The new label from the seminal Chicago club will release the local artist’s Dance Equations EP next month.
Ike Release is one half of the excellent Innerspace Halflife project – Hakim Murphy is the other member – but can his solo debut album scale the same dizzying heights as the two Innerspace long players? Unsurprisingly, Noir is based on the same classic electronic music influences as Release’s collaborative work and was realised predominately with hardware (although there were some iPad apps used, according to the accompanying press release) The key difference to the Innerspace Halflife material is that Noir is more streamlined and functional than this year’s Astral Travelling album.
The Innerspace Halflife member will release his debut solo album on M>O>S Recordings next month.
The Innerspace Halflife pair of Ike Release and Hakim Murphy lay down a live hardware set.
For lovers of rugged machine music, there is a hive of activity bustling around Chicago at present between likeminded souls Chicago Skyway, Hakim Murphy and Ike Release. Both individually and in various configurations of collaboration, they seem to have tapped into a creative spring that is sustaining them on a healthy torrent of box jams that bounce off of the analogue revival to deliver tracks both inventive and unfussy in the same breath. Hakim Murphy and Ike Release’s Innerspace Halflife project has been well received already, and now it’s Murphy and Sean ‘Skyway’ Hernandez linking up on Release’s Episodes label to serve up more of that back-to-basics beatdown business.
The notion that labels no longer act as filters doesn’t hold sway when one considers the M>O>S operation. Set up by Aroy Dee in 2003, its original purpose was to release music by the Dutch producer himself as well as close associates like Delsin boss Marsel (as Peel Seamus) and Jochem ‘Newworldaqurium’ Peteri under his Ross 154 guise. While fads and fashions have come and go during the intervening decade, M>O>S is inadvertently positioned as one of the most relevant labels of the moment.
Familiarise yourselves with the Dream Sequencer, Ike Release’s forthcoming full solo debut for M>O>S Deep.