A Happy New Year to you. Let’s start on a positive note with a lovely cheery melodic techno track from GIDE.
GIDE is a Melodic Techno / House project from Finland. He describes his style as Dreambeats.
Here’s his new single, Coolfire, released on 11 December. Coolfire is the antidote to grey skies, cold weather and depressing politics. This is a warm and uplifting journey.
The track comes in two broad sections. The first section is a lovely bass driven chiming sound that gets overtaken by rippling xylophone effects. This is fairies dancing at midnight.
The second section offers more bass driven warmth and a more earthly bound dreaminess. There’s a slow chug to it all that offers a moment to wonder at what is around us.
New Year is nearly here. While you wait give yourself a melodic techno lift from Jake Kaiser.
Jake Kaiser has been featured here many times but this is the first time in a few years. The San Francisco based artist has a new single Lost Cities which was released on 4 December.
Lost Cities is a storming piece of melodic techno with a bit of prog house uplift.
The track is one of those ones that grows and grows. There’s a constantly rising melody line that lifts the track and you ever upwards.
The beats are tough enough with the bass to make this dance floor dynamite. There’s nothing whispy and ethereal about this. It’s a track with proper substance and where it all goes… whoosh!
This is a welcome dose of positivity for grey days and gloomy political outlooks. Forget the Far Right it’s time to dance your cares away.
In this time of Twixmas it’s too much to go full boogie but a chair bound shimmy is in order to Low Nine from Iljunfant.
Iljunfant is back after a gap of two years. Iljunfant is a ships engineer from Galloway, Scotland and explains the artist name “means “elephant” in Maltese.
Here’s the rather lovely new single Low Nine. It’s dead good but a genre nightmare.
Low Nine is organic house in some senses. It has a lovely warm analogue house feel. But it’s kinda nu jazz in others with the trumpets brassily doing their thing.
Put together it’s a lovely warm summery track that is filled with good times and a lovely central hook that glides along in a haze of stabby keyboards.
Some big moody Saturday night melodic techno from Calyon which also anticipates tomorrow with a lovely church organ feel.
Calyon is a Swiss Psychologist turned Cinematic Techno Producer. Prepare for an intense techno therapy session.
Create was released a couple of weeks ago. It’s one of those techno tracks that starts massive and just gets bigger. But it does it without battering you to death with a kick drum.
Calyon is a clever fella. He uses a church like organ sound to act as the centrepiece of the track. This gives the track a widescreen cinematic experience.
There are beats and a synth hook but these are largely secondary to the organ. But that doesn’t mean that it’s there all the time. There are drop outs which give the track a real sense of drama.
Christmas is done. Let’s move forward with some dreamy progressive house and a remix from Fractal Architect.
Fractal Architect has been here a few times. It’s the the artist name for the DJ and producer Dan Watts. He’s “A veteran Electronic music aficianado who was one of the early pioneers to usher in the ‘new sound’ from Detroit and Chicago in the late 1980’s.”
He’s done a remix for Xspance which is featured on the album Progressive House Waves vol09. This is a most un-prog remix.
The track is Fade Away. In its original form (included below) it’s a nice light prog house track with a bit of an ethereal stance.
Fractal Architect takes it in another direction. The beats have a crisper edge but are kept back in the mix. Instead, a guitar/keyboard takes centre stage in a gently swaying way.
This is prog house as chillout. There’s a little spacey synth work but nothing too dramatic or ethereal. It’s much more into ambient techno.
There’s a real sense of a sparkling come down in this remix. It’s the end of a long night. But the night was a good one. Sink into dance floor dreams with this remix.
And so to the final post in this three post Best of 2025 series. The best 12” is Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan’s lovely retro synth beauty Overspill Estates.
Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan is Gordon Chapman-Fox. His work celebrates the new town developments that grew up in the UK after the war.
There’s a wonderful use of modular synths and a hauntingly cinematic quality to his work.
Overspill Estates is a four track 12” that uses music which didn’t make it onto the Your Community Hub album.
Gordon says: “I’d worked on these tracks for the best part of a year, and, in my mind, they were a fundamental part of the whole “Your Community Hub” project. I was heartbroken when they couldn’t make it onto the album, so it’s an enormous relief to see them come to life here.”
These four track may not have made it onto the album but they stand proudly on their own. There’s a gentle beauty in the wistful synths and something rather lovely that these four tracks were dedicated to Basildon, Cwmbran, Redditch and Harlow.
Lose yourself in Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan’s singular vision of a lost future.
Continuing this three post Best of 2025 we come to best album. There really was no competition. My most listened to album this year was KiF Productions awesome Still Out.
The album is an utterly beautiful pastoral journey through the English countryside. As the last lamented JD Twitch said it is “The true follow up, 35 years later, to The KLF’s ‘Chill Out’”. And you can’t get higher praise than that.
Recorded in a remote cabin on the Devon coast, STILL OUT is an album-length collaboration between musician-filmmakers – and childhood friends – Will Cookson and Tom Haverly. A reflection on friendship, landscape and the passing of time, it inspired a road trip from North Yorkshire to North Devon they took together in the summer of 2024.
It’s hard to overstate how lovely this album is and how well it’s been received – there have been three pressings of the vinyl.
There is bird song, sheep and drifting synths. There are samples of songs, poetry and a Land Rover.
There is a sense of a journey, of musical and physical landscape changing. Properly gobsmacking ambient chill.
Most sites have their best of the year lists. Not me. I’m going for something different. In the run up to Christmas we’re having best album and best 12”. But first my artist of the year.
It’s The Black Dog.
Sheffield’s finest have had an outstanding year. They’ve been extraordinarily prolific whilst managing to keep up the quality.
Their releases have included the remastered Fragments. This was originally a series of individual releases which came to a halt as a result of Covid. But it’s been added to and remastered in this new edition.
They says of it “Fragments was a completely new way of working for us. We’ve always worked with an internal brief, creating documents, pictures and videos, simply because keeping an idea on track with three individuals can be difficult. It’s easy for someone to be edged out of the creative process when the focus is not clearly defined.”
And they’ve had some wonderful new releases of which the Rothko inspired Loud Ambient is the epitome of quality music. This is a classy piece of danceable techno.
They say of it “We used Rothko’s artwork as a major influence. His use of colour fields, blending, mood and scale really helped us build an album of tracks that could stand on their own and also work together as a coherent whole across all the tones we had been working with. It was also a chance to fall back in love with our 909, 808 and 707.”
And they even gave you something for nothing in the three name your piece ambient releases in the The Black Dog Presents Sleep Deprivation: Greatest Mix series.
ACID TED 
