Machinedrum is a rarity in electronic music: an artist who traverses tempos and musical styles with seemingly effortless grace. It’s one of the reasons that new music from Travis Stewart is met with genuine excitement by fans and peers alike. His first solo Machinedrum output since 2021’s “Psyconia” EP, “4#TRAX” collates four excursions exploring the spaces between R&B, UKG and drum & bass. As always the results are smart, banging and branded with Stewart’s utterly inimitable sonic signature. He calls on alt pop maestro KUČKA (Flume collaborator and signed to LuckyMe); New York-based, Japanese artist rei brown; and future pop/electronic singer songwriter LIZ (signed to Diplo’s Mad Decent label) on vocal duties.

“4#TRAX is a tribute to #trax, a channel on IRC [Internet Relay Chat – a text-based chat system for instant messaging] that I spent much of my teens in,” explains Travis whose introduction to music-making was via “music trackers” – a type of music sequencer software in the 90s. “#trax was a community of tracker musicians that would share their tracks, throw competitions, start labels, trade samples and give feedback and I figured there was no better way to pay respect to #trax than to make new songs using a tracker. On this EP, I decided to make songs that were created using a hybrid of Impulse Tracker and Ableton Live. This gave the songs a nostalgic feel while at the same time keeping it firmly in the present by utilizing my current strengths in production, composition, sound design, editing and mixing in Ableton Live as well as using newer plugins to modernize the sound a bit”.

Lead single ‘VIOLET (feat. KUČKA)’ is a wonderful marriage of Machinedrum’s understated production with the innately soulful vocals and brilliant songcraft of KUČKA. Unsurprisingly, it’s a total earworm, twinkly and quite lullaby-esque in its form before the whole thing takes a darker turn, very suddenly juxtaposed with a wall of distorted 808s.

“Collaboration is a big part of my process these days, and it’s no different on this EP,” Travis adds. “I had a blast working with KUČKA, LIZ and rei brown on these songs. They each brought their own unique individual characters to the songs and I’m really proud of what we created together!”

Elsewhere on the EP – and the only instrumental track – ‘CAPONE’ is an out-and-out sound system banger, channeling classic dark garage energy (El-B, Oris Jay, Horsepower Productions) and flipping a sample from ‘Chan Jeye Mukhre Tey’ by Pakistani folk artist Lal Din Shahbazi for a sleek, supremely streamlined and effective dancefloor cut. ‘DEJAVU’ maintains the UKG energy to which rei brown lends his delicate, dreamy vocal and ‘BTHE1’ explores 160 jungle/R&B/footwork territory that Machinedrum played a key role in mapping 10+ years ago.

The “4#TRAX” EP artwork is by Joe Durnan with typography by Ian Anderson of legendary graphic design studio The Designers Republic (perhaps best known for its work with the likes of Aphex Twin and Autechre)