Interview: noRecall

Seattle’s noRecall is a fitting addition to Markham Road Records’ slew of bass commanders, contributing to a discography that includes artists like Entrañas, Warzou, and Subsism with a lethal four-track EP.

Out on November 12, Islay undulates its way around twitchy, scattered drums; morphing from track to track like a Komodo dragon creeping across the forest floor. The EP opens with “Grid Failure”, a knockjaw heater whose bass comes alive as it flings itself around the frequency spectrum. Next up, and already available on Bandcamp, is “Inhalation”, which arrives as a wordless invocation, landing on the ears in a sonar flurry of echolocation and dense, earthy rhythms.

Islay, the project’s titular track, is saturated and cutty; sparkling up in all the right places before returning to a guttural gravity that’s bound to become speaker-stack quicksand, gluing dancers to the floor.

Islay [EP] closes out with a transformational remix by Delusional Records founder Maude Vôs, who loads Islay into a spaceship and takes off into the night sky, leaving us with an EP that calls for an instant replay. Head to Bandcamp to listen to “Inhalation”, and pre-order the album for its release on the 12th.

If you’re looking for a chance to hear these tracks unleashed on the general public, noRecall and Maude Vôs will both be spinning in Seattle on November 22, aiding in the cross-pollination of Ommaya Records, Peace Portal, and Bodytalk.

For now, we’re chatting with the artists to get a peek into their creative processes.

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Between co-managing Ommaya Records and a residency with Seattle’s Routine, it’s inspiring to see you additionally deliver such an impressive creative output. For someone who has already released two EPs and a handful of compilation tracks in 2025 alone, how much time do you find yourself spending in the studio on an average week, and what does your writing process look like?

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Kekoa: These days I on average spend say like 7-8 hours, but this is way down from previous years. This has been an insanely busy summer, and I am ready for more studio time this winter. Might be easier said than accomplished since Ommaya is now going to be hosting more parties and I am now also apart of a soundsystem crew with Sunrise Sound Collective.

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Kabuchiko Hum, your May release on Sonic Disturbances, contains field recordings taken from your own travels. I’m curious if Islay makes use of anything like this in its sound design, and if there are any unexpected sample sources that made their way into the project.

Kekoa: Islay Scotch was the special ingredient in making this EP.

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Your tracks manage to span a wide range of tempo and genre while consistently emerging into a cohesive, cinematic realm of bass-driven soundscapes. What are some things that inspire you while creating?

Kekoa: In a very broad sense, I am just trying to combine different genre specific drum patterns with the sounds I like. So inspiration is mainly the other artists who are pushing genre bending music and those pushing forward thinking styles and sound design. It generally has to be music where I couldn’t tell you the genre. Other inspiration for tone has in the past been film or other pieces of art outside of the club music I generally listen to, so sometimes it is even just rewatching things I know will trigger the right emotions.

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Being a producer, dj, label organizer, and event attendee seems like it would allow for a pretty immersive musical experience in general. What’s your favorite dance-music-related experience you’ve had this year?

Kekoa: Osmosis in the Trees. Such an amazing festival, such amazing sets, such amazing energy and crowd. Runner up was Vitarave, also so much fun, and Maude and I actually got to hangout irl there.

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The beauty of the remix lies in the exciting multiplicity of creation, transforming one piece of art into another with endless possibility.

Maude, you refashioned Islay’s gritty bass workout, highlighting its softer elements while twisting and stretching the track into a lush science fiction sojourn. What was the process of writing the remix like for you?

Maude Vôs: When choosing to remix, I always need to find an element that I initially connect to, -a catalyst that I can produce around and carry into a new territory. I typically only use 1 or 2 stems when I remix, so I can honor the OG and then have the space to bring my spin to the remix. When Kekoa reached out with this EP, I really connected to the atmospheric pad in Islay. I launched with that pad, transforming it into a layered soundbed with 2 layers of granular processing and pitching. I then took the percussion, gated everything to get these really tight small transients, then reprocessed with some pitch modulation. I resequenced all of the new drum hits into my own downtempo 170 bpm drum pattern. The bridge/fake drop is a mutable matrix of texture, created with aggressive redux processing. (Been really into making these unexpected sections in my arrangements lately. :-p) There's a lot of lush effects chains, filtering & transition processing to finesse the production into the atmospheric, cinematic cyclone that it ended up being!