Audiopile Review: In recent years, Los Angeles-born, Berlin-based Jake Muir has emerged as one of the most compelling voices echoing around that deeply conceptual end of the experimental electronic underground. ‘Enmixed’ is essentially a DJ mix drawing exclusively from releases on the enmossed label. But Muir makes the material his own, arranging and processing the raw audio into a steamy stew of sonic strangeness. He’s clearly drawing inspiration from 90s ‘illbient’ artists like DJ Spooky, who reconfigured dark ambient, hip-hop, dub, electro-acoustic music, and drum & bass into a sick sonic fug. Illbient is currently a sub-genre that’s ripe for reappraisal. Not yet trendy, it’s a natural draw for crate diggers and heads looking for fresh sources of inspiration. With ‘enmixed’, Muir is drawing on sub rosa sounds both old and new to create something bewitchingly atmospheric and entirely his own. This is not an intriguing obscurity to be glanced at with passing interest, it’s an ambitious 80-minute epic from a major talent.

Moody cacophonies, sonic dispatches from Japan, crystalline breakbeats that are more environment than rhythm: Jake Muir’s 𝒆𝒏𝒎𝒊𝒙𝒆𝒅, described by Muir as a “(re)mixtape,” is a mind-bending deep dive into the enmossed archive. Besides reflecting the history of the label, Muir’s mix is a production in its own right. A Los Angeles native based in Berlin, Muir is a DJ and field recordist who “sees mixes as a vehicle to explore narratives outside of the album format.”

In 𝑩𝒂𝒕𝒉𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒔𝒆 𝑩𝒍𝒖𝒆𝒔 (2023), where Muir sampled various sources to explore gay cruising culture and sensuality, his more expansive, conceptual approach to the form is illuminated. Mixes are not just a linear succession of tracks with transitions—they’re excavations that also result in the creation of new audio artifacts. Inspired by the psychedelic impulses of illbient, Muir uses DJ and sound engineering techniques to melt down genre distinctions and create alien atmospheres.

From the enmossed community, Muir pulls from artists like bad lsd trips, Angelo Harmsworth, Nick Klein, Tetsuya Nakayama, and Patrick Gallagher to coalesce a super-compendium of the global sonic underground, all viewed through his own unique lens. Muir takes major liberties with processing and effects automation to carve new worlds from the soil of these preexisting works. Some of the tracks and material on 𝒆𝒏𝒎𝒊𝒙𝒆𝒅 are heavily edited, emphasizing specific harmonics or bass frequencies, and some portions contain three or four layers, putting artists in direct conversation with each other.

This heady approach—using the tools of both mixtape and remix—results in a super textual and dense palimpsest of the enmossed catalog. “Because mixes are more open- source,” Muir says, “it’s easier to express some ideas since there is more material to pull from.”