THE FULL ENTRY'Shade' / 'Happy Trees' — John Tejada and Laurel Halo, two tracks, marking Palette Recordings' thirtieth year. Both Los Angeles, both out of the CalArts orbit, both lately buried in the abstract and atmospheric end of things. So they got in a room together and made liquid tech-house funk instead. Halo doing something you can actually mix is the news here; Tejada, a Kompakt regular, has been quietly running a functioning independent for three decades while louder labels came and went. THE READ Two lifers choosing legibility over abstraction is a small but real weathervane — the experimental end reaching back toward the dancefloor after years of drift. Palette hitting 30 is also a reminder that catalogue depth, not hype, is what survives; a useful counter-reference whenever a client wants 'underground' to mean 'new.' |
THE FULL ENTRYHawksmoor's 'Yclept Thorn' out via Library of the Occult, filed gothic/dark ambient, out of the UK. The name is the thesis — a label operating entirely inside the hauntological/occult-library seam, the lineage that runs from BBC Radiophonic offcuts through Ghost Box and out the other side into something genuinely unlit. This is the deep end of the dungeon-synth-adjacent world where the work is still being made for about four hundred people. THE READ The occult-library seam is where a lot of current 'eerie English' visual and sonic reference is actually sourced from, usually uncredited. Worth knowing at the source rather than three steps downstream in a mood board. Small, uncommercial, slow — which is exactly why it keeps supplying everyone else. |
THE FULL ENTRYDazed ran Pablo Kuemin today. Paris-based, Swiss countryside kid, found his way in through underground techno raves and punk, now building sculptural wigs and hairpieces that have gone down the runway at DSM × Kei Ninomiya with flowers grown into the mohawks, and at Vetements SS27. He cites Karl-Heinz Weinberger — the Swiss photographer who spent decades shooting rebel youth nobody else took seriously — as the thing that showed him his own culture was a subject. A wig of his went at Sotheby's for €14,000. His method line is the giveaway: 'When time allows, I try to build the world the hair lives in before I create the hair itself.' THE READ Hair is where subculture reaches fashion first — cheaper and faster than garment development, so it's a genuine leading indicator for where a house's aesthetic goes next season. The Weinberger citation also flags an archival reference that is about to get worked hard; get to that source before the moodboards do. |
THE FULL ENTRYSamuel Ross's SR_A — the industrial design bureau he runs with Yi Ng, after A-Cold-Wall — has been building PROJECT TERRAIN with WHOOP for three years: customised wristbands plus apparel, designed around what Ross calls 'the body's intelligence' and 'raw, nomadic movement.' His description of the work is 'something silent, unfiltered, compact, and enduring,' which is either the most precise sentence in techwear or the most expensive way to say black. Launching through shop.whoop.com later this year. THE READ The credible version of the wearables-meet-fashion collision: an industrial designer with actual hardware history rather than a logo slapped on a strap. Watch it as the template for how biometric hardware gets aestheticised — and note the vocabulary shift, from performance metrics to bodily intelligence, which is where the category's marketing is heading. |
