Ransom Note

Eternal Love and Caravan meet in Sydney for a double-sided single on Palms Trax’s CWPT

There once were two acts in a motel,
Who found that their rhythms matched well,
One brought the Italo glow,
One the balearic flow,
And together they cast quite a spell.

They met in a Sydney hotel,
With a studio session to tell,
Of a track built for heat,
With an Afro-tinged beat,
And a low end that rolled like a swell.


Then Caravan, left on their own,
Took the original and let it roam,
Through a sunrise-lit haze,
Into trippier days,
Till the dancefloor became a strange home.

So spin it by night or by day,
Side A for the peak, B to stray,
Two voices, one sound,
On CWPT’s ground,
Eternal Love and Caravan, Heat Motel, out in May… no, September, to be exact!

Some records are the product of months of file-swapping across time zones. ‘Heat Motel’ isn’t one of them. Eternal Love and Caravan wrote and recorded it together in a Sydney studio last December, in a single session that set the tone for everything that followed – and you can hear that in it, the sound of two producers locking in rather than politely taking turns.

It arrives on CWPT, Palms Trax’s own imprint, and pairs two voices that have no business fitting together quite this neatly. Eternal Love broke through with ‘Ritmomento’ on Music From Memory’s Second Circle, an EP full of Italo-rooted, globally minded production, and that same instinct for rhythm and Afro-influenced atmosphere runs through this. Caravan brings the balearic, acid-tinged end of things, with a much more direct focus on what actually works at 2am. The result is a house cut built on insistent, Afro-inflected vocals and a rolling low end, with every element pointed at peak time.

‘Heat Motel’ is out on vinyl and digital at the end of September 2026 via CWPT.

“Everyone was smiling, fog was oozing from the walls, and people were just loving life.”

Amelia Holt moved to New York to work in fashion, saw the stress up close and decided she had dodged a bullet. Born in Rio Bravo on the Mexican side of the Texas border and raised on the other, she arrived twelve years ago with a marketing degree and ended up on the steps of Red Bull Studios and Gallery. The first person she met there was Justin Strauss, who put her on a guest list when she knew nobody in the city. One of the first records she bought was a Justin Strauss remix.

The rest happened at Bossa Nova Civic Club. She went on weeknights to avoid the busy weekends, learned to DJ at its happy hours before she owned any equipment, and was in the corner of the dancefloor the night Bookworms dropped Whirlpool Productions’ “From: Disco to: Disco” at his Confused House party. That’s the night in the quote.

These days she runs the Honey Trap party and label, hosts shows on The Lot Radio and Kiosk Radio, writes the newsletter In Your Dirty Ears and looks after 13 artists through her agency, HOUSE OF ILL FAME. She plays Nightmoves, Nowadays, Public Records and Good Room at home, and has played Berlin, Lisbon, Tbilisi, Mexico City and Melbourne away. She recently joined the programming team at Sustain-Release, which is where this mix comes from.

Sustain-Release is held at a former children’s summer camp in the woods in upstate New York: “a bunch of adults taking over a summer camp and having a good time dancing to music.” Holt played the Bossa Lounge at 1 AM on 12 September, Year 12 of the festival. It’s the slow-burner stage, moody and lit by the colour theory crew, and she played it the way she plays the early part of a night at Nightmoves or Honey Trap: songs she loves, with enough in there to dance to if you’re up for it.

She has since tested the recording at a friend’s brunch, where it went down well. Her own instruction is to listen while doing “all the wrong things”.

Full Interview here:

Mun Sing contributes ‘Pareidolic Zero’ to VIGIL, a compilation and exhibition by 29 artists and practitioners, with all proceeds going to the Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund.

Mun Sing’s ‘Pareidolic Zero’ is one of 12 tracks on VIGIL, a compilation and visual exhibition made by 29 artists and practitioners. All proceeds go directly to The Ghassan Abu Sittah Children’s Fund (GASCF), a charity providing medical care to children in Gaza and Lebanon and helping to relieve the medical sector there. The album is out on 19 November, and the exhibition runs at Raleigh Chapel until the 24th.

The project grew from distress at witnessing endless images of children being killed, and the numbness that builds from seeing them. Cameras, face recognition, eyes, CCTV, drones, lenses, data profiles and surveillance all fed into the music and the artworks, and each track is paired with a physical artwork or visualiser. ‘Pareidolic Zero’ is paired with a visual by Elliott Eldar. Its title comes from pareidolia, the habit of seeing faces in random patterns.

The name VIGIL draws on several associations: watching over someone at their bedside, staying in one place as a form of protest, and gathering in memorial. The launch at Raleigh Chapel is a ticketed event with live performances from Mirror Organs, Visio and Zeynep Ağcabay. Selected artworks will be on sale alongside a physical compilation CD and T-shirts, with proceeds going to GASCF.

VIGIL is organised by Felix Luke, with collaboration and co-production from Alex McCullough.

Lucas Dupuy - ‘HL2Piano’
Visio - ‘Eye Swarm’
Burning Pyre - ‘Deluge’
Mirror Organs - ‘slow change’
Floid & W92 - ‘Yaejo’
Mun Sing - ‘Pareidolic Zero’
Flaty - ‘Veil Remedy’
Charlie Benjamin - ‘Kumbhaka’
Zeynep Ağcabay - ‘Casus Beli’
Severin Black & Owen Pratt - ‘Lurid Bolete’
dmstfctn - ‘Demons’
Sam Purcell & Jacob Dywer - ‘Dust’

Istanbul-based digger and producer Grup Ses’s mix for Ransom Note is a trip through the cassette underworld of 1980s Turkey, when drum machines and synthesisers went from novelty to the centre of the arrangement.

It opens with a sampled tape skit asking whether you’re stressed or tired, then prescribes the cassette as the cure, to be played anywhere from the hamam to a minibus. From there it moves through electronic pop, arabesque hybrids and Anatolian-tinged studio pieces, with a Turkish cover of Mory Kanté’s “Yé ké yé ké” along the way, before closing on two slow jams.

The backdrop is the 1980 military coup. In its wake, the studio, rather than the band, became where Turkish pop was made, and the new machines spread fast. The records here are full of Junos, DX7s and Yamaha RX11s, but also stranger local tools like the Bojidar RB Alaturka Ritm-Box, a rhythm box built around traditional Turkish rhythms. Some producers used the gear to chase the international pop sound of the moment. Others pushed it towards arabesque or Anatolian pop, and plenty of these records never travelled beyond a small cassette or vinyl run.


Many of them are gathered on DALGA – A Selection of 80s Pop Oddities from Turkey, compiled by Grup Ses for Zel Zele, the Istanbul and London-based label and NTS Radio show. Neriman and Füsun Önal show the glossy, global-pop side, while Mehmet Pekün and Zor Beyler fold electronics into arabesque. Tele Tempo, a studio project arranged by Özkan Turgay with drums by Koral Sarıtaş, takes the Anatolian route. Vedat Biçkin’s “Darbuka Bongo Kavgası” splits darbuka and bongos across the stereo field over a drum machine groove, and Grup Ses calls it the most inventive production on the record. Six of the tracks have never left their original cassettes until now. The mix sets a few of them beside lesser-known finds from the same years, so the compilation sits in a wider scene.

The title is Turkish for “wave”, and the sleeve uses Antonio Cosentino’s painting “69 Volkswagen” (2003), which comes from the same everyday Istanbul imagery the compilation celebrates. For Grup Ses it also goes back to childhood. His earliest musical memory is MFÖ’s “Peki Peki Anladık”, which was constantly on at home when he was three or four. He has been digging and releasing records since 2007, with six albums of his own and archival work for Ironhand Records, Sucata Tapes and Zel Zele, including the label’s Café Türk and Bahtiyar Taş reissues.

DALGA is vinyl-only and comes out on October 30, 2026 via Zel Zele Records. “Anca Gidersin” is already out as a digital single, and Bandcamp pre-orders include an instant download of Zor Beyler’s “Bir Mumdur”.

Fulll interview here: https://www.theransomnote.com/music/mixes/grup-ses-the-ransom-note-mixtape/

There was an Old Drive in a Case,
Who held ten long years in its space;
It went blink with a hum,
And said, “Now I’m numb!”
Then the Screen wrote “Not Found” on its face.

A Man at the Claptrap HQ
Said, “I know what a Man ought to do:
Make some Acid that bites,
Proto House for the nights,
And a Sad String to see it all through.”

Said a Mancunian chap, Ruf Dug,
“I shall give the A1 a good tug!”
It came back, so they say,
As a killer that day,
Very tasty, and snug as a bug.

So, children, whatever you do,
Keep a second and third copy too;
Back it up! Back it twice!
(It is cheap, it is nice)
Or you’ll sing the File Management Blues.

Nearly six years after his last full EP on Claptrap, Vanity Project returns with ‘File Management Blues’, made after a backup drive meltdown wiped over ten years of studio files from Claptrap HQ.

The EP has four original versions on a theme, plus a rework of the lead track from Manchester’s Ruf Dug. It runs from uptempo, club rollers with swirling pads and biting acid lines to downtempo dub chuggers, spanning acid, proto house, and balearic, with a melancholic digital string melody running through it all. The release notes sign off with a reminder: always back it up, kids.

‘File Management Blues (w/ Ruf Dug Remix)’ is out 6 November on Claptrap (CLPTRP008), on 12" vinyl.

A1. ‘File Management Blues’
A2. ‘File Management Blues pt.2’
B1. ‘File Management Blues (Ruf Dug Remix)’
B2. ‘Everybody Talkin’ ‘Bout (File Management)’
B3. ‘File Management Dub’

Produced and written by Vanity Project. Remix produced by Ruf Dug. Design by Lorenz Klingebiel.

Claptrap on Bandcamp: https://claptrap-clptrp.bandcamp.com/
Pre-order via Rubadub: https://rubadub.co.uk/products/file-management-blues-w-ruf-dug-remix