Audiopile Review: Silent Season sub-label Moon Garden strikes quickly after their opening volley from Japanese producer Silentwave, a deep listening ambient album issued on cassette this past summer. With the smaller sized formats as Moon Garden’s preference thus far, their second offering is a 7” single from the German duo Hidden Sequence, a name which might be a familiar name to those invested in contemporary dub techno. Through their trio of releases issued on the top tier dub techno imprint Lempuyang, Hidden Sequence are among a newer crowd of dub techno enthusiasts like Frenk Dublin and SND & RTN who are fully immersed into the smokier side of the genre. Here, the duo remove the techno aspect while maintaining their dank density, Mystical Dub taking us on a slight detour towards the style of dub that had previously been perfected by Rhythm & Sound. With a heavy emphasis on atmosphere, the single’s two tracks embellish their roots-informed samples of faded horns and trippy vocals snippets with an orb-y wall of riddems and smoke-blessed FX, arriving somewhere close to the warm but wall-shaking releases that we’ve been enamoured with from Froid Dub or Mystica Tribe, the latter of whom are fittingly up next on the Moon Garden release schedule!

Jamie McCue, who is behind the classic Silent Season label, steps out here with a new label called Moon Garden. Hidden Sequence inaugurate it with a limited edition 7″ that sets a great standard from the off. ‘Studio A’ is a liquid dub with delicate hi-hats sprinkled over loose, tumbling drums and rich sub-bass. It’s vast in sauce and impossible not to sink into. ‘Mystical Dub’ on the B-side is an even more paired back ambient dub with a barely-there rhythm slowly unfolding beneath conscious mutterings and distant, muted melodies. It’s late-night weed music of the highest order.