Bleep's Best of 2015:
Albums / EPs / Reissues / Compilations / Artists / Labels
The Top 100 Tracks of 2015
Label of the Year: PAN
2015 has been another stellar year for PAN, always featuring heavily in our various end of year charts, it's been agreed by all at Bleep that PAN records outshone all others with twelve super strong releases catering for for all corners of the club and record shelf. Launching into the year head on with a surprise drop in the form of a live album from legendary experimentalist Oren Ambarchi. Despite having made appearances in work by everyone from Sunn O))) and Tim Hecker to remixing FIS it was a huge surprise when Oren Ambarchi unveiled his Live Knots LP on PAN but, at the same time it made sense perfectly. This was followed up by, for our money, one of the best reissues of the year in Spectre's legendary underground illbient hip-hop mixtape Ruff Kutz, the originals mix of late night smokey atmospheres and crunchy tape hiss was given a deluxe master and cut at D&M and pressed super loud across four sides of wax. This showed the diversity of PAN's vision, taking in street sounds the world over and blending them with an experimental edge missing from many other labels. The first half of the year was capped off with two albums that explored fluid dancefloor tropes with Helm's epic sized Olympic Mess - a blend of super solid steel dub techno referencing liquid noise and the "experimental/outsider" house supergroup made up of Gigi Masin, Max D, Co La and Jordan GCZ aka Lifted. Lifted's debut recording came to life as the tropical jungle excursions of 1. An all star line up that has had us drifting back time and time again for some extra baked late night ambience. The second half of the year launched with one of the most anticipated underground club rooted FWD-thinking releases of recent times with M.E.S.H's debut album Piteous Gate - its widescreen view into the basement clubs of Berlin and beyond sound-tracked a future leaning Dolby surround soundtrack of freewheeling house, bass, techno and tronica' that also gave exposure to the Janus collective and became a cornerstone that bought together scenes of people into grime, techno and hip-hop. The second half of the year rolled out with PAN dropping more surprises in the form of Errorsmith's much valued return with his left field Sprinkles-hitting-the-80th-hour-solid-straight-mixing collab with Mark Fell that perfectly moved floors, feet and minds alike wherever it got dropped. Having swerved to these more floor-focused sounds PAN also stuck to to its roots in experimental and avant-garde composition with releases from Vom Grill and Florian Hecker and Mark Lecky's Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera LP (an album so sourly addictive it will have you brushing your teeth frantically throughout due to the sounds within) while the year was capped off with some mutated grime in the form of Visionist's sci-fi sounds on Safe and the launch of PAN's first sub label in the form of PAN x CODES dropping two stellar 12"s of jungle techno rooted trax, also to top it off Lee Gamble dreamt up some more lucid techno with a super sharp white label drop.