The Top 20 Record Labels Of 2016

The name of Lee Gamble’s UIQ imprint refers to panspermia, a hypothesis that puts forward the idea that life on earth originated from an extra-terrestrial source. While just a theory, the imprint’s output alone serves as some pretty compelling evidence for an otherworldly influence on earth, with the sounds it produces sounding acutely alien and like little else to hit record shelves this year.

Any attempt to categorise the label’s music will also probably land anyone in a black hole of thought as neurons race in a futile struggle to make sense of the clash of unhinged textures. No other label has fucked with our heads quite so intensely as UIQ in 2016.

It opened the year with Zuli’s ‘Bionic Ahmed’ six-tracker landing in January, a record that has stayed at the forefront of our thoughts throughout the following 11 months, continually returning in particular to the intriguing sound design of opener ‘Robotic Handshakes In 4D’ that we’d hesitate to describe as gun-finger abstract.

Further releases sitting on the extreme left of leftfield have come in the form of Lanark Aretefax’s glitched-out ‘Glasz’, S Olbricht’s experimental ambient and Renick Bell’s warped mutations in the Autechre mould. It’s dance music in the most challenging sense of the term, but having had the pleasure of seeing Lee Gamble in action on multiples occasions this year, take it from us that these records have the power to move a floor. P Hinton