Underground Resistance
Nation 2 Nation

C.Z. - RADIAL LENS [OFFICIAL VIDEO]youtu.be/9hoHn1oCGfUC.Z. debuts on LA's Evar Records with the uncompromising Heat Index EP.The Los Angeles-based producer, beatmaker and DJ sets a course through IDM, techno, jungle and trance to deliver five frenetic, emotionally-charged dancefloor cuts.Over the course of an intensely productive career, Colby Zinser (aka C.Z.) has made music spanning genres like pop, rap, hardcore and jungle. As well as releasing music as C.Z., he's operated multiple aliases, including the prolific Ice Underlord. Drawing from a longstanding fascination with breaks, trance and the IDM of artists like Warp Records' Clark, he's developed his own rich and eclectic style of club music - a sound that crystalized on his 2020 debut album Hyperfocus.

boomkat: ...Arguably thee deepest Seekersinternational dive bubbles back up for a necessary new edition with Ossia’s excellent No Corner label, and in a new remastered roots version to bootScrolling back to near ground zero in their widely celebrated catalogue, ‘Rootprinciple’ is foundational SKRS business that appeared on Bristol’s finest in 2014, a few years after their session for the late, great Digitalis, and would pave the way for a run of outstanding turns over the years, garnering praise from all quarters to their borderless, judicious application of dub psychedelia.It’s truly essential listening if you’ve been snagged on their sound and ever tumbled down one of their wormholes, playing it relatively stripped back and breezy compared with some of their wilder shenanigans, with a real focus on sensuality and smoked out atmospheres that’s primed for toking types and late night sessions. The tracklist has been slightly trimmed, but contains all the spirited nutrition of the original, keeping heads and feet off the ground with finely toggled and juggled dub FX that have become their hallmark, filleting and diffusing samples of obscure and classic roots dub records in an endless swirl of shifty subbass hits, vaporous vocal contrails and smudged harmonic horizons that come off like the results of Rhythm & Sound’s imaginary cosmic siblings. Peerless! Crucial! Killer!

boomkat: ...Smiling C have us beaming again with ambient house treasure from a lesser-hailed node of the early ’90s UK house and rave sceneDancing between the lines of jacking Chi-house, psychedelic bleep techno and ambient house, the ‘Mad Vibe’ EP is the sole output by DJ Mad & Dr. Stevie The Ambient Guru, who, if we’re not mistaken, hail from the raving outpost of Middlesbrough on England’s North East coast - a sorely overlooked bastion of the original northern UK rave circuit. This level of detachment from the UK rave scene perhaps explains the offbeat formulation of the ‘Mad Vibe’ EP, which clearly echoes the styles of Yorkshire bleep ’n bass an hour south, but with a rawer, radgy, playful edge.A-side sports ‘Northern Echo’ with its properly charming mix of palm wine or Hawaiian guitar and simmering, latinate machine rhythms in deliciously woozy style, while ‘Communication’ hops around on a sparky jack attack with tumbling toms, nagging bleeps and catty psych guitar licks in the last third. B-side only gets ruder with ’System Shock’ working on the cusp of New Beat and some other strain of quintessentially UK rave nuttiness, and ‘Levitating Pharaohs (Full Frontal Spacehead Ambient Mix)’ wraps up in the barminess in balmy ambient guitar, sweet synth chords and rustling NYC deep house rhythms.