Audiopile Review: With almost a year between releases, 3XL makes up for lost time with a two album drop only weeks apart, following up their recent ROTW clincher from Cortex Of Light with a new album from label head Special Guest DJ. The slippery moniker is one of many from the DJ, producer and underground ambient lynchpin also known simply as Shy, over the years bouncing between solo projects, one-off collabs and helming various other labels like Experiences Ltd, xpq? and bblisss. But the primary focus as of late has been loading up his 3XL imprint, a label that has, alongside the closely connected West Mineral, become the oft-referenced focal point for the nebulous vapour dub scene (or Big Ambient, if you must). Surprisingly enough, this amounts to the first proper full length from Shy since initially donning the seemingly defunct uon guise as one of the first releases for West Mineral. Not surprisingly, however, this long awaited album is one of the richest, densest and, at times, most foreboding works to come from the scene. With the additional hands of Ben Bondy, Arad Acid and mu tate on deck, Shy’s structures are like a vortex of black ambient, off-centred dub and scrubbed digital glossolalia, the occasional disintegrated melody reaching through the mire. Imagine the slow simmering sound of ‘Live In Japan-era’ Fennesz remixing Sunn O))) for Chain Reaction, and you’re damn close. Despite the meat of the album being a finely detailed heaving mass through most of its run, the finest moment is the album’s exquisite coda, “Dream”, a fleeting moment of sublimity arriving in the wake. Our Fantasy Complex feels like a summation of the entire scene within its condensed confines. In other words, it’s a stunner. Edition of 300.

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For nigh on a decade, Berlin-based American producer, label boss, promoter and DJ Shy has operated at the centre of a scene that’s still not fully defined. Their mythical DJ sets, where you’re likely to hear precision-tweaked dubstep, dreampop, decelerated rap and dubwise ambient blended into vapour; gives some sense of the vibes at play, and a comb thru their spiderweb of a catalog – as Caveman LSD or uon, as part of Ghostride the Drift, Hoodie, crimeboys, virtualdemonlaxative and Cypher, or as the figurehead of 3XL, Experiences Ltd, xpq? and bblisss labels – further blurs that gist.

They’ve been caught in the crossfire of Big Ambient, sure, but there’s always been something scrappier, sexier and more present going on under the hood. Shy and his network of associates – Huerco, Ulla, Perila, Ben Bondy, Naemi/Exael, Ponteac Streator and Arad Acid, among others – have asserted the interrelatedness of their discrete approaches. So-called “ambient” music doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it un-focuses elements that undergird so many more corporeal sounds, and for Shy, their music reflects the druggy, DIY, genre-agnostic ethos of a trans-Atlantic neo-punk underground that exists in some liminal zone between the club, the bedsit and the basement.

Concerned with themes of “anger, sensuality, and dreaming”, the 40 minute roil of ‘Our Fantasy Complex’ frames Special Guest DJ at their most unapologetically oblique and illusive, expanding and contracting between whorls of shoegazing dynamics and extended portions of quasi-speed D&B x dub tech smeared on the mind’s-eye, with a vivid sense of bruised lushness that’s perfused all shy’s work thus far.

Joined by kindred collaborators Ben Bondy, Arad Acid and mu tate, and suspended in agitated bliss by Rashad Becker’s lucid mastering, the results feel out some of 2025’s most considered and distinctive within an amorphous zone that’s become a world unto itself. Ambient music’s fluffier signifiers are swapped out for a sort of sublime tension that, like the sound’s original ‘90s explosion, can be heard to reflect states of altered consciousness – both individual and collective.

Shy’s layered, undulating productions are more like the chewed remnants of a thousand mixtapes cooked into a stream-of-consciousness hex. Save for the glistening, zoomed-out parting piece ‘Dream’, it all mostly avoids pretty melodies in favour of a spatio-textural sensuality that wraps us up, sometimes uncomfortably intimately, in shy’s thoughts. That oneiric closer is one of three gritty palate cleansers that swirl around its peaks, where elements of Reese-bass are suspended, writhing below looming atmospheric pressure in ‘How Long Can I Burn?’, emerging charred and flecked with rattled percussion on ‘Yoro (pt I & II)’, as though K-holing thru a blazing summer’s day.

In step with Perila’s notably darker turn of events on her ‘Omnis Festinatio Ex parts Diaboli Est’, album, or the unexpected ferocity of recent Space Afrika live shows, it’s not hard to hear a darkside gravitational pull on this one, where ambient music is no longer just a balm for troubled souls, but also suggestive of humanity’s most frightful odours.