Optimo Music Vinyl & CDs

Review: GAEG, featuring Monkey Timers and Keita Sano, brings a vibrant mix of sounds on Anarcho Disco Vol 2, a heady blend of wide ranging influences. Side-1 starts off with 'Fountain,' an exhilarating track that merges Italo house, post-disco, and leftfield house elements into a fresh and dynamic sound. It's a track that immediately draws you in with its energetic and eclectic mix. 'Blue Fusion' continues the momentum, offering a similarly bold approach that showcases the duo's flair for blending genres. Side-2 opens with 'Brother,' a standout with its wild drumming and distinctive house vibe, creating a track that feels both innovative and unpredictable. 'Crazy Pa Pa' wraps things up with a psychedelic touch, using varied sampling and unique effects to craft a subversive sound that's both vintage and anarchic. If you are looking for something unqiue, Anarcho Disco Vol 2 is perfect for anyone seeking a fresh, adventurous house music experience.

Review: You can always rely on Optimo Music to serve up the leftfield goodies. And that's exactly what we have here with this new EP from Gaeg entitled Anarcho Disco Vol 1. It is a trio of innovative tracks starting with 'Merpa' which is a jumble of rhythms, the sounds of spacecraft taking off, ghoulish laughter, dubby bass and wire electronics that will lead to madness in any set. 'Hi-Land' is another richly layered with twanging bass guitar, sci-fi signifiers and vocals that ramp up the pressure. As the title suggests, this really is an outing of anarchic disco.

Review: Optimo Music continue to dazzle with their increasing experimentation, this time welcoming Finnish producer and K-X-P frontman Kaukolampi to the fore. Exploring the concept of sound as a physical and spatial phenomenon, the LP explores Kaukolampi's idea of "the sphere": his metaphysical and/or musical analogy for being subject to an undetectable outside force, as if being manipulated by an unseen cult. Hypnotic, eerie grooves play out in a muted, time-crystalline fashion, all tracks evoking the feeling of being locked in spherical amber, unwitting.

Review: Glaswegian outfit Pleasure Pool - a collaboration between producer/synth player Finn O'Hare, vocalist Andrew Robertson and a rotating cast of guest musicians from the local scene - delight in creating hard-to-pigeonhole music that combines club-friendly elements with live performance, the addictive accessibility of pop and nods to a wide variety of sonic styles. 'Love Without Illusion', their debut album, is an exemplary exploration of this approach, offering aural attractiveness and a string of highlights. Our picks of a very strong bunch include the slipped breakbeats, stirring synth-strings, New Jersey organ stabs and analogue bass of 'Modern Nature', the wayward electro-dub eccentricity of 'Sell Your Stuff', the Balearic synth-pop colour of opener 'Open Hours' and the humid, immersive, sunrise-ready deep psychedelia of 'Love Without Illusion'.

Review: The ever-expanding Optimo Music never ceases to impress. The label run by the eponymous techno duo usually sees them indulge their outer-fringe musical curiosities, rather than sticking to their dance music guns, and this trend continues into the present, in which they now present a full-blown compilation of UK anarcho-punk. Featuring sonic black flags and propagandistic deeds from the likes of Crass, Chumbawumba, The Ex, Annie Anxiety and Poison Girls, this album comes at a prescient moment, not least for a contemporary Britain struck by a cost of living crisis. The message is clear: if music can squat the world once, it can do it again.