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LP
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PRESH 029LP
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$31.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 7/24/2026
The Bug and Ghost Dubs relentlessly probe and atomize original material culled from Kevin Richard Martin's critically acclaimed Sub Zero album. Remixed to punish sound systems and freeze up the dance, both Fiedler and Martin trade fresh, contrasting blows, after their recent IMPLOSION face off album on PRESSURE. The resulting four remixes are every bit as hypnotic and persuasive as you would hope for from productions fresh out the soundlabs of Michael Fiedler aka GHOST DUBS and Kevin Richard Martin under his dancefloor destroying Bug alias. Both producers intensify the desolate mood of the originals but introduce demolition inducing beats which provide the literally irresistible momentum. Echoes of the originals are respected and heard throughout, but the extra gear shifts pay off brilliantly. Guaranteed to push serious air, and test the most powerful of sub woofers, these four remixes vary from heavy to superheavyweight. i.e. GHOST DUBS outputs a deliriously stoned headnod with his zonal refix of "When I'm Gone," which miraculously sounds both subtley mysterious, but monolithically huge, whilst The Bug prowls ice cold, on the noirish, narcotic, instrumental hip hop of "Too Human," which sounds like prime Mobb Deep mixed by Rhythm & Sound at 16 bpm. Essential remixes of an already very special album, the original atmosphere is not only captured expertly, it is categorically amplified.
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2LP
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PRESH 028LP
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Just when you thought Kevin Richard Martin's music couldn't go any slower, lower or deeper, Sub Zero emerges. A slow-motion excavation of drug-tech, dub, dreamy noise and frozen ambience, the album gradually mutates into hypnotic pulsations and melodic melancholia. It is arguably Martin's most striking release to date under his given name. Originally released digitally on Bandcamp only in the depths of winter 2022, amid the final year of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia's initial invasion of Ukraine, this desolate epic went on to become KRM's best-selling digital album on the platform. With persistent demand for a vinyl pressing and a full DSP release from fans, Martin thought the time was right for Sub Zero to finally surface in its full glory: remastered and paired with fresh new artwork. Unnervingly, the album is as beautiful as it is solemn, as glacial as it is relentless, and as subtle as it is terrifying. A trip into a sonic abyss, with a tour of a philosophical void, it's to my ears, KRM's most seductive work yet, and also his most emotionally resonant. Martin expertly balances tear-jerking motifs with heavier than hell rhythmic weight. With its melodic fog, eternal drones and eerie atmospherics, the peripheral throb of distant kick drums, the heartbeat punctuation of cavernous subs and the snowstorm blizzard of fuzz absolutely envelopes the mind, whilst crushing the soul. In terms of lineage, Sub Zero might recall a more paranoid Porter Ricks, a dystopian GAS, or a brutally dubbed-out Pan Sonic. Most fitting, however, is its kinship with the deepest dub terrain Martin previously explored on In Blue, The Bug's acclaimed 2020 collaboration with Dis Fig for Hyperdub, where he obsessively probed subaqueous pulses and low-end modulations. Sub Zero is possibly the most minimal, desolate, and deviant dub record yet released on Martin's PRESSURE label. It marks the point at which dub disappears into its own effects trails. Dub music capturing frozen moments in time. Dub as an addictive painkiller, that sounds both sacred and ocean deep.
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2LP
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ICLR 018LP
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Long-awaited vinyl release for this critically acclaimed album from October 2023. "Black is a musical eulogy to Amy Winehouse, a heartfelt memorial to a sorrowful demise. It's an album of predominantly beatless ambience possessed by the ghost of 'Back to Black.' Fragmented moods and hypnotic drones melt together as its circular beauty is set adrift, floating away into an endless void, where the original only remains in spirit alone. It doesn't make particular sense why I was drawn to this idea and compelled to immerse myself in the original song, and her life in general, but sometimes you just have to roll with your muse. Having barely registered her whilst she was alive and not cared for Mark Ronson's poptastic productions, it was only when I heard of her tragic death that it struck an unexpected chord, recalling the same surreal emotional impact as when I had heard of Kurt Cobain's premature passing previously. Both figures were unarguably gifted, but both left this planet largely without essential support, whilst they were at the peak of their powers and on top of the musical world. Gone too soon and departed too young, a world-weary voice carried on a downward spiral, Amy Winehouse seemed trapped in her self-destructive descent. It was only years later, whilst randomly watching Asif Kapadia's moving bio doc Amy on a long-distance flight, that I realized the scale of her greatness and the tragedy of the circumstances that led to her untimely death. This album is simultaneously a treatise on lovelessness, tragedy and loss, echoing the absence of a support network when it matters most during such a freefall. And just as myself and others I know shed tears watching that Amy documentary, this album is as much a reaction to the universal emotional themes conveyed within that touching documentary as to the tragic life of Amy herself. I have been working on the idea of this sonic album for over a year, and the slo-mo dream rotations remain as blurred and impressionistic as they are repetitive and haunting. An eerie cocktail of spectral jazz, shoegaze drone and dubbed out ambient music, it continues the solo path I have been developing as KRM. I hope it strikes a chord." --Kevin Richard Martin
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LP
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RM 4103LP
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Room40 presents Kevin Richard Martin (The Bug)'s Sirens, his solo debut. "When I was 22 I managed to acquire Techno Animal's Demonoid 12"; I can still recall the intensities of sound that marked the first moments of listening to it. The sense of bass as a tactile surface, that rolling groove and the howling sine waves and dub sirens that scorched with a type of sonic burning sensation that to this day makes my hairs stand on end. A year later I heard Ice's Bad Blood, from there I discovered The Bug, a band called God, a sound movement called isolationism and much more; all of these projects had one nexus point. In 2015, Kevin and I book-ended a series of concerts at Berghain for CTM festival. For his performance, Kevin debuted a new work I'd heard very little about called Sirens. I remember two things distinctly about the performance. The first: he opened the set with a blazing passage of bass and dub sirens that transported me back to those initial moments of encountering his work. The second was the feeling of absolute, crushing bass. Not before, or since, have I felt a sense of sound pressure like this. Unlike his other work with The Bug, the consistent bass carrying in the space was literally breathtaking and there were moments when it seemed difficult to see clearly as my eye sockets were vibrating in a way I'd never experienced. Sirens, which documents the intensities surrounding the delivery and early days of his first child, carries in it a sense of deep affect. The album, unlike the live work, traces out a dynamic sound world that is both tender and caustic. Within each piece, microcosms of sensation unfold, Kevin deftly maneuvers us through the tumultuous journey. Sirens somehow creates a sense of time that is without anchor and foggy in a way that is profoundly unique. Martin has remained a point of constant inspiration for me over several decades now; to have the opportunity to share his first ever solo recording brings me the utmost pride. His new work Sirens is a life journey transposed into sound that is truly personal, but effortlessly universal. It is the start of a new chapter, one that I know will only strengthen his place as one of the critical voices in contemporary electronic music." --Lawrence English, March 2019
Mastered by Stefan Betke at Scape Mastering.
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