Andrew Lyster runs the Manchester-based YOUTH label, one of the few audacious recording phenomena still being produced by an industrial city once known as one of the most eminent and fertile focal points of popular art. The uncompromising principle of innovation is the driving force behind a dynamic and varied catalogue produced on cassette, CD, vinyl or digital and always supported by a meticulous graphic design. In its records, the use of electronic dance music techniques is never obvious or confined to a specific genre; on the contrary, rhythms, timbres and melodies are twisted and blurred, broken and destroyed through an oblique and abstract arrangement of elements, so that the listener often finds himself on the threshold of the dancefloor, or directly outside it.

Lyster’s sessions and his sporadic radio appearances share the same exploratory spirit, searching through the cracks for sounds, artists and moods that other selectors miss. He has previously produced mixtapes for Cav Empt, Collapsing Market, The Wire, Blowing Up The Workshop and Left Alone.

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Tadleeh, the pseudonym of Italian-based producer and DJ of Indian origin Hazina Francia, produces a body of work towards whose tribal core tends traces of dark wave, techno, ambient, and hardcore continuum figures, and whose pieces can be found scattered across YOUTH, INITIATION, Yegorka, Haunter Records and self-releases. SHAPE+ artist in 2020, Tadleeh curated a radio show on Noods that featured artists such as Lena Willikens, Piezo, Umfang, Nkisi, Croatian Amor or Still, has collaborated with NTS Radio or Rinse FM and has been remixed by Slikback or Crystallmess.

Lone, her first album, released on YOUTH in April this year, tentatively represents the holistic zenith of her work. Dominated by a ghostly, atavistic and delicate atmosphere, Tadleeh’s previous references, to which she adds formally free chamber songs, merge and interweave soberly into a coherent and solid fabric, crossed by a restrained tension that advances cinematically through erratic passages, melancholic and nostalgic minor chords, cosmogonic interludes and hollows, percussions and ancestral chants, bacchante dances inclined towards the club and oppressive miasmas.

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The multifaceted nature of Sockethead’s work, the project by artist Richard Harris, is due to two main reasons. First, his interdisciplinary conception of artistic creation, which accumulates gestures, materials and practices from painting, music and poetry. Secondly, the development of its programmatic character, that is, the construction of a set of compositions which, in the manner of an archive, records the experiences not only of the artist himself but also of the incomplete project of modernist Manchester. An example of the twilight of popular modernism, his entire oeuvre is an immense collage marked by liminality, urgency and abandonment, and it is astonishing to observe his overwhelming amalgam of references, media, sources and genres, impossible to list here: obsolete equipment; software instruments; field recordings; avant-garde brushstrokes; fragments taken from the internet, radio or television; speeches and poems; electronic experimentation; rave ghosts; psychedelia and folk; post-punk; soul, funk and R&B; screwed rap; Detroit techno, electro et al.

A member of Return To Zero along with FUMU and Turinn, Sockethead collaborates with Michael J. Blood and Rat Heart, like-minded artists from his immediate environment. In 2023 he released his latest cassette, Drenched Worlds Falls Apart, on his label of choice, YOUTH.

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In his book Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture, Jace Clayton, aka DJ /rupture, writes that, often, “the most innovative or influential artists are rarely the most praised”. This statement could be the epigraph of the portrait of Cristian G. Martí written by a handful of Valencian DJs and other actors in the rest of Spain. An active player on the Valencian music scene since the 1980s, Cristian G. Martí has played at prestigious events around the country and co-founded the 3MV record shop, a centre for discovering trends only noticed at the time by the most curious. Despite his influence, the examples that mimic his characteristics do so only partially, due to his rebellious temperament and style, which gives him an unmistakable character. It is as if he traverses almost the entire musical spectrum in search of pieces to construct narratives within and between genres, giving more importance to the musical material, always offering a peculiar and very fine selection – like refulgent jewels among piles of records – and a truly special, unique way of mixing.