TRANSPARENT AUDIO 🇬🇧 × YAMATAI RECORDS 🇬🇧 — MOMENTUM
Various Artists Compilation Review and Radio Feature
Review by Gordon Lawrence Taylor — Voice In The Void
Infectious Unease Radio / Subterranean Zone Radio
Release: Momentum
Labels: Transparent Audio 🇬🇧 / Yamatai Records 🇬🇧
Catalogue: TAYR001
Release Date: 25 September 2026
Format: Eight-track collaborative compilation
Genre: Drum & Bass / Atmospheric Drum & Bass / Minimal D&B
Mastering: Height Sonics
Artwork: Gaijin Graphics & Mirai Vision
MOMENTUM — WHEN TWO LABELS BECOME ONE COMMUNITY
There are compilations assembled because a label needs another release on the calendar. There are various-artists projects designed primarily to showcase a roster. And then there are records that document something more substantial: relationships, shared history, creative trust and the gradual construction of a community.
Momentum belongs firmly to the latter category.
Presented jointly by Bristol-based drum & bass imprints Transparent Audio and Yamatai Records, Momentum is an eight-track collaborative project that functions as considerably more than a conventional label sampler. Its significance lies in the architecture behind it. Every track represents connection: producer to producer, artist to artist, label to label and, ultimately, community to community.
The supplied history traces that relationship back to 2022, when a simple message between James and Tom developed into a collaboration extending through events, the Circular Sonics series, a shared Kool FM residency, writers’ camps and years of mutual support. What began as communication between two people therefore became an expanding network around two labels and their artists.
That history matters.
It gives the title Momentum an unusually precise meaning.
Momentum here is not merely speed. It is accumulated movement. It is the energy generated when one event leads to another, one friendship introduces another artist, one writing session produces another collaboration and two independent organisations discover that cooperation can create something neither could manufacture independently.
The project is consequently best understood as a document of underground musical infrastructure.
And that makes it important.
TRANSPARENT AUDIO × YAMATAI RECORDS
Both labels operate from Bristol, one of the central geographical and cultural reference points in British bass music.
Transparent Audio publicly describes itself as an independent Bristol drum & bass label committed to providing developing artists with a platform while pushing intelligent and forward-thinking music across the drum & bass spectrum. Its current roster includes a striking number of artists involved in Momentum, including Spektiv, Geostatic, Koax, Lauren Walton, Morrow, Revan, Dubruvvas and Yannons.
Yamatai Records similarly describes its purpose around the development of emerging drum & bass artists and the cultivation of fresh and innovative sounds. Its catalogue has become increasingly broad while maintaining a strong interest in new-generation producers.
An earlier extended discussion of Yamatai’s development also makes something particularly significant clear: the concept of a family or collective support structure has long been central to the label’s philosophy. James Williams discussed the importance of artists supporting one another, while also identifying groove, progression and vibe as fundamental elements when selecting music for Yamatai.
That makes Momentum feel less like an unexpected crossover and more like the logical conclusion of ideas already embedded within both organisations.
These labels have overlapping principles.
Both value emerging artists.
Both understand the label as something larger than a digital distribution mechanism.
Both recognise that underground music develops through networks.
And Momentum turns those principles into an actual record.
THE SOUND OF COMMUNITY
The supplied promotional material describes the release through drum & bass, atmospheric drum & bass and minimal D&B, providing an important framework for understanding the aesthetic territory in which these collaborations operate.
But the deeper interest of Momentum is the meeting of individual musical identities.
Rather than presenting eight isolated tracks from eight unrelated producers, the project is constructed entirely around collaboration.
That distinction is essential.
Collaboration forces compromise, negotiation and response. A producer accustomed to building music according to their own internal logic suddenly has another person’s rhythmic habits, bass architecture, sound-design vocabulary and arrangement instincts entering the process.
Good collaboration does not erase those differences.
It exposes them.
The strongest collaborative electronic music often exists precisely at the point where two musical languages overlap without becoming identical.
Across Momentum, Transparent Audio and Yamatai appear to have used that tension as the fundamental compositional principle.
Eight tracks.
Multiple combinations.
No sense of one label operating as the host while the other simply supplies guests.
It is an exchange.
The original promotional statement describes it succinctly as eight tracks, two labels, one crew, arguing that the chemistry existed before the music rather than being artificially manufactured by the project.
That distinction gives Momentum its identity.
TRACK-BY-TRACK
1. DUB TEN & SPEKTIV — “BREACH”
3:31
Momentum begins with Dub Ten and Spektiv, immediately establishing the central concept of the compilation: artists crossing existing label and friendship networks rather than remaining within separate camps. The official track sequence places “Breach” at the entrance to the entire project.
Dub Ten is an Austrian drum & bass producer whose catalogue has moved through deep, bass-heavy territory while also touching more soulful and liquid approaches. Spektiv, meanwhile, is deeply embedded within Transparent Audio’s recent history and has already used collaboration as an organising principle in projects involving Morrow, Revan and Stokka.
That makes the pairing particularly appropriate as an introduction.
The title “Breach” itself is interesting in the context of the compilation. A breach is an opening: a breaking through of an established boundary. Whether intentional or otherwise, it is an extraordinarily suitable word with which to begin a record about dissolving boundaries between two labels.
Conceptually, then, “Breach” opens the gate.
It announces that Momentum will not be organised according to ownership, territory or separate rosters. It establishes movement across those divisions from the beginning.
2. GEOSTATIC & RUE — “ONCE AGAIN”
3:40
The second collaboration brings together Geostatic and Rue.
Geostatic is firmly connected to Transparent Audio, with recent work appearing directly through the label, while Rue has an established relationship with Yamatai Records; Rue’s 2026 Bird In A Cage / Can I Do release appeared through Yamatai.
This is precisely the sort of pairing that demonstrates why Momentum works as a concept.
There is no need to artificially construct an aesthetic narrative around the two labels because their catalogues already intersect within the same contemporary drum & bass ecosystem.
“Once Again” also introduces the idea of recurrence.
The title suggests return, repetition and continuation — concepts entirely compatible with the larger history of Momentum. Transparent and Yamatai did not collaborate once and disappear back into separate spaces. The relationship was repeated through events, radio, writers’ camps and shared activity until repetition became continuity.
Within that context, “Once Again” becomes almost another miniature statement of the compilation’s philosophy.
You meet.
You work together.
You return.
And something larger develops.
3. KALANE & YANNONS — “COLD SWEAT”
3:19
“Cold Sweat” brings Kalane and Yannons together.
Kalane has occupied an important position within Yamatai’s development. Earlier coverage of the label identified Kalane not simply as an artist but as part of its internal infrastructure and quality-control network. Yannons, meanwhile, appears within Transparent Audio’s artist roster.
Again, the construction is revealing.
This isn’t merely artist A featuring artist B.
It represents infrastructure meeting infrastructure: figures already embedded within the identities of their respective labels entering a shared creative environment.
The title “Cold Sweat” is appropriately physical. Drum & bass has always occupied a strange position between cerebral production science and intensely bodily experience. It may be assembled through meticulous digital editing, synthesis, compression and microscopic rhythmic decisions, but its destination remains fundamentally physical — speakers, rooms, bodies, movement.
That contradiction has always been one of the genre’s strengths.
Technical intelligence ultimately becomes physical response.
“Cold Sweat,” even at the level of its title and position within Momentum, speaks directly to that tension.
4. KOAX & R3IDY — “NO SMOKING”
4:12
By the fourth track, the compilation reaches Koax and R3IDY.
This is one of the most intriguing combinations in the sequence because both artists already have clear relationships with their respective label ecosystems. Koax is represented within Transparent Audio’s roster, while Yamatai describes R3IDY as a long-standing member of its family and an artist whose sub-heavy approach and production ideas have become closely associated with the label.
“NO SMOKING” has also already surfaced within DJ/radio circulation ahead of the official compilation release, with public posts identifying the Koax and R3IDY collaboration as forthcoming on the Transparent × Yamatai project.
That is significant because underground dance music still depends heavily upon circulation before formal release.
Tracks live in sets.
They appear as IDs.
Listeners ask questions.
DJs test them against sound systems and crowds.
Only later does the catalogue number arrive.
In that respect, “No Smoking” illustrates an older and still extremely important component of drum & bass culture: the record exists socially before it necessarily exists commercially.
And that is entirely consistent with Momentum.
This is a release about social relationships becoming musical objects.
5. LEKS & MORROW — “FIENDS”
4:09
The fifth track pairs Leks and Morrow.
Leks has become closely associated with Yamatai’s newer generation of producers, and previous Yamatai material has explicitly described his collaborative work in terms of forward-thinking production and a raw, gritty aesthetic.
Morrow, meanwhile, is part of the Transparent Audio network and has previously collaborated with Spektiv, giving this compilation another subtle internal connection to the relationships already developing around these artists.
The title “Fiends” pushes the language of the compilation somewhere darker.
There is something compulsive about the word.
A fiend is driven by appetite.
That makes it an interesting midpoint title on a project called Momentum, because momentum itself can become compulsive. Creative communities survive partly because people repeatedly return to the same rooms, conversations, studios, radio stations and parties.
They become obsessed.
They chase the next tune.
The next session.
The next mix.
The next event.
Underground music has always depended upon this slightly irrational devotion.
Nobody builds a genuinely independent music culture by accident.
It requires obsession.
“Fiends” is therefore a particularly fitting title at the centre of the record.
6. REVAN & FEARFUL — “MANTIS”
4:06
“Mantis” joins Revan and Fearful and introduces another significant piece of drum & bass lineage into the project.
Revan is established within Transparent Audio’s network, while London-based Fearful has built a catalogue associated with the darker, more stripped and pressure-orientated end of drum & bass. Earlier releases have explicitly positioned his work within dark D&B, roller and stepper territory.
The collaboration therefore strengthens the darker flank of Momentum.
The mantis is also an evocative visual metaphor: poised, angular, controlled and predatory.
Those qualities map unusually well onto the aesthetics of minimal and darker drum & bass, where impact often comes not from filling every available frequency but from restraint.
Space matters.
Silence matters.
The placement of an individual percussion strike matters.
Sub pressure becomes more intimidating when the arrangement creates enough negative space for it to exist independently.
This is one of the central lessons inherited from decades of bass music: subtraction can generate greater physical intensity than constant addition.
Within an album explicitly identified with minimal and atmospheric D&B, “Mantis” sits naturally inside that philosophy.
7. TELM & WILSON & DUBRUVVAS — “BULLDOZE”
4:07
The penultimate track expands the collaborative format again, bringing Telm & Wilson together with Dubruvvas.
Telm & Wilson have long existed around the broader Yamatai community, while Dubruvvas is represented within Transparent Audio’s artist network.
Even the title makes the function of the seventh track clear.
“Bulldoze.”
After a compilation built around gradual accumulation, conversation, cooperation and movement, the language suddenly becomes explicitly physical.
To bulldoze is to move through resistance.
And that brings us back once again to the word Momentum.
Momentum matters because once sufficient mass is moving with sufficient force, stopping it becomes difficult.
That applies to musical careers.
It applies to labels.
It applies to scenes.
And it applies to friendships.
The placing of “Bulldoze” immediately before the finale gives the album’s conceptual architecture a satisfying sense of escalation — an accumulation of collective force before the record turns toward its final statement.
8. VOXI & LAUREN WALTON — “FIND ME”
4:08
The closing track belongs to VOXI and Lauren Walton.
It is an excellent choice of artists with which to finish the compilation.
VOXI has developed a strong relationship with Yamatai, including the Sensory Overload project, while Lauren Walton sits within Transparent Audio’s current artist network and operates across production, DJing and vocal performance, with an established connection to the more melodic and liquid dimensions of drum & bass.
After titles such as “Breach,” “Cold Sweat,” “Fiends,” “Mantis” and “Bulldoze,” the phrase “Find Me” changes the emotional register.
It is suddenly intimate.
Human.
Direct.
And that makes it an intelligent title with which to conclude a compilation whose entire existence depends upon people finding one another.
James found Tom.
Transparent found Yamatai.
Artists found collaborators.
Two communities found common ground.
So the final words attached to the project are, appropriately:
Find Me.
There could hardly be a better conceptual ending.
TRACK LISTING
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Dub Ten & Spektiv — Breach — 3:31
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Geostatic & Rue — Once Again — 3:40
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Kalane & Yannons — Cold Sweat — 3:19
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Koax & R3IDY — No Smoking — 4:12
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Leks & Morrow — Fiends — 4:09
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Revan & Fearful — Mantis — 4:06
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Telm & Wilson & Dubruvvas — Bulldoze — 4:07
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VOXI & Lauren Walton — Find Me — 4:08