Ransom Note

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.