Getting in the Mood Hut

Vancouver label Mood Hut's become one of our favourite imprints of recent years, releasing the kind of pristinely pockmarked house, deeply trippy dubbed-out techno, and dank disco that we love so dearly here on THUMP. Given that yesterday saw them tease us with a new record — House of Doors' wonderful sounding Starcave EP, which you can hear snippets of below — we thought we'd run through a few of our favourite releases to date.

Jack J - "Something (On My Mind)"

From **Looking Forward to You *(12", 2014)***

There's not much to "Something (On My Mind)" — a few, wispy, half-remembered chords, a chunky, effectively stiff drum pattern, a lazily strolling bassline, a muzak-y saxaphone that drifts in and out of the mix. And that's the key to it; it isn't fussy, it doesn't try to reinvent the wheel, it just rolls on and on, ten minutes which feel like thirty seconds and an hour simultaneously. It's drift and stasis. It's a walk in the park on the first morning of summer, a swim at sunset on the best day of your life — a genuinely perfect record.

House of Doors - "Filter Feelings"

From **The Dolphin Hotel Affair Vol.1 *(12", 2014)***

Sometimes, after a hard day at work, you want to draw for a record that sounds like someone took the template of genuine, actual, 'proper' deep house and slipped it into a Radox hevy bath for a few hours. This cut from an all round wonderful EP is diving bell deep stuff, rainforest dwelling house that soothes those workaday aches. Coming on like a slightly cleaner Legowelt — a post-bath Legowelt? — "Filter Feeling" is a smoked-out stunner.

Pender Street Steppers - Life in the Zone

(Cassette, 2013)

Originally available as a cassette tape, Liam Butler and that man again, Jack J's effortlessly breezy blitz through a batch of previously unaired material is a masterclass in the kind of hazy, gauzy, funk-and-disco-inflected house that's made Mood Hut's name. The 'Street Side' sees rolling congas share joints with dubbed out impressions of chord sequences, Casio presets entwine with hallucinogenic washes, and Fatback Band basslines curling round headshop-ambient drifts. The 'Steppin' Side' is a moody trek through sadlad deep house terrain, all rain-splattered effervescent hovering and Sakamoto-style icy melody. Pure, unfettered, unfiltered bliss.

Ttam Renat - "Merging (Hut Mix)"

From **On The Inner Plains *(12", 2013)***

As THUMP's biggest — only? — dub-techno fan this near-nine-minute crawler released under Hashman Deejay's only-used-once-moniker Ttam Renat was always going to be a perpetual favourite. Not that's it a dub-techno record, by any stretch, but those gaps and stutters, the deep-in-the-mix wavering pad that meanders semi-menacingly like a sort of malevolent Dandelion Siphonophore could be straight out of a Deepchord record. Marianas Trench dwelling stuff.

Aquarian Foundation - "Vhembe"

From Language of the Hand (12", 2013)

The Aquarian Foundation are a kind of Mood Hut supergroup, comprising as they do of Hashman Deejay, House of Doors, and Kinetic Electronix, so it's not surprising that "Vhembe" is a kind of crytsalisation of the Mood Hut sonic aesthetic. It's crisply distorted, harshly lush, statically swirling, slice of premiere league house-not-house.

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