Yair Etziony's first album under the TMUX moniker - last year's "State of Exception" - developed as the Berlin-based artist and False Industries boss was attempting to rationalize his experience of the COVID-19 lockdown. Seemingly trapped in a world with a dissolving future, he looked to his past as a drum & bass DJ and his love of 1990s IDM, garage and Detroit techno to guide his escape.
- On "Stars", there's less of a conceptual framework, but Yair again looks to his lifelong love of bass to inform the album's sonic landscape. More optimistic than its predecessor, "Stars" still retains a melancholy flavor that can be traced back to rave backrooms or chill-out spaces. Opening track 'Artificial Flavours (Euphoric Version)' illustrates this perfectly, with whimsical, minor-key pads wrapped around chugging chopped breaks like a comfort blanket.

'Kfar Saba' nudges the tempo down and conjures a sound that we can trace back to Andy Weatherall's loose, dubwise experimentation or Moby's dancefloor-friendly emotionality. 'Unsustainable' meanwhile heads into fractured post-dubstep territory, welding brickwall subs to glitchy 2-step rhythms that remind of T++, Bristol's Livity Sound label, or Yair's "Altered State" collaborator Appleblim.
- Dedicated to False Industries graphic designer and Yair's good friend Tuvia K, 'King Tubi' makes the 1990s references far more tangible, using a chunky, blunted break and molasses-slow acid funk to remind of a world where it felt like anything was possible. But the drum 'n bass influence is still the most pervasive sound on "Stars" - 'Wasteland' and the album's closing title track are Yair's most upfront tracks to date, harking back to the precise techstep sound of Virus Recordings and Renegade Hardware.

In pairing words with art, the ESP Institute often does everything journalists hate. We drown the reader in hyperbole, abstractions as opposed to didactic or literal depictions, and paint the press release with superlatives that construct an existential struggle around the art and its conditions. To articulate our reasoning behind collaborating with the artist, or the synergy between their work and our catalogue, is sometimes so challenging that crossing that finish line is achingly delayed. Patrick Conway’s 2xLP 'Cellular Housekeeping', his fourth release with the label, is one of these works so monumentally exciting for us that we’ve strained over how to deliver with honor his art unto the masses. After the initial hurdle of visual representation (in this case handled with gusto by artist Hassan Rahim), how do we directly and intentionally talk about the art we deeply love, when in reality we’re largely guided by instinct? We explore many angles, often failing along the way, until finding a final click in the combination that unlocks the floodgates. With Patrick’s album, that elusive impetus revealed itself in a literary gem that both symbolized his aggressive, melancholic, romantic, and bleak overtones, as well as synchronized his work and our task with a metaphor so grand it justified putting these words to paper. In the deeply British poem of despair and hope, 'Comus: A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle', John Milton immortalized the classic idiom of the “silver lining”, and we find comfort in this transaction between struggle and what the poet considered divine intervention. Our bout of procrastination that brewed a cloud over the art may too tout a silver lining, the time that’s elapsed clearing a path for the album to exist in its rightful place, as opposed to fighting for a voice at an overcrowded table. In hindsight, this final hurdle might have only existed because without it, there is no glory, no resolution, but as all the pieces click and we collectively cross the finish line, Patrick Conway’s once captive 'Cellular Housekeeping' is now truly released.