About

— 2LP pressed on standard black vinyl.
— Includes digital download card.

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The defining output from the London-based trio – Trevor Mathison, Anna Piva and Edward George – was originally released in the late ’90s on Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald’s Chain Reaction label. The album has been remastered by Rashad Becker at Clunk, becoming available on double vinyl for the first time.

The NMBRS75 sleeve has a debossed front cover constructed from recycled, textured, grey board printed black on both sides in a clear archive bag with a card for digital download. — (via Label)

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Anyone who came into contact with Hallucinator’s first three 12" EPs in 1998 and 1999, or the subsequent compendium Landlocked, would almost certainly have approached them in the context of Chain Reaction’s founders and community of likeminded artists. Hallucinator stuck to the shadows; the press release for their debut EP read, “HALLUCINATOR are 3 people from the UK/London and this [is] their first release ever—that’s all what the artists want to let us know.” There was no information to connect the members of the trio (Anna Piva, Edward George, and Trevor Mathison) to their related projects: the arts collective Flow Motion, whose contemporaneous work explored the cosmological implications of dub and Sun Ra, and the Black Audio Film Collective, a group of avant-garde multimedia artists and filmmakers, founded in 1982, engaged in diasporic studies and postcolonial theory.

However Hallucinator’s music found its way to Chain Reaction, it’s not hard to understand why Ernestus and von Oswald found kinship with them; the trio’s work takes up the baton from Basic Channel and their acolytes and grinds it to splinters. “People,” the song that opens both Hallucinator’s debut 12" and Landlocked, floats atop the kind of slow-fast dub rhythm that you might have found on a Porter Ricks record; the vibes are appropriately hazy, washed-out synths and onionskin delay smeared together like overlapping radio signals beamed from far, far away. But certain key elements of the sound are subtly different from their peers: The clattering hi-hats sound more like scraps of live jazz than programmed drum machines, and the kick drum studiously avoids the downbeat, fluttering like a heart murmur. — (via Pitchfork)

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Landlocked, after more than a quarter of a century, seems to have aged at least as well as a dry Primitivo or the Unabomber manifesto is almost certainly due to the incredibly successful realization of these style-defining production approaches. Dominated by cool repetition in a trance-like state, formulated in cinematic techno semantics – a Rorschach test for the adventurous ear. And in sum, not just for labels like Chain Reaction, but for the genre as a whole, a groundbreaking transition just before the turn of the millennium. — (via GROOVE)

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Label: Numbers.
Format: 2 x Vinyl, LP, Album, Reissue, Remastered, Stereo
Released: 2026
Genre: Electronic
Style: Techno, Dub Techno, Minimal

File under: House / Electro / Techno
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