'PROSEGUR' is the obliterating Slip debut of North-Eastern security force Bad@Maths: pulped voices scrawled on wasted digital clatter. The voices of Elvin Brandhi and Odie Ji Ghast have stamped themselves inexorably on the Slip catalogue - Ghast's swoops and blabbers and Brandhi's doosmday swaggers all over pairings with bassist Otto Willberg and pop-garbler Mykl Jaxn (as Yeah You) respectively. As Bad@Maths, the duo's inimitable speaking-in-tongues practice lurches through electronic daggers and gunge. Elvin and Odie's roaming productions are a smash-and-grab on the furthest reaches of contemporary trap and grime, their voices re-animating 'net-culled spirits amongst whipslap beats. Modern mores, nasty drift.

WHATSAPPITE is the batty collaborative debut from Mancunian long-time sparring partners Otto Willberg and Odie Ji Ghast: a bewildering assemblage of feral double bass and vocal vignettes spliced with rabid interjections from a handpicked cast of eccentrics. Willberg and Ghast’s cuts ditch polish, finesse and good taste in favour of animal propulsion, taking base, off-the-cuff melodies and rhythms on a skew-wiff joy ride. Bolstered by brain farts from Gwilly Edmondez, Elvin Brandhi, THF Drenching, Rachel Margetts, Sam Andreae, Arshon, and Biz, WHATSAPPITE marries proper abandon with unabashed ears for a hook. --- Artwork by Odie Ji Ghast. Mastered by Owen Roberts. Tapes dubbed by Otto Willberg.

"Competition's Slip debut: laser-etched micro-songs of bruised vocals, sample grabs, and tenderised chamber MIDI. Competition is Newcastle-based Craig Pollard, whose confessional productions also spill into curation and a wider visual art practice (much of it, recently, as one third of the 'Wild Pop' crew) This mini-album sees Craig atomise songcraft, probing its remnants for signs of soul. Like the post-mushroom recall from which it takes its title, ‘You Turned Into A Painting’ is a queasy scavenging of the mundane. Pollard's voice achingly wears as he circles through lilting observations; his arrangements squeeze something unctuous from innocuous browser snatches and lowly sample packs, eschewing tricksiness in favour of low-key, loving twists." --- Artwork by Grace Whitfield. Mastered by Stephen Bishop.

Lawrence Lek’s Unreal Estate is a speculative simulation in which London’s Royal Academy of Arts has been sold off as a luxury playboy mansion to an anonymous Chinese billionaire. First shown at the RA itself in 2015, and available to play online as part of Lek’s ‘Bonus Levels’ series, this dystopian and poignantly funny piece was the winner of the ICA Tenderflix award and the Dazed x Converse Emerging Artist Award. Unreal Estate’s eerie landscape is underpinned by a soundtrack from cellist and composer Oliver Coates. Coates’ cello chorales are both tender and stark; glossy Reichian quavers, elephantine bass lines and cultivated waltzes reverberate within the gallery’s imaginary walls. Interspersed amongst Coates’ themes are selections from Unreal Estate’s narrator, whose advice to potential investors comes from a found text from Russian Tatler, translated into Mandarin by Joni Zhu. The result is a music concrete mixture of snatched vocal samples, effluent drones and tear-heavy harmonics. “…one of the most immersive ambient albums you are likely to hear this year…” – Bleep “…the music is as grand and boldly delineated as any computer game soundtrack, making it a perfect fit for Lek’s virtual world…” –  Nathan Thomas, Fluid Radio --- Mastered by Rupert Clervaux.

"Newcastle outfit Yeah You’s Slip debut: a stack of crackpot situationist pop forged in the fire of free improvisation. Mykl Jaxn and Elvin Brandhi are relentlessly producing instinctive, chewed-up tunes on the fly. Culled from sessions crammed into weekly drives to yoga, idle moments in the trolley park of Bridgend Tesco, and a late-night wander in Brussels, 'Id Vendor' captures the father/daughter duo in superlative form off the back of knockout 2016 shows at Kraak, Borealis, and Counterflows. A wicked onslaught of blunted beats, rudimentary synth contortions, and haphazard vocals as relentless as it is unpredictable as it is bloody wild." --- Mastering by Owen Roberts. Artwork by Elvin Brandhi. Originally released on cassette in June 2016. 

Heat, War, Sweat, Law is British composer Laurie Tompkins’ debut solo recording: a desperate stomp on the bones of Heaven 17’s ‘The Height Of The Fighting’, replete with rabid voices, cracked pots, faltering pipes, spent IKEA bags and egg shakers, and spasmodic ghosts of Martyn Ware synths. Part foaming rant, part exercise routine, HWSL’s incessant shaking, hammering and yelling wear down soloist, tools, and the tolerance of an audience put upon by a dispersed mob seeking to recruit them in their inane howls and claps. “…Glenn Gregory’s suave croons are a world away from these giddy bagatelles, evoking as they do a hurricane in a Sheffield charity shop…” – Paul Margree, We Need No Swords“…he cries meaningless bloody murder in nine tracks that resemble surreal playground games as much as they do compositions…” – Tristan Bath, The Quietus“…the receding hairline of an overwhelmed sound guy paying off the interest on his mic set case while pulling out hair…” – Tiny Mix Tapes --- Mixed and mastered by Owen Roberts. Video for “Sweat” by Joel Wycherley. 

Debut release of material from both Tom Rose and Caroline Haines (Chaines). Both composers working within electronic and contemporary composition, the pair’s music form a dialogue testament to sharing the same stage countless times over the past year. Chaines’ two offerings are evidence of an idiosyncratic vision embracing dislocated drums, swathes of distortion, and freakish manipulations of her own voice. There is a nagging sense of some submerged narrative – in Transverberation, the “bells and smells” of religious ceremony are evoked, while Speak Gentle Words is something like catching glimpses of distant shorelines. Tom Rose navigates the alternating interzones with three cuts that dismantle the base of Chaines’ music, as dry synthetic drums coalesce into toppling patterns and waves of synthesiser become caked in debris.The final track includes contributions from ‘cellist Tom Bayman, whose string sounds become stretched in an extended rumination upon Chaines’ unexpected violin solo. --- Music by Caroline Haines / Tom Rose. Mastered by Peter Harris

The King is Chaines’ commanding return to Slip: a claustrophobic, dank book of abstracted torch songs, festering in an uneasy grandeur. The LP collects work diligently amassed in the 3 years since the British composer/producer’s Slip debut ‘OST’, which housed contributions from ‘cellist Oliver Coates and artist Mary Stark within melancholic, uncannily tactile productions. The intervening period has seen Chaines collaborate extensively with the London Contemporary Orchestra, with commissions performed at The Roundhouse, Union Chapel, Printworks, and Tate Modern. The King sees Chaines’ eccentric, singular language grasp a fresh immediacy and emotive potency. Chaines’ voice is more present than ever – creepy, seductive and pained on the Scott-Walker-does-ASMR of “Eraserhead”, and diva-ghost of “Population 5120” – and their arrangements dissolve the symphonic into freakish forms – “Carpathia” and “Knockturning” spike pastoral organs and flutes with industrial menace and convulsing beatwork. "Three years ago, Chaines’s debut OST, featuring Oliver Coates on cello and the voice of Mary Stark, was an early jewel in the crown of the imprint. The King represents the sum of Manchester based composer/producer Cee Haines’s work since. And what a piece of work it is. Heaving and shimmering with the strings and winds of The London Contemporary Orchestra, slaphappy with its own electronic convolutions and twisted rhythmatics, vast in scope, rich in execution. The King could stand its own in any royal rumble." - The Wire

OST [SLP017], the staggering solo debut from British musician Caroline Haines, AKA Chaines, gathers studio realisations of three commissions completed since 2013’s SPLIT, with Tom Rose. Though written for specific occasions, the pieces are united by a sense of uneasy melodrama, and hallucinogenic flow. Lead cut ‘OST’ is a 20-minute epic written in collaboration with visual artist Mary Stark (vocals) where cartoonish, Rammstein-style aggression, plaintive guitar lines, and clunking glitch form an impish portrait of the UK’s north-eastern industry. But ‘OST’ is also a sincere love-letter to analogue film, with plush orchestral samples, and Stark’s disembodied voice tenderly blooming from the rubble.  'OST'’s remaining works frame its centrepiece. ‘Here’ - written for Laurie Tompkins’ 2013 Handy tour - is a whistled ode to twilight inebriation, accompanied by faint keys, revving cars, and Badalamenti synths.  On ‘I Found This’, Chaines’ warbled melodies merge with Oliver Coates’ muted cello, offset by tickling percussion and recorder chorales. Though OST operates in a place entirely its own, it is perhaps best compared with the work of similarly iconoclastic contemporaries such as Elysia Crampton, Mica Levi, and Dean Blunt. --- Tracklisting: 1. Here - 5:052. OST1 - 7:243. OST2 - 3:154. OST3 - 10:045. I Found This - 5:44 --- Mastered by Rupert Clervaux