Art by Evan Solano
Son Raw might blow up but he won’t go pop.
Catching up with UK electronic music mavericks Mumdance and Logos after a few years is a fascinating equal parts look into club music’s future and an archeological dig into its rich history. Though we initially met in 2012, by Mumdance’s reckoning, he’s in his third era. He launched career mixing and matching international sounds on Mad Decent in the aughts before pivoting towards evolving UK rave music in the mid-2010s on labels like Tectonic. There, his second act ultimately culminated in what he called “the Weightless sound,” an open-ended exploration of how to arrange sub-frequencies and electronic textures for maximum impact without relying on standard kick drum patterns.
Logos meanwhile, was one fourth of the team behind Boxed, one of London’s preeminent instrumental Grime nights of the mid-2010s, around which orbited a number of that genre’s second wave innovators, Mumdance included. Still, his music was always an outlier even among that experimental-minded crew, pushing the genre’s minimalist tendencies to their breaking point, far beyond standard DJ or MC-food, ultimately culminating in Cold Mission – a solo masterpiece that somehow made glassy, experimental ambient and London’s roughneck dance seem feel like natural bedfellows. That he and Mumdance would collaborate on a few tracks, given their common social circle, was unsurprising, but few expected them to deliver the certified classic, Proto, a rave-ready collection which reimagined 20-plus years of UK music as a foreboding, alien mash up of breaks, drum hits, reese bass, and empty spaces.
Now, 10 years after that high water mark, the duo have returned to curate Ping Volume 1. This compilation simultaneously builds upon the Weightless concept while also doubling down on the duo’s music as a driver of community and collaboration. It’s all built on the ping: a simple, unifying sonic element. To hear Mumdance tell it, the concept is deeply rooted in his musical output so far, even if the specific word to describe it is a recent development: “It was something that we were drawn to before we had the language for it. At its core, all the ping is to me is a noise on [beat] one and [beat] three, to anchor the track, but it doesn’t even have to be on those beats. The point is the track is anchored by that sound, and the track undulates around it.”
As examples for ping material that existed long before he’d developed a framework for it, he points towards older tracks in his catalog: 2011’s “Doom,” as well as “Border Drone,” and “Legion” with Logos and Kazzt, an Airhead track the duo published on their label Different Circles. Each track features a high pitched sound at its center instead of a kick. Mumdance and Logos have since identified the ping in music from acts as disparate as experimental auteur Alva Noto and various ’80s pop bands.
“It’s about limitations,” Logos muses when I ask what elements are necessary for a good ping track, before Mumdance notes: “I get overwhelmed, if I’ve got access to everything. That’s why I was drawn to the MPC sampler and the Mackie desk, because that had only 16 channels.” He credits this restrained approach to helping him overcome fear of creating again, after his hiatus from music.
Just as importantly as that unifying musical element however, is the group of like-minded producers and clubbers it has brought together in a shared online space, one devoid of the usual post-enshitified internet annoyings. Specifically, the ping owes its recent glow up to an image macro posted in the Discord chat during one of Mumdance’s radio shows: “When I started Radio Mumdance Series 03, on the first show, I said something along the lines of ‘I like these pingy ones.’ It was just offhand and it got a reaction. On Discord, you can search a word and it brings up an animated GIF. This listener called Bill Spartak, he searched the word ping when I said that and this meme of a devil looking up from a newspaper going, ‘PING!’ popped up. It’s from this old Japanese comic called Momotaro, and it got a huge reaction, which led to it becoming a running joke in the chat.”
This outburst of genuine listener enthusiasm couldn’t have come at a better time for Mumdance. Candidly admitting that he doesn’t earn a living from music anymore, after moving away from a grueling tour-heavy lifestyle and its associated vices, the producer states that he spent significant time unhappy with music and his place in it. Now, almost seven years sober, he ultimately concluded that the metric-driven, social-media dependent demands of the music industry weren’t for him, even as his love for music itself endured. Contrasting the positive vibes of the MD Discord with the “compare and despair” approach of Instagram and Twitter, he gushes about the importance of connecting with real people and not just a faceless series of likes. Whereas the former are passive to a fault, that off the cuff ping meme became a rallying cry for creativity and in-the-moment interaction, a genuine vibe shift that recentered Mumdance’s shows around the listeners, beyond being a showcase for a record collection.
Confirming this was a musical avenue worth exploring, listeners began spamming the chat with similar memes whenever a ping-worthy tune got airplay. Encouraged by the reaction, which felt like a new school twist on the DJ-listener feedback loop of the rave-centric pirate radio he grew up on, Mumdance began digging for more compatible material, eventually gathering enough tracks for an entire 2-hour show built around the concept, officially launching the Ping Report: “The first one was like a mood board. It was really shaped by the sort of feedback loop between the radio listenership and the producers making tunes. I’m creating a mood with a selection but then people are resonating with that and going on to make something which fits that mood and sending it to me to play.”
As for how this community came together, Mumdance credits his horror with Elon Musk buying Twitter for motivating him to find his own space outside of the mainstream tech firms’ walled gardens. Conversations with fellow electronic innovator Arca then introduced him to Discord, as of yet a still usable way to communicate online, and the project took on a life of its own. Soon, friends and fans gravitated towards the channel during Mumdance’s shows, but also, during off hours, as a way to chat with likeminded music heads without the din and distraction of algorithmic feeds.
“I didn’t understand how to frame it but Arca showed me how to set my Discord up,” Mumdance recalls. “Then I got my head around the fact that it was just like old forum culture. That’s what Logos and I grew up on. Small forums discussing underground music like Dogs On Acid or Dubstepforum, instead of giant sites where anyone and everyone has a say, even if the conversation doesn’t really involve them.” He’s also quick to note that despite being officially named the MD Discord after his label, the forum isn’t solely meant to be solely about him. “I actually hate being the center of attention,” he laughs, highlighting the irony of introverted DJs being put on pedestals. “It’s just for people who are into weird music!”
This same impetus with moving away from major tech brands also became the catalyst for Mumdance to launch his own web archive, entirely hosted away from mainstream platforms: “Having that archive – sure a lot of my material is [also] on Bandcamp but here, I’ve got it all including my mixes and stuff like that. I feel like I’ve written my own story, and that’s so important because we’ve lost so much music to vanishing platforms – stuff like Blog House from the late 00s or old Footwork tunes, for example, so much of it just disappears as the hosting services go under.”
As we discuss the sound’s growth, it becomes clear that the ping has existed in music since man first hit a piece of metal and heard a high pitched resonance, but I’m still impressed at the sheer variety of reference points Mumdance and Logos corral when discussing the concept. Joining us midway through our chat–getting the kids to bed was a challenge–Logos mentions both Stockhausen’s tendency to build music from very short impulse sounds as a potential ground zero and the latest community uploads as exciting new developments in the world of ping. Both beam with pride noting that the latest Ping Report was sourced entirely from the Discord community, 57 tracks in all, exploring the sound from various angles. Logos also notes how it reminds him of the Boxed era, a critical moment in UK history where people from across England (and in my case, overseas) gathered in small clubs to celebrate an exciting, niche sound.
“It feels like a similar energy,” Logos says. “It’s different sonically, but there’s loads of producers into it, like Boxed. We had this party on Friday and someone came down to London from Newcastle, which is the other side of the country, on their own, just to come and hear the music.”
That club night speaks to ping’s next step. While creating that space for geographically dispersed people with a common interest in weird electronic sounds feels more crucial than ever in today’s online hellscape, club music nevertheless thrives in and demands physical spaces, and both producers are excited at the possibilities for pings in the wider world, after the compilation’s launch party. Cracking a smile while reminiscing about the night, after I ask whether this admittedly unorthodox club music works on the floor, Mumdance notes: “You know, I’m conditioned to the ping sound. It makes me react, and [at the launch] I saw that people, when the pings come in, they were reacting to it too. It’s becoming a thing like Amapiano’s log drums or Amen breaks in Jungle.”
After evolving from a nebulously defined sound to a micro-scene worthy of full radio shows, the ping has now reached an even greater milestone thanks to the (plainly named) Ping Volume 1, an official compilation documenting it, curated by Mumdance & Logos together, their first official collaboration in years. For me, that alone counts as exciting, given that together, they made some of the most bewildering club tracks of the 2010s, but again, the duo are modest to a fault – preferring to highlight contributions by others. Both single out Betron Brut’s “Lime Bikes” as the track that’s earned the strongest reactions so far thanks to a cheeky sample flip of a TikTok detailing how to hack London’s ubiquitous bicycle rentals, contrasting pings to the clicking sound from a stolen cycle.
This is the sort of wry reference that has elevated UK dance classics for decades, from Shut up and Dance’s £10 (to get in) to Wiley’s Wot U Call it. Notes Mumdance: “In the summer if you have your window open you can just hear people riding hacked bikes and it’s just like this unnatural new sound in London–you suddenly couldn’t get away from it. That’s why it was so clever that he picked that sound, because it’s very much in the air this year. But he repurposed it in such a clever way so it resonated with a lot of our listeners.”
When I ask how they chose which tracks made the cut, not easy considering just how much ping-adjacent music they’ve been sent over the past few years, both artists insist the compilation essentially A&Red itself, with the duo choosing tracks that received the most positive reactions during radio, with an eye on showcasing long time community members in dialogue with the duo’s sound.
“Take ‘Faultline VIP’ by Henry Greenleaf and Meta… Greenleaf told me it’s like a nod to one of our older tunes. He was influenced by us and then I heard it and it resonated with me and now it’s on the compilation, so that’s very full circle,” highlights Logos. As for Mumdance, when I ask for favorites, he mentions Lilia Betts.
“I’ve known her for years,” Mumdance says. “She works at Ableton and really knows her stuff. She’s really, really intelligent. I started playing some of her old tracks on the radio and they were really resonating with the crowd. So I asked her to do something new, and she said she hadn’t picked up a sequencer in years but she’d love to. Now, ‘Boomerang’ [her track on the compilation] is her first proper release, which is exciting. We’re going to do an EP with her because the music she’s making now is so good.”
While both of those names are the epitome of the underground–more talented that renowned–Logos then jumps in to shout out the compilation’s most notable star, D&B music legend Amit. Here is a production veteran and longstanding hero of the duo, who contributed “Dirt Doctor,” the comp’s closing track, subtly twisting his trademark style to fit the ping-specific vibe.
When I bring up how the word “ping” echoes the genre tag of Bleep Techno, an early ’90s, pre-Jungle microgenre, Logos assures me I’m not the first to notice: “It does remind me of Bleep! I still like to play those tracks because like it was just extremely odd music, the weird sparseness of that era is always something I look back on and I see similarities with what we’re doing. It’s almost like rearranging a few elements and then you get magic. Bleep and ping are always going to be close.”
As for the community, Mumdance ends our talk by echoing how liberating it is to escape the wider, online electronic music discourse, in favor of something more direct and human: “People came up to me at the launch party to chat about how the tracks made them feel. And so many people have written to me saying that it’s the first time in ages that they’ve picked up their sequencers and DAWs to make stuff because they felt inspired by the idea of what we’re doing. If social media makes me sad, this is the opposite: it feels good.”
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