✦ Oli XL ✦

Oli XL is an experimental musician from Stockholm. After slowly becoming a key voice in the leftfield club sphere, and appearing in compilations such as PAN’s Mono No Aware, Oli vastly expanded the world of his already distinguished sound with the release of his debut album Rogue Intruder, Soul Enhancer in 2019, to critical acclaim. With a dissected freehand approach to the rhythms of the UK rave continuum, fragmented sampling techniques are paired with personal field recordings & processed vocals, resulting in a bizarre but emotionally rich musical universe recalling the playfulness of Basement Jaxx as much as humorless glitch.
Following a small set of vocal driven live shows diving deeper into the album’s pop sensibility, Oli has spent the last year carefully crafting a new collection of music… TBA..
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✦ Golin ✦

Passionate and oddly baroque in its digital zeitgeist, Golin’s work blurs the lines between mainstream pop and experimental electronic music. Her approach is informed by a unique perspective on the way music can mediate contemporary experience of cultural and physical displacement. She first appeared in 2016 as Rin, featuring on Ziúr's track "Lilith". Her debut as Golin – the entirely self-produced debut EP Momo (Midlife Music) – came in 2017, followed in 2018 by Fushigi, a collaborative EP with producer Buga, courtesy of Shanghai's Genome 6.66 Mbp label. Following a two-year residency at Brussels' favorite cultural house Beursschouwburg and a year as part of the European SHAPE network's platform, the CalArts-trained dancer released her solo EP Crush via True Panther’s Twin imprint in October 2020..
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✦ Estoc ✦

The name of estoc's 2021 release, Blend Queen, is an apt description of the Philly-based producer's musical acumen. Her hard-edged productions build bold new shapes out of existing raw material, with a glimmer of irony mixed into the ferocity. Her famed mashups, for example, might interest anyone who has ever wanted to hear a hyperpop-swaddled coupling of Creed and hard techno producer Gabber Eleganza, or a big room trance edit of any of The Fray's cheesy anthems. One 2022 estoc edit, splicing "Macarena" and Tiësto, moved one commenter on SoundCloud to describe the rework as "a one of a kind abomination." But estoc's music is more than hardcore absurdist fluff. Its brutal and often ridiculous style serves as a fortress against cultural hegemony. In a 2017 interview for The Astral Plane, she explained the intent behind her popular DJ tools: "This idea of creating a tool to defeat those with more power and protection than you is really appealing to me, as it fits into the narrative of anti-fascist and anti-imperialist ideology," she said. "Being able to look at what seems like insurmountable odds and coming out ahead with the right tools." Estoc's repertoire challenges the belief that mashup culture is low culture. In fact, it goes even further, inviting us to engage more the ideological concepts that upholds these tunes. Her debut album, Serenity, veers away from her previous mashup work, and includes original vocals as well as shadowy, beatless tracks that exist worlds distant from her usual maximalist leanings.
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✦ Promesses ✦

Promesses is both a label and a DJ duo composed of Samos and Härdee. They are also at the head of the parties Professeur Promesses and the festival Milieux. The artistic direction of the label takes note of the new musical hybridizations born of eclectic backgrounds and influences. Residents at Rinse France, their shows are familiar with the crossing of musical genres (rap, reggaeton, dancehall, footwork, trance, jersey, ambient ect.). They build their sets as a space without borders and create a network between the artists and their productions to become de facto complementary with the work of the label.
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✦ Dida ✦

Dida is both Dennis Vanderauwera’s moniker and artist name, a prime example of the composer/DJ’s continuous flirt with the informal and the formal. For Dida, the silly and the genius seem one and the same. Actually Dida’s first LP was titled Ingenuous Scenes (2021), a record that exploited the borderline genius of “kids” by building on children’s library music, strangely familiar sound pops that toy with that paranoid and perverse inside-jokeishness of anything “avant-garde.” In Dida’s music, composition is always and never easy on the ear, proof be last x-mas’ gift Waes Hael!, an album consisting of seven out-of-control jingling and jangling Christmas carols. Expect from Dida’s liveshow a similarly crooked vibe, demonstrating his amateurish take on the classical and his keen soundtrack-y sense for mini-drama. Highlights may include stammered vowels or speechlessness turned to song, the oei’s and ai’s that reveal Dida’s flair for stupid Flemishness and the unmistakable party sensibility, leaving nothing not turned inside-out and upside down.
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✦ Otis ✦

Otis is the founder of Slagwerk, a Brussels-based label notorious for their parties, bringing together the ever-surprising stretches of contemporary music – its history includes Amnesia Scanner, Aïsha Devi, Oli XL, Lee Gamble, Varg2TM, Rabit, Abyss X and M.E.S.H. – and a delight in the many faces of club, never disconnected from the families it fosters. Having had the opportunity to play around Europe in clubs such as De School (Amsterdam), Macao (Milan) and Trauma Bar (Berlin), supporting the likes of Yves Tumor, Endgame, Malibu, Bladee and Swan Meat and appear on radio platforms including NTS Radio (London), Red Light Radio (Amsterdam), Rinse France (Paris), Otis’ sets each seem an inspired and heterogeneous take on that sublime desire to simultaneously keep up and let go.