Collapsing Drums was founded by Charlie Behrens in 2020, a label dedicated to “experiments in sound, rupture and repair”. It also served as a reaction to the then developing Covid-19 pandemic, those early releases acknowledging the chaos of the first lockdown, but refusing to settle for despair. While stylistically varied – ranging from the earthy collage-scape of Masimba Hwati and Paul Nataraj’s Soil Leaf Root to the experimental hiphop of Mr AKA Amazing’s Illegibility Mistakable – the label finds optimism in disorder, sniffing out repair where there has been rupture. This playlist spans the label’s output in its first five years.

Charlie Behrens
“Cautious Optimism”
from Uneasing (2020)

Behrens launched the label with a trio of his own releases, the production of which was triggered by lockdown taking away much of his other graphic design work, providing him the time and the stimulus to create music. Uneasing was released as the UK began to ease its Covid 19 restrictions, the album’s title reflecting the simmering tension which, in that time of taking tentative steps back towards apparent ‘normality’, felt as though it might boil over into something drastic. However, despite the queasy uncertainties and disappointments brought by this new world, Behrens finds a sense of hope which runs – in one way or another – through each of the label’s releases. “Cautious Optimism” is a squelching soup of staccato electronics, registering somewhere between energetic puppy bounce and what sounds like a dial-up modem become unsettlingly sentient. The former, however, always overrides the latter.

BAG x Collapsing Drums
“Bounce”
from Momentary Lapses (2023)

BAG is a collaboration between British musician Dan Allison and Canadian Jody DeSchutter – Momentary Lapses is their collaboration with Behrens, released a few years after the latter’s preliminary triptych of Collapsing Drums releases. It also moves in a different direction; “Bounce” sets itself adrift down a stream of caustic consciousness, scattered with the angular detritus and protruding sonic clutter – threads of magnetic squall and lumps of clang poking up like the corners of submerged shopping trollies in your mind’s canal. However, DeSchutter’s spoken word additions skip across the surface like a tossed stone, abstract and semi-scientific affirmations land with an unfocussed but oddly energising and uplifting effect.

Tears | OV
“The Other”
“Recrudescence (Behrens Mix)”
from The Other (2024)

Tears | OV are Deborah Wale, Katie Spafford and Lori E Allen. The Other was released in 2024 as an 8" lathe cut. The A side sounds like a fleshier iteration Coil’s “Penetralia”, into which Wale has slipped a taut, Siouxsie Sioux-like vocal. The B side begins with a swarm of buzzing electronics and unexpected sound effects – a chomped apple and a flickering fluorescent bulb – before the mixture recedes, allowing the glowing voice of some benevolent robot to cycle through its programme of surreal shout-outs: Buster Keaton, Slim Pickens, Mr Tumble. Just as the brain cogs drop into place and it becomes apparent that the robot is toasting clowns of different kinds – physical comedian, rodeo clown, children’s entertainer – the metallic voice is swallowed by a radiant bank of clattering electronics and rising rumble. It’s baffling, but fantastic for it.

Mr AKA Amazing
“MANGOBAY”
from Illegibility Mistakable: Master AKA Mr Amazing (2024)

Mr AKA Amazing – aka Duane Warner – creates music at 54 The Gate, an arts project in Shepherd’s Bush, London for people with learning disabilities – at which Behrens is also an arts facilitator. Collapsing Drums shares a similar outlook around creative freedom and representation in the arts, with several of the project’s participants releasing their work via his label. Warner is one such artist. Illegibility Mistakable: Master AKA Mr Amazing collects several tracks from earlier, self-released albums – Think Big and Am I Being Unreasonable – into one righteous lump of lo-fi hiphop that’s somewhere between cLOUDDEAD and Adam Bohman. “MANGOBAY” sounds like someone wrestling with the ideas of life and relationships while speaking through a broken supermarket tannoy.

Biped
“Patience”
from Property (2024)

Biped is the Marseille/Bristol “producer, provoker, pre-apocalyptic sound-poet”; 2024’s Property follows up a string of intimate and affecting releases around themes such as “the hollow desire for an easy life, sex-difference in the psyche and society, and church exploitation of human need”. It also ups the intensity: “It’s Cancelled” is a defiant clenched fist of glitching electronics and vocal swoop, while “Patience” fixes the heat to a slow churning and insistent boil. What could have been all-out despair is instead allowed to breathe, to unravel and stretch out into quieter moments of optimism and calm.

Masimba Hwati & Paul Nataraj
“Soil Leaf Root”
from Soil Leaf Root (2025)

Soil Leaf Root is a ‘modified record’ – that is, one covered with calico and dyed with mud from a contested location in Harare, where the New Zimbabwe flag was hoisted in 1980. As a concoction of whirring, electronics-strewn field recordings, this 50 minute plus piece is intoxicating in its intimacy, like drifting half asleep through various conversations, rituals, prayers. As a piece which considers the “complex entanglements of migrant stories, memory, identity, otherness”, it feels urgent, an insight into shared humanity. Despite living on different continents, Masimba Hwati and Paul Nataraj find a sense of commonality.

Ex Agent
“New Assumptions”
from New Assumptions (2025)

More new directions for the Collapsing Drums label courtesy of their most recent release: Bristol’s Ex Agent comprises Evo Ethel, Aidan Surgey, Eve Rosenberg, Alfie Hay and Archie Ttwheam, alongside a band of guest players, their delicately collapsing post-punk cacophonies and slow drift ruminations intended as explorations of “queer and neurodivergent identity through sonic themes of refuge, instability, and resistance”. With its regular sets of thrusting guitar spires between valleys of contemplative piano, the title track registers like a more melancholic and rumbling iteration of Millions Now Living Will Never Die era Tortoise. The whispered, confessional vocals and nocturnal, jazz-washed brass give their music a vulnerability.