Ransom Note

Long before The Ransom Note had a name. Long before Team Love had a manifesto. Dave was always there. Usually near the speakers. Two festivals, one philosophy. When Love International made its pilgrimage to Rainbow Disco Club, it wasn’t simply a case of a Croatian institution touching down in Asia – it was two kindred spirits recognising themselves in each other. Born in Tokyo in 2010, Rainbow Disco Club has always operated under a single guiding concept: “Beyond Space and Time” – a commitment to authentic underground music that transcends genre, geography and trend. Alongside these club nights in Tokyo the annual event as you’ll likely know, takes place in the Japanese countryside of Shizuoka’s Izu Peninsula/ Love International, meanwhile, as many of you will also likely know, draws a loyal family of returning artists, crews and ravers to the shores of Tisno each summer for what amounts to a celebration of sun, music and community. Different latitudes, identical heartbeats. And yes – before you ask – we did make him answer questions about rainbows… WhatsApp Image 2026-06-10 at 21.00.26 (12) We’ve known Dave Harvey a long time. Long enough that neither of us is entirely sure when it started – somewhere in the blur of the 90s, in rooms that probably no longer exist, with people we’re still lucky enough to call friends. Long before The Ransom Note had a name. Long before Team Love had a manifesto. Back when it was just about getting to the right room on the right night and staying as long as humanly possible. Dave was always there. Usually near the speakers. Watching what he’s built since then – and more importantly, how he’s built it, with the same unguarded enthusiasm he had at the very beginning – has been one of the genuine pleasures of growing up in and around this ‘scene’ together. Because the thread has always been consistent. Whether as a DJ, programmer, promoter, or raver, there are few dancefloors he hasn’t graced, and fewer still where he hasn’t left some kind of mark. Since cutting his teeth in those 90s rooms, he’s built an inimitable sound that moves freely between house, techno, breaks and electro, EBM, wonky chuggers and disco-infused oddities – often all within the same set. Here he is, doing exactly that. Captured live at Rainbow Disco Club, in case you needed any further evidence. The rest, we’ll let the colours speak for themselves. @loveintfestival @rainbowdiscoclub @futureboogie

Patricia Wolf makes music from the inside of an ecosystem. Her recent release on Music To Watch Seeds Grow By; Yarrow (the 9th edition in the series) emerged from weeks spent at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado, working alongside ecologists studying plants, pollinators, and the slow pressures of a changing climate. Patricia Wolf Mock Up The album maps a Yarrow’s life from root to seed: the conditions needed to grow, the quiet underground, the moment a flower opens to something that might carry it further. Field recordings from those Colorado summers are woven through the compositions, leaving room, as Wolf puts it, for the natural sounds to come through – her way of sharing an emotional inner life when thinking about these environments. For this mix, Wolf turned her attention to morning. Imagining this year’s Watching Trees festival crowd coming down from a long night of dancing – we talked her through in the afterglow of this year’s edition. Wolf built A Wander in the Garden for that specific threshold hour – somewhere between nine and ten, when birdsong starts to reassert itself and the body wants something slow, expansive, and unhurried. The anchor track arrived first: the Cosmic Tones Research Trio’s Photosynthesis, from which everything else grew. What follows is a walk through an imaginary garden with several climates – shade beneath a linden tree, open meadow thick with yarrow and field poppy, a pine grove smelling of warm sap, an orchard of cherries and mulberries just beginning to ripen. If she had to name the plant that holds this hour best, Wolf chooses lavender: something with a direct line to the nervous system, a quiet insistence on calm. FULL INTERVIEW HERE: https://www.theransomnote.com/music/mixes/seeds-mix-11-patricia-wolfs-wander-in-the-garden/

We’re premiering the video for ‘Abiotic Factors’ – Patricia Wolf’s opening dispatch from Gothic, Colorado and the invisible forces that determine whether anything grows at all… Tia and Wil’s Music To Watch Seeds Grow By series – the ambient/new-age/planty cassette label has in nine editions, tried to make a compelling case that the best way to understand ambient is to get your hands in some soil and think about it properly. Each artist chooses a plant that inspires their music and can be sown in the month of the release. Simple. Seasonal. You may have noticed it already. For the ninth edition – the third of Season Two – they’ve brought in Portland, Oregon-based musician and field recordist Patricia Wolf, whose album Yarrow takes its name from Achillea millefolium, a flowering plant whose broad geographic range spans North America and Eurasia, which also happens to make it the perfect conceptual thread to connect Portland (where the music was written and recorded) to London (where the cassette was pressed and will land through your letterbox alongside a packet of yarrow seeds and a fact card about the plant). A transatlantic weed of the most beautiful kind. Wolf is one of the most interesting people quietly operating at the edges of sound art. Her recent arc has taken her from grief (I’ll Look For You In Others, 2022) to a kind of luminous rebirth (See-Through, 2022), then to birds – literal birds, in Iceland, for a documentary score (Hrafnamynd, 2025) – and now, with this album, to plants. Specifically, to the invisible forces that determine whether plants live or die at all. Yarrow was created in response to Wolf’s artist residency at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado, as part of the Art-Science Exchange Project in the summer of 2024. She worked closely with ecologists Dr Paul CaraDonna, Dr Amy Iler, Dr Jane Ogilvie, Dr Nickolas Waser, Dr Mary Price, and Dr Will Petry, spending weeks embedded in long-term research on plants, pollinators, and their interactions as the climate changes. This is not, in other words, an ambient album about plants in the vague, pastoral sense. It’s an album about plants in the way a botanist might describe them: as dynamic organisms in constant, often invisible negotiation with their environment. Which brings us to ‘Abiotic Factors’, the album’s opening track and the subject of today’s premiere. Abiotic factors – for those of us who skipped that particular biology lesson – are the non-living environmental conditions that determine whether an organism can exist at all: light availability, temperature, rainfall, wind, soil composition. They are the infrastructure beneath the visible world, the silent set of forces that a plant cannot choose but must simply work with, adapt to, or perish. As a concept for an opening track, it’s contemplative and a perfect orientation into the album… which you’ll all hear in its entirety soon little seedlings. The video was shot closer to home – in Wolf’s Portland neighbourhood - through the lens of Edward Pack Davee, the filmmaker behind the Hrafnamynd documentary Wolf scored last year. Watch here: https://www.theransomnote.com/art-culture/video-premiere-patricia-wolf-abiotic-factors/

Hercules and Love Affair is an electronic music project created in 2004 by DJ, producer and songwriter Andy Butler. Originally formed in New York City, the act became known for blending classic disco, Chicago house, techno and synth-pop into emotionally charged dance music with an art-pop sensibility. Rather than functioning as a traditional band, Hercules and Love Affair operates as a rotating collective of vocalists, musicians and collaborators, with Butler remaining the project’s central creative force. The project remains at the forefront of queer dance music culture in the UK and beyond and in our own opinion, remains pivotal for the fact that there has been no bowing or amenity towards fads or trends. They returned at the tail end of 2025, now as we approach summer a new remix package has been announced which includes contributions from the likes of Ciel, Luke Solomon and Mystery Affair. However, as mentioned above, their connection to the underground and origins of the sound has afforded them the rare privilege of a remix from none other than Larry Heard under the Mr Fingers alias. In celebration of this, here is a rare mix from Hercules and Love Affair, a homage to house music and the direction of travel as we proceed.

Your favourite DJ’s favourite punk band are back, and they’ve brought the sweat with them. There was a Young Band from the Paradise Palms, Who played with such fury it rattled your arms, They grooved like the ESG, bit like The Slits, And drove Windmill Brixton completely to bits! “O come to our Party!” cried Bikini Body, “It’s perfectly sweaty and pleasantly shoddy! The bassline is punching, the drumming is tight, And everyone’s dancing till quarter to light!” So they packed up the Palms and they played BBC, And KEXP and Radio 6 and NTS and free, And the dancefloor said “Goodness!” and the basement said “More!” And nobody quite knew what a party was for. Bikini Body return with the Weirdest Party EP, their first release on Paradise Palms Records following two records on Optimo Music – a pairing that did a lot to define both their trajectory and their restless, hybrid sound. This new set pushes further into the territory they’ve made their own: the charged, uneasy space where dancefloor pressure and punk confrontation refuse to separate. Percussive, physical and wired with attitude, the tracks draw a lineage that runs from ESG and Liquid Liquid through Bush Tetras, The Slits and X-Ray Spex, with the remixes opening things out for club systems without sanding off a single rough edge. It’s music that works equally hard in a sweaty basement and on a packed dancefloor – which, given a 13-date UK co-headline tour ending in a sold-out London show, a packed Windmill Brixton headline, and airplay across BBC Radio 1, 6 Music, KEXP and NTS, appears to be exactly where people are putting it. Weirdest Party EP is out on Paradise Palms Records on 22nd May 2026. Catch them live on our stage at Another Thought on 13th June.

Simply Nothing is a dubbed-out analogue synth workout like only these two know how. Carefully constructed percussion, with George Hume's bass sitting beneath a veil of spectral vocals courtesy of Sarah-May Brown. On the EP there's a two other original tracks plus a remix from the excellent Hybrid Man does what Hybrid Man does best, pulling the hypnotic core of the original. Simply Nothing is out now on Lunatic Music.

With the current climate doing its best to grind things down, sometimes making music with your people is all you can do – and LA’s underground is responding in kind. Few collectives embody that spirit quite like the Elbow Grease and DISCOS XXX crew. SSRI – the Sound & Spirit Research Institute, a studio brainchild born from the meeting of DJ Dex aka Nomadico of Underground Resistance, Kosmik of The Black Lodge, and Dave Aju repping Elbow Grease. Three heads, one singular vision. “Omnicallora” came to life the way the best things do – organically, hardware in hand, passed around in round-robin fashion with the Suzuki Omnichord at the centre of it all. The legendary instrument’s Italo-leaning character bleeds through every bar, complete with robo-vocoder flexings, waxing lyrical about pre- and post-fader feedback, before Aju took it home to Point Winona to mix and shape it into its final form. The result is a West Coast tech stomp that wears its Italo influences with pride – undeniably fun, undeniably them. The track lands as part of Point Winona Sound Library Vol 1, the 20-track joint venture between Elbow Grease and DISCOS XXX aka DX3, gathering some of LA’s finest under one roof at the Los Feliz hilltop palace itself. Curated by the legend that is Tavish and Dave Aju, it’s a geographic statement – warehouse-wrecking and rooted-futurist in equal measure. Point Winona Sound Library Vol 1 drops March 6. Pre-order over at Bandcamp.