Resonance Theory | 04

"Seeking Beauty in Sadness" - Evil Graham Lee

"Searching, Finding" - Outside

"Too Far" - Meeting by Chance

"Two Thousand and Seventeen" - Four Tet

"MINDRUM" - 40 Winks

"Tango in Dub" - Unforscene

"Dr Doctor" - Stuart McCallum

"Side B" - ADJAK∆

"Campfire" - Flitz&Suppe

"Movement 3" - Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra

"Breeze" - Modha

"Believe" - Vanilla

"Sleep Tight" - Rahlou

"Cranes in the Sky" - Tom Misch

"Josephine Plays With Sines" - Near Stoic

"Purrfect" - Funki Porcini

"Seeking Beauty in Sadness" - Evil Graham Lee

"Seeking Beauty in Sadness" is track two on I Think I'm Alone Now, the first album Graham Lee has released under his own name, issued by Isle of Jura in July 2026. Graham Lee grew up in Kenilworth, Queensland, trained as a primary school teacher in Brisbane, and spent three years drifting through Asia and Europe before landing in Sydney in 1983. The Triffids found him through his dobro playing on Eric Bogle's first album and asked him to guest on a demo they were cutting at the Sydney Opera House. The band went back to London. Lee stayed in Sydney, took up pedal steel, and picked up session work on Paul Kelly's Post while waiting for something to happen. When The Triffids returned in 1985 they asked him to join for good. The band then served as Bill Drummond's backing group on The Man, the album Drummond wrote in a week as his farewell to artist management. Four years later Drummond and Jimmy Cauty built Chill Out in two days at Trancentral. The closing of the circle belongs to Kevin Griffiths, a Kent-born DJ who moved to Adelaide and named his label after the Scottish island where the KLF burned a million pounds, because Chill Out is his favorite record. He released Lee's solo debut. Drummond wrote the notes. Lee, for his part, still maintains The Triffids' official website and files its discography entries under the byline GFLee.

"Searching, Finding" - Outside

"Searching, Finding" surfaced on A New Beginning, the four-track EP Dorado issued in November 2022, then settled onto Almost Out, Matt Cooper's sixth album as Outside and his first in 22 years. Cooper plays drums, his first instrument, and most of everything else. Francesco Sales plays slide guitar over a sparse electronic bed, with Valentina Pahor co-producing between lockdowns in London and Portugal. Cooper joined Ollie Buckwell's Soho label Dorado in 1993 and made The Rough and the Smooth at 22 with Jhelisa, Greg Osby and Cleveland Watkiss in the room; Abbey Road remastered it for its thirtieth birthday. The decades between went to Incognito, where he served as musical director, and to STR4TA, Gilles Peterson and Bluey's Brit-funk reunion. He works from a garden studio in Ealing now, and Buckwell still tells him when time's up. The 1993 debut Almost In carried a track called "Almost Out.”

"Too Far" - Meeting by Chance

"Too Far" leads off Time Deception, the May 2026 album from Meeting By Chance, the solo alias of Marcin Cichy from Skalpel. It runs on a looped piano figure, vocal fragments, a bass pulse and drums that sound played rather than programmed, and it opens side B of the NoPaper Records vinyl. Skalpel reached Ninja Tune in 2000 after a Polish tour with DJ Vadim and a CD-R called Polish Jazz, then spent two albums slicing Komeda-era LPs into downtempo. Cichy keeps about 7,000 records and lists Sade's Love Deluxe as his funeral music. The alias is named for Duane Michals' 1970 sequence Chance Meeting, two men passing in an alley, one turning back too late. 

"Two Thousand and Seventeen" - Four Tet

"Two Thousand and Seventeen" sits second on New Energy, the ninth Four Tet album, released on Kieran Hebden's Text Records in 2017 after leading the campaign as a single that July. A plucked melody in hammered-dulcimer range carries the whole track over soft drums and a low bassline, following an 82-second opener named for the unmetered introduction of a raga. Hebden made the album on a laptop in Ableton, mixing and mastering it himself in an untreated spare room, having taken a year off touring. The alias comes from a 1971 Harry Verbeke record. Hebden attended Elliott School in Putney, the comprehensive that also produced Burial, Hot Chip and The xx, and formed Fridge there before signing a deal at fifteen. 

"MINDRUM" - 40 Winks

Two Antwerp producers, Padmo' and Weedy, have run 40 Winks since 2000, passing a demo called April to July around the city before a Japanese reissue and a Japanese 12-inch got them noticed abroad. Miami's Merck Records, the IDM label that also carried Machinedrum and Tycho, issued Sound Puzzle in January 2007 and shut its release schedule the following month. Berlin's Project Mooncircle picked them up after that. "MINDRUM" came out as a single in 2025 ahead of SPIRITS, which the duo describe as their gospel record. A chopped "It's beautiful" vocal returns across stop-start breaks and jazz flute. The label name, No Hay Banda!, comes from Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive. There is no band. 

"Tango in Dub" - Unforscene

"Tango in Dub" is track eight on Fingers & Thumbs, the double CD Bristol trio Unforscene released on Tru Thoughts in 2008, an album that has never been cut to vinyl. Brothers Will and Benji Bower formed the group in the late 90s and added engineer Ben Muscat in 2003; the three wrote, played and recorded the record themselves, calling in Alice Russell, Deborah Jordan and a horn section as needed. Their other trade is scoring film and television, with Bristol Old Vic credits alongside BBC and Channel 4 commissions. Muscat's engineering resume runs through Full Cycle, DJ Die and Krust, so the dub arrives with a Bristol low end. Tru Thoughts began in 1999 under Robert Luis's stairs in Brighton, and proceeded to issue Bonobo's first album.

"Dr Doctor" - Stuart McCallum

"Dr Doctor" opens Distilled, the 2011 album Stuart McCallum built by sampling his own compositions, writing around the samples, then sampling the results until only the concentrate remained. The strings under this track come from a suite he wrote for John Surman on a Manchester Jazz Festival commission. McCallum's guitar ran through The Cinematic Orchestra from Ma Fleur through The Crimson Wing, and the players here match: Ira Coleman and Zero 7's Robin Mullarkey on basses, harpist Rachael Gladwin, Iain Dixon on reeds. The label is Naim, the Salisbury imprint founded by the man behind Naim Audio, so the audiophile pressing standards came with the deal. McCallum has since formed The Breath with singer Ríoghnach Connolly on Real World, taken a doctorate, and become Deputy Head of Popular Music at the Royal Northern College of Music.

"Side B" - ADJAK∆

"Side B" is half of Jazz Names Pt. 2, a two-track digital EP two Paris beatmakers, SNK∆ and Adjaman, released in 2013 under a name spliced from their own. The tracks are called "Side A" and "Side B" on a record that never touched vinyl. Their January 2013 tape Jazz Names titled six cuts by first name only, "Miles," "Art," "Larry," "Sun," "Oscar," "Dorothy". Adjaman went on to a 50-cassette release, Smaller Things, on Cosmic Compositions, the label whose Avant Garde Series was then building full compilations around Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra.

"Campfire" - Flitz&Suppe

"Campfire" is an instrumental from Moods Vol. 1, the 2018 compilation United Common Records pressed to vinyl in a run of 25 before the rest went digital. Flitz&Suppe is one producer working from a Cologne bedroom since 2010. He mixes and masters his own work and often draws his own sleeves. His steadiest partner is Mr. Käfer, an Austrian who came to Cologne for an internship at Melting Pot Music; Their joint records are built from field recordings, ambient piano and soft drum loops, with the Yōkai EP pitched as the feeling of a well-kept garden at night attended by benevolent spirits. The 2019 solo EP Déjà-rêvé went out through Dust Collectors. 

"Movement 3" - Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra

"Movement 3" is one of the nine sections of Promises, the 46-minute piece Sam Shepherd built on a single harpsichord-and-celesta motif, released on Luaka Bop in March 2021. Pharoah Sanders heard Elaenia in 2015, at 75, and proposed the collaboration himself over lunch. His tenor was cut in Los Angeles in 2019, the London Symphony Orchestra's strings at AIR Studios a year later, and the result became his first album in over a decade and his last. The printed dialogue has Sanders dreaming of bears on a ship singing, “we have what you're looking for, then judging a take: it came out different, it came out good though.” Hal Leonard published the full score in 2023, vocal part notated in scat syllables. Sanders never played it live. Shepherd premiered it at the Hollywood Bowl a year after his death, with the Sun Ra Arkestra, Shabaka Hutchings and Four Tet on the bill.

"Breeze" - Modha

"Breeze" is track seven on At Your Pace, the second Modha album, out March 2026 on Jazzanova's Sonar Kollektiv. Modha are Dhanya Langer, a Freiburg drummer who quit music school, and Max Scholl, a Limburg kid who started in a metal band at six; their first EP came out on Pinewax in 2020 with JuJu Rogers and James Chatburn. The album was cut live between Berlin and Limburg with a band credited as co-writers, among them Moses Yoofee, whose trio won the 2024 German Jazz Prize and who told DJ Mag that Berlin jam sessions were his exit from the conservatory. "Breeze" features a Berlin quintet with a studio by the Panke in Wedding whose self-released Heller Tag drew Gilles Peterson plays and four Mojo stars. Their trumpeter Konstantin Döben plays horns across the Modha record.

"Believe" - Vanilla

"Believe" is one of 27 instrumentals on High Life, the beat tape Vanilla in 2011 with Dilla and Madlib named as the models and every credit, down to the cover photo, going to the producer. It opened a trilogy of soul-sampling tapes that closed with Sweet Talk in 2014. Vanilla is a UK producer who has never published his name; the alias came from blond hair and rhymed with Dilla, which he considered reason enough. He names Nujabes and Dilla as the two pillars. His first physical record, 2017's Moonlight, ran 500 copies on white marbled vinyl and now resells at a median above $90.

"Sleep Tight" - Rahlou

"Sleep Tight" sits second on Pillows, the ten-track instrumental debut Rahlou released on Gummy Soul in November 2013, made while the Brooklyn DJ awaited his first child. He met label founder Wally Clark on an Atlanta sidewalk, approaching him over a Carla Thomas record, and days later the two hauled 25 crates of giveaway vinyl off a stranger's porch in a Volvo filled to the brim; Clark taught him to move from the MPC to the laptop, and Pillows collects those first sessions. Gummy Soul began as Clark's Nashville radio show, modeled on the WRVU program Egon ran before joining Stones Throw, and took its name from the crepe sole of the Wallabees in Ghostface's skit. The label's fame came from Amerigo Gazaway's Fela Soul and Bizarre Tribe, the latter rebuilt from Tribe's original sample sources but got a Sony cease and desist anyway; the takedown page linked to a definition of fair use. 

"Cranes in the Sky" - Tom Misch

"Cranes in the Sky" sits second on Quarantine Sessions, the 2021 set Tom Misch built during lockdown, by his own account just sitting with his guitar and jamming. The eight tracks rework James Blake, Nirvana and Crystal Waters, land a duet with Marcos Valle on "Parabéns." Misch commissioned painter Oliver Macdonald Oulds to render the "Cranes" session as the cover art. Source from Solange's 2016 single, written eight years earlier in a Miami hotel over a bare Raphael Saadiq instrumental and named for construction cranes crowding a skyline; it took the Grammy for Best R&B Performance. Misch, a Suzuki-method violinist turned jazz-guitar graduate, found his direction when a sister's boyfriend played him J Dilla; his 2014 Beat Tape 1 homage "Dilla Love" drew a blessing from Dilla's mother.

"Josephine Plays With Sines" - Near Stoic

"Josephine Plays With Sines" sits second on Amor Fati, the January 2026 album by Near Stoic, the alias of Tunis-born, Paris-based producer Skander Ben Yahia. Ben Yahia made techno as Collateral Damages, played Concrete's Woodfloor as Emissär weeks before the boat closed, then stopped for a year and a half to build generative patches on a modular system; Near Stoic is what returned. The debut, Notebook, came out on cassette through Third Kind in 2021 with its title in French and Arabic. Amor Fati was three years in the writing and arrived as UE002 on Uncloud Editions, the Utrecht collective's new label; the splatter vinyl shipped with a tin ring cast from a Tunisian machmoum out of his family memory, and the cover merges his grandparents' vacation house with the walls of their Tunis home. 

"Purrfect" - Funki Porcini

A masterclass in beat craft, our closer "Purrfect,” is cut from Love, Pussycats & Carwrecks, the 1996 Ninja Tune album James Braddell recorded at his own studio, the Uterus Goldmine. Braddell was a London kid who started making noise in San Francisco, spent a decade in Rome writing for Italian film and TV, then returned to England in 1994 with several 9 Lazy 9 records already on Ninja under an Italianized name. The sleeve credits two tracks [purportedly] composed between speed cameras on the M40 and a man playing vodka glasses in real time. "Purrfect" was made in association with Unitone HiFi, the Auckland dub trio whose Wickedness Increased came out on Germany's Incoming! in 1995. The sample is "Kids Nowadays" from Jim Price's 1971 A&M album, the Exile on Main St. horn player's one solo record, produced by Jimmy Miller on the Stones' mobile with Nicky Hopkins, Keltner and Bobby Keys. 

Listen to: Resonance Theory | 01