This release is one of the hardest ones I’ve ever done. It carried weight I wasn’t expecting, haunting me. For months, these tracks sat unreleased. I kept coming back to them, until I stopped looking for reasons to hold them back.

“Knighthood” is a deeply emotional, ethereal-sounding track with intentionally hard edges. It began scattered, using old-school basslines and fragments of melody that didn’t yet know what they wanted to become.

Over time, something emerged - delicate, celestial melody taking shape in the broken beats. The creative process split into two equally compelling directions, and rather than choose, I let both versions breathe. The original maintains that organic development, while the VIP mix explores the same emotional terrain from a deeper angle, a couple semitones down and using a little more space.

Club Control is a bold new statement.

The title track leads with assertive attitude, a shot of heavy tech-house that gets totally spaced out in the middle. The bassline thumps through the whole way, leading some more atmospheric elements of the track until the end.

This took a lot of time to develop right. While this stands well on its own, I needed a second half to this single.

The B-side then became the “Dream and Bass” remix. This remix takes the original and flips it on its head. The dramatic turn is something like a misremembered, intense view of the original - just like a fleeting dream, and just as vivid in the moment. There’s something very different here, but it’s profound.

“El Dorado” took about a year to get right. This started as a simple question: what would psytrance sound like with some Latin percussion thrown in? Turns out, the answer required a lot more studio time than I expected.

The Latin influences aren’t just seasoning here - they change the entire structure. Instead of the usual psytrance build-and-release, you get these interlocking rhythmic patterns that pull in different directions. High-energy, but with more complexity than your typical festival fare.

The “Breaks” remix strips out some of the trance and finds the funk that was hiding underneath. Same source material, completely different perspective - less cosmic, more groove-focused. That bassline is on a mission!

Originally released 10 years ago, “Typhoon” was essentially a standalone release. This was always a favorite because of the “fast but slow” nature of this track - a breakbeat track with some complexity and a lot of patience.

I always saw this as an “imperfect” track, largely due to the unique soundset from the Kaossilator Pro. The loops were recorded live and then sequenced in Ableton. This created an interesting constraint - there’s an implicit imprecision in the recording process that took several takes to get right.

Like many of my other favorites, the constraints give the track a lot of life, and imperfections are what makes it memorable. “Typhoon” is a track well-deserving of this re-release, just in time for hurricane season.

Picking up on the hard-dance tip from where Speaking in Tongues left off, “Thrillride” is a hard trance oriented track but with a lot of techno influence and a hefty amount of dirt.

I really enjoyed how this one evolved, both in producing it and in how it listens. There’s a lot of early 90s influence present here, which is highlighted more in the “Carousel mix”. By contrast, the “Gravitron mix” takes on an “inverted” character, elements of the original were reshaped for a really different sound.

Strap in for the ride. Listen to Thrillride on your favorite platform. If you want a copy to keep, the digital single is cheaper on Bandcamp (linked) than anywhere else.

Evening / Things You’ll Need to Know revisits in extended single form, two of my favorite tracks from Existential Funk. Within this release are some new remixes along some older ones; undoubtedly the stars of the show are the “Modern” mix of “Evening” and the so-called “Deeper” mix of “Things”.

To highlight these two remixes in particular:

• “Evening (Modern mix)” is a note-for-note re-creation of the original, but brings the unrestrained style to something a little more precise and distinguished. This is sort of a more foggy take on nu-breaks compared to the ravey original.
• “Things You’ll Need to Know (Deeper mix)” is titled so because it has a drastically different soundset than the original, and a little more “depth” in this version of the drum and bass track. Like “Evening’s” new take, it is a nearly identical arrangement (with a little different take on the intro) but has a BIG new bassline at the breakdown. The original didn’t skimp on this, and this is a fresh take in a different direction.