London’s Night Slugs had a great 2013. Having been operational since 2009, the label – run by Bok Bok and L-Vis 1990 – upped its game last year, with its artists and those of US sister label Fade To Mind alighting upon a distinctive, crisp sound touching on grime, R&B, house and techno without quite fitting any of those categories. Fade To Mind also released the first full mixtape by LA-based songwriter and vocalist Kelela. Titled Cut 4 Me, its tracks produced by a host of Night Slugs and Fade To Mind artists, which reached the Quietus’ albums of the year list.
Now Night Slugs co-head (and regular Rinse FM show host) Bok Bok has announced that he’ll be returning for his first solo EP on the label since 2011’s ‘Southside’, which contained the perennially banging grime construction ‘Silo Pass’. The full EP will be released in May, but in advance, the label have made one of its tracks – ‘Melba’s Call’, a stark, punchy track featuring Kelela on vocals – available for your listening enjoyment. The song will available to buy from March 31st. Listen via the embed below, and for more from Bok Bok, his recent mix for Resident Advisor comes highly recommended.
Of Night Slugs and Fade To Mind, the Quietus’ Rory Gibb wrote the following in his end of 2013 dance music review: "Perhaps the best recent example of an inclusive, considerate internet-borne dance music community – one with scant regard for supposed divisions between pop and experimental music, and which engages with wide-ranging musical source material in a respectful and considered manner – is the London-LA axis of Night Slugs and Fade To Mind, two sister labels who’ve had an excellent 2013. Both have been putting out challenging between-zones music since their founding (lest we forget, Night Slugs kicked off in 2009 with Mosca’s mind-bending three-part epic ‘Nike’), but this has been the year when they’ve matured into a futuristic, chrome-plated club music behemoth."
