As its name might suggest, enmossed is a label rooted in its environment. Run from a remote property in Maine on the edge of the White Mountain Forest, it was founded in 2016 by Philip Maier – a former participant in North Carolina’s experimental underground scene who chose to move off-grid when he was priced out of nearby Portland a few years back. Maier had run a few small press cassette labels in the past. “While I was very happy with all of the sounds of the releases, the complete disorganisation of it wasn't something I enjoyed, so enmossed was founded with a clear intentionality and unified aesthetic,” he explains. “There were a few key considerations, primarily deep ecology and material communal connection. A common vision of growth – of a personal touch or expression of connection – could unite the pieces selected for release. I also have an affinity with artists labouring in obscurity, unconcerned with recognition.”

Maier has taken steps to minimise enmossed’s carbon footprint – his property runs off solar power, while the label’s limited runs of physical releases are hand-constructed, largely using recycled materials and water based inks. But enmossed’s conception of environmental music run deeper, too, with many of its releases conceived in dialogue with the maker’s surroundings – be it a mountainside, a club cloakroom or a morning commute. Beyond that, there’s no firm remit. “Sonically, I release music that I want to hear,” says Maier. “Music that engages, demands, gives, inspires, comforts, emboldens, thrills, or calms. Music that is a personal vision with a clear intentionality. Music that reaches outwards, music that is necessary to hear and to make.”

Here are seven highlights from enmossed’s catalogue to date.

Horaflora
“Lunacy In The Garden Of Forking Paths”
From Eaves Drop

Over the course of a year, Raub Roy made his journey to work in Oakland wearing a Sennheiser AMBEO binaural headset, documenting his commute as he went. This repeated journey formed the raw material for Eaves Drop, a sonic collage that carefully melds field recording with subtle instrumentation – scrapes of strings, electronic murmurs, careful taps of snare – so it’s sometimes hard to see the join. Children play, dogs bark, a woman sings along to music on her headphones. It sets the listener up as a voyeur, then throws a sound at you so vivid and present you jolt, as if suddenly exposed.

Florian T M Zeisig
“Been Listening A Lot”
From Coatcheck

The club is usually coded as a place of liberation and escape – but what of those who experience the architecture of a club not as leisure, but as labour? Described by the label as “a series of surreal apertures for viewing the club’s framework of workplace behaviour and patron expectation”, Coatcheck finds Zeisig – a Berlin based musician, artist and sometime cloakroom attendant – weaving a tactile ambient music infused with the textures of dub techno.

Julien Malaussena
“Odd Music”
From Articulated Sound Energy

On Articulated Sound Energy, the Paris based composer Julien Malaussena explores a powerful, physical sound at the edges of familiar musicality. The album’s lead track “Odd Music” features Kug-Sax-Sippia, an Austrian compositional collective playing on 13 alto saxophones. Guided by Malaussena’s score, they perform as a singular mass, shifting gradually from pensive, studious drones into passages of keening intensity. The musicologist and composer Max Erwin perhaps captures it best in the record’s sleevenotes: “It’s an unsettling aural experience that never quite manages to leave a distinct impression, a slow tour through a sonic house of mirrors.”

Osawa Tome
“Cobalt Purpose”
From Mountain Minor

Zeke Graves calls the music he makes as Osawa Tome “cosmic Appalachia”. It’s a tribute of sorts to his father, a fan of old-tymey folk music, but Mountain Minor takes the sound of Appalachian mountain music and radically recontextualises it. Plucked banjo is run through sampler, synths and FX pedals to create a warmly atmospheric ambient music that feels somehow out of time. “I hear this music as a retuning into the frequencies and rhythms of a kind of plant and mineral consciousness,” says Graves, “a place where patterns always redraw themselves in new forms, and a deeper cyclical logic plays out.”

M//R
“Drum Dub”
From Anxious Meditation

Following a series of vinyl releases for LIES, Great Circles and Details Sound, Billy Werner brings his muted atmospheric take on club music to enmossed’s door. Excerpted from his upcoming 12" Anxious Meditation, “Drum Dub” does to footwork and club music roughly what Basic Channel did to techno back in the 1990s, taking up flicking rhythms, shimmering pads and snatches of vocal and setting them adrift through a void of echo and delay.

Chaperone
“Ashen Landscape Smouldering Love Letter”
From Northeastern Meditations

It was theorised that the rhythms of Detroit techno in some way channelled the sturm und clang of the city’s automotive production line. Northwest Meditations, a full-length by Philadelphia producer Chaperone, feels motivated by a similar urge to transmute industrial surroundings into sound. But this is what it sounds like when the factories close. “Ashen Landscape Smoldering Love Letter” is a techno from the edgelands, its crumbling textures and hollowed out rhythms evoking rusted metal and weeds pushing through concrete.

Felisha Ledesma
“2am”
From Sweet Hour

In January 2021, the Berlin based artist Felisha Ledesma dropped her debut solo release Sweet Hour on ENXPL – a joint enterprise between enmossed and Nick Klein’s Psychic Liberation imprint. Made using AMQR, a software synth that Ledesma built in collaboration with Ess Mattisson, it consists of two tracks that explore different phases of the nocturnal experience. “2am” is the ‘club’ track, 20 minutes of dreamy washes and strobing effects that move through passages of heady ecstasy and dazed repose.

Read Louis Pattison's Unlimited Editions piece about enmossed in The Wire 445. Subscribers can also access the article via the digital archive.