The World Unknown Record Label Finally Becomes A Reality

World Unknown is a monthly underground party held in a railway arch in Brixton, South London.

It’s a post-industrial pleasure dome full of strange and often exotic music that pumps and throbs and shimmers and shakes. The 60s and 70s vintage projector-based lighting and roomful of disco-fog adds to the otherworldliness of the night which is totally unlike any other club in London, and quite possibly the world.

Noting a distinct shortage of contemporary record labels releasing the kind of music that they play at the parties, organisers and resident DJ’s Andy Blake (Cave Paintings, Dissident) and Joe Hart (Bodyhammer, Bloc) decided World Unknown should have it’s own 12” only label.

Each World Unknown release will be a split-artist 12” and there will be six coming out in the first year of it’s life. Here are details of the first two, due to hit the shops in the first week of July 2011.

The first World Unknown 12” kicks off with a slamming piece of prototype house from Glasgow’s  Naum Gabo aka Jonnie Wilkes from Optimo and his production partner James Savage. Showing that a relatively low pace doesn’t mean any drop in energy levels and dancefloor pump power, Whop! cracks along like something from an alternate reality version of 1980’s Chicago. It’s as easy to imagine it rocking the house at Medusa’s or the Box as it is to envision it in the present day soundtracking some kind of bizarro fetish party or a particularly intense session at Berghain’s Lab-oratory. This is jacking in the true sense of the word.

On the flip side Italian born Berlin resident Franz Underwear ups the tempo with a stunning piece of slamming European musclebeat. Shades of Ibiza 88-89 pervade here; the kind of pumping, chunky synth action, Teutonic vocal exhortations and vaguely menacing but ultimately benign vibe that sent thousands of potty European kids totally round the bend and changed the world of dance music forever. Fuse together ideas of glamorous open air Mediterranean nightclubs full of sex-crazed hedonistic Eurotrash, sweaty, strobey, smoky South London acid-house basements with walls of bassbins at one end, and your first decent E - that one so strong and clean that your brain nearly popped out of your head and ended up on Mars, and you’re getting somewhere near what this record sounds like. Savage, joyous and teetering on the edge of sanity.