — where glitchy textures and slippery percussion melt into each other in a beautifully off-balance fashion. Spatial Fix flows like ambient on a bender, always shifting, always alive.
Sa Pa - The Fool
Sa Pa’s latest EP — the first release on Short Span, a new label from Matthew Kent, who previously ran the mix music platform Blowing Up The Workshop — is all about pressure. Slow, cavernous basslines carve through misty ambient layers, creating a soundscape you can feel in your chest. Warm, hypnotic, and beautifully heavy.
96 Back - Catford Jewelzz [Tempa]
Half-step dubstep with a psychedelic mutation — Catford Jewelzz blends Coki-era sub weight with rubbery synths and fractal percussion, pushing Tempa’s reboot into unpredictable new territory.
Boylan – Tunnel
A molten blast of apocalyptic breakbeat — timeless, physical, and ice-cold. Shard View launches with 10 heavy, percussion-led missives from the depths of Peckham’s war room with London, Detroit, and Berlin colliding in a war drum of bass futurism.
Compilations / Singles
A very light section this month but both of these comps sing in their own ways.
Deep, rumbling—a shift in the seasons. Serious stuff, but always with a grin—Ommaya Vol. 3 back for round three, bringing in friends from Tokyo to Berlin alongside familiar faces to properly bass-boost this entry
A forward-leaning selection of producers navigating the outer edges of Bass Music. Swerving between weighty low-end pressure, footwork tempos, dubwise manipulations, and seismic percussive workouts, this release captures a raw, unpolished energy built for low-ceiling rooms and sound system explorations.
Malibu-esque ambiance drifting through the abyss.
Mixes
"64 tracks in 2 hours. All vinyl. Recorded in two overdubbed takes on 3 turntable setups - kinda like going back to back with myself."
Shouts to Osmosis which seems like an incredible festival and Michael McKinney (via Passion of the Weiss) for his always excellent monthly mix roundups. He wrote of this set “Osmosis in the Trees 2024 starts out as a survey of zero-grav electronics, all deep-space pings and bleary-eyed ambience. But it’s not long before the silhouettes start to sharpen, and, suddenly, yumi’s off to the races, speeding between vein-popping footwork, billion-ton dancehall, mile-a-minute drum workouts, and just about anything else liable to crack the dancefloor in half. It’s a remarkable set that, on paper, ought to disintegrate”
NAP's pi/live is a three-hour whirlwind of dance music’s wild fringes—scorching reggaetón, foggy dub-techno, stomping UK garage, psychedelic trance and more —spun with the fearless, boundary-smashing energy that defines his legendary sets.
A convergience of friendship from the organizers of Sweat Sessions and Final Passage featuring Purelink, Significant Other, Yushh, and adjacent bass / dubwise productions.
Upcoming Shows and Concerts
An expanded list with callouts will be coming soon with the entirety of summer.
Fri 5/23 [Of Montreal] performing ‘The Sunlandic Twins’ / cumgirl8 @ Brooklyn Steel
Fri 5/23 [Squid] @ Warsaw
Wed 5/28 [death's dynamic shroud + Vitesse X] @ Elsewhere
Thu 5/29 [Pachinko / Alison’s Halo] @ Brooklyn Paramount
Sat 5/31 [MIKE] @ Irving Plaza
Sat 5/31 [SMINO] @ Terminal 5
Mon 6/2 [MOURNING [A] BLKSTAR, FATBOI SHARIF @ TV Eye
Wed 6/5 [Turnstile, Teezo Touchdown, Boy Harsher, Big Boy] @ Under the K Bridge
Wed 6/5 [Sunny Day Real Estate] @ Ashbury Lanes
Wed 6/5 [Courting / Slow Fiction] @ Night Club 101
Fri 6/7 [Lucy Liyou + Eliana Glass] @ Public Records
Tue 6/10 [Perfume Genius] @ Brooklyn Paramount
That’s all for this week, if you enjoyed this newsletter please share it with a music loving friend and subscribe for more <3