Ransom Note

Giorgi Pipia is a Georgian DJ and selector originally from the western region of Georgia, now based in Tbilisi—one of Eastern Europe’s most influential underground electronic music hubs. Deeply connected to the city’s evolving club culture, he is a resident at the community-driven club Left Bank and a regular radio host on Rinse FM France, where he showcases his wide-ranging musical taste and expe...

With the current climate doing its best to grind things down, sometimes making music with your people is all you can do – and LA’s underground is responding in kind. Few collectives embody that spirit quite like the Elbow Grease and DISCOS XXX crew. SSRI – the Sound & Spirit Research Institute, a studio brainchild born from the meeting of DJ Dex aka Nomadico of Underground Resistance, Kosmik of Th...

Music that makes you feel deeply human… There’s a version of events where Joshua Idehen is still behind a bar in the West End, coming home late, flicking through channels. But then came Dizzee Rascal on Channel U – that first-person rant, that stream of consciousness pouring into the void – and something locked into place. Nearly two decades later, the British-born Nigerian poet and spoken-word ar...

For Phil Kieran – DJ, producer, film composer and the Belfast-based mind behind Le Carousel – it was closer to twelve years, the span it took to bring The Humans Will Destroy Us to life. The follow-up to his cult debut lands on 13th March via Phil Kieran Recordings, and it arrives fully formed: part shoegaze-inflected electronics, part Kosmische drift, part dancefloor catharsis – a record that fee...

A transmission from deep within the French underground. Sarcus Soundsystem, the trio of Ubik, Jacky Jeane and Olga B, have been quietly doing something right in Paris for a while now. Their various endeavours around the capital have drawn attention through noise, care and curiosity. A genuine investment in the spaces they use and the people who fill them. As a collective, their extended sets are b...

AHardway dancefloor throb injected into Strange Fruit’s shoegaze-inflected original… There was a Strange Fruit from Jakarta who said, “I shall go on Tuesday, iridescent and red! With a hypnodub shimmer and kosmische delight, I shall drip upon Wednesday and dance through the night!” The Hardway Bros heard it and let out a shout: “We’ll remix your polarness inside and about! We’ll chug through the s...

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...

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 dayti...

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 dancefloo...

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...

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...

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 fr...

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 surg...

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...

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 ps...

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. Sh...

For Glasgow-based artist Susannah Stark, the walk from the city to Carbeth becomes a meditation on paying attention, on taking your time with things, on letting roots guide the way. In Stark’s work, sensitivity isn’t fragility; it’s a form of attentiveness, a willingness to be present with the human voice, with the spaces between sounds, with what emerges when you slow down enough to notice. Her a...

Raw, rhythmic, intricate percussion and off-kilter melodic ideas woven into proper post-punk territory from the Bogotá producer. The opening salvo from Dance On The Volcano, the Bogotá producer’s mini-album for Natural Selections – five tracks of intricate percussion and off-kilter melodic ideas woven into proper post-punk territory. Raw, rhythmic, and unapologetically tense. Out Jan 22nd on Natur...

Channeling the imposing physicality of brutalist concrete monoliths into that thing we call dystopian techno. The UFO95 flew over Brussels one night, With Absence Has Shape tucked under its light, Through brutalist towers so starkly imposing, Where concrete dreams lay decomposing. “Oh MORD!” cried the vessel, “Oh MORD!” it did say, “I’m bound for the club on the sixth of Febru-ay! With radiophonic...

Moon Roq is the collaboration of two musical minds: Franklin & The Iron Glove. Originally born as a carefully curated mix series, their journey has since blossomed into a project that now includes a vibrant blog and finally, a DJ duo. The sound of Moon Roq is rooted in their shared passion for infectious, hypnotic grooves, which glide through the realms of house, disco and techno. You’ll also find...

Best known as one half of acclaimed Sheffield electronic duo Hiem - whose disco-infused productions have graced labels like Crosstown Rebels and Eskimo, and featured collaborations with Phil Oakey and Roots Manuva - Boswell is now stepping out under his full birth name for a bold solo venture into stranger sonic territory. "I Know What I Saw" trades "lissom disco" for the eerie glow of unexplained...

There’s a particular alchemy that happens when a band and producer find themselves on the same wavelength – not through careful planning, but through the natural convergence of shared musical worlds. Jakarta’s Strange Fruit and electronic artist Jonathan Kusuma have arrived at exactly that point with the Hypnodubmix of “Iridescent,” the first glimpse of the band’s forthcoming Drips EP. Strange Fru...

Angela Lin, aka Angie QQ, producer and A&R behind the Sounds of Taiwan compilation, returned to Taiwan in May 2019 seeking refuge after the loss of her mother. Angela Lin，又名 Angie QQ，《台灣之聲》合輯的製作人與 A&R。2019 年 5 月失去母親後，她選擇回到台灣，尋找心靈慰藉。 What she discovered in Taroko National Park became the seed for this mix: a meditation on grief, memory, and the way certain p...

Ibiza has changed a lot. It isn't what it once was that's for sure. However, from time to time you might just catch a glimpse of what it was and what it still means to an awful lot of people. Andy is an old friend of Ransom Note and for those in the know he's a bit of an unsung hero having worked behind the scenes at various record labels you probably love. He's probably signed some of your favour...

Odopt is the musical partnership of Ivan Maslov, a Buenos Aires-based producer and composer, and Gregory, a DJ with two decades of experience behind the decks, now residing in Paris. Since 2015, they've dropped rugged, hardware-driven bangers, carving out a niche in the space of Electronic groove. Their music is constantly doing the rounds on dance-floors worldwide and you may have crossed paths w...