Dampé

Darker Than Wax’s final release of the year brings us back to the world of UK dance music with Dampé - the solo project of Joe Munday, a musician, producer and DJ from South London. Joe’s foundation in dance music stems from becoming a regular on the floor at influential parties like FWD>> and You’re A Melody. Dampé brings together these London sounds with worldwide influences and nuanced, ethereal production to create something entirely his own. With a string of releases on Berlin’s Dirt Crew Records, and a monthly show on the venerable Rinse FM, Dampé has carved out a space for his sonic brand of introspective, deep UK dance music. Spurred by a chance meeting with the Darker Than Wax crew in London in 2018, an instant relationship between artist and label flourished through our shared sonic ethos. After numerous setbacks from the chaos of 2020, we are proud to finally share Dampé’s label debut with the world – Oil.

A polished, wide-ranging work in its own right, Oil run’s the gamut from moments of lush, meditative sound design, to banging mutant-Bruk and flailing percussive dancefloor cuts. Kicking off with restless ambient excursion ‘Jawahar Park’, into the deep, evolving dancefloor affair with title track ‘Oil’, and rounding out with the shimmering slo-mo house of ‘Flora Waves’, the first side of the record showcases Dampé’s sonic range and his unique approach to forging new sounds. On the flip side, ‘Awning Slapper’ is the EP’s certified party starter led by distorted bass and accented with fleeting chords and percussion, while ‘Manzana’ brings us on a rhythmic excursion built on saturated found sounds and some made-for-the-Adriatic euphoric synth lines. Also featured on the record is a remix from Canadian producer Teo Mattress, putting his signature dreamy Vancouver-house spin on ‘Jawahar Park’. Despite travelling through a number of diverse auditory peaks and valleys, Oil oozes consistency and polish from front to back – a solid spin at home or in the club.